Modern Art and Visual Culture 1660-1900

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VISION AND DIFFERENCE Femininity, feminism and

histories of art GRISELDA POLLOCK

ROUTLEDGE London and New York

3 Modernity and the spaces of

femininity

Investment in the look is n o t as privileged in w o m e n as in men. More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, and maintains a distance. In o u r culture the predomin‑ ance of the look over smell, taste, touch and hearing has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations. The m o m e n t the look dominates, the body loses its materiality. (Luce Irigaray (1978). Interview in M . - F. Hans and G. Iapouge

(eds) [ a s Pemmes, la pornographic ct i‘émtisme, Paris, p. 50)

INTRODUCTION The schema which decorated the cover of Alfred H. Barr’s catalogue for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936 is paradigmatic of the way modern art has been mapped by modernist art history (Figure3.1). Artistic practices from the late nine‑ teenth century are placed on achronological flow chart where movement follows m0vement connected by one-way arrows which indicate influence and reaction. Over each movement a named artist presides. All those canonized as the initiators of modern art are men. Is this because there were no w o m e n involved in early modern mavements? N o.‘ Is it because those who were, w e r e without significance in determining the shape and character of modern art? N o . Or is it rather because what modernist art history celebrates is a selective tradition which normalizes, asthe only modernism, a particular and gendered set of practices? I would argue for this explanation. As a result any attempt to deal with artists in the early history of modernism who are women necessitates a deconstruction of the masculinist myths of modernism.2

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3.1 The Development of Abstract Art. 1936. Chart prepared for the Museum of Modern A r t , New York, by Alfred H. Barr, j r . Photograph courtesy, The Museum of Modern A r t , New York.

These are, however, widespread and structure the discourse of many counter-modernism, for instance in the social history of art. The recent publication The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the A r t of Manet and his Followers, by T. J. Clark,3 offers a searching account of the social relations between the emergence of n e w protocols and criteria for paint‑ ing ‐ modernism - and the myths of modernity shaped in and by the n e w city of Paris remade by capitalism during the Second Empire. Going beyond the c0mmonplaces about a desire to be contemporary in art, ' i ] faut etre de son temps',‘ Clark puzzles at what structured the

3.2 Gustave Caillebotte, Paris, a rainy day (1877)

notions of modernity which became the territory for Manet and his followers. He thus indexes the impressionist painting practices to a complex set of negotiations of the ambiguous and baffling class forma‑ tions and class identities which emerged in Parisiansociety. Modernity is presented asfar more then a sense of being ’up to date' - modernity is a matter of representations and major myths ‐ of a new Paris for recreation, leisureandpleasure,of nature to be enjoyed at weekends in suburbia, of the prostitute taking over and of fluidity of class in the popular spaces of entertainment. The key markers in this mythic territory are leisure, consumption, the spectacle and money. And we can reconstruct from Clark a map of impressionist territory which stretches from the new boulevards via Care St Lazare out on the suburbantrain to LaGrenouillere, Bougivalor Argenteuil. In these sites, the artists lived, worked and pictured themselvesS (Figure 3.2). But in two of the four chapters of Clark's book, he deals with the problematic of sexuality in bourgeois Paris and the canonical paintings are Olympia (1863, Paris, Musée du Louvre) and A bar at the Folies‐Bergére (1881‐2, London, Courtauld Institute of Art) (Figure 3.3). it is a mighty but flawed argument on many levelsbut here I wish to

3.3 Edouard Manet, A bar at the Polies‐Bergére (1881-2)

attend to its peCuliar closmes on the issue of sexuality. For Clark the foundingfact isclass. Olympia's nakedness inscribesherclass andthus debunks the mythic classlessness of sex epitomized in the image of the courtesan." The fashionably blase’ barmaid at the Folies evades afixed identity aseither bourgeois or proletarianbut none the less participates in the play around class that constituted the myth and appeal of the popular.7 Although Clark nods in the direction of feminism by acknowledging

that these paintingsimply amasculineviewerfconsumer, the manner in which this is done ensures the normalcyof that positionleavingit below the threshold of historical investigation and theoretical analysis.a To recognize the gender specific conditions of these paintings' existence one need only imagine a female spectator and a female producer of the works. How can a woman relate to the viewing positions proposedby either of these paintings? Can a woman be offered, in order to be denied, imaginary possession of Olympia or the barmaid? Would a woman of Manet’s class have a familiarity with either of these spaces anditsexchangeswhich couldbeevokedsothat the painting'smodern‑ ist job of negation and disruption could be effective? Could Berthe

Vision and Difference

Morisot have gone to such a location to canvass the subject? Would it enter her head asasite of modernity asshe experienced it? Could she as awoman experience modernity as Clark defines it at all?” For it is astrikingfact that many of the canonicalworks heldup asthe

founding monuments of modern art treat precisely with this area, sexuality, and this form of it, commercial exchange. I am thinking of innumerablebrothelscenes through toPicasso’sDemoisellesd’Avignonor that other form, the artist’s couch. The encounters pictured and imagined are those between men who have the freedom to take their pleasuresin many urbanspacesandwomen fromaclass subjectto them who have to work in those spaces often selling their bodies to clients, or toartists. Undoubtedly these exchanges are structuredby relationsof class but these are thoroughly captured within gender and its power relations. Neither can be separated or ordered in a hierarchy. They are historical simultaneities and mutually inflecting. Sowe mustenquirewhy the territory of modernismsooften is away

of dealing with masculine sexuality and its sign, the bodies of women - why the nude, the brothel, the bar? What relation is there between sexuality, modernity and modernism. If it is normal to see paintings of women’s bodies as the territory across which men artists claim their modernityandcompetefor leadershipof the avant-garde, canwe expect to rediscover paintings by women in which they battled with their sexuality in the representationof the malenude?Ofcourse not; the very

’ While accepting that paintings such as Olympia and A bar at the Folks-Berger's come from a tradition which invokes the spectator as masculine, it is necessary to acknowledge the way in which a feminine spectator is actually implied by these paintings. Surely one partof the shock,of the transgressioneffectedby the painting Olympia for itsfirst viewers at the Paris Salon was the presence of that ’brazen' but cool look from the white woman on abed attended by a black maid in a space in which women, or tobehistorically precisebourgeois ladies, would bepresumed to be present. That look, soovertly passingbetween a seller of woman‘s body and a clientiviewer signifiedthe commercialand sexual exchangesspecificto apartof the publicrealmwhichshouldbeinvisible to ladies.Furthermoreitsabsencefrom their consciousnessstructured their identitiesasladies.In some of hiswritingsT. ]. Clark correctly discusses the meanings of the sign woman in the nineteenth century as oscillating between two poles of the fillt publique (woman of the streets) and the ftmme horméte (therespectable married woman). But it would seem that the exhibi‑ tion of Olympia precisely confounds that social and ideological distance between two imaginary poles and forces the one to confront the other in that part of the public realm where ladies do go ‐ still within the frontiers of femininity. The presence of this painting in the Salon - not because it is a nude but because it displaces the mythological costume or anecdote through which prostitution was represented mythically through the courtesan ‐ transgresses the line on my grid derivedfromBaudelaire’atext, introducingnot just modernityasamannerof int‑ ‘mga pressingcontemporary theme, but the spaces of modernity into a soci terri‑ tory of the bourgeoisie, the Salon, where ViEWing “ C h 3“ image is quite shocking becauseof the presenceof wives, sisters and daughters. The understandingof the shock depends upon our restoration of the female spectator to her historical and social place.

