1 4 modernity and the spaces of femininity · 1 4 modernity and the spaces of femininity...

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MODERNITY AND THE SPACES OF FEMININITY

Introduction

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 a distance, and maintains a distance. In our culture thepredominance of the look over smell, taste, touch and hearing has brought about an inipoveri.sh-mertt of bodily relations. The moment the look dorninates, the body loses its materiality.

The schema which decorated the cover of AlfredH. Barr's catalogue for the exhibition Cubism andAbstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art, NewYork, in 1936 is paradigmatic of the way modernart has been mapped by modernist art history [2].All those canonized as the initiators of modern artare men. Is this because there were no womeninvolved in early modern movements? No.' Is itbecause those who were, were without significancein determining the shape and character of modernart? No. Or is it rather because what modernist arthistory celebrates is a selective tradition whichnormalizes, as the only modernism, a particularand gendered set of practices? I would argue forthis explanation. As a result any attempt to dealwith artists in the early history of modernism whoare women necessitates a deconstruction of themasculimst myths of modernism.z

These are, however, widespread and structurethe discourse of many counter-modernists, for in-stance in the social history of art. The recent pub-

From Crisclda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity,Feminism and the Histories of Art, London: Routledge, 1988,pp. 50-90. Copyright © 1988 by Crisclda Pollock. Abridgedby the author for this edition. Reprinted by permission of theauthor, Vision and Difference, and Rootledgc.

GRISELDA POLLOCK

-Luce Ingaray (1978) Interview in M.-F. Bans and C:. I.alxaigc, eds„Les Femmes, la pornographic et l erotisme ( Paris). P 50.

lication The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in theArt of Manet and His Followers, by T. J. Clark, 3offers a searching account of the social relationsbetween the emergence of new protocols andcriteria for painting-modernism-and the mythsof modernity shaped in and by the new city ofParis remade by capitalism during the SecondEmpire. Going beyond the commonplaces abouta desire to be contemporary in art, "il faut etre doson temps, -4 Clark puzzles at what structured thenotions of modernity which became the territoryfor Manct and his followers. He thus indexes theImpressionist painting practices to a complex setof negotiations of the ambiguous and baffling classformations and class identities which emerged inParisian society. Modernity is presented as farmore than a sense of being "up to date"-moder-nity is a matter of representations and majormyths-of a new Paris for recreation, leisure andpleasure, of nature to be enjoyed at weekends insuburbia, of the prostitute taking over and offluidity_ of class in the popular spaces of entcrtain-ntent. The key markers in this invthic territory arel eisure, consumption, the spectacle and money.And we can reconstruct from Clark a map ofI mpressionist territory %%,Inch stretches from thenew boulevards via Gare St-Lazare out on thesuburban train to La Grenouillcrc, Bcrtigival or

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Mo

1925

1 930

193SNONC+EOMETRICAL ABSTRACT ART

GEOMETRICAL ABSTRACT ART

1 935

?. Cover design of the catalogue for the exhibition Cubismand Abstract Art, 1936, New York, Museum of Modern Art.

Argenteuil. In these sites the artists lived, workedand pictured thernselves.s But in two of the fourchapters of Clark's book, he deals with the prob-lematic of sexuality in bourgeois Paris, and thecanonical paintings are Olympia (1863, Paris,Musee du Louvre) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergere(1881-82, London, Courtauld Institute of Art) [3].

It is a mighty but flawed argument on many

* While accepting that paintings such as Olympia and :t Barat the Folies-Bergere come from a tradition which invokes thespectator as masculine, we need to acknowledge the way inwhich a feminine spectator is actually implied by these paint-ings. Surely one part of the shock, of the transgression effectedby the painting Olympia for its first viewers at the Paris Salonwas the presence of that "brazen" but cool look from thewhite woman on a bed attended by a black maid in a spacein which women, or to be historically precise, bourgeois ladies,would be presumed to be present. That look, so overtly passingbetween a seller of woman's body and a client/viewer signifiedthe commercial and sexual exchanges specific to a part of thepublic realm which should be invisible to ladies. Furthermoreits absence from their consciousness structured their identitiesas ladies. In some of his writings "1'. J. Clark correctly discussesthe meanings of the sign woman in the nineteenth century asoscillating between two poles of the frlle publiyue ( woman of

CRISELDA POLLOCK

levels, but here I wish to attend to its peculiarclosures on the issue of sexuality. For Clark thefounding fact is class. Olympia's nakedness in-scribes her class and thus debunks the mythicclasslessness of sex epitomized in the image of thecourtesan.6 The fashionably blase barmaid at theFolies evades a fixed identity as either bourgeois orproletarian but nonetheless participates in theplay around class that constituted the myth andappeal of the popular.?

