Modern Art and Visual Culture 1660-1900

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Representing W o m e n

! Linda Nochlin ' i

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To Dick, in loving memory

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Among the many people who have assisted m e , both intellectually and materially, in the course of writing this book are Tamar Garb, Marni Kessler, Elizabeth Marcus. Ellen McBreen, Edward Powers, Maura Reilly. Robert Simon, and Abigail Soiomon‐Godeau.

Any copy of this hook issued by the publisher as a paperback is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold. hired out or otherwise circulated without the the publisher‘s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including these words being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

@1999 Linda Nochlin

First published‘in paperback in the United States of America in 1999 by Thames and Hudson lnc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York New York 10110

Library orCongress Catalog Card Number 98‐61187 ISBN 0-500‐28098-3

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means. electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing From the publisher.

Printed anti bound in Singapore

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Notes and Sources

List of Illustrations

Index

34

58

80

106

152

180

216

239

262

Contents

Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian

The M y t h of the Woman Warrior

G e r i c a u l t : The Absence o f Women

The image of the Working Woman

Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter's Studio

A House Is Not a Home: Degas and the Subversion of the Family

Mary Cassatt's M o d e r n i t y

Body Politics: Seurat's Poscuses

A House Is Not a Home: Degas and the Subversion of the Family

In abrothel, both The ladies and gentlemen Have nicknames only. w. H.AUDEN, "Postscript to the Cave of Meaning"

l first started thinking about Degas and the subversion of the family when I noticed, after the removal of The Bellelli Family (c. 1858‐60] to the Musée d'Orsay, the existence of halfa small dog scooting out of the painting to the right. I had never noticed this detail before the painting was moved‐it isvery hardto see in mostreproductions‐andnone of the scholars who have discussed The Bellelli Family have taken account of its presence.‘ The dogmusthavebeen alast‐minute addition: it does not appear in the final 0rdrupgaard sketch of about 1859. It is possible that Degas’s main reason for putting it in his painting was a formal one, to fill up an awkward empty space in front ofthe figure ofGennaro Bellelli, who might otherwise seem outbalanced by the three‐figured group on the left. Yet a formal intention does not nullify a signifying result: the way the dogworks in the construction of meaningin the painting. With a kind of airy, heedless, cheekyje in ‘enfoutisme, entirely at odds with the almost desperate seriousness of the paintingasawhole, these canine hindquarters work to undermine the solemn balance and traditional formality of Degas's monumental, tensely harmonized family‐group structure with awave of a fluffy tail. The dog's vector is, in the extreme, centrifugal; assuch, it might be opposed to the reassuringly anchoring position of Porto, the Newfoundland, wholly present‐indeed, literally part ofthe family‐in Renoir's more cheerful and relaxed representation ofa bourgeois family group, The CharpentierFamily (1878).

Yet it is not really the dog I wish to talk about (Degas, incidentally, is said to havehateddogs) but rather,the relativelycovert contravention it figures in The Bellelli Family of what one might call conventional

87 EDGAR DEGAS The Bellelli Family (detail). c. 1858‐60

154 A House ls

bourgeois‐specifically upper-bourgeois‐family values such as those represented in The Chnrpenlier Family and many other similar portraits of the period. Now one could point to The Bellelli Family as a special case: indeed it is one of course, if only in the sense that it was the repre‑ sentation of an unhappy family. Degas was well aware of the strains existing between husband, Gennaro Bellelli, and wife, Degas's father's sister, his aunt Laura,when heembarkedon this ambitious project in the late 18505. At the same time, he evidently wanted the portrait of the Bellellis to beamajorpainting with adignified structure and asense of traditional universality as well. The tensions proliferating among the artist's lofty intentions; his sense of the specific and the contemporary; his conscious and/or subconscious awareness of animosity between the couple; the perhaps unacknowledgedstrength of his feelings for his aunt andhers for hernephew;these, and the consequent insertion of the signs of dissension and instability into the superficially harmonious fabric of his representation, are what makethe portrait interestingand disturbing to the modern viewer. The Bellelli Family [originally referred to simply as“Family Portrait" when it was first exhibited in the Salon of 1867)2 is asmuch a painting about the contradictions riddlingthe general idea of the ham‐bourgeois family in the middle ofthe nineteenthcentury asit is a family portrait tout court.

The Bellelli family portrait, then, must be read not merely as a family document but also asa representation of“The Family," its struc‑ ture inscribing those tensions and oppositions, characteristic of certain familial relationships in general and the relationships existing in this family in particular, at a concrete historical moment. At the same time, the painting must be seen as inscribing those unifying codes of struc‑ tural relationship‐hierarchized according to age and sex, homogenized in terms of class and appearance‐goveming the ideal of nineteenth‑ century bourgeois family existence.

Within the complex web of inscriptions constituting The Bellelli Family, both temporal and spatial considerations play their role. For Degas has presented the family diachronically asahierarchical contin‑ uum of generations: grandfather Rene’, then the parents, followed by Giulia and Giovanna; and, as the presence of the recently deceased grandfather is indicatedsimply by an image on the wall, sothe presence of the unborn next generation is merely hinted at in the costume and stance of Laura. This notion of a generational historicity is height‑ ened by nuances of style and structure: there are references to a specifically aristocratic tradition of portraiture, that of Van Dyck and Bronzino for example, and the willed balance and geometric ordering of

Not a Home

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the composition suggest that it is notjust to any old past that the young artist wishes to connect his family.

Yet the high tone of this reference to family continuity is inter‑ rupted or complicated by synchronic tensions. The stately procession of inheritance and succession is interrupted and called into question by contemporary and specifically psychological disharrnonies characteris‑ tic of the high bourgeois family of Degas’s own time and the Bellellis' particular family drama. Interestingly, these tensions are, in pictorial terms, represented not merely by the slumped figure of Gennaro andthe over‐erect one of Laura, but perhaps even more acutely by the figure that both separates and connects them, the awkwardly and unstably posed Giulia.

Strains there were many in the Bellelli family. The scenario of the Bellelli relationship reads like the outline ofa contemporary nineteenth‑ century novel, one by Balzac, or later, by Zola; or perhaps it simply reveals the source of both the painting and the novels‐pace Roland Barthes‐in contemporary discourses of the family which position this institution asaproblematic aswell asan idealsocial construction.J

Laura Degas had married Gennaro Bellelli asa “last resort" at the advanced age of 28, for her domineering father (standing guard in the painting on the wall behind her] had found all preceding suppliants‑ includingone whom she truly loved andwanted to many‐insufficiently rich or distinguished to accede to the hand of this young woman who was herselfboth rich and beautiful. “On aparticularly distressing occa‑ sion," says Roy McMullen in his biography of Degas, “an Englishman who had failed to measure up to the requirements...had lost his temper and denounced the whole proceedings as‘more like a business negotia‑ tion than an affair of the heart!“4

The Bellellis' was evidently a loveless marriage, and at the time Degas was engaged in painting the portrait‐first sketching in Florence, where the Bellellis lived in rented quarters, then painting the large canvas back in Paris‐Laura Bellelli, whom heloved and who was star‑ tlingly open with him about her marital problems, was desperately unhappywith herhusband. in 1859 and 1860, she wrote to Degas about her misery, describing her sad life with a husband whose character was “immensely disagreeable and dishonest," and declaringthat “livingwith Gennaro, whose detestable nature you know and who has no serious occupation, shall soon leadmeto the grave.“ In another letter, she refers to the “disagreeable countenance" of a bitter and always idle Gennaro, and declares that hehas no “serious occupation to make him less boring to himself."5

Given the outspoken distaste of the wife for the husband, the preg‑ nancy discreetly evoked in Degas's painting should perhaps be read not merely asthe dignifled suggestion of future generations carrying on the Degas‐Bellelli family tradition, but asevidence of aquite different situ‑ ation. From a certain vantage point, Laura Bellelli’s gently expansive form may beviewed not merely asa representation of woman's predes‑ tined role as procreator, but as the subtle record of an outrage, an act committed on her bodywithout the loveor respect ofthe perpetrator~an act that has come to bedefined asmarital rape.

