Ahead Of Her Time, Empress Elisabeth of Austria

 

 
 
 
 
At 28, The age when the most famous portrait of her was painted, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was the rare royal who looked in life like the fairytale version. Her portrait, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, is one half of a pair of portraits, the other depicting her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph. She is dressed in diaphanous white, her shoulders bare, her skirts voluminous; there is a fan in her hand and her famous diamond stars in her famous hair. When their portraits are hung side by side, Franz Joseph is looking at Elisabeth. Elisabeth is looking at the viewer. Empress Eugénie of France called her “the loveliest crowned head in Europe,” and Franz Liszt called her “a celestial vision.” She was little loved among the palace ladies, but even one of her harshest critics had to admit that she was “almost supernaturally lovely.” Biographies give the distinct impression that every man she met fell instantly and irrevocably in love.
 
Elisabeth was fanatical about her beauty, her crown jewel carefully guarded. She was famous for her waist, a tight-laced 19 inches; her hair, which reached nearly to the floor; and her weight, which, until her death, fluctuated from just under 100 pounds to just over 110, always far too slight for a woman of her height. The tight lacing of her corset took an hour, and washing her hair in raw egg and brandy took up to three hours once a month. She had a language teacher with her to occupy this time, and she counted the hairs that had fallen from her head when it was done.
 
Her niece, Marie Larisch-Wallersee, wrote in her memoirs that her aunt’s “life’s task was to keep young, and she was always thinking about the best methods by which she could preserve her beauty.” She slept, sometimes, in a mask lined with raw veal and her body wrapped in wet towels to keep her waist small. When they were in season, she smeared her face with strawberries. “The Empress,” Marie Wallersee wrote, “took warm baths of olive oil, which she believed helped to preserve the suppleness of her figure, but on one occasion the oil was nearly boiling and she narrowly escaped the horrible death associated with many Christian martyrs.” She was perpetually starving to maintain her famous waist. Her mother worried that starving was “becoming an obsession,” and her husband wrote to her often to express his concern about “this terrible dieting,” his worry that she was becoming “too thin.”
 
No one knows, now, what she looked like in middle age, or older. At 38, 10 years after her famous portrait was painted, and at 48, at 58, for all intents and purposes, she was as beautiful as ever. Beginning in her thirties, she refused to be photographed, and later portraits of her are copied from earlier ones. The last artistic rendering she sat for was a sculpture, when she was 42. She lived to age 60, but there is a strange feeling almost as if she had died earlier. She created an image of herself as forever young and forever beautiful, an image adored in Austria and enshrined on commemorative cups and celluloid.
 
She left behind a kind of anorexic archive. In his 2010 book So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance, Patrick Anderson writes that anorexia is “an archival project of undoing and becoming,” a kind of Derridian archive fever. Just as Derrida, in his 1995 book Archive Fever, asserts that “[t]he archive always works, a priori, against itself,” Anderson argues that anorexia is “[l]ikewise oriented both as and against its own preservation.” “[A]norexia,” he writes, “archives its own compulsive rejections, even as the anorexic body disappears.” The anorexic body archives its starvation even as it disappears. So much wasted, so like Elisabeth. One of her ladies-in-waiting, Marie Festetics, once wrote,
 
“She seems to me like a child in a fairytale. The good fairies came, and each of them laid a splendid gift in her cradle, beauty, sweetness, grace … dignity, intelligence and wit. But then came the bad fairy and said “I see that everything has been given you, but I will turn these qualities against you and they shall bring you no happiness. […] Even your beauty will bring you nothing but sorrow.”
 
On the silver screen and the small one, Elisabeth still reigns—in a perennially popular film trilogy from the 1950s and, in the last few years alone, in two popular television shows and a much-lauded movie—always beautiful but always absent, her story more malleable for the space she left behind. Elisabeth, tied only loosely to historical memory, can be a Heimatfilm heroine or an anachronistic feminist. Count Egon Corti, one of Elisabeth’s earliest biographers, quoted another lady-in-waiting of Elisabeth’s as saying that she would “live on in legend, not in history.” She made sure of it, enshrining her image and erasing herself, leaving gaps in the archive that fiction rushed in to fill—leaving merely, to paraphrase Derrida, her lovely impression.
 
 
Elisabeth, also called Sisi, became Empress at 16. Her husband, Franz Joseph, was supposed to marry her older sister, but—the story goes—he fell in love with Elisabeth at first sight. Whether she seduced him, or unknowingly charmed him, or fell for him too but felt awful about it, varies in the many tellings. She was unpopular at court and left Vienna often, spending her time and her country’s money on many trips abroad. The kitschy Sissi trilogy of films from Ernst Marischka cast a young Romy Schneider as the idealized romantic lead. Franz Joseph, played by Karlheinz Böhm, is dressed like a Disney prince, and everything is all saturated Agfacolor. In Germany, the films play every year at Christmas—not Christmas movies, but movies with a Christmas feeling. And year-round, Sissi is everywhere in Austria; her face is on cups and postcards and chocolates.
 
Her beauty is the core of her legend and in the fiction built out of the remnants of her history. In life, her beauty was politically powerful, even if her own role was limited. During a visit to Italy—anti-Habsburg, a wellspring of revolutionary feeling—early in their marriage, Elisabeth was greeted with applause. The British Consul said that “Her Majesty’s exquisite beauty, her grace and affability, have all contributed to win the sympathy and welcome of the masses,” and her husband reportedly said that her beauty “conquered Italy better than his soldiers and cannons had been able to do.” The deal to create a dual monarchy with Hungary, quelling long-simmering Hungarian resentment, is thought by many historians to be Elisabeth’s doing, as her fondness for the Hungarians was well known.
 
This, her most significant and maybe only real political achievement, was a bargain built by her beauty: Gyula Andrássy, a central figure on the Hungarian side of the agreement long rumored to have been Elisabeth’s admirer or even lover, referred to her as “the beautiful Providence which watches over my country” and called her “the prize of all womanhood.” Franz, a reactionary who had only recently violently opposed greater autonomy for Hungary, could hardly say no to his wife’s beautiful face. Her beauty still has something of this ambassadorial quality. In nearly every place where she spent time—Madeira, Corfu, Vienna, Hungary—she is now a tourist attraction, with Sisi tours and events. In her Romy Schneider incarnation, she is immensely popular in China.
 