Although Clark nods in the direction of femi-nism by acknowledging that these paintings implya masculine viewer/consumer, the manner inwhich this is done ensures the normalcy of thatposition, leaving it below the threshold of histori-cal investigation and theoretical analysis. 8 To rec-ognize the gender-specific conditions of thesepaintings' existence one need only imagine a fe-male spectator and a female producer of theworks. How can a woman relate to the viewingpositions 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 familiar-ity with either of these spaces and its exchangeswhich could be evoked so that the painting's mod-ernist job of negation and disruption could beeffective? Could Berthe Morisot have gone tosuch a location to canvass the subject? Would ithave entered her head as a site of modernity as sheexperienced it? Could she as a woman have experi-enced modernity as Clark defines it at all?*

the streets) and the femme honnete (the respectable marriedwoman). But it would seem that the exhibition of Olympiaprecisely confounds that social and ideological distance be-tween two imaginary poles and forces the one to confront theother in that part of the public realm where ladies do go-stillwithin the frontiers of femininity. The presence of this paint-i ng in the Salon-not because it is a nude but because itdisplaces the mythological costume or anecdote throughwhich prostitution was represented mythically through thecourtesan-transgresses the line on my grid derived fromBaudelaire's text, introducing not just modernity as a mannerof painting a pressing contemporary theme, but the spaces ofmodernity into a social territory of the bourgeoisie, the Salon,where viewing such an image is quite shocking because of thepresence of wives, sisters and daughters. The understandingof the shock depends upon our restoration of the femalespectator to her historical and social place.


For it is a striking fact that many of the canoni-cal works held up as the founding monuments ofmodern art treat precisely with this area, sexuality,and this form of it, commercial exchange. I amthinking of innumerable brothel scenes through toPicasso's Demoiselles d Avignon or that otherform, the artist's couch. The encounters picturedand imagined are those between men who havethe freedom to take their pleasures in many urbanspaces and women from a class subject to themwho have to work in those spaces often sellingtheir bodies to clients, or to artists. Undoubtedlythese exchanges are structured by relations of classbut these are thoroughly captured within genderand its power relations. Neither can be separatedor ordered in a hierarchy. They are historicalsimultaneities and mutually inflecting.

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So we must inquire why the territory of mod-ernism so often is a way of dealing with masculinesexuality and its sign, the bodies of worsen-whythe nude, the brothel, the bar? What relation isthere between sexuality, modernity and modern-ism? If it is normal to see paintings of women'sbodies as the territory across which men artistsclaim their modernity and compete for leadershipof the avant-garde, can we expect to rediscoverpaintings by women in which they battled withtheir sexuality in the representation of the malenude? Of course not; the very suggestion seemsludicrous. But why? Because there is a historicalasymmetry-a difference socially, economically,subjectively between being a woman and being aman in Paris in the late nineteenth century. Thisdifference-the product of the social structura-

3. Fdouard Manct, i1 Bar at the l-olies Bergere, 1 881-82 London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Courtauld Collection.

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4. Berthe Ntorisot, Two U, ornen Reading, 1869-70.Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Chester DaleCollection.

tion of sexual difference and not any imaginarybiological distinction--determined both what andhow men and women painted.

1 have long been interested in the work ofBcrthc Morisot (1841-1896) and Mary Cassatt(1844-1926), two of the four women who wereactively involved with the Impressionist exhibit-ing society in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s whowere regarded by their contemporaries as impor-tant members of the artistic group we now labelthe I mpressionists.9 But how arc we to study thework of artists who are women so that we candiscover and account for the specificity of whatthey produced as individuals while also recogniz-ing that, as women, they worked front differentpositions and experiences from those of their col-leagues who were men?

Sexuality, modernism or modernity cannotfunction as given categories to which we addwomen. That only i dentifies a partial and t nascu-

dining roomsdrawing roomsbedroomsbalconies/verandasprivate gardens (See figs. 4, S, 7.)

GRISELDA POLLOCK

line viewpoint with the norm and confirmswomen as other and subsidiary. Sexuality, mod-ernism or modernity are organized by and organi-zations of sexual difference. To perceive women'sspecificity is to analyze historically a particularconfiguration of difference.