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

suggestion seems ludicrous. But why? Because there is a historical asymmetry ‐ a difference socially, economically, subjectively between beingawoman andbeingaman in Paris in the latenineteenthcentury. This difference ‐ the product of the social structuration of sexual difference and not any imaginary biological distinction - determined both what and how men and women painted. I have long been interested in the work of Berthe Morisot (1841-96)

andMary Cassatt (1844‐1926), two of thefour womenwho were actively involved with the impressionist exhibiting society in Paris in the 18705 and 1880s who were regarded by their contemporaries as important members of the artistic group we n o w label the lmpressionists.° But how arewe to study the work of artists who are women so that we can discover and account for the specificity of what they produced as individuals while also recognizing that, aswomen, they worked from different positions and experiences from those of their colleagues who were men? Analysing the activities of women who were artists cannot merely

involve mapping women on to existing schemata even those which claimtoconsiderthe productionof artsocially andaddress the centrality of sexuality. Wecannot ignore the fact that the terrains of artistic prac‑ tice andof art history are structured in and structuringof gender power relations. As Roszika Parker and I argued in Old Mistresses: Women, Art and

ideology (1981), feminist art history has a double project. The historical recoveryof data about women producersof art coexists with andisonly critically possible through a concomitant deconstruction of the discourses and practices of art history itself. Historical recovery of women who were artists is a prime necessity

because of the consistent obliterationof their activity in what passes for art history. Wehaveto refutethe lies that there were nowomen artists, or that the women artists who areadmittedare second-rate andthat the reason for their indifference lies in the all‐pervasive submission to an indeliblefemininity ‐ alwaysproposedasunquestionably adisability in making art. But alone historical recovery is insufficient.What sense are we to make of information without a theorized framework through

complicated issue. To avoid the embrace of the feminine stereotype which homogenizes women’s work asdetermined by natural gender, we must stress the heterogeneity of women's art work, the specificity of individual producers and products. Yet we have to recognize what women share - as a result of nurture not nature, i.e. the historically variable social systems which produce sexual differentiation. . This leads to a major aspect of the feminist project, the theorization

Vision and Difference

and historical analysis of sexual difference. Difference is not essential but understood asa social structure which positions male and female people asymmetrically in relation to language, to social and economic power and to meaning. Feminist analysis undermines one bias of patriarchal power by refuting the myths of universal or general mean‑ ing. Sexuality, modernism or modernity cannot function as given categories to which we add women. That only identifies a partial and masculine viewpoint with the norm and confirms women asother and subsidiary. Sexuality, modernism or modernity are organized by and organizations of sexual difference. To perceivewomen's specificity is to analyse historically a particular configuration of difference. This is my projecthere.Howdo thesocially contrivedorders of sexual

difference structure the lives of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot? How did that structure what they produced?The matrix I shall consider here is that of space. Spacecanbegraspedin severaldimensions.The first refersusto spaces

aslocations.What spaces are representedin the paintingsmadebyBerthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt? And what are not? A quick list includes: 3.4 Bertha Morisot 3.5 Berthe Morisot dining-rooms in the dining room (1886) Two wmen reading (1869‐70) drawing-rooms bedrooms balconiesfverandas private gardens (See Figures 3.4‐3.11.) The majority of these have to be recognized as examples of private

‘. legitimized as central topics of the painting practices.” On closer 1 examination it is much more significant how little of typical impres‑

sionist iconographyactuallyreappearsin the works madeby artists who l are women. They do not represent the territory which their colleagues | . who were men so freely occupied and made use of in their works, for '.t‘ /- instance bars, cafes, backstage and even those places which Clark has

seen asparticipatingin the mythof the popular- such asthe bar at the 56

____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ A _ _

3.5" Mary Cassatt Susan on a balcony (1883)

Vision and Difference

and historical analysis of sexual difference. Difference is not essential but understood asa social structure which positions male and female people asymmetrically in relation to language, to social and economic power and to meaning. Feminist analysis undermines one bias of patriarchal power by refuting the myths of universal or general mean‑ ing. Sexuality, modernism or modernity cannot function as given categories to which we add women, That only identifies a partial and masculine viewpoint with the norm and confirms women asother and subsidiary. Sexuality, modernism or modernity are organized by and organizations of sexual difference. To perceivewomen's specificity is to analyse historically a particular configuration of difference. This is my projecthere.Howdo thesocially contrivedorders of sexual

aslocations.What spaces are representedin the paintingsmadeby Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt? And what are not? A quick list includes: dining-rooms drawing-rooms bedrooms balconiesiverandas private gardens (See Figures 3.4‐3.ll.) The majority of these have to be recognized asexamples of private

areas or domestic space. But there are paintings located in the public domain, scenes for instance of promenading, driving in the park,being at the theatre, boating. They are the spaces of bourgeois recreation, display and those social rituals which constituted polite society, or Society, LeMonde. In the case of Mary Cassatt’s work, spaces of labour are included, especially those involving child care (Figure 3.10]. In several examples, they make visible aspects of working-class women’s labour within the bourgeois home. . I have previously argued that engagement with the impressionist groupwas attractive to some women precisely becausesubjects dealing with domestic social life hitherto relegatedasmeregenre paintingwere legitimized as central topics of the painting practices.lo On closer examination it is much more significant how little of typical impresr sionist iconographyactuallyreappearsin the works madeby artists who are women. They do not represent the territory which their colleagues who were men so freely occupied and made use of in their works, for

‐ instance bars, cafes, backstage and even those places which Clark has seen asparticipatingin the mythof the popular- such asthe bar at the

3.4 Berthe Morisot 3.5 Berthe Morisot in the dining room (1886) Two women reading (1869‐70)

- ~ ’ .

3.6 Mary Cassatt Five o'clock tea (1880)

1? Mary Cassatt Susan on a balcony (1883)

On asummer's day (1830)

The build (1892)

3.11 Berthe Morisot

3.8 Mary Cassatt Lydia at a tapestry frame (6. 1881)

3.9 Mary Cassatt Lydia crocheting in the garden (1880)

3.14 Berthe Morisot On the balcony (1872)

3.12 Berthe Morisot The harbour at Lorie-m (1869)

Claude Monet The garden of the princess (1867)

Vision and Difference

Folies-Bergere or even the Moulin de la Galette. A range of places and subjects was closed to them while open to their male colleagues who could move freely with men and women in the socially fluid public world of the streets, popular entertainment and commercial or casual sexual exchange. The second dimension in which the issue of space can beaddressed

is that of the spatial order within paintings. Playingwith spatial struc‑ tures was one of the defining features of early modernist painting in Paris, be it Manet’s witty and calculated play uponflatness or Degas’s use of acute angles of vision, varying viewpoints and cryptic framing devices. Withtheir close personalcontactswithbothartists, Morisotand Cassatt were no doubt party to the conversations out of which these strategiesemergedandequally subject to the lessconscious social forces which may well have conditioned the predisposition to explore spatial ambiguities and metaphors.11Yet although there are examples of their using similar tactics, i would like to suggest that spatial devices in the work of Morisot and Cassatt work to a wholly different effect. A remarkable feature in the spatial arrangements in paintings by

Morisot is the juxtaposition on asingle canvas of two spatial systems ‑ or at least of two compartments of space oftenobviously boundariedby some device such as a balustrade, balcony, veranda or embankment whose presence is underscoredby facture. In The harbourat Lorienf,1869 (Figure 3.12), Morisot offers us at the left a landscape view down the estuary represented in traditional perspective while in one corner, shapedby the boundary of the embankment, the main figure is seated at an oblique angle to the view and to the viewer. A comparable composition occurs in On the terrace, 1874(Figure3.13), where againthe foregroundfigure isliterallysqueezedoff‐centreandcompressedwithin abox of space markedby aheavilybrushed‐inbandof dark paint form‑ ing the wall of the balcony on the other side of which lies the outside world of the beach. In On the balcony, 1872 (Figure 3.14), the viewer's gaze over Paris is obstructed by the figures who are none the less separated from that Paris as they look over the balustrade from the Trocadéro, very near to her home.12 The point can be underlined by contrastingthe painting by Monet,Thegardenoftheprincess, 186?(Figure 3.15), where theviewer cannot readily imaginethe point fromwhich the paintinghasbeenmade,namelyawindow highin oneof the new apart‑ ment buildings, and instead enjoys afantasy of floating over the scene. What Morisot's balustrades demarcate is not the boundary between public and private but between the spaces of masculinity and of femininity inscribed at the level of both what spaces are open to men and women and what relation a man or woman has to that space and its occupants.