Elisabeth’s later years and legacy are marked by her efforts both to destroy and to preserve her image. She spent countless hours of her life in the struggle to be beautiful; she wanted to make something ephemeral eternal, and, in the end, she sort of got it. She wanted, it seems, to be seen and known for her beauty and to disappear, for fear of being found wanting. As she aged, she hid herself from others’ eyes, retreating behind veils and fans. A police agent assigned to her for protection on one of her many trips abroad recalled that she made “a tremendous lot of work for us” because “no one was allowed to look at her.” Marie Festetics, her lady-in-waiting, wrote that “an aide-de-camp (let alone an adjutant general) in view is enough to unsheathe all her weapons; out come the blue veil, the large parasol, the fan, and the next path that turns off the road is taken.” She sometimes wore an “impenetrable silver-gray gauze veil,” and sometimes it wasn’t even her behind it all. She once had her hairdresser, a woman of similar stature, put on her clothes and greet the gathered crowds in a foreign port, and when she went swimming off the coast of England, she had a maid, dressed in a matching bathing costume, enter the water at the same time accompanied by a guard, so the crowds that gathered on the nearby cliffs with spyglasses to their eyes could never be sure that they were seeing her. Many of her letters were destroyed, at her request, by a loyal lady-in-waiting; more were removed from official archives by her daughter after her death. Always, everywhere one looks for her, Elisabeth is slipping away.
 

 

She is ubiquitous elsewhere but has been—until, perhaps, recently—relatively unknown in the United States, where we like our beauty queens homegrown and Marilyn-miserable. I first came across her, I think—my memory fails—on a pro-ana website, pink text on a white background, pretty. I only looked, I never commented. I starved myself for years; sometimes I refused to eat and sometimes threw up everything I ate. I was obsessed with famous anorexics, starving girls and Christian mystics. “Anorexia,” Anderson writes, “compels its own archival drive, beckons us to seek the vicissitudes of its histories, stimulates a desire to encounter the ghosts of its historical presence.”
 
Elisabeth was an ancestor of sorts to anorexic girls on the internet, having assembled her own proto-pro-ana photo book. In 1862, she wrote to her brother, “I am creating a beauty album, and am now collecting photographs for it, only of women. Any pretty faces you can muster […] I ask you to send to me.” The same request went out, to some scandal, to Austrian diplomats in foreign countries. The albums remain, intact, in the archives.
 
She left behind her, too, traces of her body, flesh made text. As Maud Ellman notes in her 1993 book The Hunger Artists, anorexics have an affinity for writing, record-keeping, as if “fat is to be transubstantiated into prose.” Elisabeth always had a scale at hand, and like many an anorexic, she kept careful, compulsive track of her weight and measurements, writing them down daily. A Count Wilczek once recalled walking in on Elisabeth and Empress Eugénie of France, who, “with their backs turned to the door behind which [he] stood […] were busy with two tape measures, measuring surely the most handsome calves to be found in all of Europe at the time.”
 
The specifics of her diet and her exercise regimen were recorded by those who knew her, and later by her biographers, with the same painstaking attention as those details were recirculated on the anorexic internet. She often refused to come to dinner, and when she did, she ate “alarmingly little,” as one member of her entourage, Count von Rechberg, noted. “We too,” he complained, “have to suffer for this, for the whole meal, consisting of four courses, four desserts, and coffee, does not last more than twenty-five minutes.” Her diet at times consisted of milk, orange juice, beef broth, or a mixture of egg whites and salt, and she sometimes ate violet-flavored ice. Marie Festetics once wrote that “[s]he is so obsessed with the idea that she is getting stout. I believe that if I did not insist so often, she would long since have died of starvation.” For a time, she alternated “milk days” and “orange days,” on which she would eat nothing else.
 
Her life was a study in the constraints and freedoms available to the beautiful and wealthy; you can only escape to Madeira and Corfu if there’s someone footing the bill. Beauty is a kind of currency, and she was so beautiful that she could afford to be unreasonable. At the Hofburg, the primary residence of the royal family (though Elisabeth, whenever she could help it, was elsewhere), she had a large gymnasium installed and had gymnastic rings hanging from the ceiling in her dressing room. At her Hermesvilla, a manor in Vienna far from the crowds at court, which Franz Joseph had built for her in the vain hope that she might stay more often close to home, the gymnasium was the finest room of all. When she traveled, which was often, her exercise routine traveled with her, as did her cows, to ensure she had the highest-quality milk. She would ride for hours, as good or better than any man, and she did gymnastics and exercised with weights each morning and evening. When she went to England to participate in the hunt, she rented Combermere Abbey in Cheshire; before she arrived, she had a gym installed. When she gave up riding, she took up fencing and long walks. She would hike for hours, in any weather.
 
These habits were thought to make her modern—a match for her rumored insider’s anti-monarchism, her independent streak—but they mostly made her thin.
 
These records of her, weighed and measured, and the recollections by those who knew of her routines, replace any visual record of her body in later years, when she effaced herself, erased herself from the archives and nearly from life. (Self-starvation, Anderson writes, enacts “the continuous disappearance of the live.”)
 
I have my own starving archives; I still find, sometimes, in my bedroom at my parents’ house, notebooks with scribbled-down lists of calories eaten and burned, whole days when I know what I ate, what I weighed, how I moved, and what I measured. The first summer I starved myself, I ate only grapes and air-popped popcorn, women’s magazine snacks, descendants of Elisabeth’s oranges and milk. “One wonders,” Ellman writes, “what historians a hundred years from now will make of this new genre, these interminable inventories of the alimentary canal where dieters immortalize their every snack.” There is a kind of perverse pleasure in the genre, she suggests—in the way it ostensibly operationalizes writing as restraint when, at the same time, “one could also argue that they eat in order to keep writing, since every stolen morsel represents the pretext for a further composition. What is more, their words preserve their food for future delectation, deep-frozen or freeze-dried upon the page.” Anorexia, she writes, has “provoked this orgy of verbosity”—it creates an urge to archive.
 
Derrida asserts that the archive begins right as memory starts to disintegrate. I starved myself for years, consuming coffee and carrots; any meal I couldn’t refuse I could refuse to keep down. I remember little of it—some bad decisions, some binges, some nights on the bathroom floor with a book. Every so often, I search “eating disorder memory loss” online and turn up studies on the many memory disturbances found in those with eating disorders, including, most severely, some in which researchers have identified Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome—a rare disorder characterized by extreme memory loss—in some cases of anorexia. Anderson writes that “[w]hat some clinicians summarize as a ‘disorientation in place and time,’ this disintegration of the function of memory enacts an almost literal incarnation of Derrida’s archive fever as simultaneous destruction and preservation.”
 
 
The Sissi films, by far the most popular portrayal of Elisabeth, give her fairytale face a fairytale story. She has a husband who loves her and subjects who adore her; she is always full of hope. They end with Elisabeth in her thirties. A fourth film was planned, but Schneider—as eager to distance herself from the image of Elisabeth as Elisabeth was herself—refused to participate, lending the movies a kind of metarealism. But while Schneider’s Sissi is the prototypical portrayal of Elisabeth, it is far from the only one. She has been the subject of novels and made-for-TV movies, and, in the last few years alone, the recent Netflix series The Empress, the German television channel RTL’s show Sisi, and the movie Corsage.
 