This is my project here. How do the sociallycontrived orders of sexual difference structure thelives of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot? Howdid that structure what they produced? The ma-trix 1 shall consider here is that of space.

Space can be grasped in several dimensions.The first refers us to spaces as locations. Whatspaces arc represented in the paintings made byBerthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt? And what arenot? A quick list includes:

The majority of these have to be recognized asexamples of private areas or domestic space. Butthere arc paintings located in the public domain-scenes, for instance, of promenading, driving inthe park, being at the theater, boating. They arethe spaces of bourgeois recreation, display andthose social rituals which constituted polite soci-ety, or Society, Le Monde. In the case of MaryCassatt's work, spaces of labor are included, espe-cially those involving child care. In several exam-ples, they make visible aspects of working-classwomen's labor within the bourgeois home.

I have previously argued that engagement withthe Impressionist group was attractive to somewomen precisely because subjects dealing with do-mestic social life hitherto relegated as mere genrepainting were legitimized as central topics of thepainting practices.I° On closer examination it ismuch more significant how little of typical I m-pressionist iconography actually reappears in theworks made by artists who are women. They donot represent the territory which their colleagueswho were men so freely occupied and made use ofi n their works-for instance, bars, cafes, backstage


11. Mary Cassatt, The Loge, 1882. Washington, D.C.,National Gallery of Art, Chester Dale Collection.

ing an unwrapped bouquet, the other shelteringbehind a large fan, create a telling effect of sup-pressed excitement and extreme constraint, ofunease in this public place, exposed and dressedup, on display. They are set at an oblique angle tothe frame so that they are not contained by itsedges, not framed and made a pretty picture forus as in The Loge [12] by Renoir, where the spec-tacle at which the scene is set and the spectaclethe woman herself is made to offer merge for theunacknowledged but presumed masculine specta-tor. In Renoir's The First Outing the choice of aprofile opens out the spectator's gaze into the au-ditorium and invites her/him to imagine that she/lie is sharing in the plain figure's excitement whileshe seems totally unaware of offering such a de-lightful spectacle. The lack of self-consciousnessis, of course, purely contrived so that the viewercan enjoy the sight of the young girl.

The mark of difference between the paintings

1 2. Auguste Renoir, The loge, 1 874. London, CourtauldI nstitute Galleries, Courtauld Collcction-

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by Renoir and Cassatt is the refusal in the latterof that complicity in the way the female protago-rlist is depicted. In a later painting, At the Opera,1 879 [1], a woman is represented dressed in day-time or mourning black in a box at the theater.She looks from the spectator into the distance ina direction which cuts across the plane of thepicture, but as the viewer follows her gaze anotherlook is revealed steadfastly fixed on the woman inthe foreground. The picture thus juxtaposes twolooks, giving priority to that of the woman, whois, remarkably, pictured actively looking. She doesnot return the viewer's gaze, a convention whichconfirms the viewer's right to look and appraise.I nstead we fill(] that the viewer outside the pictureis evoked by being as it were the mirror i mage ofthe man looking in the picture.

This is, ill a sense, the subject of the painting-the problematic of women out in public beingvulnerable to a compromising gaze. The witty pun

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on the spectator outside the painting beingmatched by that within should not disguise theserious meaning of the fact that social spaces arepoliced by men's watching women and the posi-tioning of the spectator outside the painting inrelation to the man within it serves to indicatethat the spectator participates in that game aswell. The fact that the woman is pictured so ac-tively looking, signified above all by the fact thather eyes are masked by opera glasses, prevents herbeing objectified and she figures as the subject ofher own look.

Cassatt and Morisot painted pictures of womeni n public spaces but these all lie above a certainline on the grid I devised from Baudelaire's text.The other world of women was inaccessible tothem while it was freely available to the men ofthe group and constantly entering representationas the very t erritory of their engagement withmodernity. There i s evidence that bourgeois

GRIT) II

Ladies

GRISELDA POLLOCK

women did go to the cafes-concerts but this isreported as a fact to regret and a symptom ofmodern decline.Z7 As Clark points out, guides forforeigners to Paris such as Murray's clearly wish toprevent such slumming by commenting that re-spectable people do not visit such venues. In thejournals, Marie Bashkirtseff records a visit she andsome friends made to a masked ball where behindthe disguise daughters of the aristocracy could livedangerously, playing %with sexual freedom theirclassed gender denied them. But given both Bash-kirtseff's dubious social position, and her condem-nation of the standard morality and regulation ofwomen's sexuality, her escapade merely recon-firms the norm.Z$