There is another set of facts about the family represented here that demands yet another kind of reading of the painting: a political one. Despite the surface stability of the family group, and the suggestion of

elegance andsettled comfort in the setting, this is apainting of a family in exile, a family which hadwandered and been uprooted several times in the course of its existence. The Bellellis were living in a rented, fur‑ nishedflat in Florencebecause Gennaro hadbeen exiled from his native Naples and, indeed, had been condemned to death in absentia on account of his role in the local 1848Revolutionand his subversivepolit‑ ical activities on behalf of Cavour, who wished to expel the Bourbons and create a greater Italy by uniting the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with Piedmont.G He and his wife had fled to Marseilles, then to Paris, then to London, and in 1852 had settled with their two children in Florence. This then, is a painting not merely of a family, or of an unhappy family, but of a family torn from its native habitat. Is it merely coincidental that in his notebooks of 1858 in Florence, Degas records a planto depict Mary Stuart's heartbroken departure from France in 156], based on an incident in the Seigneur de Brantome's Vies des dames illustre's? This was to have been a sentimental history painting which Degas described in the following terms, no doubt drawn from his source: “Without thinking of anything else, she leaned both her arms on the poop ofthe galley next to the tiller and began to shed huge tears while continually rolling her beautiful eyes toward the port and the land she had left, and while repeating over and over again, for nearly five hours and until night began to fall, the same doleful words: ‘Adieu, France."v7 It is not too far-fetched to speculate that the painter conceived of his aunt asa modern Mary Stuart, melancholy in her isolation and exiled, inconsolably, from friends and family in Naples.

Yet, interestingthoughthis paintingandthis family maybe, it isnot just The Bellelli Family that I will be concerned with in this text, but rather, the intersection of the particularity of the Bellelli story with the signifying structure of the painting and the relation of both to the more general and consistent practice of fragmentation and centrifugality characteristic of Degas's representations of family groups, a practice that contrasts strongly with the more unified, harmonized, and cen‑ tripetally focussed representations of the subject by more conventional painters of the period. And finally, I will examine the relation of all of these issues to the problematizationof the discourse of the family in the second halfof the nineteenth century in France.

a number of Degas's images in which gender opposition, tension, or outright hostility is a major issue‐works like the Young Spartans (c. 1860~62, fig. 89); the Interior, also called The Rape (c. 1868‐69,

89 EDGAR DEGAS Young Spartans, c. 1860‐62, reworked until 1880 ’

fig. 90); or Sulking (c. 1869‐71)‐and in which a yawning space between the gendered opponents and/or fragmented or centrifugal composition constructs a disturbing sense of psychological distance or underlying hostility between the figures in question.

It is, oddly enough, precisely in the representation offamily scenes‑ just where one would most expect a pictorial structure suggesting “togetherness“‐that Degas most strongly emphasizes apartness and dis‑ junction. ln the striking portrait of his aunt Stefanina with her two daughters, for example, The Duchessa di Monteiasi with Her Daughters Elena and Cami/Ia (c. 1876, fig. 91), the black‐clad matron stares stolidly ahead at the viewer, while the two young women, perhaps playing the piano and relegatedto the bottom left marginof the painting, focus their attention away from her, out of the paintingaltogether.“ in Degas's now‑ destroyed painting of the Place de la Concorde (1876, fig. 93), the Vicomte Lepic, his two daughters and their greyhound are all centri‑ fugally deployed, and the fragmentation and disjunctiveness of the composition are made even more evident by the presence of a sliver of

158 A House is Not a Home

an onlooker in the left‐hand margin and the vast empty space of the square itselfin the background.This is adaringly de~centered composi‑ tion, inscrihing in visual terms the fragmentation and haphazardness of experience characteristic of the great modern city, but with the added poignancy that the point is made with parent and children, rather than with mere passing strangers. In the double portrait ofthe Bellelli sisters, Giovanna and Giulia Bellelli (c. 1865‐66,fig. 92), the two girls turn their backs on one another, and in the portrait of Degas's close friend, Henri Rouart,with his daughter, He'l'ene [1871‐72], the child perches uneasily on her father's knee, looking grimly out at the spectator, as he looks dully to the left. The other members of the Impressionist group, Berthc Morisot for example, or Mary Cassatt, often turned to members of their own families or those of their friends as subject matter; few of these painters indulged in sentimental family feeling. Rather, it is Degas's insistence on separation and disjunction, a formal structure ofindifferf ence as the very hallmark of the family portrait, that is so striking.”

90 EDGAR DEGAS Interior.c. 1868-69

91 EDGAR DEGAS The Duehessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters Elena and Camilla. c. 1876

The wistful sense of uneasiness emanating from the artist‘s portrait of his orphan cousin and her uncle, Henri and Lucie Degas (c. 1876) is a function of the same sort of psychic and compositional disjunction that marks Degas’s representations of family members generally.

Even in the one work, Carriage at the Races (1869), in which Degas has apparently created a pastoral image of ham‐bourgeois family felic‑ ity, a composition representing his old friend Paul Valpincon, his wife and their infantson Henri, a group ascuddly and engaging asany senti‑ mentalist of the family could want, the family unit depicted, is, in a sense, a fraud. For the mother‐figure at the heart of this family group, emphasized by her white dress and the solicitously adjusted white umbrella over herhead, is not, in fact, the happy motherat all but rather, the hired help, the wet‐nurse, who, like the fashionable bulldog perched on the edge ofthe carriage, is simply one ofthe necessary accouterments of the ham-bourgeois domestic economy. The soi-disanr family group disguises the presence of an intruder: that ofthe so‐calied seconde mere who is the actual provider of nourishment to the son and heir.

it would be easy to reduce Degas's uneasy representations of the family to the projection of some sort of personal neurosis on his part,

92 EDGAR DEGAS Giovanna and Giulia Bellelli, c. 1865-456

93 EDGAR DEGAS Place de la Concorde. 1876

which one could attribute to the early loss of his mother, the surplus of bachelor uncles and marriages of convenience in his family or to poor communication with his father, etc., but that would be to miss the point.'°The family was atheme considerably debated during the second half of the nineteenth century in France among men of Degas‘s class, and specifically within the group of sophisticated men of letters; who were his friends and associates.

After the Commune, the problematization of the family was stimu‑ lated by the nascent discipline of sociology, which took on the institution with a vengeance, claiming the Commune to be a disaster occasioned by the weakening of family authority and the resultant triumph of anarchy and greed among the lower orders. This was the interpretationnot only of authorities on the right‐Catholic or Royalist‑ but, most especially, of right‐thinking Republicans of juste-milieu tendencies, sociologists like Henri Baudrillart, a member of the presti‑ gious lnstitut and the author of the influential La Famille et l'éducation enFrancedans leur rapports avec l'étatdc la société, publishedin 1874.” In this important study, Baudrillart lays emphasis on the bourgeois family asthe chiefpillar of the state, abulwark against the chaotic and uncontrolled energies anddesires of the masses, and on the necessity for the middle‐class family to instill the virtues of industry, honesty, loyalty and self-sacrifice in its members‐through the instrumentality of its female members above all.

Often, in the wake of the bourgeois trauma represented by the Commune, the need for vigorous political control within the state was equated with the need for increased state intervention in the affairs of the family, that is to say, the working‐class family. Such intervention became an important element ofthe modernizationprocess in the nine‑ teenth and early twentieth centuries, asJacques Donzelot revealed in his now‐classic study, La Police desfamilles of 1977.12This demand for the policingof the poor family was almost always accompanied by aparal‑ lel demand for self‐policing, for internalized education in self‐control and repression ofimpulse on the part of the superior levels of society.

Yet of course I am makingit sound asthoughthe family were itselfa fixed, known entity, rather than a formation in the process of construc‑ tion during the course of the nineteenth century. While a great deal of ink was spilled in defining family norms,which varied between the different classes to be sure, and positing family ideals, the modern family‐that entity we tend to think of as relatively fixed and perma‑ nent, put in place within the individual by such structuring devices as the Oedipus complex and the superego, and socially positioned asthe

private sphere in opposition to the public one of politics‐was still in the process of coming into being during the period when Degas was painting.

