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THREE FATAL WOMEN. ANNA, EMMA AND ELINE 22 November 2009 – 13 May 2010  Emma Bovary Comparison The winter exhibition in the Louis Couperus Museum features a literary, cultural and historical comparison between the heroines of the novels Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), Emma Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) en Eline Vere (Louis Couperus). What do these three ‘fatal women’, Anna, Emma and Eline have in common? All have a great craving for love. Anna is the great romantic. She falls head over heels for a handsome officer, Captain Wronsky, and jeopardizes her, and his, very existence in the upper class Russian society of around 1850. The outcome is a tragic one. Emma Bovary is in love with love and throws her lot in with various lovers. It ruins her marriage and eventually, she drags herself and her family to utter destruction. Eline literally states that she needs so much love, but she never really gets it. In that sense, she is perhaps the most tragic of all three women. Her Otto does, however, find love with somebody else.
‘Arsenic and old lace’ The exhibition shows images from the life of such women in the nineteenth century; in paintings, prints and fashion. Since it cannot have been easy, in the age of corsets, to have clandestine lovers, one of the standing showcases is filled with elegant women’s underwear of the period. A showcase with pots and bottles of poisons from Art Nouveau The Hague Hofstad pharmacy serves to remind us that all three women took drugs; Anna and Eline used morphine in order to be able to sleep, and Emma kills herself with arsenic. Anna threw herself in front of a train. This is visualised in the garden room of the museum.
The exhibition was made possible thanks to financial contributions from Fonds 1818 and the Prins Bernhardt Cultuurfonds. The accompanying catalogue was written by trainee Nienke Timmers from Leiden University.  A corset of around 1880
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