The Empress and Sisi both wear history lightly: both protagonists are gorgeous girlbosses with hearts of gold. In the former, Franz Joseph is well intentioned and kind, and the plot centers on a (fictional) attempted coup by his brother; in the latter, Franz Joseph is probably evil but in a sexy way, and the plot centers around a rebel plot to kill him (fictional in the specifics, though a Hungarian nationalist did attempt to assassinate him before he married Elisabeth). In both, as in the Sissi movies, Elisabeth’s beauty is a given, a gift: her starving, if mentioned, is the brief result of her occasional grief, while her love of riding and walking are signs of her independence or her naturalness, not her obsessiveness.

 
Corsage, however, is a rare depiction of Elisabeth in middle age, and takes her eating disorder as a primary concern. From the moment the movie starts, Elisabeth, played by Vicky Krieps—her face cold, the skin barely concealing the contemptuous muscles of her jaw—is being weighed and measured, surrounded by dumbbells and gymnastics equipment. At her birthday party, the guests sing a song with the refrain “Beautiful may she remain” when the cake comes out. Elisabeth refuses to eat. The movie is not a historical drama so much as an archival one, its purposeful anachronisms emblematic of the gaps in history. While she is in her brocaded rooms, her husband stands waiting outside in a bare concrete hallway lined with stacks of chairs, looking less like a room in a castle than a staging area.
 
Krieps—who previously, in 2018’s Phantom Thread, acted out intense desire born of or enabled by unyielding hunger, exacting standards, and disturbing illness—plays Elisabeth not as frigid, exactly, despite what so many biographers want to insist. To be hungry all the time is, after all, to be constantly wanting—and what she wants is to be wanted. The Sissi movies, of course, are all romance and no sex, the recent TV shows sexy, soap-soaked, and silly. In Corsage, it seems that Elisabeth gets off on her beauty, or on the recognition of it. When she is in England, her riding companion, Bay Middleton (a man as obviously in love with her in the movie as he was rumored to be in life), comes to her, at her request. She is dressed in only a corset and riding pants. “Do you think I’m beautiful?” she asks him, with him on his knees in front of her. The camera shifts from her face to his eyes, and back. He tells her, “You’re sunshine. You’re the fucking sun.” He moves his hands up her thighs—we watch them watch each other, close—but then he realizes: “That was all you wanted, wasn’t it?” She tilts her head, nodding slightly, and replies, “I love to look at you looking at me.” When he leaves, she makes herself come in the bath.
 
In another scene, her husband sits on the bed, and she tells him to look at her, not to stop, while she makes herself come. What she cannot stand is any slight to her beauty. The emperor, looking at a new portrait of her, one painted from earlier portraits when she refused to sit, tells her that the painting is lovely. He means it, but he also means to hurt. “I wonder,” he muses, “how you managed to look so young.”
 
In the film’s final third, Elisabeth appears heavily veiled at an event, looking ever so slightly stouter. The camera shifts; Elisabeth is inside shooting up (the real-life Elisabeth’s cocaine needle is in an Austrian museum), and the woman in the veil—her lady-in-waiting, Marie—runs in, unable to breathe through the lacing of the corset she is wearing. The film’s ending is its most effusive, sweeping departure from history. Elisabeth cuts off her famous hair and has it made into a wig. She gorges on candies and instructs Marie, her nascent body double: “Three orange days a week, clear beef broth in the evening, lean meat if you want. Nothing more. No potatoes, no bread, no dumplings. And no pastry, for God’s sake.” Marie begins to be weighed while Elisabeth begins to eat cake, and at the end, like Edna Pontellier in petticoats, she jumps into the sea, effacing and replacing herself completely.
 
Among on-screen depictions of the empress, only Corsage’s relationship to history is more melancholic than mythic, interested in dwelling in the spaces left in the archive instead of skipping over them. Freud, for his part, considered anorexia a kind of melancholy, though the history of the disease is also bound up with the history of hysteria. Melancholics and hysterics both, in the words of Caryl Flinn, are “people who remember too much. Specialists in the past, they are consummate historians.” Anorexics, consummate historians, chroniclers of their own disappearance—which is to say, archivists, writing everything down, memory laced tight through holes.
 
 
Corsage is slow, circling; it repeats Elisabeth’s refusal to eat much at all, her compulsive exercise. It recognizes what so few accounts of anorexia do, that anorexia is less a plot than a pattern. Many narratives of anorexia follow a familiar narrative of recovery, tracing the onset of illness, the rock-bottom weight, the treatment, and finally recovery. These narratives forget that many never recover, and even those who do are recovering forever, another repetitive behavior. “[N]o repetition compulsion,” writes Derrida, “no ‘mal-de’ can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive”—there can be no sickness that is not, in some way, an illness of the archives.
 
Towards the end of Elisabeth’s life, a doctor who examined her found that she was suffering from edema caused by starvation, a condition more commonly associated with soldiers in wartime than empresses at resorts by the sea, but she had been starving for so long. Hers was the diet of someone who had to die to be beautiful, and just might. In the end, though, it wasn’t the starving that killed her; it was an anarchist, concerned not with her body but with her crown (he intended to kill a different royal, but didn’t time it right). While Elisabeth was out walking in Geneva, a man named Luigi Lucheni peered under her parasol, then stabbed her in the ribs with a needle. One version of the story has it that she didn’t die on the spot because of how closely her famous corset held the knife in place, though it seems too neat a metaphor for the paradox of beauty’s privation and protection to be true.
 
When he was asked about his motives, Lucheni kept repeating, “Only those who work are entitled to eat.” He can’t have known that his phrasing would scan almost as a joke. She died starving and worked hard at it.
 
In Corsage, an early scene shows the Empress at a museum opening in Vienna. A man tells her they are fortunate that there are so many depictions of her in the city. She is absent so much that “we almost think of Majesty as a phantom,” he says, as if, even before death, she existed more as image than flesh. After she died, she was brought back to Vienna, her perpetual point of departure, to be buried. The Viennese were eager to gaze at her famous body. (At their darkest, the websites I used to read laid out the fantasy of being a beautiful corpse.)
 
Her subjects waited in line for hours to see her. But her coffin, of course, was closed.
 
Empress Elisabeth and the Archives of Anorexia. By Meghan Racklin   Los Angeles Review of Books, October 20, 2023  

he 19th-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria is everywhere in Vienna: on chocolate boxes, on bottles of rosé, on posters around the city. The Greek antiques she collected are at Hermesvilla, on the city outskirts; her hearse is at Schönbrunn Palace, the former summer residence of the Hapsburg royal family; and her cocaine syringe and gym equipment are on display at the Hofburg, which was the monarchy’s central Vienna home.

 These traces paint an enticing, but incomplete, picture of an empress who receded from public life not long after entering it, and spent most of her time traveling the world to avoid her own court. She had a tattoo on her shoulder; drank wine with breakfast; and exercised two to three times a day on wall bars and rings in her rooms. These eccentricities, combined with her refusal to have her picture taken after her early 30s, fueled an air of mystery around her.