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

In Morisot’s paintings, moreover, it is asif the place from which the painter worked is made part of the scene creating a compression or immediacy in the foregroundspaces.This locatesthe viewer in that same place,establishinganotionalrelationbetweentheviewer andthe woman defining the foreground, therefore forcing the viewer to experience a dislocation between her space and that of aworld beyond its frontiers. Proximity and compression are also characteristic of the works of

Cassatt. Less often is there a split space but it occurs, as in Susan on a balcony, 1883 (Figure 3.7). More common is a shallow pictorial space which the paintedfigure dominates Youngwoman in black: portraitofMrs Gardner Cassatt, 1883(Figure3.16)/.Zhe viewer isforcedintoaconfronta‑ tion or conversation with the painted figure while dominance and familiarity are deniedby the deviceof the avertedheadof concentration on an activity by the depicted personage. "at are the conditions for this awkward but pointed relation of the figure to the world? Why this lack of conventional distance andthe radicaldisruption of what we take asthe normal spectator‐text relations? What has disturbed the ‘logic of the gaze? In a previous monograph on Mary Cassatt I tried to establish a

correspondence between the social space of the represented and the pictorial space of the representation.” Considering the painting Lydia, at a tapestry frame, 1881 (Figure 3.8), I noted the shallow space of the painting which seemed inadequate to contain the embroidery frame at which the artist’s sister works. I tried to explain its threatened protru‑ sionbeyondthe picture's space into that of the viewer asacomment on the containment of women and read the painting as a statement of resistance to it. In Lydia crochzting in the garden, 1880 (Figure 3.9), the woman is not placed in an interior but in a garden. Yet this outdoor space seemsto collapsetowards the pictureplane,againcreatingasense of compression. The comfortable vista beyond the figure, opening out to include aview and the sky beyond asin Caillebotte’s Garden at Petit Gennevillt’ers with dahlt’as, 1893, is decisively refused. I argued that despite the exterior setting the painting creates the

intimacy of an interior and registers the garden, a favoured topic with impressionist artists, not asa piece of private property but asthe place of seclusion and enclosure. I was searching for some kind of homology between the compression of pictorial space and the social confinement of women within the prescribedlimitsof bourgeoiscodes of femininity. Claustrophobia and restraint were read into the pressurized placement of figures in shallow depth. But such an argument is only a modified form of reflection theory which does not explain anything (though it does have the savinggraceof acknowledgingthe roleof signifiers in the active production of meaning).

3.16 Mary Cassatt Young woman in black: portrait ofMrs Gardner Cassatt (1883)

In the case of Mary Cassatt I would now want to draw attentionto the disarticulation of the conventions of geometric perspective which had normally governed the representation of space in European painting since the fifteenth century. Since its development in the fifteenth century, this mathematically calculated system of projection had aided painters in the representation of a three-dimensional world on a two‑ dimensional surface by organizing objects in relation to each other to produce a notional and singular position from which the scene is intelligible. It establishes the viewer as both absent from and indeed independent of the scene while being its mastering eyeH.

3.17 Mary Cassatt Young girl in a blue annchair (1878)

It ispossibleto representspaceby otherconventions. Phenomenology hasbeenusefully applied to the apparentspatial deviations of the work of Van Gogh and Cézanne.“ Insteadof pictorial space functiomng as a notional box into which objects are placed in a rational and abstract relationship, space isrepresentedaccordingto the way it isexperienced by a combination of touch, texture, as well as sight. Thus objects are patterned according to subjective hierarchies of value for the producer. Phenomenologicalspaceisnotorchestratedfor sightalonebutby means of visual cues refers to other sensations and relations of bodies and objectsin alivedworld. Asexperientialspace this kindof representation becomes susceptible to different ideological,historicalaswell aspurely contingent, subjective inflections. _ _ . These are not necessarily unconscious. For instance in Younggirl in a

blue armchair, 1878 (Figure 3.17) by Cassatt, the viewpomt from which the room has been painted is low so that the chairs loom large as if imagined from the perspective of a small person placed amongst massive upholstered obstacles. The background zooms sharply away indicating a different sense of distance from that a taller adult would enjoy over the objects to an easily accessible back wall. The painhrtg therefore not only picturesasmallchild in aroombutevokesthat child 9 sense of the space of the room. It is from this conception of the

Vision and Difference

possibilitiesof spatialstructure that I cannow discernaway throughmy earlier problem in attempting to relate space and social processes. For athird approach lies in considering not only the spaces represented, or the spaces of the representation, but the social spaces from which the representationismadeand its reciprocalpositionalities.The producer is herself shaped within a spatially orchestrated social structure which is livedatbothpsychic and social levels.The spaceof the look at the point of productionwill to some extent determine the viewing positionof the spectator at the point of consumption. This point of view is neither abstract nor exclusively personal, but ideologically and historically construed. It is the art historian's job to re-create it ‐ since it cannot ensure its recognition outside its historical moment. The spaces of femininity operated not only at the level of what is

represented, the drawing-room or sewing-room. The spaces of femininity are those from which femininity is lived asapositionality in discourse and social practice. They are the product of a lived sense of social locatedness,mobilityandvisibility, in the socialrelationsof seeing and being seen. Shaped within the sexual politics of looking they demarcate a particular social organization of the gaze which itself works back to secure a particular social ordering of sexual difference. Femininity is both the condition and the effect. How does thisrelateto modernityandmodernism?AslanetWolffhas

convincingly pointed out, the literature of modernity describes the experience of men.“ It is essentially a literature about transformations in the public world and its associated consciousness. it is generally agreed that modernity as a nineteenth-century phenomenon is a productof the city. It is aresponsein amythicor ideologicalformto the new complexities of a social existence passed amongst strangers in an atmosphere of intensified nervous and psychic stimulation, in a world ruledby money andcommodity exchange, stressedby competition and formative of anintensified individuality, publicly defended by a blasé mask of indifference but intensely ‘expressed‘ in a private, familial context.“ Modernity stands for a myriad of responses to the vast increase in population leading to the literature of the crowds and masses, a speeding up of the pace of life with its attendant changes in the sense and regulation of time and fostering that very modern phenomenon,fashion, the shift in the character of towns andcities from being centresof quite visible activities - manufacture, trade, exchange - to being zoned and stratified, with production becoming less visible while the centres of cities such as Paris and London become key sites of consumption and display producing what Sennett has labelled the spectacular city.” All these phenomena affected women aswell asmen, but in different

