Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. - Review - book review

Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, by the agency of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, New York, Thames and Hudson 1997; 264 pages, $2995 hardcover (paper-back reissue, 1999; $2495)

on what account is Joseph Bara, fallen soldier of the Revolution in Jacques-Louis David's painting of 1794 depicted stark naked? And on what account with his pale skin, drawn out hair and tiny rosebud cavity between the jaws does he look like a girl? The peculiarities of David's unfinished tribute have drawn out been acknowledged but hardly explained. Now, in her fascinating account of French Neo-Classicism, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, Abigail Solomon-Godeau insinuates an answer for this uncouthly feminized image and many others by the agency of David and his epigones. Just as women were banished from public life and their revolutionary gains rescinded in an antifeminist backlash below the Jacobin Republic (1792-94), girlish male nakeds like Bara proliferated in painting and statuary Beautiful male bodies abound in visual art of the period continuing from one side the Empire (1804-14), in the delicate forms of Ganymede, Ero Narcissus. Masculinity come ups in two varieties, with virile pugilists like the Horatii swearing their oaths while elsewhere sweet males lie sleeping, dying, or otherwise passively upon display. Alert to the contemporaneous suppression of women's political vicinity on the national stage, Solomon-Godeau recommends that these languishing boy-bodies show the return of the feminine repressed

Her thesis, however, is no simple matter of a social cause and its pictorial result A professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Solomon-Godeau takes into account many determining aspects of the masculine Neo-Classical beau ideal, including the era's anti-Rococo reaction, artistic training, antique prototypes and pervasive esteem for the esthetician JJ Winckelmann, with his famous enthusiasm for decent boys in both marble and the muscle and fat While she avoids both present-day notions of homosexuality and speculations about the proclivities of individual artists, Solomon-Godeau describes a homosocial world of cultural production without women It is intriguing to learn that winners of the Prix de Rome who be delighted withed five-year residencies at the Mancini palace, were not allowed to bring their wives. They lived and worked side by the agency of side with other men, below the direction of male instructors, studying in a state of nature male models, producing art works intended for male audiences. Paintings by the agency of Louis-Leopold Boilly and Horace Vernet of artists' studios (1798 and 1821 respectively) exhibit all-male gatherings characterized by friendly sport and fraternal discourse. Passionate friendships many times developed among these artists and men of letters; given women's unequal access to education, male-female relationships could hardly proffer equivalent intellectual satisfactions.

The patriarchal world of la vertu male from which women were all on the contrary excluded in French Neo-Classicism the one and the other reflects an ideology of sex and reaffirms it, "thereby naturalizing," Solomon-Godeau explains, "male dominance and female subordination." With femininity effectively elided and assimilated, masculinity prevails in the cultural imaginary in the one and the other heroic and/or feminized forms. A trenchant example of this dynamic is seen in Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson's slumber of Endymion (1791). In the myth, Diana, smitten with the handsome shepherd, tosss him dreams to keep him asleep--and available for her caresses. Girodet, however, omits the goddes from his composition, substituting a moonbeam that falls upon the bare body of Endymion. The dreamer is gazed on by no woman but through a winged Zephyr, a naked lad who smiles at the vulnerable spectacle before him. Typically, Girodet's contemporary commentators disavowed the erotic charge of this painting, applying formulaic standards of "truthfulness" and "poetic invention" to an image of same-sex desire.

With its dual paradigms of masculinity, the stalwart Brutus and the sweet erote Neo-Classical art addressed its male spectators upon multiple levels; admiration, delectation and narcissistic identification were possible replys to the excessively sexed bodies upon offer. Perhaps insecure viewers could be reassured through one remarkably consistent feature of smooth the brawniest of these nudes--the diminutive size of their genitals. Solomon-Godeau, like Leo Steinberg before her, dares not alone to notice such a phenomenon on the other hand to ponder its significance.[1] A small penis was the esthetic ideal in the classical world, where magnitude and rigidity were signs of animality not manliness; the French Academy transmitted the antique canon of proportions, on the contrary Solomon-Godeau astutely observes the compensatory supports that invariably embellish otherwise daintily endowed heroes in Neo-Classical painting: strategically placed daggers, swords, scabbards and lances be subservient to as supplements, and illustrate for her the Lacanian disparity between the penis and the phallus. "While the authority of the phallus may well be vestureed in the image of ideal masculinity," she states, "the power of patriarchy is thus much in excess of its anatomical representative that the actual organ fails to carry its symbolic weight."