 Now, nearly 125 years after Elisabeth’s assassination, at age 60, two new productions — a new Netflix series called “The Empress” and a film called “Corsage” that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May and will hit American theaters on Dec. 23 — offer their own ideas.

 “Growing up in Austria, , she was the main tourist magnet, aside from Mozart,” said Marie Kreutzer, who wrote and directed “Corsage.” Nevertheless, she added, Elisabeth, who was married to Emperor Franz Josef I, is largely a mystery. “Her image is one you can reimagine and reinterpret and fill with your own imagination, because we have a lot of stories about her, but you don’t know if they’re true,” Kreutzer said.

The moody, intellectual and beauty-obsessed empress has had many reincarnations.

 While alive, Elisabeth, who also went by “Sisi,” traveled constantly, often to Hungary, Greece and England, and was rarely seen by the Viennese public. In private, she wrote poetry, rode horses and hunted, hiked high into the Alps, read Shakespeare, studied classical and modern Greek, took warm baths in olive oil and wore leather masks filled with raw veal as part of her skin care routine.

 

 “She was such a recluse,” said Michaela Lindinger, a curator at the Wien Museum, who has studied Elisabeth for more than two decades and wrote “My Heart Is Made of Stone: The Dark Side of the Empress Elisabeth,” a book about the Empress that inspired “Corsage.” “People didn’t see her, and she didn’t want to be seen,” Lindinger said.

 Nevertheless, she was the empress of Austria, and later the queen of Hungary, too, so she was widely discussed. “No matter how much she fled the attention and scrutiny and the court, she was always pursued,” said Allison Pataki, who wrote two historical novels about Elisabeth, “The Accidental Empress” and “Sisi: Empress on Her Own.” “She was thrust into the spotlight as this young girl who was chosen by the emperor, in large part because of her physical beauty.”

After Elisabeth was killed by an anarchist in Switzerland, in 1898, she became an object of fascination throughout the Hapsburg Empire, and her image appeared on commemorative coins and in memorial pictures. In the 1920s, a series of novels about her were published, focusing on her love life.

 During the 1950s, the “Sissi” film trilogy, starring Romy Schneider, revived Elisabeth as a happy-go-lucky Disney princess come to life, clad in bouncy pastel dresses and beloved by animals and people alike. The syrupy films, which appear on German and Austrian TV screens every Christmas, are part of the “Heimatfilm” genre, which emerged in the German-speaking world after World War II and feature beautiful scenes of the countryside, clear-cut morals and a world untouched by conflict.

 “I grew up watching the Romy Schneider movies in a campy way,” said Katharina Eyssen, the show runner and head author for “The Empress,” who is from Bavaria, in southern Germany. As played by Schneider, Elisabeth is “just a good-hearted girl that has no inner conflicts,” she said.

 Eyssen’s take on Elizabeth, played by Devrim Lingnau in “The Empress,” is feistier, wilder and edgier than Schneider’s. The series opens shortly before Elisabeth meets her future husband (and cousin), during his birthday celebrations in Bad Ischl, Austria. As the story goes, Franz Josef was expected to propose to Elisabeth’s older sister, Duchess Helene in Bavaria, but he changed his mind once he saw Elisabeth.

 Where Schneider’s eyes sparkle with joy and excitement, Lingnau’s are heavier and signal a darker inner world

In the biographies Eyssen read while developing the show, she said, Elisabeth’s character is portrayed as “difficult, fragile, almost bipolar, melancholic.” But Eyssen didn’t fully buy this perspective. “There has to be a creative and passionate force, otherwise she wouldn’t have survived that long,” she said.

 Much of what is known about the empress’s personal life comes from her poems, as well as letters and written recollections from her children, her ladies-in-waiting and her Greek tutor. “She’s a myth in so many ways,” Kreutzer said. “It was a different time, there was no media as there is today. There are so few photographs of her.”

 After her early 30s, Elisabeth refused to have her picture taken, and the last time she sat for a painting was at age 42. Photos and paintings of her that are dated later are either retouched, or composites. “She wanted to stay in the memory of the people as the eternally young queen,” Lindinger said.

“Corsage” goes further than “The Empress” down the dark pathways of Elisabeth’s character, offering a punk-gothic portrait of the empress at 40, as a deeply troubled soul who grasps for levity and freedom in the stifling atmosphere of the Hapsburg court. She smokes, she’s obsessed with exercise and the sea, and she weighs herself daily (all true, according to historians).

 The title of the movie, in German, translates as “corset.” Famously, Elisabeth maintained a 50-centimeter waistline throughout her life.

Kreutzer and Vicky Krieps, who stars as Elisabeth, decided that, for the sake of authenticity, Krieps would wear a corset like the Empress’s during filming.

 “It’s a real torture instrument,” Krieps said. “You can’t breathe, you can’t feel. The ties are on your solar plexus, not on your waist.” She said she almost gave up on filming because of how miserable the corset made her.

 Kreutzer also noticed a change in Krieps, with whom she had worked on another movie several years earlier, that began during one of the first fittings.

  “She became slightly impatient with the women working on it and the women who were surrounding her and touching her,” she said. “I know now it was the physical tension and pain that made her feel unwell and act differently than I know her to be. It was like her getting into the skin of somebody else.

”Having grown up on the Romy Schneider films, Krieps said she felt as a teenager that there was something darker in the empress that was being shielded from view, and started to relate to the entrapment she imagined Elisabeth had felt during her life.

After Krieps went through puberty, she said, “suddenly I had a sexuality and my body was always related to this sexuality.” Later, as a mother, she said, “my body became something like a prison,” and society expected her to be an entirely different person.

She began to see in Elisabeth’s struggles with her body and the roles assigned to her as “a heightened version of something every woman experiences,” she said.

The final years of Elisabeth’s life have remained largely unexplored in popular culture. (“Corsage” takes artistic liberties with the portrayal of her death.) After Elisabeth’s only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, killed himself in 1889, her longstanding depression became deeper and more permanent. While sailing on her yacht, Miramar, she would sit on the deck even in bad weather, her ever-present black lace parasol her only defense against the rain and breaking waves, according to “Sisi: Myth and Truth” by Katrin Unterreiner. Once, during a heavy storm, she had herself tied to a chair above deck. According to her Greek tutor, Constantin Christomanos, she said: “I am acting like Odysseus because the waves lure me.”

Pataki, the novelist, said that throughout her life, Elisabeth fought against the constricting role of being an empress. From her poems, intellectual pursuits and travels, it appears as though Elisabeth was always looking outward, imagining herself anywhere but where she was. In one poem from 1880, she gave a hint of what she might have been thinking during all the time she spent on the deck of the Miramar: “I am a sea gull from no land/I do not call any one beach my home./I am not tied by any one place,/I fly from wave to wave.”

In some ways, Pataki said, she might have felt more comfortable in today’s society than in 19th-century Vienna. “Her primary role and the expectation put on her was, have sons, produce heirs,” Pataki said. “But Sisi was very ahead of her time in wanting more for herself as a woman, an individual, a wife and a leader.”