To enter such spaces as the masked ball or thecafe-concert constituted a serious threat to a bour-geois woman's reputation and therefore her fcmi-ninity. The guarded respectability of the ladycould be soiled by mere visual contact, for seeing

MANET MORISOT bedroom

CAILLEBOTTE CASSATT

RENOIR MORISOT drawing

CAILLEBOTTE CASSATT room

BAZILLE CASSATT veranda

CAILLEBOTTE %IORISOT

MANET CASSATT garden

MORISOT

tIlei] tcr debutantes RENOIR CASSA'r'r theater

(loge)

park elegant families MANET CASSATT parkMORISOT

Fallen Women

theater dancers DEGAS

(backstage)

cafes mistresses and NIANET

kept women RENOIR

DEGAS

folics The courtesan: MANET

"protean image of DEGAS

wanton beauty" GUYS

brothels "poor slaves of MANET

filthy stews" GUYS


was bound up with knowing. This other world ofencounter between bourgeois men and women ofanother class was a no-go area for bourgeoiswomen. It is the place where female sexuality orrather female bodies are bought and sold, wherewoman becomes both an exchangeable commod-ity and a seller of flesh, entering the economicdomain through her direct exchanges with men.Here the division of the public and privatemapped as a separation of the masculine and femi-nine is ruptured by money, the ruler of the publicdomain, and precisely what is banished from thehome.

Femininity in its class-specific forms is main-tained by the polarity virgin/whore which is mys-tifying representation of the economic exchangesin the patriarchal kinship system. In bourgeoisideologies of femininity the fact of the money andproperty relations which legally and economicallyconstitute bourgeois marriage is conjured out ofsight by the mystification of a one-off purchase ofthe rights to a body and its products as an effectof love to be sustained by duty and devotion.

Femininity should thus be understood not as acondition of women but as the ideological forth ofthe regulation of female sexuality in a familial,heterosexual domesticity ultimately organized bythe law. The spaces of femininity-ideologically,pictorially-hardly articulate female sexualities.That is not to accept nineteenth-century notionsof women's asexuality but to stress the differencebetween what was actually lived or how it wasexperienced and what was officially spoken or rep-resented as female sexuality.z9

In the ideological and social spaces of feminin-ity, female sexuality could not be directly regis-

`1 may have overstated the case that bourgeois women's sexu-ality could not be articulated within these spaces. In the lightof recent feminist study of the psychosexual psychology ofmotherhood, it would be possible to read mother-child paint-ings by women in a far more complex way as a site for thearticulation of female sexualities. Moreover i n paintings }r%lorisot-for instance, of her adolescent daughter-wc maydiscern the inscription of yet another moment at which fe-male sexuality is referred to by circling around the emergencefrom latency into an adult sexuality prior to its strict regulation within marital domestic fortes. More generally it wouldbe wise to pay heed to the writings of historian Carroll Stnith-Rosenherg on the importance of female friendships- She

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tered. This has a crucial effect with regard to theuse artists who were women could make of thepositionality represented by the gaze of the flan-eur-and therefore with regard to modernity. Thegaze of the flaneur articulates and produces a mas-culine sexuality which in the modern sexual econ-omy enjoys the freedom to look, appraise and pos-sess, in deed or in fantasy. Walter Benjamin drawsspecial attention to a pocln by Baudelaire, "A UncPassante" (To a Passerby). The poem is writtenfrom the point of view of a man who sees in thecrowd a beautiful widow; lie falls in love as shevanishes from sight. Benjamin's comment is apt:"One may say that the poem deals with the func-tion of the crowd not in the life of a citizen buti n the life of an erotic person." 30

It is not the public realm simply equated withthe masculine which defines the flaneur/artist butaccess to a sexual realm which is marked by thosei nterstitial spaces, the spaces of ambiguity, de-fined as such not only by the relatively unfixed orfantasizable class boundaries Clark makes so muchof but because of cross-class sexual exchange.Women could enter and represent selected loca-tions in the public sphere-those of entertain-ment and display. But a line demarcates not theend of the public/private divide but the frontierof the spaces of femininity. Below this line lies therealm of the sexualized and corn modified bodies ofwomen, where nature is ended, where class, capi-tal and masculine power invade and interlock. Itis a line that marks off a class boundary but itreveals where new class formations of the hour-geois world restructured gender relations not onlybetween men and women but between women ofdifferent classes.*