Mark Poster, in his Critical Theory of the Family of 1978, sets forth the most accurate, complex and nuanced model of bourgeois family structure available, making clear andraisingto the levelof critical con‑ sciousness just those features of family relationship and ideology that Degas and his contemprfa‘riekand perhaps many of usaswell‐take as inherent to family structure,but which in fact are class‐ and historically specific."

To summarize Poster's model of the nineteenth‐century bourgeois family:

The bourgeois family by definition is located in urban areas... Family planning first began in this group. In everyday life, rela‑ tions among members of the bourgeois family took on a distinct pattern of emotional intensity and privacy...Sexuality among this class, until recent changes, is one of the more astonishing features of modern history. Like no other class before, the bourgeoisie made a systematic effort to delay gratification. This led to sexual inca‑ pacities for both men andwomen...Among the bourgeoisie,women were viewed asasexualbeings, asangelic creatures beyond animal 1959thinternalized,this Rageofwomefiléiftoprofound’emo‑ tional conflicts...l’flitution was required bybourgeois males... because the “double standard:“ Wlifchh‐r'iglriafél Willi‐[HE class, maids sexual fulfileenl'infirossibTeforboth-spouse‘s. T“ _

Bourgeois marriage ho_un.d_the_e_o_Tiple forever. Social and financial intereststendedto predominatein these nutmeg.. . “ the snunrlest reason for marriage.Yet there was a contradictory drive in Ixfiée‐oisyoulh towards romantic love. The strange thing about the‘seritimental pattern ofthe middle class is that romantic love rarely outlasted the first few years...of the union. "Happily ever after" meant living together not with intense passion but with restrained respectability.

Relations within the bourgeois family were regulated by st~riG swoltdivisions. The hgsband_vras_therido_minantauthority over the family and he provided for the family by work in factory or market. The wife, considerably less rational and less capable, gon‑ c__emerl lfiselfexclusively with the home.The major interest of the wife for agood part of the marriage concerherlfhe children: she was to raise them with the utmost attention, adegree of care new to

family history. A new degree of intimacy and emotional depth characterized the relations between parents and children of this class. A novel form of maternal love was thought natural to women. Women were not simply to tend to the survival of their children, but to train them for a respectable place in society. More than that, they were encouraged to create a bpnd between them‑ selves and the children so deep that the child's inner life could be shaped to moral perfection...As it eschewed the productive func‑ tion, the bourgeois home also divorced itself from external authority.Within the family‘s clearly defined boundaries, authority over the relations of parents and children was now limited to the parents alone.

Willi new forms of love and authority. Ihe bourgeois family generated ii new emotional structure. Child-rearing methods ol'this family were sharply different from those ol'ihe earlier aristocracy and peasantry. During the oral stage,the mother was deeply c o n i ‑ mitted to giving her infant tenderness and attention...During the analphase, the same constant attention continued accompaniedby a sharp element of denial. The child was compelled to exchange anal gratification for maternal love, denying radically the pleasure ofthe body in favor of sublimated forms of parental affection.

Ambivalence, accordingto Foster, the central emotional context of bourgeois childhood, must be seen asa direct creation of the bourgeois family structure. In fact, he maintains, "the secret of the bourgeois family structure was that. without conscious intention on the part of the parents, it playedwith intense feelings of love and hatewhich the child felt both for its body and for its parents in such away that parental rules became internalized and cemented in the unconscious on the strengthof both feelings, love and hate, each working to support and reinforce the other. Love, asego‐ideal, and hate, assuperego. both worked to foster the attitudes of respectability. In this way, Poster maintains, the family generated an “autonomous" bourgeois, a modern citizen who needed no external sanctions or supports but was self‐motivated to confront a competitive world, make independent decisions andbattle for capital.

Poster summarizes the formative structure of the bourgeois family and the resultingsharp differentiation of gender roles asfollows:

The emotional pattern of the bourgeois family is defined by authority restricted to parents, deep parental love for children and atendency to employ threats of the withdrawal of love rather than

physicalpunishment asasanction.This pattern, applied to the oral, anal and genital stages, results in a systematic exchange on the child‘s part of bodily gratification for parental love, which in turn produces a deep internalization of the parent of the same sex. Sexual differences become sharp personality differences. Mas‑ culinity is defined as the capacity to sublimate, to be aggressive, rational and active;femininity is definedasthe capacity to express emotions, to be weak, irrational and passive. Age differences become internalized patterns of submission. Childhood is aunique but inferior condition. Childhooddependency isthe basis for learn‑ ing to love one's superiors. Passage to adulthood requires the internalization of authority. Individuality is gained at the price of unconsciously incorporatingparental norms...Thebourgeois family structure is suited preeminently to generate people with ego struc‑ tures that foster the illusion that they are autonomous beings. Having internalized love-authority patternsto an unprecedented degree by anchoring displaced body energy in a super-ego. the bourgeoissees himselfashis own self‐creation, asthe captain of his soul, when in fact he is the result of complex psycho‐social processes."

In comparison to this psychoanalytic thematization of the forma‑ tion of the family under capitalism, Jiirgen Habermas's positioning of the modern nuclear family asthe historically emergent institution con‑ stitutingprivaterelationswithin what heterms the “lifeworld“ (existing in oppositionto the public, or political, sphere of this world at the same time that it is linked to and mutually dependent upon the official eco‑ nomic sphere of the so-called system world) emphasizes very different features of bourgeois family structure within the social, economic and political context of modemization.” Degas's representations of the family, it seems to me,cannot befully understoodor interpretedwithout taking account of this process andthe ways in which the family assumes a new and important role in relation to the other institutional orders of capitalism. Nor can such representations be understood without an awareness of the important ideological role played by idealist, pictorial or literary constructions of the family in which the mutual interlinkage of the family and public life, of the family andthe economy, is occluded in favor of avision of the family which envisions it asapure opposition to the world of getting and spending, an oasis of private feelings and authentic relationships in a desert of harsh reality. The complex con‑ struction of the bourgeois family was marked in all its phases by

non‐synchronous features, by failures and contradictions aswell asby triumphs. For example, in Degas's time, for the upper bourgeoisie in general, the older notion ofthe extended family and its interests, and of marriage as a strategic cementing of economic, social and political alliances, coexisted with very different, more “progressive" notions of romantic love, freely chosen spouses, the primacy of the individual couple and their mutual interests, and soforth.’6

I have gone into such detail in establishing an identifying model of the nineteenth-century bourgeois family because I believe it is impossi‑ ble to deal with the representations and critiques problematizing this institution in the literary and artistic discourse of the time without some familiarity with various theories of the family and its historical forma‑ tion under capitalism. Certainly, sharp criticism of the bourgeois family and its defining hypocrisy constituted one of the favored themes of the naturalist writers of Degas’s time and circle. In these texts, it is the dif‑ ference between appearance‐of decorum, mutual interest, and above all, of unimpeachable respectability‐and reality‐sordid, exploitative, cornipt‐that constitutes the favored topos, rather than what might be characterized asthe Freudian figure of ambivalence. Zola’s Pot‐Bouille of 1884, for example, isjust such a searching and serious critique ofthe corruption infecting bourgeois family relations.17 In Pot‐Bouille, the opposition between respectability, the appearance, and corruption, the reality, is figured in the contrast Zola establishes between the family areas and the servants‘ quarters of a Parisian apartment house, asetting the author characterizes asa“bourgeois chapel." But in the center of the house is the servants’ staircase and inner court. Here, in this place that Zola calls “the sewer of the house," all is dank and redolent of stale odors. The servants shout malevolent gossip and vulgarities from window to window. “The facade of respectability that conceals the vul‑ garity of the servants' court is an analogy for the strict moral facade and inner corruption that characterize every family in the house."I8 Pot‑ Bouille, according to Demetra Palmari, constitutes a serious and devastatingcondemnation of bourgeois morality fromthevantage point of a progressive social critique couched in the language of naturalism. From this vantage point, the failure of the family lies in the fact that although it is supposed to uphold the highest moral standards, the family does not serve this function at all. “Though the family is acentral element of their lives, its members have virtually no affection for one another and are continually trying to escape its oppressive bonds, at the same time that they cling to its emotionally lifeless form, for it is the societaljustification of their moral code."“’

in those pre‐Freudian days, Zola's analysis of the problems beset‑ ting the bourgeois family fastens on the contrast between appearance and reality, between masquerade and truth, as the besetting evil; that is to say, hypocrisy rather than internalized ambivalence is positioned as the motor of family interaction. Love-spontaneous, natural, unfettered‐onthe other hand,ratherthanbeingseen asaninherentpart of the “problem" of the bourgeois family, the most potent, internal‑ ized weapon of family control, is idealized as the (rarely available] “solution."