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

ways. What I have described above takes place within and comes to define the modernforms of the publicspace changingasSennett argues in hisbook significantly titled The FallofPublic Manfrom the eighteenth century formation to become more mystified and threatening but also more exciting and sexualized. One of the key figures to embody the novel t o m of public experience of modernity is the flaneur or irnpassivestroller, the manin the crowd who goes, in Walter Benjamin's phrase, ‘botanizing on the asphalt'.“ The fléineur symbolizes the privilege or freedom to move about the public arenas of the city observ‑ ing but never interacting, consuming the sights through a controlling butrarelyacknowledgedgaze, directedasmuchatother peopleasatthe goods for sale. The flaneur embodies the gaze of modernity which is both covetous and erotic. But the flaneur is an exclusively masculine type which functions

within the matrix of bourgeois ideology through which the social spaces of the city were reconstructed by the overlaying of the doctrine of separate spheres on to the division of public andprivate which became as a result a gendered division. In contesting the dominance of the aristocratic social formation they were struggling to displace, the emergent bourgeoisies of the late eighteenth century refuted a social system based on fixed orders of rank, estate and birth and defined themselves in universalistic and democratic terms. The pre-eminent ideological figure is M A N which immediately reveals the partiality of their demoaacy anduniversalism.The rallyingcry, liberty,equality and fraternity (again note its gender partiality) imagines asociety composed of free, self-possessingmaleindividualsexchangingwith equalandlike. Yet the economic and social conditions of the existence of the bourgeoisie as a class are structurally founded upon inequality and differencein termsbothof socio-economiccategories andof gender.The ideological formations of the bourgeoisie negotiate these contradictions by diverse tactics. One is the appeal to an imaginary order of nature which designates as unquestionable the hierarchies in which women, children, hands and servants (as well as other races) are posited as naturally different from and subordinate to white European man. Another formation endorsed the theological separation of spheres by fragmentation of the problematic social world into separated areas of genderedactivity.This divisiontook over andreworkedthe eighteenth‑ century compartmentalization of the public and private. The public sphere, defined as the world of productive labour, political decision. government, education, the law andpublicservice, increasinglybecame exclusive to men. The private sphere was the world, home, wives, children and servants.“ As Jules Simon, moderate republican politician, explained in 1892:

Vision and Difference

What is man’s vocation? It is to be a good citizen. And woman's? To bea good wife and a good mother. One is in some way called to the outside world, the other is retained for the interior.” (my italics)

Woman was defined by this other, non-social space of sentiment and duty from which money and power were banished.21Men, however, moved freely between the spheres while women were supposed to occupy the domestic space alone. Mencame home to bethemselves but in equally constraining roles as husbands and fathers, to engage in affective relationships after a hard day in the brutal, divisive and competitive world of daily capitalist hostilities. We are here defining a mental map rather than a description of actual social spaces. In her introduction to the essays on Women in Space, Shirley Ardener has, however, emphasized that

societies have generated their own culturally determined ground rules for making boundaries on the ground and have divided the social into spheres, levels and territories with invisible fences and platformstobescaledby abstract laddersandcrossedby intangible bridgeswithasmuchtrepidationandexultationason aplankover a raging torrent.22

There was nonethe lessanoverlapbetweenthe purely ideologicalmaps and the concrete organization of the social sphere. As social historians, Catherine Hall and Lee Davidoff have shown in their work on the formation of the British middle class in Birmingham, the city was literally reshapedaccordingto this ideal divide. The new institutions of public governance and business were established asbeing exclusively masculinepreservesand the growingseparationof work andhomewas maderealby the buildingof suburbs such asEdgbastonto which wives and daughters were banished.23 As both ideal and social structure, the mapping of the separation of

the spheres for women and menon to the divisionof publicandprivate was powerfully operative in the construction of a specifically bourgeois way of life. It aided the production of the gendered social identities by which the miscellaneouscomponents of the bourgeoisie were helpedto cohere as a class, in difference from both aristocracy and proletariat. Bourgeois women, however, obviously went out in public, to promenade, go shopping, or visiting or simply to be on display. And working-class women went out to work, but that fact presented a problem in terms of definition as woman. For instance Jules Simon categorically stated that awoman who worked ceased to be awoman.“ Therefore, across the public realm lay another, less often studied map

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

Which secured the definitions of bourgeois womanhood ‐ femininity ‑ in difference from proletarian women. For bourgeois women, going into town mingling with crowds of

mixed social composition was not only frightening because it became increasingly unfamiliar, but because it was morally dangerous. It has beenarguedthat to maintainone‘s respectability,closely identifiedwith femininity, meantnot exposing oneself in public. The public space was officially the realmofandfor men; forwomen toenter it entailedunfore‑ seen risks. For instance in LaFemmc (1858‐60)Jules Michelet exclaimed How many irritations for the single woman! She can hardly ever goout in the evening; she would betaken for aprostitute. There are a thousand places where only men are to be seen, and if she needsto go there on business, the menare amazed, andlaughlike fools. For example, should she find herself delayed at the other end of Paris and hungry, she will not dare to enter into a restaurant. She would constitute an event; she would be a spect‑ acle: All eyes would be constantly fixed on her, and she would overhear uncomplimentary and bold conjectures.” The privaterealmwas fashionedfor menasaplaceof refugefrom the

burly-burly of business, but it was also a place of constraint. The pressures of intensified individuality protected in public by the blasé mask of indifference, registered in the equally socially inducedroles of loving husband and responsible father, led to a desire to escape the overbearing demands of masculine domestic personae. The public domain became also a realm of freedom and irresponsibility if not immorality. This, of course, meant different things for men and for women. For women, the public spaces thus construed were where one riskedlosingone’s virtue, dirtying oneself; going out in public and the idea of disgrace were closely allied. For the man going out in public meant losingoneself in the crowd away from both demands of respect‑ ability. Mencolluded to protect this freedom. Thus awoman gorng out to dine at a restaurant even with her husband present was scandalous whereas a man dining out with a mistress, even in the View of his friends, was granted afictive invisibility.”s '~ The public and private division functioned on many levels. As a

metaphorical map in ideology, it structured the very meamng of the terms masculine and feminine within its mythicboundaries. In practice as the ideology of domesticity became hegemonic, it regulated women’s and men’s behaviour in the respective public and private spaces. Presence in either of the domains determined one's social identity and therefore, in objective terms, the separationof the spheres problematized women’s relation to the very activities and experiences

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we typically accept asdefining modernity. In the diaries of the artist Marie Bashkirtseff, who lived and worked

in Paris during the same period asMorisot and Cassatt, the following passage reveals some of the restraints:

What I longfor is the freedomof goingabout alone,of comingand going, of sitting in the seats of the Tuileries, and especially in the Luxembourg, of stopping and looking at the artistic shops, of entering churches and museums, of walking about old streets at night; that’s what I longfor; andthat's the freedom without which one cannot become a real artist. Do you imagine that I get much good from what I see, chaperoned as1am, andwhen, in order to goto the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my ladycompanion, myfamily?” These territories of the bourgeois city were however not only

gendered on a maleifemale polarity. They became the sites for the negotiationof gendered class identities and class gender positions.The spaces of modernity are where class and gender interface in critical ways, in that they are the spaces of sexual exchange. The significant spaces of modernity are neither simply those of masculinity, nor are they those of femininity which are asmuchthe spaces of modernity for being the negative of the streets and bars. They are, asthe canonical works indicate, the marginalor interstitialspaces where the fieldsof the masculine and feminine intersect and structure sexuality within a classed order.

THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE One text above all charts this interaction of class and gender. In 1863

of modern life'. In this text the figure of the flaneur is modified to become the modern artist while at the same time the text provides a mappingof Parismarkingout the sites!sights for the flaneurlartist. The essay is ostensibly about the work of a minor illustrator Constantin Guys but he is only a pretext for Baudelaire to weave an elaborate and impossible image of his idealartist who is apassionateloverof crowds, and incognito, a man of the world.

The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. Hispassionandprofessionaretobecomeoneflesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionatespectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb andflow of movement. in the midstof the fugitive andthe

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

infinite. To beaway from home andyet feel oneself everywhereat home; to see the world and to be the centre of the world and yet remain hidden from the world ‐ such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is aprince and everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family.”5

The text is structured by an opposition between home, the inside domain of the known and constrained personality and the outside, the space of freedom, where there is liberty to look without being watched or even recognized in the act of looking. It is the imagined freedom of the voyeur. In the crowd the flaneurlartist sets up home. Thus the flaneurfartist is articulated across the twin ideological formations of modem bourgeois society ‐ the splitting of private and public with its double freedom for men in the public space, and the pre-eminence of adetached observing gaze, whose possessionand power is never ques‑ tioned asits basis in the hierarchy of the sexes is never acknowledged. ForasIanetWolff has recently argued, there is no female equivalent of the quintessential masculine figure, the flaneur; there is not and could not be a female flaneuse. (See note 15.) Women did not enjoy the freedom of incognito in the crowd. They

were never positioned asthe normal occupants of the public realm. They did not havethe right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch. As the Baudelairean text goes on to show, women do not look. They are positioned asthe object of the flaneur’s gaze. Womanisfor the artist in general . . . far morethanjust the female of man. Rather she is divinity, a star . . . aglittering conglomera‑ tion of all the graces of nature, condensed into a single being; an object of keenest admiration and curiosity that the picture of life can offer to its contemplator. She is an idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching. . . . Everythingthat adorns women that serves to show off her beauty is part of herself . . . No d0ubt woman is sometimes alight, aglance, aninvitationto

happiness, sometimes she is just aword.” Indeedwoman is just a sign, a fiction, a confection of meanings and

fantasies. Femininity is not the natural condition of female persons. It is ahistorically variable ideologicalconstruction of meanings for a sign W'O'M'A'N which isproducedbyandfor another social groupwhich derives its identity and imagined superiority by manufacturing the spectre of this fantastic Other. WOMANis bothan idoland nothingbut aword. Thus when we come to read the chapter of Baudelaire's essay

7'l

Vision and Difference

titled 'Women and prostitutes’ in which the author charts a journey across Paris for the flaneuriartist, where women appear merely to be there as spontaneously visible objects, it is necessary to recognize that the text is itself constructing a notion of WOMAN across a fictive map of urban spaces - the spaces of modernity.

The flaneuriartist starts his journey in the auditorium where young women of the most fashionable society sit in snowy white in their boxes at the theatre. Next he watches elegant families strolling at leisure in the walks of a public garden, wives leaning complacently on the arms of husbands while skinny little girls play at making social class calls in mimicry of their elders. Then he moves on to the lowlier theatrical world where frail and slender dancers appear in a blaze of limelight admired by fat bourgeois men. At the café door, we meet a swell while indoors is his mistress, called in the text ‘a fat baggage', who lacks practically nothing to make her a great lady except that practically nothing is prac‑ tically everything for it is distinction (class). Then we enter the doors of Valentino’s, the Prado or Casino, where against a background of hellish light, we encounter the protean image of w a n t o n beauty, the courtesan, 'the perfect image of savagery that lurks in the heart of civilization’. Finally by degrees of destitution, he charts women, from the patrician airs of young and. successful prostitutes to the poor slaves of the filthy stews.

3.19 Constantin Guys Two courtesans

_._.___,_ Modernity and the spaces of femininity

Attempting to match the drawings by Guys to this extraordinary spectacle will disappoint. in no way are the drawings asvivid, for their project is less ideological and altogether more mundane as in the manner of the fashion plate.

None the less they provide some interest in revealing how differently the figures of females are actually represented according to location. The respectable women chaperoned or accompanied by husbands in the park pass by fused almost with their clothing so that, decorporealized, their dress defines their class position and meaning. In spaces marked o u t for visual and notional sexual consumption the bodies are in evidence, laid o u t , opened up and offered to view while drapery functions to reveal a sexualized anatomy (Figures 3.18 and 3.19).

Baudelaire's essay maps a representation of Paris as the city of women. It constructs a sexualized journey which can be correlated with impressionist practice. Clark has offered one map of impressionist paint‑ ing following the trajectories of leisure from city centre by suburban railway to the suburbs. I want to propose another dimension of that map which links impressionist practice to the erotic territories of modernity. I have drawn up a grid using Baudelaire’s categories and mapped the works of Manet, Degas and others on to this schema.3m

G R I D I

u; THEATRE debutantes; young women RENOIR CASSATT a! (LOGE) of fashionable society 5 PARK m a t r o n s , mothers, children, MANET CASSATI'

elegant families MORISOT

THEATRE DANCERS DEGAS Z (BACKSTAGE) E CAFES mistresses and kept women MANET O RENOIR 3 DEGAS g FOLIES THE COURTESAN MANEI‘ t - l 'protean image of w a n t o n DEGAS 5 beauty' GUYS

BROTHELS ‘poor slaves of filthy stews' 243551.

3.20 Edgar Degas Dancers backstage (c. 1872)

From the loge pieces by Renoir (admittedly not women of the highest society) to the Musiqueaux TuiIeries of Manet, Monet's park scenes and others easily cover this terrain where bourgeois men and women take their leisure. But then when we move backstageat the theatre we enter different worlds, stillof menandwomenbut differently placedbyclass. Degas’spicturesof the dancers on stageandrehearsingarewellknown. Perhaps less familiar are his scenes illustrating the backstage at the Opéra where members of the Jockey Club bargain for their evening's entertainment with the little performers (Figure 3.20). Both Degas and Manet representedthe women who hauntedcafes and asTheresa Ann Gronberghas shown these were working-class women oftensuspected of touting for custom asclandestine prostitutes.” Thence we can find examples sited in the Folies and cafes-concerts as

well astheboudoirsof the courtesan. Evenif Olympia cannotbe situated 74

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

in arecognizable locality, referencewas madein the reviews to the café Paul Niquet’s, the haunt of the women who serviced the porters of Les Halles and asign for the reviewer of total degradation and depravity.32

WOMEN AND THE PUBLIC MODERN The artistswho were womenin thisculturalgroup of necessityoccupied this map but partially.They can belocatedall rightbut in spaces above a decisive line. Lydia at the theatre, 1879 and The logs, 1882 (Figure 3.21) situate us in the theatre with the young andfashionable but there could hardly be a greater difference between these paintingsand the work by Renoiron this theme, Thefirst outing, 1876 (London,NationalGallery of Art), for example. The stiff and formal poses of the two young women in the painting

by Cassatt were preciselycalculatedasthe drawings for the work reveal. Their erect posture, one carefully grasping anunwrappedbouquet, the other shelteringbehind alarge fan, create atelling effect of suppressed excitement and extreme constraint, of unease in this public place, exposed and dressed up, on display. They are set at an oblique angle to the frame sothat they are notcontainedby its edges, not framed and madeapretty picturefor usasin The loge (Figure3.22) by Renoirwhere the spectacle at which the scene is set and the spectacle the woman herself is made to offer, merge for the unacknowledgedbut presumed masculine spectator. In Renoir's The first eating the choice of a profile opens out the spectator's gaze into the auditorium and invites herihim to imagine that shelhe is sharing in the main figure‘s excitement while she seems totally unaware of offering such a delightful spectacle. The lack of self-consciousness is, of course, purely contrived so that the viewer can enjoy the sight of the young girl. The mark of difference between the paintings by Renoir and Cassatt

is the refusal in the latter of that complicity in the way the female protagonist is depicted. In a later painting, A! the opera, 1879 (Figure 3.23), awoman is representeddressed in daytime or mourningblack in abox at the theatre. She looks from the spectator into the distance in a direction which cuts across the plane of the picture but asthe viewer follows hergazeanother look isrevealedsteadfastly fixedonthe woman in the foreground. Thepicturethus juxtaposes two looks,givingpriority to that of the woman who is, remarkably,picturedactively looking. She does not return the viewer’s gaze, a convention which confirms the viewer’s right to look and appraise. Instead we find that the viewer outside the pictureis evokedby beingasit were the mirror imageof the man looking in the picture. This is, in a sense, the subject of the painting - the problematic of

Vision and Difference

women out in public being vulnerable to a compromising gaze. The witty pun on the spectator outside the painting being matched by that within should not disguise the serious meaning of the fact that social spaces are policedby men’swatching women and the positioningof the spectator outside the painting in relation to the man within it serves to indicate that the spectator participates in that game aswell. The fact that the woman ispicturedsoactively looking, signifiedabove all by the fact that hereyes are maskedbyopera glasses, preventsherbeingobiectified and she figures as the subject of her own look. Cassatt and Morisot painted pictures of women in public spaces but

these all lie above acertain line on the grid [ devised from Baudelaire's text. The other world of women was inaccessible to them while it was freely available to the men of the group and constantly entering