stresses that from our post-Freudian vantage point it is verydifficult to read the intimacies of nineteenth-century women,to understand the valcncies of the terms of endearment, oftenvery physical, to comprehend the forms of sexuality and loveas they were lived, experienced and represented_ A great dealmore research needs to be done before any statements can bemade without the danger of feminists merely rehearsing andconfirming t he official discourse of masculine ideologues onfemale sexualitics (C Smith-Rosenberg, "f Icaring \\'omen'sWords .\ Feminist Reconstruction of History," in her bookUisorderlr Conduct 1''isions of Gender in 1 'ictorian :l rnerica,New York, Knopf, 1')85.)

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Men and Women in the Private Sphere

I have redrawn the Baudelaircan map to includethose spaces which are absent-the domesticsphere, the drawing room, veranda or balcony, thegarden of the summer villa and the bedroom (Grid11). This listing produces a markedly different bal-ance between the artists who arc women and menfrom that on the first grid. Cassatt and Morisotoccupy these new spaces to a much greater degreewhile their colleagues are less apparent, but impor-tantly, not totally absent.

By way of example, we could cite Renoir's por-trait Afadanie Charpentier and Her Children,1878 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art),or Bazille's family Reunion, 1867 (Paris, Musecd'Orsay), or the painting of Camille in severalposes and different dresses painted by ClaudeMonet in 1867, Woman in the Garden ( Paris,Musec d'Orsay).

These paintings share the territory of the femi-nine but they are painted from a totally differentperspective. Renoir entered Madame Cliarpcn-tier's drawing room on commission; Bazille cclc-bratcd a particular, almost formal occasion andMonct's painting was devised as an exercise inopen-air painting. 3 l The majority of works byMorisot and Cassatt deal with these domesticspaces: for instance, Two lVomen Reading,1 869-70 [4J, and Susan on a Balcony, 1883

( Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art).These are painted with a sureness of knowledge ofthe daily routine and rituals which not only con-stituted the spaces of femininity but collectivelytrace the construction of femininity across thestages of women's lives. As I have argued previ-ously, Cassatt's oeuvre I nav be seen to delineatefemininity as it is induced, acquired and ritualizedfrom youth through motherhood to old agc. 3 z

Morisot used her daughter's life to produce worksremarkable for their concern with female subjec-tivity, especially at critical turning-points of thefennrllne. For i nstance, her pauitingPsyche showsan adolescent woman before a mirror, which illFrance is named a "Psyche" (1876; I,ugano,Thyssen-13ornclnism Collection). The classical,mythological fignrc Psyche was a young mortal

GRISF•;I.DA POLLOCK

with whom Venus's son Cupid fell in love, and itwas the topic of several paintings in the Neoclassi-cal and Romantic period as a topos for awakeningsexuality.

Morisot's painting offers the spectator a viewi nto the bedroom of a bourgeois woman and assuch is not without voyeuristic potential, but atthe same time the pictured woman is not offeredfor sight so much as caught contemplating herselfi n a mirror in a way which separates the womanas subject of a contcmplativc and thoughtful lookfrom woman as object-a contrast may make thisclearer; compare it with Manet's painting of ahalf-dressed woman looking in a mirror in such away that her ample back is offered to the spectatoras merely a body in a working room, Before theMinor, 1876-77 (New York, Solomon R. Gug-genlicim Museum).

But I must stress that I am in no way suggestingthat Cassatt and Morisot arc offering us a truthabout the spaces of femininity. 1 am not suggest-i ng that their intimacy with the domestic spaceenabled them to escape their historical formationas sexed and classed subjects, that they could seeit objectively and transcribe it with some kind ofpersonal authenticity. To argue that would pre-suppose some notion of gendcred authorship, thatthe phenomena I am concerned to define andexplicate arc a result of the fact that the authors/artists are women. That would merely tie the\women back into some transhistorical notion ofthe biologically determined gender characteris-tics, what Rozsika Parker and I labeled in OldMistresses as the feminine stereotype.