This topos of appearance versus reality, of glittering performance versus sordid coulisse, of masquerade as the livery of bourgeois respectability, is one favored not merely by serious naturalists like Zola,but by the light‐hearted, cynical, worldly men ofletters of Degas‘s time and ambience as well. As such, it constitutes an important sub‑ genre of the entire discourse of prostitution of the period, a genre focussing onthe difficulty of distinguishingbetweenrespectablewomen and prostitutes.20 Of course the Goncourts resort to the topos again and again, both in their novels and in the pages of the Journal,2I but the apotheosis of the genre, constructing a critique of bourgeois family values through a witty, parodic literary structure rather than a natural‑ istic, moralistic one, is in fact the creation of Ludovic Hale'vy, Degas's close friend and fellow habitue’ of the coulisses ofthe Ope'ra: the Famille Cardinalstories.

Degas created over thirty illustrations, mostly monotypes,for the series of interrelated short stories dealing with the Cardinals: Monsieur, Madame,andthe two “petites Cardinals,"Virginie andPauline,members of the corps deballet.22Degas evidently admired the Cardinal stories, rel‑ ishingtheir charm and cynicism, despite the fact that Halévyrejectedhis prints as illustrations for the collected volume, La Fainille Cardinal. When Hale'vy later published the more moralizing, sentimental novel, L’Abbe’ Constantin, Hale'vy notes Degas's negative reaction in his diary, saying: “He is disgusted with all that virtue, all that elegance. He was insulting to me this morning. 1 must always do things like Madame Cardinal, dry little things, satirical, skeptical, ironic, without heart, without feeling..."23

What Zola hypostasizes astragedy, Halévy deconstructs asfarce. It is simply taken for granted that the “family values" represented by an upwardly mobile lower‐ or lower‐middle‐class family with two dancing daughters are farcical‐hypocritical and corrupt‐and that the desperate needfor “respectability" that apparently motivates the Cardinal parents in their ambitions for their lovely and desirable daughters is laughable

" “ ' ~ " : ' l 1 m a § “ ' : < : " ~ - " . : . ~ _-..;

rather than pathetic. Social critique, if it is present at all, is directed against the lower‐class victims rather than the worldly men who supply these young women with material benefits in return for sexual favors: this social arrangement is simply taken asread. lts acceptability‐and worldly humorousness‐is underscored by the fact that the tales of the Cardinals' peccadilloes are always narrated by the author himself; Hale'vy figures as the observer-narrator of La Famille Cardinal, and Degas, rather too conspicuously for the author's taste perhaps, intro‑ duces his friend as a recognizable portrait in many of his illustrations [which were probably created during the 18705 and early 18805). The Cardinal stories are constructed as a series of paradoxes, in which the family is figured in the form ofits parodic debasement, and in which the mother enacts the role of the loving, concerned‐ever‐vigilant‐pro‑ curess and the father that of the strict but respectable pimp, who, from time to time, because of his political ambitions, refuses to let his daugh‑ ters darken his door. These paternal political ambitions serve to define the ridiculous M. Cardinal as a sort of M. Prudhomme of the left, for La Famille Cardinal is aparody ofthe radicalpolitics ofthe lower orders as well as of their search for respectability. For M. Cardinal is repre‑ sented as a genuine member of the Commune, a parodic Communard, and M. Prudhomme as a Communard. He is a militant atheist whose cocotte‐daught'ers, having set him and his wife up in confortcoussu in a suburban cottage, buy him busts of Voltaire and Rousseau asa birthday present, while their lovers provide himwith fireworks and refreshments for the radical fete he has organized in the village in hopes of becoming its radical mayor.The two Cardinal daughters are hardly described at all. Their charms are a matter of suggestion, indicated by the reactions of their male admirers and the high price their sexual services fetch on the coulisse market. They are obviously fluff‐heads, alternately dumb, tangled up in their own silly spontaneous erotic impulses, and extremely astute, making domestic arrangements that pay well and leavethem free to pursue their insatiable but innocent lust for pleasure and possessions. Both Colette's GigiandAnita Loos's Gentlemen PreferBlondes aswell as the comedy films of MarilynMonroe are presaged in these adorably silly young creatures. In the case ofthese “naturally" predatory girls, Hale'vy implies, education‐one of the cornerstones of bourgeois family aspira~ tion‐would be a drawback rather than an advantage. When Pauline Cardinal, now a panic de lure ensconced in the lap of luxury, wishes to break some appointments with her wealthy lovers in order to visit her mother in the country, she has her lady's maid write to the gentlemen in question rather than doing so herself. When Mnre Cardinal expresses

94 EDGAR DEGAS Ludovic Halévy Meeting Mme Cardinal Backstage. from La Famille Cardinal, e. 1880

shock over her bad manners, Pauline replies: “Hermance writes better than 1do; she‘s been governess in a great family; she never makes a mistake in spelling. But asfor me! It‘s a little your fault, mamma. You were muchmore anxious to teach medancing than spelling.“ ”Becausel thought it was more useful and I was right," Mme Cardinal replies. “Would you be what you are if it hadn't been for the ballet? And see what spelling brings you to‐to beyour lady's maid.”24

Bourgeoisvirtue, far from beingrewarded, is in fact punished in this paradoxical mode of family satire. What you would expect the right‑ thinking, respectable mother to demand is never quite what Mme Cardinal, in her role of procuress-mother, is up to in her search for “respectable"‐actually, high‐class prostitutional‐connections for her daughters.

Family feeling, that demand for harmony and mutual support usually seen ascentral to the respectability of the family asan institu‑ tion, is wittily demeaned by such paradoxical figuration. When for

95 EDGAR DEGAS Dancers at Their Toilette, e. 1879

example, Virginie's rich and aristocratic lover, the marquis, discusses domestic arrangements with M. and Mme Cardinal, suggesting that he will pay the parents a little pension and set up housekeeping with Virginie in his house on Boulevard de la Reine-Hortense, M. and Mme Cardinal are overcome with horror. This is not because the marquis wishes to live in sin with their daughter, as one might expect, but because hewishes to set herup separately from them‐outside the bosom of her family‐and pay them off with a measly pension. M. Cardinal

walks out in a huff, saying that nothing can induce them to part from their Virginie, leavingMadame to negotiate with her daughter's would‑ bekeeper:

So it was agreed, betweenthe marquis and me, that he should hire a large apartment, large enough for the whole of us. At first the marquis proposed to take us all into his house, but I told him Monsieur Cardinal would never agree to that; and I seized the opportunity to describe M. Cardinal's character; that hewasa great stickler for honor and respect and consideration before everything; that we must save appearances at any cost; that, to do that, two doors and two staircases were necessary, so that there shouldn't be any disagreeable meetings at unseasonablehours.

The marquis understoodit all aswell ascouldbe; the very next morning he began his search for apartments, and by noon they were found. That's where we're living now‐Rue Pigalle...We are very comfortable there...Salon and dining‐room in the middle; at the right, our rooms...at the left, Virginie's and the marquis's. Two doors and two staircases. The marquis did his best to induce M. Cardinal and me to take the rooms on the main staircase side; but M. Cardinal refused,withhisusual tact. Tact is his strongpoint,you know. Wetook the servants' staircase.25

In still another incident from the same story, “Madame Cardinal,“ Mme Cardinal and the marquis almost come to blows about who is entitledto give the ailingVirginie her footbath.

