Berthe morisot summer's day analysis

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 not as privileged in women as in men. More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at adistance, and maintains adistance. In our culture the predomin‑ ance of the look over smell, taste, touch and hearing has brought about an impoverishmentof bodily relations.The moment 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 andAbstract Art at the Museumof ModernArt, 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 placedon achronologicalflow 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 asthe initiators of modern art are men. Is this because there were no w o m e n involved in early modern mavements? No.‘ Is it because those who were, were without significance in determining the shape and character of modern art? No . Or is it rather because what modernist art history celebrates is a selective tradition which normalizes, asthe only modernism, aparticularand 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 Art, New York, by Alfred H. Barr, j r . Photograph courtesy, The Museum of Modern Ar 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 Art of Manet and his Followers, by T. J. Clark,3 offers a searching account of the social relationsbetween 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 becontemporary in art, ' i ] faut etre de son temps',‘ Clark puzzles at what structured the

51

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 Parisian society. 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, leisure and pleasure, 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 suburban train 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

52

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 founding fact is class. Olympia's nakedness inscribes her class and thus 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 paintings imply amasculine viewerfconsumer, the manner in which this is done ensures the normalcy of that position leavingit 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 proposed by 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 and its exchangeswhich couldbeevokedsothat the painting'smodern‑ ist job of negation and disruption could be effective? Could Berthe

53

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 a striking fact that many of the canonical works held up asthe

founding monuments of modern art treat precisely with this area, sexuality, and this form of i t , commercial exchange. I am thinking of innumerablebrothelscenes through toPicasso’sDemoisellesd’Avignon or that other form, the artist’s couch. The encounters pictured and imagined are those between men who have the freedom to take their pleasures in many urbanspaces andwomen fromaclass subject to them who have to work in those spaces often selling their bodies to clients, or to artists. Undoubtedly these exchanges are structuredby relations of 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 must enquire why 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 modernityandcompete for leadershipof the avant-garde, canwe expect to rediscover paintings by women in which they battled with their sexuality in the representationof the male nude?Of course 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 asmasculine, it is necessary to acknowledge the way in which a feminine spectator is actually implied by these paintings. Surely one part of the shock, of the transgression effectedby the painting Olympia for its first viewers at the Paris Salon was the presence of that ’brazen' but cool look from the white woman on a bed attended by a black maid in a space in which women, or to behistorically precisebourgeois ladies, would bepresumed to be present. That look, soovertly passingbetween a seller of woman‘s body and a clientiviewer signified the commercial and sexual exchanges specific to apart of the public realmwhich shouldbe invisible to ladies. Furthermore its absence from their consciousness structured their identitiesasladies. In some of hiswritings T. ]. Clark correctly discusses the meanings of the sign woman in the nineteenth century as oscillating between t w o poles of the fillt publique (woman of the streets) and the ftmme horméte (the respectable married woman). But it would seem that the exhibi‑ tion of Olympia precisely confounds that social and ideological distance between t w o 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 derived fromBaudelaire’atext, introducingnot just modernity asamannerof int‑ ‘mga pressing contemporary 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 because of the presence of wives, sisters and daughters. The understandingof the shock depends upon our restoration of the female spectator to her historical and social place.

54

Modernity and the spaces of femininity

suggestion seems ludicrous. But why? Because there is a historical asymmetry ‐ a difference socially, economically, subjectively between beingawoman andbeing aman in Paris in the late nineteenthcentury. 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 the four 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 ow 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, as women, 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 claim to consider the productionof art socially andaddress the centrality of sexuality. Wecannot ignore the fact that the terrains of artistic prac‑ tice and of art history are structured in and structuring of 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 recovery of data about women producersof art coexists with and is only 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 obliteration of their activity in what passes for art history.Wehave to refute the lies that there were nowomen artists, or that the women artists who are admitted are second-rate and that the reason for their indifference lies in the all‐pervasive submission to an indelible femininity ‐ always proposedasunquestionably 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 as determined 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 no rm 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 project here. Howdo the socially contrived orders 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. Spacecanbegrasped in several dimensions. The first refersus to spaces

aslocations.What spaces are representedin the paintingsmadeby Berthe 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

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, LeMamie. 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 because subjects dealing with domestic social life hitherto relegated asmere genre paintingwere