Nonetheless the painters of this cultural groupwere positioned differently with regard to socialmobility and the type of looking permitted themaccording to their being men or women. Insteadof considering the paintings as documents of thiscondition, reflecting or expressing it, I wouldstress that the practice of painting is itself a sitefor the inscription of sexual difference. Social posi-tionality- in terms of both class and gender deter-mine-that is, set the pressure and prescribe theli mits of-the work produced. But we arc hereconsidering a continuing process. The social, sex-ual and psychic construction of femininity is con-

MODERNITY AND THE SPACES OF' FEN11NINITY

stantly produced, regulated, renegotiated. Thisproductivity is involved as much in the practice ofmaking art. In manufacturing a painting, engag-i ng a model, sitting in a room with someone, usinga score of known techniques, modifying them,surprising oneself with novel and unexpected ef-fects both technical and in terms of meanings,which result from the way the model is positioned,the size of the room, the nature of the contract,the experience of the scene being painted and soforth-all these actual procedures which make uppart of the social practice of making a paintingfunction as the (nodes by which the social andpsychic positionality of Cassatt and Morisot notonly structured their pictures, but reciprocally af-fected the painters themselves as they found,through the making of images, their world repre-sented back to them.

It is here that the critique of authorship is rele-vant-the critique of the notion of a fully coher-cut author subject previous to the act of creation,producing a work of art which then becomesmerely a mirror or, at best, a vehicle for com-municating a fully formed intention and a con-sciously grasped experience. The death of the au-thor has i nvolved the emphasis on thereader/viewer as the active producer of meaningfor texts. But this carries with it an excessive dan-ger of total relativism; any reader can make anymeanings. There is a limit, a historical and ideo-logical limit which is secured by accepting thedeath of the mythic figure of the creator/authorbut not the negation of the historical producerworking within conditions which determine theproductivity of the work while never confining itsactual or potential field of meanings. 'This issuebecomes acutely relevant for the study of culturalproducers who are women. Typically within arthistory they are denied the status of author/cre-ator (see Barr's chart, fig. 2). Their creative per-sonality is never canonized or celebrated. More-over they have been the prey of ideologicalreadings where without regard to history and dif-fcrencc, art historians and critics have confidentlyproclaimed the meanings of the work by women,meanings which always reduce back to merelystating that these are works by women.

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How sexual difference is inscribed will be deter-mined by the specificity of the practice and theprocesses of representation. I n this essay I haveexplored two axes on which these issues can beconsidered-that of space and that of the look. Ihave argued that the social process defined by theterm modernity was experienced spatially in termsof access to the spectacular city which was opento a class and gender-specific gaze. (This hoversbetween the still-public figure of the flancur andthe modern condition of voyeur.) In addition, Ihave pointed to a coincidence between the spacesof modernity and the spaces of masculinity as theyi ntersect in the territory of cross-class sexual ex-change. Modifying therefore the simple conceit ofa bourgeois world divided by public and private,masculine and feminine, the argument seeks tolocate the production of the bourgeois definitionof woman defined by the polarity of bourgeois ladyand proletarian prostitute/working woman. Thespaces of femininity are not only limited in rela-tion to those defining modernity but because ofthe sexualized map across which woman is sepa-rated, the spaces of femininity are defined by adifferent organization of the look.

Difference, however, does not of necessity in-volve restriction or lack. That would be to rein-scribe the patriarchal construction of Nvoman. Thefeatures in the paintings by Mary Cassatt andBerthe Morisot of proximity, intimacy and di-vided spaces posit a different kind of viewing rela-tion at the point of both production and consump-tion.

The difference they articulate is bound to theproduction of femininity as both difference and asspecificity. They suggest the particularity of thefemale spectator-that which is completely ne-gated in the selective tradition we are offered ashistory.

LVomen and the Cane

I n all article entitled "Film and the Nlasqueradc:Theorizing the Female Spectator," Mary AnnDoane uses a photograph by Robert Doisneau ti-tled An Oblique Look, 1948, to introduce herdiscussion of the negation of the female gaze [ 1 3]

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1 3. Robert t)oisneau, AirOblique Look,photograph, 1948.London, Victoria andAlbert Museum.

CRISELDA POLLOCK

in both visual representations and on the streets.33In the photograph a petit bourgeois couple standin front of an art dealer's window and look in. Thespectator is hidden voyeur-like inside the shop.The woman looks at a picture and seems about tocomment on it to her husband. Unbeknownst toher, lie is fact looking elsewhere, at the profferedbuttocks of a half-naked female figure in a paint-ing placed obliquely to the surface/photo/windowso the spectator can also sec what he sees. Doaneargues that it is his gaze which defines the prob-lematic of the photograph and it erases that of the%vornan. She looks at nothing that has any mean-ing for the spectator. Spatially central, she is ne-gated in the triangulation of looks between themain, the picture of the fet1shized woman and thespectator, who is thus enthralled to a masculineviewing position. To get the joke, we must becomplicit with his secret discovery of somethingbetter to l ook at The j oke, like all dirty jokes, isat the wonnan's expense. She is contrasted i ccrno-

graphically to the naked woman. She is denied thepicturing of her desire; what she looks at is blankfor the spectator. She is denied being the objectof desire because she is represented as a womanwho actively looks rather than returning and con-firming the gaze of the masculine spectator.Doane concludes that the photograph almost un-cannily delineates the sexual politics of looking.