He seized the tub but I held on. He pulled and I pulled; half the boiling water fell on his legs and he gave a yell and dropped it. Then I ran through the door to my Virginie. “Here, my angel, here‘s your footbath!“ And I looked the marquis straight in the eye and said: “Just try to tear a mother from her daughter's arms, will you. you grinning ape! You abandonyour children, but I don’t abandon mine 1"26

This is of course cynical, boulevardier mockery of “family values," underscoredby the shrug, wink and nudge of the worldly narrator, who shares the complicitous semiology of the homme du monde with his audience. This audience includedDegas, who, in works like the Dancing Lesson (6. 1874) or Dancers at Their Toilefie (c. 1879, also known asthe DanceExamination) may well imply, subtly of course, that the ubiquity ofthe dancers' mothers behindthe scenes has certain questionable over‑ tones and that apparent chaperonage actually disguises its opposite.

I

The difference between the outright procuress‐mother, like Mme Cardinal, and the generic stage-mother is not a pronounced one in the eyes of the sophisticated backstage gentleman of Degas's time, and indeed,the motherrepresentedin Dancersat Their Toilettebears asuspi‑ cious resemblance to Mme Cardinal in the monotype series dedicated to Halevy's stories.

Degas's climactic subversion of family values, however, occurs not in the realm of backstage shenanigans established by the Famille Cardinalprints, but in asetting of overt transgression: in the brothel,the family’s forbidden opposite, in apastel over monotype, TheNameDayof the Madam (1876‐77). This image,too, isrelatedto aliterary strategy of moral paradox, specifically that employed by Guy deMaupassant in his nouvelleof 1881,La Maison Tellier, in which prostitutes play the role of grandes dames at the first communion ofthe madam's niece, and where the comic tears of sentimental whores create a moment of genuine emotion in the little church in Normandy where they have gathered for the celebration. “The convention," writes Edward D. Sullivan in his analysis ofthis work, “to besure, is the convention of farce and develops the conceivable consequences of the singular proposition of a bawdy house closed because ofa f1rst communion."27 Right from the beginning, however, Maupassant emphasizes the "family atmosphere" of the brothel in question: the MaisonTellier is constructed asasite of warmth, good fellowship and even ofrespectability. “There were always about six or eight people there, always the same, not cut‐ups, but honorable men...and they took their Chartreuse teasing the girls a little or else they talked seriously with Madame, whom everyone respected...The house was familial, very small, painted yellow...Madame, born into a good peasant family...had accepted that profession absolutely as she would havebecome amilliner or aseamstress...”3

Degas, although hetoo relies on the figure of reversal in The Name Day offhe Madam, pushes things a bit further. It is not the image of respectability that he wishes to construct, but its opposite. In one reading, this might be construed asa grotesque reversalofthe notion of family piety, the madam, the “mother figure“ of the piece, inscribing a notion of maternal abjection, to borrow Kristeva‘s location. The whole brothel setting, with the naked girls pressed together, proffering both their sexual charms and their congratulatory bouquet,creates a sense of family values displaced: the house is certainly a home in terms of warmth, ofthe pressingtogether of bodies in a tleshly intimacy impossi~ ble to the chilly decorum governing the behavior of a “real" bourgeois family like the Bellellis, but it is nevertheless a house of scandal. of

,. fi z ‐ ‘ l ‘ m “ fl u - V5 -R e f . - m a m - a t :

96 EDGAR DEGAS The Name Day of the Madam. 1875-77

debasement. Perhaps it is irony which is the figure at issue here, as Victor Koshkin-Youritzin Suggests in his extremely suggestive article entitled "The Irony of Degas." Characterizing this, among all the bor‑ dello monotypes created by Degas, asa “serious and poignant aspect of irony," he points out that this seriousness can only be appreciated to the full if “one recalls the entire body of Degas’s work, especially the many family scenes [Bellelli, Monte, Lepic, etc.) with their piercing sense of isolation. Very simply," Koshkin-Youritzin concludes, “is there not a rather exquisite irony to the fact that here‐not in a private home or polite social gathering, but a mere bordeIIO‐one finds probably the

97 EDGAR DEGAS |n the Salon. c. 1876-85

fullest expression of human warmth, inter‐relationship, and general : happiness to be found anywhere in Degas's work‐and moreover, perhaps the only speciflc example of human giving?”9

It is unexpectedly enlightening to examine Degas's whole series of brothel monotypes (c. 1876‐85)‐for example, In the Salon (J82]‐from the unexpectedvantage point oftheproblem of“family values" asit was constituted in the later nineteenth century.30 It seems to me that Degas‘s strategies vis‐d‐Vis the representation ofthe family are best read against the foil of their apparent opposite, the brothel, the one functioning as the parodic supplement of the other. The family asthe site of alienation and disconnection; the brothel asthe last refuge of living wannth and human contact; or the family as the place where women are sold for money asin the brothel, but with greater hypocrisy, under a veneer of socialvirtue, and above all, bourgeois respectability: these are the topics 3 suggested by Degas's representations.

The brothel monotypes are too often considered as a unified group ofworks, inscribing asingle discourse of prostitution and transgression, . 98 EDGAR DEGAS Two yet as a group, they are far from unified. They range from alienating, w w w - “ 1 8 7 5 4 5 caricatural coarseness and animalism‐see, for example, Two Girls in 99 EDGAR DEGAS Waitingh a Brothel (J 81, fig. 100]; In the Salon [J 82); or Waiting I (J 64, first c.1876‐85

174 A House is Not a Home A House Is Not a Hom

100 EDGAR DEGAS Two Girls in a Brothel, c. 1876‐85 101 EDGAR DEGAS Relaxation, c. 1876-85

versionl‐to representations of relaxed conviviality among women on i their own, or womenwith a male client, or women enjoyingeach other‘s

bodies‐Siesta in the Salon (J 18); Naked Women (J 118); Two Women (J 117, fig. 98); Conversation (J 106l‐to a kind of melting bodily uni‑ fication, a dark, dreamy, flngerprinted figuration of flesh finding satisfaction in flesh, inscribed in compositions in which centripetality‑ in one case, around a hearth in The Fireside (J 159]‐is often the controlling compositional feature, and formal blending, dissolution of borders, and material unity are the strategic constructive principles‐for example Relaxation (J73] or Brothel Scene, In the Salon (J71, fig. 104]. Boundaries andoppositions are obfuscated in these amazingprints,sug‑ gesting an almost palpableyearning for that ultimate, even pre‐Oedipal, unification with the object of desire‐a total and fantasmic satisfaction ofthe flesh‐utterly forbidden by bourgeois family codes, and any others that we know of for that matter?I

In Degas‘s most typical works, for example The Dancer with a Bouquet, also known asBallerina and Lady with a Fan (1878, fig. 105), the figure of relationship‐of “togetherness“‐is always stipulated as a

176 A House Is Not a Home 103 EDGAR DEGAS The Fireside, c. 1876‐77

, m » - . ~ _ _ _ _ _ , . _ fi - > ‐ w < ‘ . _ ‘ l p , _ , . - . a ‐ f » » , ‐ _ , ‐ ~ . ~ ' ; . , , w . ; ‐ - ,

, . m ~ ‐ ' . . , - . . 4 . ~ _ . v _ _ _ , ~ v ‐ h u m p - v _ . _

I believe, that one can speak of some of Degas's representations of women as"positive," in that they call into question,by means of uncon‑ ventional structures of composition and expression, the notion that the

‘ family is the natural site "of feminine existence, rejecting the standard 1 codes andpictorial conventions of the time, even those informingmany , of the engaging family representations of his Impressionistcolleagues. i Pursuing the implications of this negative dialectic even further, l Degas went so far asto locate the purported virtues of the bourgeois

“home" in the “house," soto speak, on the very site‐both seductive and repellently grotesque‐of the family‘s transgressive Other. In so doing, heundermined the oppositional authority of both asimaginary spaces of moraldistinctiveness. '