Vision and Difference

representationasthevery territory of their engagementwithmodernity. There is evidencethatbourgeoiswomen didgo to the cafes-concertsbut this is reported asafact to regret and asymptom of modern decline?“ As Clark points out, guides for foreigners to Paris such as Murray’s clearly wish to prevent such slummingby commenting that respectable people do not visit such venues. In the journals Marie Bashkirtseff records a visit she and some friends made to a masked ball where behindthe disguise daughters of the aristocracy could live dangerously, playing with sexual freedom their classed gender denied them. But givenbothBashkirtseff’sdubioussocialposition, andhercondemnation of the standard morality and regulation of women's sexuality, her escapade merely reconfirms the norm.34 To enter such spaces asthe maskedballor the cafe‐concert constituted

a serious threat to a bourgeois woman’s reputation and therefore her femininity. The guarded respectability of the lady could be soiled by merevisual contact for seeing was bound up with knowing. This other world of encounter betweenbourgeoismenandwomen of another class was a no-go area for bourgeois women. It is the place where female sexuality or rather female bodies are bought and sold, where woman becomesbothan exchangeablecommodity andaseller of flesh. entering the economic domainthrough her direct exchanges with men. Herethe division of the public and private mapped as a separation of the masculine and feminine is ruptured by money, the ruler of the public domain, and precisely what is banished from the home. Femininity in its class-specific forms is maintained by the polarity

virginfwhore which is mystifying representation of the economic exchanges in the patriarchal kinship system. In bourgeois ideologies of femininity the fact of the money and property relations which legally andeconomically constitute bourgeois marriage isconjured out of sight by the mystificationof aone-off purchaseof the rights to abody andits products asan effect of love to be sustained by duty and devotion. Femininity should be understood therefore not as a condition of

women butasthe ideological form'of the regulationof female sexuality withinafamilial, heterosexualdomesticity whichisultimatelyorganized by the law.The spaces of femininity ‐ ideologically, pictorially - hardly articulate female sexualities. That is not to accept nineteenth-century notionsof women’s asexualitybut to stress the differencebetweenwhat was actually lived or how it was experienced and what was officially spoken or represented asfemale sexuality.” In the ideological and social spaces of femininity, female sexuality

could not be directly registered. This has acrucial effect with regardto the use artists who were women could make of the positionality represented by the gaze of the flaneur - and therefore with regard to

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

modernity.The gaze of theflaneurarticulates andproducesamasculine sexuality which in the modem sexual economy enjoys the freedom to look, appraise and possess, is deed or in fantasy. Walter Benjamin draws special attention to a poemby Baudelaire, 'A one passante' (‘To apasser-by').The poem iswritten from the point of view of amanwho sees in the crowd a beautiful widow; he falls in love as she vanishes front sight. Benjamin's comment is apt: ’One may say that the poem deals with the function of the crowd not in the lifeof acitizenbut in the life of anerotic person.“5 It is not the public realm simply equated with the masculine which

defines the flaneurlartist but access to a sexual realm which is marked by those interstitialspaces, the spacesof ambiguity, defined assuch not only by the relatively unfixed or fantasizable class boundaries Clark makes so much of but because of cross‐class sexual exchange. Women couldenter andrepresent selectedlocationsin the publicsphere - those of entertainment and display. But a line demarcates not the end of the publicfprivate divide but the frontier of the spaces of femininity. Below this line lies the realm of the sexualized and commodified bodies of women, where nature is ended, where class, capital and masculine power invade and interlock. It is a line that marks off a class boundary butit revealswhere newclassformationsof thebourgeoisworld restruc‑ tured gender relations not only between men and women but between women of different classes.*

MEN AND WOMEN IN THE PRIVATE SPHERE I haveredrawnthe Baudelaireanmapto include those spaces which are absent - the domestic sphere, the drawing-room, veranda or balcony. the garden of the summer villa and the bedroom (Grid 11). This listing

‘ I may have overstated the case that bourgeois women‘s sexuality could not be articulated within these spaces. In the lightof recent feminist study of the psycho‑ sexualpsycho ofmotherhood, it wouldbe ibletoreadmother-childpaintings bywomenin a ormorecomplexway asasite or thearticulationof femalesexualities. Moreoverin paintingsby Morisot, for instance of heradolescent daughter, we may discernthe inscriptionof yet another moment atwhich female sexuality is referred to by circlingaround the emergence from latency intoan adultsexuality prior to its strict regulationwithin maritaldomestic forms. More generally it would bewise to pay heed to the writings of historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg on the importance of female friendships. She stresses that from our post-Freudianvantage point it is very difficult to readthe intimaciesof nineteenth-century women, to understandthe valenciesof the terms of endearment, oftenvery physical, to comprehendthe forms of sexuality and loveasthey were lived,experiencedandrepresented.Afirstdeal moreresearchneedsto bedonebeforeanystatemntscanbemadewithout danger of feminists merely rehearsing and confirming the official discourse of masculine ideologues on female sexualities. (C. Smith-Rosenberg ‘Hearing women‘s words: afeminist reconstructionof history’, in herbook DisorderlyConduct.- VisionsofGender in Victorian America, New York, Knopf, 1985.)

Vision and Difference

produces a markedly difference balance between the artists who are w o m e n and m e n from that on the first grid. Cassatt and Morisot occupy these n e w spaces to a much greater degree while their colleagues are less apparent, b u t importantly, n o t totally absent.

GRID II

MANET MORISOT BEDROOM CAILLEBO'ITE CASSA'IT RENOIR MORISOT DRAWING CAILLEBO'ITE CASSA'IT ROOM

é BAZILLE CASSA'IT VERANDA Q CAILLEBOTTE MORISOT S MONET CASSA'I'I‘ GARDEN

MORISOT THEATRE debutantes RENOIR CASSATT THEATRE (LOGE) PARK elegant families MANET CASSATT PARK

MORISOT

THEATRE dancers DECAS (BACKSTAGE)

Z CAFES mistresses and MANET E kept women RENOIR O DEGAS 3 FOLIES THE E COURTESAN MANET j ’protean image of DEGAS at} wanton beauty' GUYS

BROTHELS ’poor slaves of M A N N filthy stews’ GUYS

By way of example, we could cite Renoir's portrait of Madame Char‑ pentier and her children, 1878 (New York, Metropolitan Museum) or Bazille’s Family reunion, 1867 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) or the painting of Camille in several poses and different dresses painted by Claude Monet in 1867, Woman in the garden (Paris, Musée d'Orsay).

These paintings share the territory of the feminine but they are painted from a totally different perspective. Renoir entered Madame Charpentier's drawing-room on commission; Bazille celebrated a particular, almost formal occasion a n d Monet‘s painting was devised as

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

an exercise in open-air painting.” The majority of works by Morisot and Cassatt deal with these domestic spaces: for instance Tum women reading, 1869-70 (Figure 3.5) and Susan on a balcony, 1883 (Figure 3.7). These are painted with a sureness of knowledge of the daily routine and rituals which n o t only constituted the spaces of femininity but collec‑ tively trace the construction of femininity across the stages of women’s lives. As I have argued previously, Cassatt's oeuvre may be seen to delineate femininity asit is induced, acquired and ritualized from youth through motherhood to old age.33 Morisot used her daughter’s life to produce works remarkable for their concern with female subjectivity especially at critical turning-points of the feminine. For instance, her painting Psyché shows an adolescent w o m a n before a m i r r o r, which in France is named a ‘Psyché’ (Figure 3.24). The classical, mythological figure Psyche was a young mortal with whom Venus’s son Cupid fell in love and it was the topic of several paintings in the neo‐classical and romantic period asa topos for awakening sexuality.”