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

sionist iconography actually reappears in 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 asparticipating in 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 as a 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 no rm 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 project here. Howdo the socially contrived orders 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. Spacecanbegrasped in several dimensions. The first refersus to spaces

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 as examples 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 group was attractive to some women precisely because subjects dealing with domestic social life hitherto relegated asmere genre paintingwere legitimized as central topics of the painting practices.lo On closer examination it is much more significant how little of typical impresr sionist iconography actually reappears in the works madeby artists who are women. They do no t 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 asparticipating in the myth of the popular - such asthe bar at the

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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 a summer'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 be addressed

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 upon flatness or Degas’s use of acute angles of vision, varying viewpoints and cryptic framing devices.With their close personalcontacts withbothartists, Morisot and Cassatt were no doubt party to the conversations ou t of which these strategies emergedandequally subject to the less conscious 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 a single canvas of two spatial systems ‑ or at least of two compartments of space often obviously boundariedby some device such as a balustrade, balcony, veranda or embankment whose presence is underscoredby facture. In The harbour at 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, shaped by 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 again the foreground figure is literally squeezed off‐centre and compressedwithin abox of space marked by aheavily brushed‐inband of 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 contrasting the painting by Monet, Thegardenof theprincess, 186?(Figure 3.15), where the viewer cannot readily imagine the point fromwhich the paintinghas beenmade, namely awindow high in one of the new apart‑ ment buildings, and instead enjoys a fantasy of floating over the scene. What Morisot's balustrades demarcate is n o t 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.

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Modernity and the spaces of femininity

In Morisot’s paintings, moreover, it is as if the place from which the painter worked is made part of the scene creating a compression or immediacy in the foreground spaces. This locates the viewer in that same place, establishing anotional relationbetween the viewer and the woman defining the foreground, therefore forcing the viewer to experience a dislocation between her space and that of a world 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 painted figure dominates Youngwoman in black: portrait ofMrs Gardner Cassatt, 1883 (Figure3.16)/.Zhe viewer is forced into aconfronta‑ tion or conversation with the painted figure while dominance and familiarity are deniedby the device of the averted headof 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 and the radicaldisruption of what we take as the 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‑ sionbeyond the picture's space into that of the viewer asacomment on the containment of women and read the painting as a statement of resistance to i t . 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 seems to collapse towards the picture plane, againcreatingasense of compression. The comfortable vista beyond the figure, opening out to include a view and the sky beyond as in 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 as the 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 prescribed limits of bourgeois codes 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 no t explain anything (though it does have the saving grace of acknowledging the role of signifiers in the active production of meaning).

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

In the case of Mary Cassatt I would now want to draw attention to 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.

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

It is possible to represent space by other conventions. Phenomenology has beenusefully applied to the apparent spatial 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 is representedaccording to the way it is experienced by a combination of touch, texture, as well as sight. Thus objects are patterned according to subjective hierarchies of value for the producer. Phenomenologicalspace is notorchestrated for sight alonebutby means of visual cues refers to other sensations and relations of bodies and objects in alivedworld. Asexperiential space this kindof representation becomes susceptible to different ideological, historical aswell aspurely contingent, subjective inflections. _ _ . These are not necessarily unconscious. For instance in Young girl 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 picturesasmall child in a roombutevokes that child 9 sense of the space of the room. It is from this conception of the

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Vision and Difference

possibilitiesof spatial structure that I can now discern away throughmy earlier problem in attempting to relate space and social processes. For a third approach lies in considering not only the spaces represented, or the spaces of the representation, but the social spaces from which the representation ismadeand its reciprocalpositionalities. The producer is herself shaped within a spatially orchestrated social structure which is lived atbothpsychic and social levels. The space of the look at the point of productionwill to some extent determine the viewing position of the spectator at the point of consumption. This point of view is neither abstract no r 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,mobility and visibility, in the social relations of 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 this relate to modernity andmodernism?As lanetWolff has

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 product of the city. It is aresponse in amythic or ideological form to the new complexities of a social existence passed amongst strangers in an atmosphere of intensified nervous and psychic stimulation, in a world ruled by money and commodity exchange, stressed by competition and formative of an intensified 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 and cities from being centres of 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.” Al l these phenomena affected women aswell asmen, but in different