I have introduced this example to make some-what plainer what is at stake in considering thefemale spectator-the very possibility that textsmade by women can produce different positionswithin this sexual politics of looking. Withoutthat possibility, women are both denied a repre-sentation of their desire and pleasure and are con-stantly erased so that to look at and enjoy the sitesof patriarchal culture we women must becomenominal transvestites. We must assume a mascu-line position or masochistically enjoy the sight ofwoman's humiliation. At the beginning of thisessay I raised the question of 13crtlnc Morisot's


relation to such modern sights and canonicalpaintings of the modern as Olympia and A Bar at

the Fohes-Bergcre, both of which figure withinthe sexual politics of looking-a politics at theheart of modernist art and modernist art history'sversion of it. Since the early 1970s, modernism hasbeen critically challenged nowhere more pur-posely than by feminist cultural practitioners.

In a recent article titled "Desiring Images/I maging Desire," Mary Kelly addresses the femi-nist dilemma wherein the woman who is an artistsees her experience in terms of the feminine posi-tion-that is, as object of the look-while shemust also account for the feeling she experiencesas an artist occupying the masculine position assubject of the look. Different strategics haveemerged to negotiate this fundamental contradic-tion, focusing on ways of either repicturing orrefusing the literal figuration of the woman'sbody. All these attempts center on the problem:"How is a radical, critical and pleasurable posi-tioning of the woman as spectator to be done?"

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Kelly concludes her particular pathway throughthis dilemma (which is too specific to enter intoat this moment) with a significant comment:

Until now the woman as spectator has been pinned tothe surface of the picture, trapped in a path of light thatleads her back to the features of a veiled face. It seemsimportant to acknowledge that the masquerade has al-ways been internalized, linked to a particular organiza-tion of the drives, represented through a diversity ofaims and objects; but without being lured into lookingfor a psychic truth beneath the veil. To see this picturecritically, the viewer should neither be too close nor toofar away. 34

Kelly's comment echoes the terms of proximityand distance which have been central to this essay.The sexual politics of looking function around aregime which divides into binary positions, activ-ity/passivity, looking/being seen, voyeur/exhibi-tionist, subject/object. In approaching works byCassatt and Morisot we can ask: Are they com-plicit with the dominant regime? 35 Do they natu-

1 4. Berthe Morisot in herstudio, photograph.

264

1 5. Mary Cassatt, WomanBathing, color print withdrypoint and aquatint, fifthstate, 1891. New York,Metropolitan Museum of Art,Gift of Paul J. Sachs, 1916.

ralize femininity in its major premises? Is feminin-ity confirmed as passivity and masochistic or isthere a critical look resulting from a different posi-tion from which femininity is appraised, expert-enced and represented? In these paintings bymeans of distinctly different treatments of thoseprotocols of painting defined as initiating modern-ist art-articulation of space, repositioning theviewer, selection of location, facture and brush-work-the private sphere is invested Nvith mean-i ngs other than those ideologically produced to

GRISELDA POLLOCK

secure it as the site of femininity. One of themajor means by which femininity is thus reworkedis by the rearticulation of traditional space so thatit ceases to function primarily as the space of sightfor a mastering gaze, but becomes the locus ofrelationships. The gaze that is fixed on the repre-scnted figure is that of equal and like and this isinscribed into the painting by that particular prox-imity which I suggested characterized the work.There is little extraneous space to distract theviewer from the intersubjective encounter or to

MODERNITY AND THE SPACES of FFMININIl'1

reduce the figures to objectified staffage, or tomake them the objects of a voyeuristic gaze. Thecyc is not given its solitary freedom. The womendepicted function as subjects of their own lookingor their activity, within highly specified locationsof which the viewer becomes a part.