Morisot’s painting offers the spectator a view into the bedroom of at bourgeois woman and as such is n o t without voyeuristic potential but at the same time, the pictured w o m a n is n o t offered for sight so much ascaught contemplating herself in a mirror in a way which separates the w o m a n as subject of a contemplative and thoughtful look from w o m a n as object - a contrast may make this clearer; compare it with Manet’s painting of a half-dressed woman looking in a mirror in such a way that her ample back is offered to the spectator asmerely a body in a working r o o m , Before the mirror, 1876‐7 (New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).

But I must stress that I am in no way suggesting that Cassatt and Morisot are offering us a truth about the spaces of femininity. I am n o t suggesting that their intimacy with the domestic space enabled them to escape their historical formation as sexed and classed subjects, that they could see it objectively and transcribe it with some kind of personal authenticity. To argue that would presuppose some notion of gendered authorship, that the phenomena I amconcerned to define and explicate are a result of the fact that the authorsfartists are women. That would merely tie the w o m e n back i n t o some transhistorical notion of the biologically determined gender characteristics, what Rozsika Parker and I labelled in Old Mistresses as the feminine stereotype.

None the less the painters of this cultural group were positioned differently w i t h regard to social mobility and the type of looking permit‑ ted them according to their being m e n or w o m e n . Instead of considering the paintings as documents of this condition, reflecting or expressing i t , I would stress that the practice of painting is itself a sitefor the inscription ofsexual difl‘erence. Social positionality in terms of both class and gender

3.24 Berthe Morisot Psyché (1876)

determine - that is, set the pressure and prescribe the limits of - the w o r k produced. But we are here considering a continuing process. The social, sexual and psychic construction of femininity is constantly produced, regulated, renegotiated. This productivity is involved as much in the practice of making art. In manufacturing a painting, engaging a model, sitting in a r o o m with someone, using a score of k n o w n techniques, modifying them, surprising oneself with novel and unexpected effects both technical and in terms of meanings, which result from the way the model is positioned, the size of the r o o m , the nature of the contract, the experience of the scene being painted and so forth ‐ all these actual procedures which make up part of the social practice of making a painting, function asthe modes by which the social and psychic positionality of Cassatt and Morisot n o t only structured their pictures, but reciprocally affected the painters themselves as they found, through the making of images, their world represented back to them.

It is here that the critique of authorship is relevant ‐ the critique of the notion of a fully coherent author subject previous to the act of creation, producing a w o r k of art which then becomes merely a m i r r o r o r, at best, a vehicle for communicating a fully formed intention and a consciously grasped experience. What I am proposing is that on the one hand we

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

consider the social formation of the producer within class and gender relations, but also recognize the working process or practice as the site of a crucial social interaction between producer and materials. These are themselves economically and culturally determined be they technical ‑ the legacy of conventions, traditions and procedures - or those social and ideological connotations of subject. The product is an inscription of those transactions and produces positions for its viewers.

I am n o t suggesting that the meaning is therefore locked into the work and prescribed. The death of the author has involved the emphasis on the reader/viewer as the active producer of meaning for texts. But this carries with it an excessive danger of total relativism; any reader can make any meanings. There is a limit, an historical and ideological limit which is secured by accepting the death of the mythic figure of the creatort‘author but n o t the negation of the historical producer working within conditions which determine the productivity of the work while n e v e r confining its actual or potential field of meanings. This issue becomes acutely relevant for the study of cultural producers who are w o m e n . Typically within art history they are denied the status of authoricreator (see Barr‘s chart, Figure 3.1). Their creative personality is never canonized or celebrated. Moreover they have been the prey of ideological readings where without regard to history and difference, art historians and critics have confidently proclaimed the meanings of the work by women, meanings which always reduce back to merely stating that these are works by women. Thus Mary Cassatt has been most often indulged as a painter of typical feminine subjects, the mother and child, while the following enthusiastic review by the Irish painter and critic George Moore speaks volumes about his problem with praising an artist w h o genuinely impressed him but was a woman:

Madame Lebrun painted well, but she invented nothing, she failed to make her o w n of any special m a n n e r of seeing and rendering things; she failed to create a style. Only one woman d i d this, and that w o m a n is Madame Morisot, and her pictures are the only pictures painted by a w o m a n that could n o t be destroyed without creating ablank, a hiatus in the history of art. True that hiatus would beslight - insignificant if you will ‐ but the insignificant is sometimes dear to us; and though nightingales, thrushes and skylarks were to sing in King’s Bench Walk, 1 should miss the individual chirp of the pretty sparrow. Madame Morisot’s note is perhaps asinsignifi‑ cant as a sparrow's, but it is an unique and individual note. She has created a style, and has done so by investing her art with all her femininity; her art is no dull parody of ours; it is all womanhood - sweet and gracious, tender and wistful womanhood."1

Vision and Difference

Thus it becomes especially necessary to develop means by which we can represent women ascultural producers within specific historical formations, while at the same time dealing with the centrality of the issue of femininity in structuring their lives and work. Yet femininity must not be presented as the founding cause of their work. This involves moving away from stressing the social construction of femininity astaking part in privilegedsocial practices such asthe family prior to the makingof art which then becomes amerely passivemirror‑ ing of that social role or psychic condition. By stressing the working process ‐ both as manufacture and signification - as the site of the inscription of sexual difference I am wanting to emphasize the active part of cultural practices in producing the social relations and regula‑ tions of femininity. They can also conceivably be a place for some qualificationor disruption of them. The notionsprings women from the trap ofcircularity. Socially shaped within the feminine, their art ismade to confirm femininity as an inescapable condition understood perpetually from the ideological patriarchal definition of it. There is no doubt that femininity is an oppressive condition yet women live it to different purposes and feminist analyses are currently concerned to explore not only its limits but the concrete ways women negotiate and refashion that position to alter its meanings. How sexual difference is inscribed will be determined by the

specificity of the practice and the processes of representation. In this essay I have exploredtwo axes on which these issuescan beconsidered - that of space andthat of the look. I have arguedthat the socialprocess defined by the term modernity was experienced spatially in terms of access to the spectacular city which was open to a class and gender‑ specific gaze. (This hovers between the still public figure of the flaneur and the modern condition of voyeur.) In addition, 1have pointed to a coincidence between the spaces of modernity and the spaces of masculinity as they intersect in the territory of cross-class sexual exchange. Modifyingtherefore the simple conceit of abourgeois world divided by public and private, masculine and feminine, the argument seeks to locate the production of the bourgeois definition of woman defined by the polarity of bourgeois lady and proletarian prostitute! working woman. The spaces of femininity are not only limited in relationto those defining modernity but becauseof the sexualized map across which woman is separated, the spaces of femininity are defined by a different organization of the look. Difference, however, does not of necessity involve restriction or lack.

That wouldbeto reinscribe the patriarchalconstructionof woman. The features in the paintings by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot of proximity, intimacyanddivided spaces positadifferent kindofviewing

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

relation at the point of both production and consumption. The difference they articulate isboundto the productionof femininity

asboth difference and asspecificity. They suggest the particularity of the female spectator --that which is completely negatedin the selective tradition we are offered ashistory.

WOMEN AND THE GAZE In an article entitled 'Film and the masquerade: theorizing the female spectator’, Mary Ann Doane uses a photograph by Robert Doisneau titled An oblique look, 1948to introduce her discussion of the negationof the female gaze (Figure 3.25) in both visual representations and on the streets.“ In the photograph a petit bourgeois couple stand in front of anart dealer's window and look in.The spectator ishiddenvoyeur-like inside the shop. The woman looks at a picture and seems about to comment on it to her husband. Unbeknownst to her, he is fact looking elsewhere, at the proffered buttocks of a half-naked female figure in a paintingplacedobliquely to the surfacefphotofwindow sothe spectator canalsosee what he sees. Doane argues that it is his gazewhich defines the problematicof the photograph andit erases that of the woman. She looksatnothingthat hasany meaningfor the spectator. Spatially central she isnegatedin the triangulationof looksbetweenthe man, the picture of the fetishized woman and the spectator, who is thus enthralled to a masculine viewing position.To get the joke, we must be complicit with hissecret discovery of somethingbetterto look at. The joke, likealldirty jokes, isat the woman's expense. She iscontrasted iconographically to the naked woman. She is denied the picturing of her desire; what she looks at is blank for the spectator. She is denied being the object of desire becauseshe is representedasawoman who actively looks rather than returning and confirming the gaze of the masculine spectator. Doane concludes that the photograph almost uncannily delineates the sexual politics of looking. I have introduced this example to make somewhat plainer what is at

stake in consideringthe female spectator ‐ the very possibility that texts made by women can produce different positions within this sexual politics of looking. Without that possibility, women are both denied a representationof their desire and pleasure and are constantly erased so that to look atandenjoy the sites of patriarchalculture wewomen must become nominaltransvestites. Wemust assume amasculine positionor masochisticallyenjoy the sightof woman’shumiliation.At the beginning of this essay I raised the question of Berthe Morisot's relation to such modernsights and canonicalpaintingsof the modernasOlympia andA barat the Folies-Bergére,bothof which figure within the sexualpoliticsof

looking - a politics at the heart of modernist art and modernist art history's version of it. Since the early 19705, modernism has been critically challenged nowhere more purposely than by feminist cultural practitioners. In arecent article titled ‘Desiring images/imaging desire‘, Mary Kelly

addresses the feminist dilemma wherein the woman who is an artist sees her experience in terms of the feminine position, that is as object of the look, while she must also account for the feeling she experiences as an artist occupying the masculine position as subject of the look. Different strategies have emerged to negotiate this fundamental contradiction, focusing on ways of either re‐picturing or refusing the literal figuration of the woman’s body. All these attempts centre on the problem: ‘How is a radical, critical and pleasurable positioning of the woman asspectator tobedone?’ Kellyconcludes herparticular pathway through this dilemma (whichis too specificto enter intoat this moment) with a significant comment:

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

Until now the woman asspectator has been pinned to the surface of the picture, trapped in apath of light that leads her back to the features of a veiled face. It seems important to acknowledge that the masquerade has always been internalized, linked to a particular organization of the drives, represented through a diversity of aims and objects; but without being lured into looking for a psychic truth beneath the veil. To see this picture critically, the viewer should neither be too close nor too far away.‘2

Kelly'scomment echoes the terms of proximity and distance which have been central to this essay.’ The- sexual politics of looking function around aregime which divides into binary positions, activityipassivity, lookingibeing seen, voyeur/exhibitionist, subjectlobject. In approaching works by Cassatt and Morisot we can ask: Are they complicit with the dominant regime?“3 Do they naturalize femininity in its major premisses? Is femininity confirmed as passivity and masochistic or is there a critical look resulting from a different position from which femininity is appraised, experienced and represented? In these paint‑ ings by means of distinctly different treatments of those protocols of painting defined asinitiating modernist art ‐ articulation of space, re‑ positioning the viewer, selection of location, facture and brushwork ‑ the private sphere is invested with meanings other than those ideologically produced to secure it asthe site of femininity. One of the major means by which femininity is thus reworked is by the rearticula‑ tion of traditional spacesothat it ceases to functionprimarilyasthespace ofsightfor amasteringgaze, butbecomesthe locusofrelationships.The gaze that is fixed on the representedfigure is that of equal and like and this is inscribed into the painting by that particular proximity which I suggested characterized the work. There is little extraneous space to distract the viewer from the inter‐subjective encounter or to reduce the figuresto objectifiedstaffage, or to makethemthe objectsof avoyeuristic gaze.The eye is not given itssolitary freedom.The women depictedfunc‑ tion as subjects of their own looking or their activity, within highly specified locations of which the viewer becomes a part. The rare photographof Berthe Morisotat work in her studio serves to

rEpresent the exchange of looks between women which structure these * In earlier drafts of this chapter I explore the possibilities of coordinating the historical perspectives on the spaces of modernity and femininity with those of feminist psychoanalytical writing on femininity (Cixous, lrlgaray and Montrelay} betweenwhich there was tantalizingcoincidenceon the issuesof the look, the body and the tropes of distance and proximity in the construction and feminine negotiation of sexual difference under a patriarchal system. The use of a statement by Luce In'garay asintroit, and the citation from Mary Kelly, marks the possibility of that reading which could not be undertaken here without massively enlarging this chapter.

works (Figure 3.26). The majority of women painted by Cassatt or Morisot were intimates of the family circle. But that included women from the bourgeoisie and from the proletariat who worked for the household as servants and nannies. It is significant to note that the realities of class cannot be wished away by some mythic ideal of sisterhood amongst women. The ways in which working‐class women were painted by Cassatt, for example, involve the use class power in that she could ask them to model half-dressed for the scenes of women washing. None the less they were not subject to the voyeuristic gaze of those women washing themselves made by Degaswhich. asLiptonhas argued, can be located in the maisons‐closes or official brothels of Paris.“ The maid’s simple washing stand allows a space in which women outside the bourgeoisie can berepresentedboth intimately and asworking women without forcing them into the sexualizedcategory of

3.2? Mary Cassatt Woman bathing (1891)

the fallen woman. The body of woman can bepictured asclassed but not subject to sexual commodification (Figure 3.27). i hope it will by n o w be clear that the significance of this argument

extendsbeyondissuesabout impressionistpaintingandparity for artists who are women. Modernity is still with us, ever more acutely asour cities become in the exacerbated world of postmodernity, more and more a place of strangers and spectacle, while women are ever more vulnerable to violent assault while out in public and are denied the right to move around our cities safely. The spaces of femininity still regulate women’s lives - from runningthe gauntlet of intrusive looksby menon the streets to surviving deadly sexual assaults. In rapetrials, women on the street are assumed to be 'asking for it'. The configuration which shaped the work of Cassatt and Morisot still defines our world. It is relevant then to develop feminist analyses of the founding moments of

Vision and Difference

modernity and modernism, to discern its sexualized structures, to discover past resistances and differences, to examine how women producers developed alternative models for negotiating modernity and the spaces of femininity.

4 Woman as sign in

Pre-Raphaelite literature: the representation of Elizabeth Siddall

This essay by Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock was first published in Art History, 1984. It has been revised by

Griselda Pollock.

The feminist critique of art history began by berating the discipline for its discriminatory exclusion of women artists. This was anecessarybut limitedtactic. Forarthistory asdiscourse activelyproducesitsmeanings by exclusion, repression and subordination of its Other. The feminine is located by the textual strategies and ideological formations of art historyasthe passive,beautifulor erotic objectof acreativityexclusively tied to the masculine.Therefore feminist deconstructionof art historical texts and their highly political effects is a fundamental necessity as a preliminary for developing appropriate strategies for analysing women asCultural producers. In 1975 I was invited to give a short paper at the second conference

of the newly founded Association of Art Historians. I was offered the token space of speaking about ‘Women in Victorian art'. Instead of attempting to catalogue the many women active asartists in the period or itemizetheir specialities, i choseto consider thecomplex issuesraised by the case of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (1829‐62). Well known in art history books asthe beloved model and later wife of the leading Pre‑ Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Siddall attracted feminist attentionbecause she too producedpaintings and drawings as well as poetry. Her case epitomized the contradictions of woman as muse for, and object of, art celebrated by art historians and woman as ignored producer. This drama had been played out at a moment of considerable historical significance in the history of women. The art