An Empress Ahead of Her Time Is Having a Pop Culture Moment. By Valeriya Safronova. The New York Times, October 7, 2022. 

I collect women.  The saved tab of my Instagram account contains—in addition to recipes, funny videos I intend to DM to crushes, and nimble axioms on wellness in pastel fonts—images of women, each serving a purpose for the ongoing Frankenstein project that is me: a haircut I want to get, an outfit I want to buy, a body I want to emulate. Sisi did the same, albeit without the algorithms that permit us to assemble our little archives in relative seclusion. “I am creating a beauty album,” she wrote to her brother-in-law in 1862, “and am now collecting photographs for it, only of women. Any pretty faces you can muster at Angerer’s”—i.e., Hapsburg court photographer Ludwig Angerer’s— “or other photographers, I ask you to send me.” How embarrassing.

 
The West has a grand tradition of Women with Too Much Time on Their Hands. Empress Elisabeth of Austria, a key if underappreciated figure in this history, was struck with all the listlessness and suffering of a modern heroine. The Bavarian princess, born in 1837 and known to all as Sisi, enjoyed an unusually informal upbringing, then married Emperor Franz Joseph I at the age of sixteen. Elisabeth had a famously difficult time at court, spending most of her never-ending leisure hours clashing with her mother-in-law, sympathizing with the democratic yearnings of the people, traveling solo (whenever she could), and assembling a collection of some two thousand photographs. She organized these images into albums, which will be on view at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig in an exhibition opening October 24.
 
The show is titled “Sisi in Private,” but what kind of privacy displays itself for posterity? Are we violating her privacy or operating on the assumption that she didn’t really want it—or that the dead don’t deserve it? In her own lifetime, Sisi brooked the growing pains of celebrity. There is no feminine pathology, however private, that has not metastasized into its own aesthetic, and celebrity itself is a kind of metastasized subjectivity—one we now all share.
 
Sisi called her most remarkable compendiums “albums of beauty,” and I believe she had to in order to procure their contents—photographs of beautiful women. But the subtext of these images in the aggregate hints at something sexier and unspeakable, the early stirrings of a new affect that had yet to be named but was keenly embodied by the leg-flashing courtesans Sisi pored over (racier photographs were supplied to her by Parisian ambassadors). The word Beauty is freighted with moral baggage, exclusion, a certain Latinate stuffiness that, along with most Western ideals, has not aged well. Now everyone wants to be hot—the term has the punch of cruder diction. It’s queer, not as hopelessly cathected to whiteness, and infinitely more flexible than beauty. Now fully fledged and preening under its own rubric, hot is smarter than beautiful, more seductive, more self-aware, and for those reasons, sinister. It is the revenge of the libido after generations of limp, lifeless perfection. The direct gaze of Manet’s Olympia, coupled with her louche, specific, unidealized body, is what made her so unsettling to a bourgeois audience. The Black woman standing near her, as Lorraine O’Grady writes in her watershed 1992 essay “Olympia’s Maid,” exemplifies “the West’s construction of non-white women as not-to-be-seen.” Her erasure is its own form of objectification, helping to produce the new affect Olympia so boldly models.

 
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger noted that glamour, another uniquely modern phenomenon, is contingent on the object of the gaze knowing it is being looked at; its engine is the creation of envy. Hot is similarly an attitude, a highly subjective synthesis of sex and attention cultivated in private and then projected outward. It’s not hiding from the gaze so much as smirking back, because we now know privacy is a joke. In an essay reprinted in the show’s accompanying catalogue, Olivia Gruber Florek juxtaposes T. J. Clark’s remarks on the gaze of Manet’s Olympia with descriptions of the frank expressions in the photographs of Parisian prostitutes in one of Sisi’s albums—photographs intermingled with reproductions of paintings by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the German painter known for his idealized portraits of the European upper crust. Sisi deconstructed the modern gaze despite herself, while it was still being established. And then she was murdered—stabbed to death by an assassin in 1898.
 
Both modern painting and the camera informed the development of modern subjectivity. Sisi’s uncle, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, had his own “gallery of beauties,” which would have been familiar to the young princess. Ludwig commissioned these portraits of women and handpicked the models, who ranged from family members and fellow aristocrats to anonymous peasants. It was a public, patriarchal template for Sisi’s albums. Do the albums really record a private practice, then? Look at this woman. Do you think I could get away with her haircut?
 
I believe everyone is an artist, and lacking title or institutional pedigree, anxiety can manifest in ways as compelling as what we call art. In Sisi’s albums, we see the etiology of our own pathologies preserved like pressed flowers. There is a poignancy and a fascination in them, bordering on hotness, but not quite escaping the onus of beauty.
 
Beauty Queen. Christina Catherine Martinez on “Sisi in Private”. Art Forum, October-November 2020.

Earlier this month, fashion's fanciest gathered in Salzburg for the annual Chanel Métiers d'Art collection. The runway show, meant to showcase the brand's couture bona fides, was held in a palace, featured Alpine-inspired looks and models looped around a centerpiece laden with fruits and sweets. To launch the festivities, Karl Lagerfeld made a short film imagining Pharrell Williams and Cara Delevingne as a pair of glamorous Austrian royals.
 
US Weekly cooed: "Pharrell Williams, Cara Delevingne Channel a Prince and Princess for Chanel Short Film: See the Glam Clip!" Well, that "prince and princess" are better known as Franz Joseph and Elisabeth, emperor and empress of Austria, the last major ruler of the Habsburgs and one of nineteenth-century Europe's most famously beautiful women, respectively. Empress Elisabeth, not actually a princess, is best known as Sisi.
 
In the English-speaking world, Sisi is admittedly a deep cut, as female royals go. If there's an Austrian aristo most Americans can name, it's Marie Antoinette, daughter of Habsburg empress Maria Theresa. (But of course, hardly anybody remembers the ill-fated French queen was born in Vienna.) Still, Sisi remains a byword for glamour, one that designers drop when they want to conjure opulence without the guillotines. Since her death, she's inspired a Barbara Cartland novel, a trilogy of beloved Austrian films, an entire cottage tourism industry and, oddly enough, Jessica Simpson's wedding gown. She gets a loving paragraph in Diana Vreeland's memoirs, D.V.:
 
    “And Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, is one of my heroines…. Elisabeth adored her hair, took great care of her hair…. perhaps you remember the great Winterhalter portrait. She was one of the first modern women. She was one of the first women who did exercises, one of the first who did gymnastics, and one night a week she'd go to bed in special sheets of bath toweling packed in beefsteaks—for her skin. Apparently, she never looked older than thirty—ever.”
 
Sisi was also one of the most famously miserable royals who ever drew a breath. She despised the snotty, formal Habsburg court and spent as much time as possible far from Vienna and her dutiful, plodding husband. Shy to a degree that was practically paralyzing, she loathed public appearances and dodged them whenever she could—far too often, critics said. She feuded endlessly with her adamantine-willed mother-in-law. She spent years drifting around Europe, writing maudlin poetry, bemoaning her (very, very privileged) life. She was a complicated, high-strung woman who emphatically refused to live by others' rules; unfortunately, she couldn't seem to hammer out her own code, either. Her story is a bracing corrective to every princess trope Disney has ever pumped into popular culture. And now she's remembered, by and large, as a pretty lady with a tiara.
 
History does strange things to dead women.
 
 
 
Let's orient ourselves, using Princess Diana as our royal North Star. Sisi's story overlaps significantly with that of the People's Princess: Both married young and naive, both were saddled with domineering mothers-in-law, both grew into beautiful, glamorous and tragic figures, and in both cases, it didn't take Susan Miller to see trouble coming.
 
But there's a pretty major difference in how their stories open: Prince Charles came to his marriage grudgingly, and Diana was practically pulled from a lineup of perfect princess candidates. With Sisi, it was obvious from the beginning she was dreadfully unsuited to the job—but the young emperor Franz Joseph wanted her, and that was that.
 
Jean Haslip's The Lonely Empress records Sisi's birth in 1837, in Munich, one of eight siblings. She was a Wittelsbach, a member of the ruling family of Bavaria, though not (and this is important) from the branch that actually sat on the throne. The family had a longstanding reputation for kookiness; Sisi's cousin Ludwig would later fritter away much of their dynastic fortune building castles like Neuschwanstein, an enormous and enormously tacky homage to Richard Wagner that's said to have inspired Cinderella's castle at DisneyLand. Sisi's father Max was famously eccentric, with his drinking and his liberalism and his raucous crew of artsy and intellectual friends. He didn't much stand on ceremony, and he had little patience for courtly rigamarole.
 
Franz Joseph, the man who'd make Sisi an empress, was practically an animate sack of courtly rigamarole. He found himself on the throne at 18. That was thanks in no small part to his mother, the Bavarian-born Archduchess Sophie, who redefined the term formidable. Seemingly every account that mentions her claims that Sophie was for a time known as "the only man in the Hofburg." Apocryphal, maybe, but certainly telling. When the upheavals of 1848 drove out Prince Metternich—the foreign minister and legendary political scheme who'd helped reassemble Europe after Wellington finally stomped Napoleon, as well as less-than-effective Emperor Ferdinand—Sophie made sure her husband took a pass on the throne so it skipped to their son, Franz Joseph. (For more on this fancy bit of governmental footwork, see Andrew Wheatcroft's Habsburgs: Embodying Empire.) They put off the democracy-demanding hordes by swapping the old boss out for a younger, much better-looking new boss.
 

This woman who so thoroughly influenced Franz Joseph in his early years was a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. She believed in the rituals and the ceremony and the formalities. She wasn't the type to give two shits whether a daughter-in-law felt stifled. From Brigitte Hamann's The Reluctant Empress (noticing a theme, here?):
 
    “Archduchess Sophie was still entirely caught up in eighteenth-century thinking. She had no high opinion of individualism, let alone emotion, as an element in court politics—in contrast to her daughter-in-law-to-be. On one occasion, Sophie wrote to Princess Metternich that one should not believe "that individual personalities have any significance." She had always noticed that one person was replaced by another, without making the slightest difference in the world.”

 
Sophie was Sisi's aunt, and for various personal and political reasons, she liked the idea of her son marrying one of her sister Ludovika's daughters (because that's the way you roll when you're European royalty, I guess). Specifically, she liked the looks of Helene, Sisi's older sister. Sophie and Ludovika arranged a meeting in the Austrian resort town of Bad Ischl, but their plan went sideways when Franz Joseph fell for Sisi practically on sight. Sophie described their meeting in a letter to Marie of Saxony, via Hamann: "He beamed, and you know how his face can beam when he is happy. The dear little one did not suspect the deep impression she had made on Franzi."
 
Don't mistake that anecdote for wholehearted approval. Sophie also wrote: "He told me, his expression beaming, that he found Sisi charming. I begged him not to act rashly, to think the matter over carefully, but he felt that it would not be right to delay." According to her diary, he praised her "soft, lovely eyes," her "lips like strawberries," calling her "fresh as a budding almond." Sisi was, for the record, 15, and not really in the position to turn him down. (She apparently burst out to Sophie: "I love the Emperor so much! If only he were not the Emperor!")
 
And so a moody teenaged girl married into one of the stuffiest, fussiest courts in Europe. It did not go well.
 
When Sisi arrived, the Austrian aristocracy didn't exactly roll out the welcome wagon. As far as they were concerned, she might as well have been born in a barn. (Presumably plenty of mommas were miffed their daughters hadn't gotten a fair shot if this sort of girl was the final selection.) Nor did she have the necessary training—her wardrobe, education in Austrian history and crash-course in protocol were all rush jobs. Nor did Sisi turn the charm up to eleven. She couldn't cope well with the crowds and the pressure. Hamann writes:
 
       "At the sight of so many strangers, the young Empress panicked and fled to an adjoining room, where she broke out in tears. We can easily imagine the whispering among the ladies in full regalia waiting for the bride in the audience chamber. When Sisi finally joined the reception exhausted and unsteady, her face tear-stained, she provided new food for gossip. For she was too timid to make conversation with each of the ladies presented to her. According to protocol, however, no one was allowed to speak to the Empress except to reply to questions."
 
Wrote one witness, Baron Karl Kübeck, in his diary (via Hamann): "On the podium and among the spectators, jubilation and expectant joy. Behind the scenes, increasingly somber, very somber signs."
 
A sampling of the sort of poetry she was writing almost immediately after her wedding: "Fresh spring returns/And trims the trees with new green/And teaches new songs to the birds/And makes the flowers bloom more beautifully./But what is springtime bliss to me/Here in the faraway, strange land?/I long for the sun of home,/ I long for the banks of the Isar." (Another poem contains the line, "I have awakened in a dungeon,/With chains on my hands.") You can't really blame her, considering she married into the sort of situation where the whole palace knew the morning after she'd been deflowered. She was expected to offer her subjects her hand for the kissing, even if they were friends or relatives. She wasn't allowed to wear a pair of shoes more than once.
 
Sisi grew increasingly miserable, and her mother-in-law bore the brunt. She didn't like the micromanaging, the constant correction of her behavior, the fact that one of Sophie's closest friends was assigned as lady-in-waiting and therefore followed her everywhere. Their relationship went from bad to worse when the empress began having children. Sophie took charge of their upbringing, parking the nursery closer to her apartments than Sisi's. Years later Elisabeth told one of her ladies in waiting, after the birth of her fourth (and favorite) child (via Hamann):
 
       "Only now do I understand what bliss a child means. Now I have finally had the courage to love the baby and keep it with me. My other children were taken away from me at once. I was permitted to see the children only when Archduchess Sophie gave permission. She was always present when I visited the children. Finally I gave up the struggle and went upstairs only rarely."
 
But slowly, surely, Sisi began to act out. She welcomed her brother's wife into the family—an actress who'd already borne him a daughter out of wedlock. She donated to help a Protestant congregation build a steeple—and remember, the Habsburgs were once Holy Roman Emperors. She took increasingly liberal political stances, increasingly loudly. She threw balls but invited only young people, not their higher-ranking mothers.
 
In 1860, her health collapsed. It's not entirely clear why, but historians speculate that her punishing exercise regimen and aggressive diets—which, to a modern eye, look awfully like disordered eating—might've contributed. Her son's birth in 1858 was hard. She was coughing constantly. Then there were rumors Franz Joseph had taken a mistress. Whatever the reasons, she decamped to Madeira for several months, returned, temporarily, then took off for Corfu. And when she returned, she came into her prime.
 
For one thing, she'd grown into a full-blown beauty and she knew it. The famous portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (which appears in Lagerfeld's short film) was painted in 1865. So often, you look at portraits of famous beauties and think, "Eh." Looks just don't translate very well from generation to generation. But you look at that and the racier companion painting, and you can see it. The delicate features, the piles and piles of hair. She has the coquettish little closed-mouth smile of Vivien Leigh or a young Elizabeth Taylor.
 
"The Empress, as I have often told you before, is a wonder of beauty—tall, beautifully formed, with a profusion of bright brown hair, a low Greek forehead, gentle eyes, very red lips, a sweet smile, a low musical voice, and a manner partly timid, partly gracious," Hamann quotes an American envoy writing home in 1864—the famously lovely Empress had become one of Vienna's great tourist attractions even then. But she hated being on display. Her lady-in-waiting Marie Festetics repeats a conversation about gawking theatergoers: "How happy the people are when they see Your Majesty," she said, with Elisabeth replying,"Oh, yes, they're curious—whenever there's something to see, they come running, for the monkey dancing at the hurdy-gurdy just as much as for me."
 
Two years after that portrait was painted came her greatest triumph: Her coronation with Franz Joseph as King and Queen of Hungary. This may sound like a matter of procedure, but in fact it was a major break with the beginning of her husband's reign, which had launched with the bloody repression of a Hungarian break for freedom. But things had changed by the late 1860s. By this point, the Habsburgs' domain was a cobbled-together jalopy rolling down the road of history, wheels rattling loudly, parts of varying importance flying off. They lost a province here, an ally there. Nationalism was an increasingly powerful force, eroding the bonds that held this polyglot empire together. (Ultimately a Serbian nationalist would shoot Franz Joseph's heir, Franz Ferdinand, and launch the war that brought the whole thing crashing down around their ears.) Plus, the 1866 Austro-Prussian War pretty much snatched their power among the German states. They couldn't lose Hungary.
 
How exactly to hang on to Hungary—that was the question. They wanted their constitution back, as well as a Hungarian coronation for Franz Joseph (a nod to Hungary as an entity separate from Austria). Sophie loathed the country, and Franz Joseph's old-guard advisors largely opposed any leniency or special recognition. (Plus, the emperor had survived an assassination attempt at the hands of a Hungarian in 1853.) Naturally, in contrast to her mother-in-law, Sisi had developed a capital-R Romantic love for the country and an admiration for the dashing leader Gyula Andrássy, and she maneuvered relentlessly on their behalf, pestering her husband incessantly, bringing all her charms to bear, wearing him down as he considered his options. Ultimately, he agreed to the dual monarchy.
 
The coronation itself was pretty much peak Sisi. Haslip quotes Franz Liszt, who wrote that, "Erzsebet was a celestial vision." There's a reproduction of the gown she wore on display in Vienna today, and it's stunning:
 
It was around this time that Franz Joseph's younger brother Maximilian was killed, the culmination of his fucking fool attempt to become emperor of Mexico at the urging of Napoleon III. (Yes, that really happened.) Between that and the ascendance of Hungary, Sophie was pretty much finished as a force to be reckoned with. That dragon was vanquished.
 
If you rolled the credits here, it would still be possible to see Sisi's story as a fairy tale. But of course, life doesn't work like that.
 
The young Sisi makes a sympathetic figure, but the deeper you get into her life, she's increasingly frustrating. Most of the information in this article comes from Haslip's fairly straightforward 1965 biography and Hamann's more overtly feminist 1986 work. Haslip often seems downright disgusted with her subject. Hamann puts Elisabeth's unhappiness in context, and yet you still get the feeling she occasionally wants to screech at the woman. As one of Sisi's own ladies in waiting wrote (via Haslip):
 
        "The Empress is sweet and good, but she makes everything a burden for herself, and what to others is a source of happiness becomes for her a source of discontent. She seems to me like a child in a fairytale. The good fairies came, and each of them laid a splendid gift in her cradle, beauty, sweetness, grace… dignity, intelligence and wit. But then came the bad fairy and said 'I see that everything has been given you, but I will turn these qualities against you and they shall bring you no happiness. I will deprive you of something which a man bears within him unconsciously—moderation in your actions, occupations, thoughts and sensibilities. Nothing will bring you happiness, everything will turn against you. Even your beauty will bring you nothing but sorrow and you will never find peace."
 
You see this theme more and more, the longer you watch Sisi's life unspool. After the coronation she played little role in politics. She spent long stretches in Hungary, Bavaria and other assorted European locales; she had little to discuss with her prosaic husband back in Vienna. The decades were dominated by passions that flared and then were just as quickly dropped: Her mania for horses, which took her "riding to hounds" in England and Ireland; her villa in Greece, built at tremendous expense and promptly abandoned; the spiritualist period, which was admittedly de rigeur for the nineteenth century. She wrote reams and reams of maudlin poetry, often painting herself as the untouchable fairy queen Titania. The effort dedicated to maintaining her looks intensified. Her niece Marie Latisch outlined a wide variety of outlandish beauty measures: "nightly face masks with raw veal, during strawberry season a strawberry mask, warm olive-oil baths to maintain the smoothness of her skin…. 'damp cloths over her hips to maintain her slenderness, and for the same reason, she drank a dreadful mixture of five or six egg whites with salt.'"
 
Her behavior was growing strange, too. Her daughter Valerie (13 at the time) wrote in 1881 in her diary: "Mama had a very strong bath, and when I went in to her, she could not stop laughing, the bath had made her completely nervous. I was afraid, but fortunately she is already well again today." Four years later, she wrote during one of Sisi's illnesses: "Much worse than the ailment is Mama's indescribable despair and hopelessness. She says that it is a torment to be alive, and she indicates that she wants to kill herself."
 
She also told poor Valerie things like, "I really love nobody but you… the whole of that capacity for loving which has hitherto been imprisoned in my heart I have poured out upon you" (via Haslip) and (via Hamann): "Marriage is an absurd arrangement. One is sold as a fifteen-year-old child and makes a vow one does not understand and then regrets for thirty years or more, and which one can never undo again." Fair to the institution of monarchical marriage, perhaps, but not a particularly kind thing to say to a daughter who loves her father, too.
 
In 1889 came the greatest catastrophe of Sisi and Franz Joseph's lives. Their son Rudolf died at his hunting lodge, Mayerling, as part of a suicide pact; he shot his young mistress then several hours later put a bullet through his own brain. He was their only son, and he died without an heir, which is the only reason Franz Ferdinand ever found himself in the historical spotlight.
 
After Mayerling, Sisi's spa-to-spa drifting intensified, as everyone around her fretted about her dark depressive spells. She was on yet another trip—Geneva, this time—when she was stabbed on the street by an anarchist. Her corset was so tight nobody realized what had happened until she made it back to her ship, collapsed, and died.
 
Visit Vienna today, and it's obvious that Sisi is essentially the German-speaking Scarlett O'Hara. She's everywhere. The Winterhalter portrait appears on brochures, magnets, coffee cups, chocolates, tote bags, Christmas ornaments—you name it, they're selling it. Gift shops on every corner carry replicas of the diamond stars she wears in the painting. Sites connected (even tangentially!) to Elisabeth always seem the most crowded. One of the most popular attractions in the Hofburg, the centuries-old seat of Habsburg power, is her exercise equipment. You see her popping up in cafes and coffee houses all over town.
 
The most up-to-date exhibits I saw in Vienna were in the wing devoted to the Sisi Museum. The show-stopper is the room full of carefully preserved remnants of the empress's wardrobe, which is kept dim and more thoroughly climate-controlled than the Treasury holding literal religious relics. Much of the museum is dedicated to gently but firmly correcting the misinformation in the beloved Austrian film trilogy that began with 1955's Sissi, which is perhaps most responsible for Elizabeth's legacy.
 
Take everything I just told you and chuck it out the window, because history bears hardly any relation to these flicks. Gone is the difficult woman who spent much of her life lurching unhappily from obsession to obsession, frantically working to maintain her beauty and avoid the public eye. Picture Rebecca of Schonbrunn Farm; Anne of Bavarian Gables. Their appeal is obvious. They offer the hoop skirts, sweeping soundtrack and breathless romance of Gone with the Wind, without Scarlett's bitchiness or, you know, the slavery. Plus Austria looks absolutely lovely in mid-fifties film stock, like an ancient copy of National Geographic.
 

 
Star Romy Schneider is flat-out adorable, harmlessly cute like a young Debbie Reynolds and outfitted in a series of fluffy gowns like meringues. She first bursts into the frame on horseback, whooping happily, and shortly thereafter cheers on a baby deer in a scuffle with an equally harmless dog. She loves her home in Possenhofen and spends her days hiking with her beloved Papa, kitted out in traditional Bavarian garb. She meets Franz Joseph when she accidentally catches him with a fishing pole. This is patently ridiculous; nothing that charming ever happened to Franz Joseph in his entire life. (Bless his heart, he was a natural-born bureaucrat.) But of course the cinematic character bears no resemblance to his real-world analogue. He's a darling strawberry blonde cutting a dashing figure in his military uniforms and most of his dialogue seems to be saying "Sisi" in varying emotional tones. He bursts with incandescent happiness at seeing his beloved bride.
 
His mother, the archduchess, is unequivocally the villain of the piece. She's constantly making trouble between Franz and Sisi, lurching around one palace or another in black and purple and dark blue like a scheming crow. Vilma Degischer plays her as the archetypal bitchy mother-in-law, and it's actually pretty entertaining. But once again. the rough edges have been filed off. Forget the woman who seized a power vacuum to put her son on the throne of imperial Austria and replace her with Agatha, from Bewitched.
 
Pitted against this judgmental version of Sophie, Sisi becomes a romanticised, dramatically simplified figure who just wants her freedom, where freedom seems to be defined as plenty of fresh air and ample opportunities to gambol. She's endlessly, unfairly chided for breaking the rules, which she always does charmingly: She simply can't help her natural high spirits! The power struggle over her children's upbringing is taken as an opportunity to paint her as a doting Victorian mama. The portrayal of her relationship to Hungary is especially telling—she's portrayed as guileless and apolitical, Angel in the House-ing her way into harmony between the two countries.
 
Conveniently, the third movie ends before Franz Joseph and Elisabeth lose their eldest child to a sudden illness in Hungary and decades before Rudolf's disastrous suicide at Mayerling—in other words, before it would've become hard to sustain the portrayal of the empress as a chipper, wide-eyed little dear. Schneider bailed and didn't reprise the role until 1972's Ludwig, about the Wagner-loving cousin king of Bavaria, where she appeared as an older, vastly more cynical Sisi.
 
Sisi hasn't been wholly reduced to the woman portrayed by Schneider. Her misery is sufficiently well known that in the 90s, a German pharmaceutical company declared the existence of "the Sisi Syndrome," a particular subset of depression common in women and characterized by listlessness. But the films have set the terms on which Sisi is memorialized, framing her legacy in a very specific way.
 
Outside Austria and Germany, Sisi is remembered primarily as a fashion icon, by people like Vreeland and Lagerfeld. Watch this clip, in which Carolina Herrara explains how Sisi and the iconic Winterhalter portrait inspired Jessica Simpson's custom-made wedding gown. "I love it that you're inspired by a painting," replies the clueless Newlyweds star. "That makes me feel special."
 
Of course, Sisi would probably relate to the relentless dieting (though certainly not the reality TV or blatant tabloid attention-seeking).
 
Lagerfeld's "Reincarnation" is more of the same romanticising. It's just an excuse to put Cara Delevingne in a poofy dress so she can twirl about with Pharrell (another upgrade for Franz Joseph, who'd probably die all over again if you played him something as boppy as "Happy"). (And Sisi would've loathed that getup Delevingne is wearing, which is some straight costume shop garbage.) The headlines are pretty telling. Elle: "Pharrell and Cara Delevingne Sing and Dance in Chanel Fairy Tale." The Gloss: "You'll Swoon When You See Pharrell As Cara Delevingne's Prince Charming In This New Ad." Cosmo: "Introducing Chanel's New Prince and Princess." Delevingne teased the film with Instagram images straight out of Cinderella:
 
Not that Lagerfeld gives two shits about accuracy, of course. "There's a touch of Pop Art in it," he told Women's Wear Daily. "It's not meant to be a historical reconstruction or something heavy like that. This is light and funny." You could compare her to any number of famous women (Princess Di, Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, Marie Antoinette). But Sisi reminds me of nobody so much as Marilyn Monroe—a complicated woman who died and was promptly reduced to a series of very, very lovely pictures. Nothing heavy, just a lady in a pretty poofy dress.
 

The Most Miserable Princess Ever: Sisi, Empress Elisabeth of Austria. By Kelly Faircloth. Jezebel, December 18, 2014.