104 EDGAR DEGAS Brothel Scene, In the Salon, c. 1876‐85

purely formal one, constituted here by the way tutu and fan echo and [ re‐echo each other asformal entities, not assigns of human connection. The “closeness" is specified as that of shapes on paper or canvas, , certainly notthat ofindividual psychology or communitariansolidarity: I on the contrary, it is precisely the social and psychological distance between the dancer on the stage and the elegant spectator in the box that is at once clided, and at the same time, evoked, by the formal i echoing, even overlapping, of the semicircular shapes that bind them 1 in a completely fortuitous rapport. This rejection of conventional psy‐ l chological connection, of traditional narrative, constitutes for us an , essential part of Degas's modernity: his making strange of human relat‐ t edness; his insistence on isolation, disjunction and unexpected “meaningless" conjunction asthe norms for the pictorial construction of contemporary social existence. His rejection of the cliches‐and the pre‐ l sumed hypocrisy‐of the discourse of the family and of women in general seems like one aspect of this modernity. It is only in this sense, |

178 A House Is Not a Home A House Is Not 3 Hum

89 patron, Alfred Bruyas, describing his fateful luncheon with Nieuwerkerque, during the course ofwhich the latter asked Courbet to do a painting for the Exposition of 1855 which would have to hesubmitted to two committees for approval. Courbet proudly rejectedthe offer, declaring to the Superintendent that he also was a Government and that he defied the Superintendent's to do anything for his (Courbet's) that he could accept. Leh‘res de Gustaile Courbet (1Alfred Bruyas, ed. P. Borel (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1951), p. 68. Herding, "Das Atelier des Malers," p. 22. Of course, it is important to rememberthat Courbet by no means renounced official acceptance. Heshowed eleven paintings‐no small number for a relatively young man of thirty‐six‐at the govemment‐sponsored exhibition in the Palais des Beaux‐Arts. For information about the fate ofthe painting between the time that Courbet exhibited it in 1855 and that of its purchase for the Louvre, see “En 1920. ‘L'Atelier‘ deCourbet entrait au Louvre," Les Arnis de Gustave Courbet, Bulletin, 29 (1961), pp. 1‐13 and note 1,p. 2. For a discussion of the depoliticization of Courbet and his work in the early years ofthe Third Republic, see my article, “The De‑ Politicization of Gustave Courbet: Transformation and Rehabilitation under the Third Republic," October, 22 (Fall 1982), pp. 65‐77. Although there were always a few people, like Jules Vall'es, who saw Courbet's life and his painting asprimarily political in their meaning, the re‐politicization of the artist's work was not achieved until 1941 when Meyer Scliapiro published his remarkable article, "Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naivete’,“ Journal ofthe Warburg and Courtauld institutes (April‐June 1941), pp. 164‐191, in which the author insisted on the social and political meaning of Courbet's choice of language and the impact of 1848 on the formation of his style. This reading was the springboard for my own investigation of Courbet, in both my doctoral dissertation Gustave Courbet: A Study ofStyle and Society (New York: Garland, 1976, originally a Ph.D dissertation, New York University, 1963) and articles like “Gustave Courbet‘s Meeting: A Portrait ofthe Artist asa Wandering Jew" (see note 82 for reference). A fullfscalc revisionist

reading of Courbet from the vantage point of asocial history of art had to wait untilT. J. Clark‘s Image ofthe People in 1973.

94. For a differentiation between The Painter's Studio, Courbet's work in general, and the project of modernism, see my “The Invention ofthe Avant‐Garde: France, 1830‐80" (see note 10 for reference).

95. The compulsive syndrome is, asAngus Fletcher astutely points out, the proper psychoanalytic analogue to allegory. See Fletcher,Allegory, p. 286. Compulsive behavior is, asFletcher points out, like allegory, highly orderly and above all. supersystematic (p. 291); such compulsive systematization also marks to a high degree the utopian theories of Charles Fourier aswell asthe theories and practices of his followers: the utopian vegetarian, l'apothc Jupille, for instance, who proselytized for socialist salvation through a non‐carnivorous diet; or the Fourierist dramatist Rose‐Marius Sardat, author ofa bizarre didactic drama entitled “La

in sixteen acts and aprologue, with a cast of

a "Temple deBoiilieur" and setting forth the hopes, duties, pleasures and daily life in a phalaiistery of eighty families in a rhetorical structure which might well be called, for lack of abetter term, a “real allegory." Courbet‘s

the wilder excesses ofthese utopian eccentrics described by Champfleury in Les E.rcentrigires, 2nd edition (Paris: 1877, first publ. 1852), pp. 77‐82, 149‐151 and 155, but there is enough oftliat tradition of eccentric extremism remaining in The Painter‘s Studio to remove it from the realm of the simple, dowri-to‐earth

transformation. For the impact of Fouricrist ideas on the iconography of Studio, see my “The invention of the Avaiit‐Garde,” esp. pp. 18‐19.

96. Ernst Bloch, cited in Raulet, "Critique of Religion and Religion asCritique.“

Chapter Five Notes to pages 152‐179

1. Richard Thomson, for example, in his article “‘Les Quat‘ Pattes': The image of the Dog in Late Nineteenth‐Century French Art," Art

History, 5: 3 (September 1982), p. 327, mentions the fact that Degas "included dogs in his portraits on several occasions" but does not mention the one in The BellelliFamily. Hefocuses on the more prominent pedigree hound represented in the artist's Place dela Concorde (now destroyed), and on other Degas works.

and the identification ofits subject, see the excellent analysis in the exhibition catalogue, Degas, eds. Jean Sutherland Boggs, et al. (Paris: Grand Palais; Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada; New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988‐89), cat. no. 20; hereafter cited asDegas, 1988‐89.The painting is dated there 1858‐67. For the classic analysis of the painting and Degas‘s relation to the family see Jean Sutherland Boggs, "Edgar Degas and the Bellellis," Art Bulletin,37: 2 (June 1955), pp. 127‐ l36. Also see the revision of that article in Degas og familien Bellelli/Degas et lafamilleBellelli, ed. H. Finsen (Copenhagen: Ordrupgaard, 1983), pp. 14‐19.

the time Degas painted the Bellellis is indicated by the fact that, during the 18605, the "interior of the middle‐class home became the prevailing metaphor for arefuge where authentic feelings could besafely acted out"; yet at the same time. "strained relations between the sexes‐within marriage and without‐provided the theme for countless novels, plays, illustrations and paintings of this period.“ For a discussion of both of these aspects in the representation of the family interior, especially in the visual arts, see Susan J. Sidlauskas. “A ‘Perspective of Feeling':The ExpressiveInterior in Nineteenth‐Century RealistPainting,“ Ph.D Dissertation,University of Pennsylvania, [989, pp. 80-81 and 101. For a consideration ofthe theatrical representation of the theme of dissension within the “modern" family, see Charles EdwardYoung, “The Marriage Question in Modern French Drama," University of Wisconsin Bulletin, 5: 4 (1912), n.p. [ W i l l bedealing with the problems ofthe family and its representation in considerable detail below.

Work (Boston: Houghton Miffliii, 1984), p. 52.

7. mid, p.66. B. For information and further interpretation of

this painting, see Degas, 1988‐89. cat. no. 14 9. Compare, for example, Degas's Gioi/arrna and

Giulia Bellelliwith Morisot's Two Seated Women (c. 1869, also known as The Sisters) or Degas's Viscount Lepic and His Daughters (1871) with Morisot's Julie Manet and Her Fatherto see the difference. The same point might be made in the case of the representation of fathers and sons by comparing Mary Cassatt's Alexander Cassart and His Son (1884) with Degas's Henri Rouar andHis Son Alexis (1895‐98).

10.The term "uneasy" applied to Degas's images must inevitably recall Eunice Lipton's niemorablc study, Looking into Degas: UllCllSj Images of Women andModem Life(Berkeley/ LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1986).

11. HenriJoseph Baudrillart, LaFaiiiille et I'e'ducation enFrance daris leurs rapports ( w e l'état de la société (Paris: Didier et cie, 1874).

12.Translated into English asJacques Donzelot, The Policing ofFamilies, trans. R.Hurley (Nei York: Pantheon Books, 1979).