The rare photograph of Berthe Morisot at workin her studio serves to represent the exchange oflooks between women which structure these works[14]. The majority of women painted by Cassattor Morisot were intimates of the family circle. Butthat included women from the bourgeoisie andfrom the proletariat who worked for the house-hold as servants and nannies. It is significant tonote that the realities of class cannot be wishedaway by some mythic ideal of sisterhood amongwomen. The ways in which working-class womenwere painted by Cassatt, for example, involve theuse of class power in that she could ask them tomodel half-dressed for the scenes of women wash-i ng [15]. Nonetheless they were not subject to thevoyeuristic gaze of those women washing them-selves made by Degas which, as Lipton has argued,can be located in the maisons-closes or officialbrothels of Parjs.36 The maid's simple washingstand allows a space in svInch women outside thebourgeoisie can be represented both intimately

1. For substantive evidence see Lea Vergine, L AutreMoitie de l avant-garde, 1910-1940, translated by MircilleZanuttin (Italian cd. 1980), Paris, Des Femmes, 1982.

2. See Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin, "Modernism and Fem-inism: Some Paradoxes," in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh(ed.), Xfodemism and :Ifodemity, Halifax, Nova Scotia,Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983.Also Lillian Robinson and Lisa V'ogel, "Modernism andHistory," A'au, Literary History, 1 971-72, iii (1), 177-99.

3. T. J. Clark, The Painting of rllodern Life: Paris in theArt of :19anet and His Pollorrers, New York, Knopf, andLondon, Thames & Iludson, 1 984.

4. George Boas, "Il faut etrc do son temps," Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 1 940, 1, 52-65, reprinted inWingless Pegasus. A Handbook for Critics, Baltimore,Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950

5. The i tincrarv can be fictisrly reconst ructed as follows:

NOTES

265

and as working women without forcing them intothe sexualized category of the fallen woman. Thebody of woman can be pictured as classed but notsubject to sexual cornmodification.

I hope it will by now be clear that the signifi-cance of this argument extends beyond issuesabout Impressionist painting and parity for artistswho are women. Modernity is still with us, evermore acutely as our cities become, in the exacer-bated world of postmodernity, more and more aplace of strangers and spectacle, while women areever more vulnerable to violent assault while outi n public and are denied the right to move aroundour cities safely. The spaces of femininity stillregulate women's lives-from running the gaunt-let of intrusive looks by men on the streets tosurviving deadly sexual assaults. In rape trials,women on the street are assumed to be "asking forit." The configuration which shaped the work ofCassatt and Morisot still defines our world. It isrelevant then to develop feminist analyses of thefounding moments of modernity and modernism,to discern its sexualized structures, to discover pastresistances and differences, to examine howwomen producers developed alternative modelsfor negotiating modernity and the spaces of femi-ninity.

a stroll on the Boulevard des Capucines (C. Monet, 1873,Kansas City, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art), across thePont de 1 'Europe ( G. Caillebotte, 1876, Geneva, PetitPalais), up to the Care St-Lazare ( Monet, 1877, Paris,Musce d'Orsay), to catch a suburban train for the twclve-minute ride out to walk along the Seine at Argenteuil(Monet, 1875, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art) orto stroll and swim at the bathing-place on the Seine, LaCrenouillere (A. Renoir, 1869, Moscow, Pushkin Mu-seum), or to Dance at Bougival (A. Renoir, 1883, Boston,lb1uscum of Fine Arts). I was privileged to read early draftsof Tim Clark's book now titled The Painting of ModernLife and it was here that this Impressionist territory wasfirst lucidly mapped as a field of l eisure and pleasure on themetropolitan/suburban axis. Another study to undertakethis work is "Theodore Reff, lI7anet and A4odern Paris,Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

26 6

6. Clark, op. cit., 146.

7. Ibid., 253.

8. The tendency is the more marked in earlier drafts of

material which appears in The Painting of Modern Life—

e.g., "Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia i n

1865," Screen, 1 980, 21 (1), especially 33-37, and

"N4anct's Bar at the Folies-Bergare" i n Jean Bcauroy et al.

(eds.), The Wolf and the Lamb: Popular Culture in

France, Saratoga, Anma Libri, 1977. See also Clark, op

cit., 2 550-52, and contrast the radical reading of Mallet's

paintings which results from acknowledging the specificity

of the presumed masculine spectator in Eunice Lipton's

"Manet and Radicalised Female Imagery," Artforum,

'larch 1975, 13 (7), and also Beatrice Farwell, "Nlanct

and the Nude: A Study of the Iconography of the Second

Empire," University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D.

dissertation, 1973, published New York, Garland Press,

1981.

9. