Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists. - book reviews

Taken together, the volumes under review offer an occasion to map the overlapping conceptual fields of "women's studies," "gender studies," and "men's studies" as they relate to art history in general, and to 19th-century European painting in particular. With varying steps of sophistication, these books rely upon tried-and-true strategies of feminist analysis, familiar since the 1970 and commonly known as the Images of and "Images by" approaches. the one and the other methods have been critiqued, frequently by the same feminists who lay them to good use.(1) The way each author negotiates -- or fails to negotiate -- the limitations of these [i]modus operandi[/i]s is indicative of the relative potential of the three "studies" fields that generally structure our approaches to sex and gender

Janis Bergman-Carton's first volume The Woman of Ideas in French Art, 1830-1848 is a classic "Images or, investigation which brings to a of recent origin historical context the methods that feminists have drawn out used to identify so-called negative imagery. In the author's words, her focus is upon the cultural mechanisms that undermined the power and visibility that the woman of ideas achieved after 1830 and that guaranteed her legal disenfranchisement after the failure the Revolution of 1848" (p 2)

Given this aim, the execution is professional. In clear plain Bergman-Carton describes the historical background for the emerging see the verb of French women of alphabetic characters in the early 19th hundred then overviews the caricatures of women authors that appeared in the popular pres devoting individual chapter to Honore Daumier and another to lesser-known illustrators. Turning to painting, individual chapter analyzes the iconography of women reading in French painting (including a somewhat tangential excursus upon images of the Magdalene, one as well as the other reading and penitent), and another chapter reviews portraits of women authors. Occasionally, Bergman-Carton's ambition to demonstrate the viciousness of men's visions of intellectual women leads her to exaggerate the lasciviousness of the caricatures. (2) on the other hand overall, her analyses accumulate to document the overwhelming misogyny that welcomeed women who tried to be taken seriously as writers and thinkers. Pictured the two as sexless shrews and soulles whores, women writers were vilified as traitors to their sex violators of the natural order, and threats the pair to particular governments and to civilization more broadly. Today, when mass agriculture encourages young women to take feminist gains for granted, at the same time deploying analogous rhetoric against those who advocate for further reform, the history win backed by Bergman-Carton seems well worth telling.

The limitations of the Images of approach, however, fastening this project into some uncomfortable assumptions and foreclose possibly productive lines of analysis. Bergman-Carton not absents her study as a appendix to existing books on negative images of women in 19th-century France, which "focus upon victimized women," especially "courtesans and women victimized into prostitution" (p 1) This formulation is problematic in the one and the other its totalizing equation of prostitution and victimhood -- which precludes any consideration of feminist agency through poor women, including prostitutes(3) -- and its corollary assumption that middle-class "women of ideas" were the 19th century's "unruly female types" (p 221) forerunners of today's feminists. This assumption is embedded in the label "woman of ideas," which is not a period mete but refers to the novel feminist tract, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, from Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich.(4) The failure to acknowledge working-class women's agency is paralleled by means of a willingness to let plane middle-class women's own voices be suffocate in watered out by more authoritative accounts of them. Despite Bergman-Carton's confessed aspirations to look beyond "victimized women" the consequence of studying women of ideas alone through their depictions by men is to create a novel class of more upscale victims who are slandered and misunderstood. At the same time, this [i]modus operandi[/i] reinscribes a canonic evaluation of the art in question: non-"art" imagery, of the like kind as cartes de visite, are not considered at all; the "low" art of illustrators like Daumier is assessed as virulently misogynistic; and Delacroix make go rounds out to be the portraitist worthy of George Sand.

Bergman-Carton could have avoided the pair these limitations had she not chosen a narrow definition of "women of ideas" as "women whose published works were viewed by dint of many as invasions of the masculine realm of written culture" This classification frankly omits "the scores of intelligent and talented women with careers in painting," with the explanation that art was a field "in which women were able to function in a manner les threatening to male assessments of the `feminine nature'" (pp 1-2) of that kind generalizations unhappily perpetuate the bias of our text-based agriculture which equates images with meaningless decoration. Although Bergman-Carton's conclusion somewhat problematizes of that kind assumptions, her study as a whole is seted on it, with the introduction explicitly claiming that "because their ability to use the French language has given them access to the discursive configurations of French culture, women of alphabetic characters have always been associated with actual and potential challenges to the hegemony of male privilege" (p 2) and asserting that the ideas of "such Enlightenment thinkers as Rousseau, Diderot, and Buffon are inscribed in eighteenth-century paintings" (p 14) The assumption that power is located in written and parole language, while artists simply mirror existing texts, ultimately undermines Bergman-Carton's claims for the importance of her application of mind -- and by implication all art history: if words are where the action is, in what manner important could these images be to undermining the woman of ideas? by what means important are images to any kind of social formation, whether oppressive or liberating? Ironically, this all-too-common perception of artists as passive mirrors of their era echoe the 19th-century body s Bergman-Carton cites as evidence of the prejudice against women writers, who were unfavorably compared with women painters upon the theory that women were more naturally suited to the emotional art of painting than to the intellectual effort of writing.(5) To accept this ideology is to blind oneself to the ways artists participate in intellectual and political debates, and thus to let slip through the fingers the rationale for any close attention of art beyond formal and stylistic analysis.