13. Mark Poster, Critical Theory oftheFamily (New York: Seabury Press, 1978). The bourgeois family model differs significantly from earlier aristocratic and peasant ones, coming into being only with the rise of capitalism.

14. Ibid., pp. 169‐178, passim. 15. For an excellent analysis ofthe Habermasiaii

schema and a critique ofhis social theorization of the family in terms ofhis neglect ofthe importance of gender roles in both the private sphere and within the economic world. see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices:Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1989), pp. 113‐143. As Fraser points out, “Habermas‘s account offers an important corrective to the standard dualistic approaches to the separatk ofpublic and private in capitalist societies. Heconceptualizes the problem asa relation among four terms: family, (official) economy, state, and public sphere. His view suggests th in classical capitalism there are actually two distinct but interrelated public/private separations. One public/private separation operates at the level of 'systems,‘ namely, the separation ofthe state or public system, from

Notes: Chapter Five 2

256

the (official) capitalist economy, or private system. The other public/private separation operates at the level ofthe ‘lifeworld,’ namely, the separation of the family, or private lifeworld sphere from the space of political opinion formation and participation, or public lifeworld sphere. Moreover, each of these public/private separations is coordinated with the other. One axis of exchange runs between private system and private lifeworld sphere, that is, between (official) capitalist economy and modern restricted nuclear family...’[lie roles of worker and consumer link the (official) private economyand the private family, while the roles of citizen and (later) client link the public state and the public opinion institutions" (pp. 124‐I25).

fact that the older modes of conceiving ofthe family in some way coincided quite well with capitalist aims of cementing Genieinschaft with Gesellschaft and making the family work together with larger public and capitalist institutions to furtherthe objectives of productivity, i.e. the notion that stable, well‑ disciplined family units “worked" better. And yet such coherence goes against another notion of the family, faniiliar especially to readers of English social history of the mid‑ nineteenth century, asthe very opposite. a redemption ofthe cold, impersonal, competitive public arena of money‐making, an oasis ofprivacy, run by the “angel of the house“ asan antidote to the harsh market‑ place which constituted the public, masculine world.

analysis of the novel by Demetra Palmari, "The Shark Who Swallowed His Epoch: Family, Nature and Society in the Novels of Emile Zola," published in the collection of essays entitled Changing Images ofthe Family, eds. V. Tufte and B. Myerhoff (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 155‐l72.

family represented in the novel, the Josscrands, who, in their obsession with obtaining a good parti for their daughters, echo the situation recounted ofLaura in the Bellelli chronicles. Says Palmari ofthe Zola's Josserands: "The daughters must be married, and the search for husbands is the mother's obsession, for marriage is the basis oftheir

Notes: Chapter Five

moral system and world view. In tnith, marriage is itself a mask ofinorality, for it is usually a facade for adulterous intrigues.

The J'osserands are prepared to do anything to marry offtheir daughters and the girls care little about the choice of husbands, for their paramount concern is to be married. Berthe's mother lies about her daughter's dowry and steals a small inheritance from her retarded son in order to enlarge the sum. Pushed into an extreme position‐the mother admits she would go so far asto commit murder to get her daughter properly married‐she reveals herselfas a victim crippled by society who in turn victimizes and oppresses her daugliter...The plot isa maze ofillicit liaisons for which marriage and family are a thinly respectable facade. It ends with a final allegorization of the servants' court. ‘When it thawed, the walls dripped with damp, and astench arose from the little dark quadrangle. All the secret rotteniiess ofeach floor seemed fused in this stinking drain'" tpp. 164‐165). She continues: "It is a code so rigid and hostile to all that is natural‐all that is spontaneous in humanity‐that it iscompletely unenforceable. In creating such rigid moral standards society becomes not a protector but an enemy oflife. love and honesty. Ideally, it is the family that provides order against external chaos. but to do so it must be allowed a degree of flexibility and naturalness.Too great rigidity in this...itselfengenders chaos. Love and spontaneity reappear because these aspects oflife cannot beeliminated, but they are garbed in their dark manifestations‐as exploitative sexuality. brutal confrontations, violent outbursts-more disruptive. disorderly. and threatening to the social order than they would have been if allowed a proper place to begin with." lbirl., pp. 1654166. prissiin. The Goncourts, for instance, are obsessed with this issue. See T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life:Paris in the Art of/llaiict and His Followers (New York: Knopf, l985): Alain Corbin, Les Filles ile noce: Misére seruelh' ct prostitution o u r 19' ct 20" siecles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978): Hollis Clayson, "Alianr‐Gardc and Ponipier liiiages of Nineteenth-Century French f‘ioslilution: 'llic Matter of Modernism, Modeinity and Social ltleology" iii Modernism anrl Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers (Halifax, Nova

2 ] .

Scotia: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), pp. 43‐64; and most recently, Charles Bernheimer, Figures ofIIIReptile: Representing Prostitution iii Nineteenth‐Century France (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989), for important discussions ofthe discourse of prostitution. Clark and others have seen the confusion between respectability and prostitution ascentral to the construction of the social problems oflater nineteenth‑ century France. See, for example, their anecdote ofthe adorable and apparently respectable middle‑ class mother and daughter glimpsed in the park‐the very models of domestic and filial virtue‐whom they later find out are notorious whores specializing in serial fellatio. first mother, then daughter performing the act in the comfort of the client‘s own home. (I regret to say I can no longer locate the exact reference to this incident which Iread many years ago in the complete edition of the Goncourt Journals: Journal: Ménioires dela vie litte'raire, 1851‐61, 1892‐95, ed. Acade'mie Goncourt [Paris: Flammarion, l935-36], 9 vols. Attempts to track the story down in abridged versions ofthe Journals have been fruitless.) For the complex publishing history of both the Cardinal stories and Degas's relationship to this publication, see “Degas, Hale'vy, and the Cardinals," in Degas, 1988‐89, cat. nos. 167‐169. McMullen, Degas, p. 353. Ludovic Hale'vy, "Pauline Cardinal," in La Fainille Cardinal (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1883), pp. 62‐63. Ludovic Hale'vy, “Madame Cardinal," in ibid.. pp. 19-20. Ibid.,p. 32. EdwardD. Sullivan, Maupassant: The Short Stories (London: Arnold, l962), p. 43. Guy deMaupassant, La Maison Tellier, in Games completes, vol. 6 (Paris: Louis Cunard, 1908), pp. 1‐2. Indeed, asEmily Apter has pointed out, "the maison close (literally ‘closed house‘) [is]...a subversive catachresis, yokiiig the bourgeois notion of‘home' to the morally tainted connotations of ‘closet' sexuality,“ Emily Apter, "Cabinet Secrets: Fetishism, Prostitution, and the Fin‐de-Siecle Interior," Assemblage, 9 [June 1989],p. 8. Victor Koshkin‐Youritzin, "The Irony ofDegas," Gazette des Beau-Arts, 87 (1976), p. 36.

c. l876‐85. see Degas, 1988‐89,cat. nos. 180-188.Also see Eugenia PaiTy Janis, Degas Manatypes, (Cambridge, Mass.: Fo; Art Museum, 1965). individual examples from the series will be referred to in term ofJanis‘s catalogue numbers. as“J. I am, however, wary of exorierating Degz complicity in the scopophilic practices 01 his time on the basis of the self-revelatio of the medium constituted by these print ashave, to some degree, Carol Armstron| and to a lesser one, Charles Bernheimer. 1 Carol Armstrong, "Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body, in TI Female Body in Western Culture, ed. 5. R Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 223‐242 and Charles Bernheimer, "Degas's Brothels: Voyeurism and Ideology," Representation 20 (Fall [987], pp. 158‐186. I turn for tli critique of this strategy of recuperation through formal practices to Constance Penley's negative assessment of structurz materialist film practice and its attempt l subvert the identificatory modality ofthr apparatus by constantly revealing its presence, asa transgression which ultim: identifies with the Law. "The use of self‑ reflexive aesthetic strategies is, of course almost the definition of avant‐garde practice...[the use of] ‘filmic material processes' assubject matter: celluloid scratches, splicing tape marks, processiin stains, fingerprints, image slip, etc...But i take Christian Metz‘s [the film theorist's) thesis that the primary identification isv the camera, then we must immediately question the ‘objectivity' of the strategy showing the spectator these 'prostheses' . own body, ofliis own vision, because it i quite likely that this could reinforce the primary identification, which, asMetz ar is the basis ofthe construction of a transcendental subject." Penley continue “Side by side with the axiom ofsclf~rcflt is the emphasis on these films as epistemological enterprise.“ But, asshe points out. “in its extreme form the desir to know slips from epistemology into

to know. This perversion involves the attempted mastery ofknowletlge and the demonstration of the all‐powerfulncss 0!

the subject." Constance Penley, “The Avant‑ Garde and its lmaginary, The Future ofan Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989), pp. 18‐19. The same criticism could be offered ofDegas's attempt to remove his work from the established codes of pornographic representation of his time through strategies ofself‐reflexivity. Both Armstrong and Bemheimer deal intelligently with the complex and, admittedly, ambiguous issues involved; I am n o t suggesting that there is an absolutely correct position on this issue: quite the contrary.

C h a p t e r S i x Notes t o pages 1 8 0‐2 1 5

There are some discrepancies in the wording of titles and the dating ofsome of Mary Cassatt's work which will n o t be settled definitively until the catalogue raisonné, currently under preparation, is published. In a number of instances, the titles and dates in this essay vary from those given in Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, the catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998.

1. Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories ofArt (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 50‐901

2. Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), vol. 3, p. 257.

3. w i l l , p. 257‐253. 4. amt, p. 258. 5. Dorothy Richardson, “Some Notes on the

Eternally Conflicting Demands ofHumanity (Not 'Femininity'!) and Art,” Vanity Fair. 24 (May 1925), p. 100.

6. Julia Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Bellini," Desire in Language, ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. T. Gora, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

7. Marie Christine Hamon, Pourquoi lesfemrnes aiment‐elles les honimes? et n o n pas plutot leur mere? (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

8. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance A r t and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).

258 N o t e s : C h a p t e r Six

9. For a discussion of Dodgson's photographs, see Susan H. Edwards, "Pretty Babies: Art, Erotica or Kiddies Porn?" History ofPhotograplzy, 18: 1 (Spring 1994), esp. pp. 3 9‐4 0 .

10. Carolyn Kinder Carr and Sally Webster, “Mary Cassatt and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies: The Search for their 1893 Murals," American Art, 8 (Winter 1994), pp. 52‐69. ‑

11. Cassatt to Palmer in a letter of 11 October 1892. Cited by F. A. Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, Impressionistfrom Pennsylvania (Oklahoma: Norman, 1966), p. 131.

12. Judy Sund, "Columbus and Columbia in Chicago, 1893: M a l l of Genius Meets Generic Woman," A r t Bulletin, 75: 3 (September 1993), pp. 443‐466.

13. ibid., p. 464. 14. Cassatt to Palmer in a letter of 11 October

1892. Cited by Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, p. 130 and Sund, “Columbus and Columbia in Chicago, 1893,“ p. 462.

15. Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life (New York: Villard Books, 1994), p. 106.

16. Maud Howe Elliott, "The Building and Its Decoration," in A r t and Handicraft in the Woman's Building ofthe World's Columbian Exposition, ed. M. 11. Elliott (Paris and New York: Goupil and Company, 1893), p. 23.

17. Carol Zemel, Van Goglr's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late Nineteenth‐Century A r t [Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 235.

18.1bid., p. 237 and note 62, p. 280. 19. Cassatt to Palmer. Cited by Sweet, Miss Mary

Cassatt, p. 1 3 ] . 2 0 . Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past:

The Nabis and French Medieual A r t , Ph.D Dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York, 1996, p. 1.

21. Cassatt to Palmer. Cited by Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, p. 131.

22. Cassatt to Hallowell. Cited in an 1864 letter from Hallowell to Palmer. See Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), p. 254.

23. Louisine W. Havemeyer. “The Suffrage Torch, Memories of a Militant," Scribner's Magazine, 71 (May 1922), p. 528. Cited by Frances Weitzenhoffer, The Hanenreyers: Impressionism Carries to America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), p. 205.

24. From Louisine Havcmeyer's unpublished chapter on Mary Cassatt (intended for her

Memoirs), p. 33. Cited by Weitzenhoffer in The Hauerneyers, p. 220.

25. Griselda Pollock. Mary Cassatt (London: Jupiter Books, 1980), p. 27.

C h a p t e r Seven Notes t o pages 2 1 6‐2 3 7

1. The smaller version, in the Berggruen Collection, on loan to the National Gallery, London, is painted in oil on canvas and measures 15‘lz ><19'/4 in. (39.5 x 49 cm). The large version in the collection o f t h e Barnes Foundation, painted from 1886‐88, measures about 7 ><10 feet (813/4 x 121‘I4 in. or 207.6 x 308 cm). The relationship between the two versions is problematic, but 1 find convincing Francoise Cachin's suggestion that, rather than either being a preliminary sketch or a copy after the finished work, the smaller version may have been "an attempt to solve difficulties that Seurat encountered while he was painting the large version, probably in the summer o f 1887." Georges Seurat, 1 8 5 9 - 1 8 9 1 , ed. Robert L. Herbert (New York: The Metropolitan Museum o f A r t , 1991), p. 292; hereafter cited as Seurat, 1991.

2. For a fuller discussion of the issues at stake in the status of the male versus the female nude in the art practice of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Carol Ockman, "Profiling Homoeroticism: lngres‘s Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors qugamemnon," A r t Bulletin, 75: 2 (June 1993), pp. 259‐274 and Abigail Solomon‐Godeau, “Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation," A r t History, 16: 2 (June 1993), pp. 286‐312.

1 B u t see recent lectures by John Goodman, Whitney Davis and other scholars for a r e‑ evaluation and reinterpretation o f t h e role of both homophobia and (covert) homosexual desire in the emphasis on and construction of the male nude during the neoclassical period. On the other hand, the work of Jusepe de Ribera, who was the subject of an exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum in 1992, suggests that in certain cases the nude may not be the site of masculine desire at all. but rather that ofsuffering and martyrdom. ln Ribera‘s painting the male nude constitutes the dominant theme of representation, while the female is completely absent. However, pain or incipient pain rather than sexual desire seems

to be the emotion of choice in Ribera'f although the border between the t w o 1 times, be uncertain.

enters into the histories of both versio Poseuses: a politics of the possession ( actual paintings themselves rather tha the bodies within them. In 1975 the conceptual artist Hans Haacke made tl version o f t h e Poseuses the focus of a installation questioning the commodil ofso‐called vanguard art and the incr presence and power of corporate inter the art market. The piece, however. we exhibited in the context of an exhibiti featuring gender politics, a show calle "Differences: On Representation and Sexuality" at the New Museum in Nev 1985. The late Craig Owen says of Hal Haacke's Les Poseuses: Provenance of Version, 1 8 8 8‐1 9 7 5 , that “Haacke's v been included in a show dealing with difference presumably because its 'obj belongs to a long tradition of images female nude‐images destined for a m viewer who supposedly accedes throu image to a position of imaginary cont possession" (Craig Owen, "Posing," in Recognition: Representation, Power at Culture (Berkeley: University of Calitk Press, 1992], p. 202 [reprint o f h i s ess Difiercncesl). Nor is this the only act I possessionrdispossession suffered by painting. In the case of the large vcrs eccentric German collector Count Ha Kessler, urged on by Paul Siguac wln that he would ultimately give it to tl Museum, bought the work in 1898, l margins c u t , placed the painting on embedded it in the Art Nouveau dec‑ house designed by Henry van de Vcl another arch‐admirer of neo-Impres: See A. M. Harnmacher, Die Welt Hen Velde (Antwerp: Mercator, 1967). p. a reproduction of the Poseuses as n I Kessler‘s decor. Says Hammacher of Poseuses in this setting: "Two thirds rolled up in a roller‐frame (Unralnni v a n de Velde expressly designed for purpose, against his will under press Kesslcr..." (p. 348). The painting was released from architectural captivity when Albert Barnes bought i t , and d spectators o f t h e opportunity to obsr

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