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Modernity and the spaces of femininity

ways. What I have described above takes place within and comes to define the modern forms of the public space changing asSennett argues in his book significantly titled The Fall ofPublic Man from 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 man in 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 but rarely acknowledgedgaze, directedasmuchatother people asat the 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 and private 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-possessingmale individuals exchangingwith equal and like. Yet the economic and social conditions of the existence of the bourgeoisie as a class are structurally founded upon inequality and difference in terms bothof socio-economic categories 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 gendered activity.This division took over and reworked the eighteenth‑ century compartmentalization of the public and private. The public sphere, defined as the world of productive labour, political decision. government, education, the law andpublic service, increasingly became 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 be a 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 be themselves 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 platforms to bescaledby abstract laddersandcrossedby intangible bridgeswith asmuch trepidation and exultation ason aplankover a raging torrent.22

There was none the lessanoverlapbetween the 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 reshapedaccording to this ideal divide. The new institutions of public governance and business were established as being exclusively masculine preserves and the growing separation of work andhomewas made real by 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 division of public andprivate 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 miscellaneous components of the bourgeoisie were helped to 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

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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 been argued that to maintain one‘s respectability, closely identifiedwith femininity, meantnot exposing oneself in public. The public space was officially the realmof and for men; for women to enter it entailedunfore‑ seen risks. For instance in La Femmc (1858‐60)Jules Michelet exclaimed How many irritations for the single woman! She can hardly ever goout in the evening; she would be taken for a prostitute. There are a thousand places where only men are to be seen, and if she needs to go there on business, the menare amazed, and laugh like 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 private realmwas fashioned for menasaplaceof refuge from 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 induced roles 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 risked losingone’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. Men colluded 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 mythic boundaries. 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 separation of the spheres problematized women’s relation to the very activities and experiences

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Vision and Difference

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 going about alone, of coming and 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; and that's the freedomwithout 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 go to the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion, my family?” These territories of the bourgeois city were however not only

gendered on a maleifemale polarity. They became the sites for the negotiation of 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 asmuch the spaces of modernity for being the negative of the streets and bars. They are, as the canonical works indicate, the marginalor interstitial spaces where the fields of 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 Parismarking out 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 ideal artist who is a passionate lover of crowds, and incognito, a man of the world.

The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. Hispassionand professionare to becomeone flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement. in the midst of the fugitive and the

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Modernity and the spaces of femininity

infinite. To be away from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at 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 as its basis in the hierarchy of the sexes is never acknowledged. For asIanetWolff 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 as the normal occupants of the public realm. They did not have the right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch. As the Baudelairean text goes on to show, women do not look. They are positioned as the object of the flaneur’s gaze. Woman is for the artist in general . . . far more than just the female of man. Rather she is divinity, a star . . . a glittering 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. . . . Everything that adorns women that serves to show off her beauty is part of herself . . . No d0ubt woman is sometimes a light, a glance, an invitation to

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

fantasies. Femininity is not the natural condition of female persons. It is a historically variable ideological construction of meanings for a sign W 'O 'M ' A ' N which i sproducedb yand for another social groupwhich derives its identity and imagined superiority by manufacturing the spectre of this fantastic Other. WOMAN is both an idol and nothingbut a word. 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 hewatches elegant families strollingat 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 abackgroundof hellish light, we encounter the protean image of wanton beauty, the courtesan, 'theperfect imageof 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 representedaccording 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 out for visual and notional sexual consumption the bodies are in evidence, laid out, 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 mapof 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

GRID I

u; THEATRE debutantes; young women RENOIR CASSATT a! (LOGE) of fashionable society 5 PARK matrons, 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 wanton DEGAS 5 beauty' GUYS

BROTHELS ‘poor slaves of filthy stews' 243551.

73

3.20 Edgar Degas Dancers backstage (c. 1872)

From the loge pieces by Renoir (admittedly no t 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 backstage at the theatre we enter different worlds, still of me nandwomenbut differently placedby class. Degas’spictures of the dancers on stage and rehearsingarewell known. 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 represented the women who haunted cafes and asTheresa Ann Gronberg has shown these were working-class women often suspected of touting for custom asclandestine prostitutes.” Thence we can find examples sited in the Folies and cafes-concerts as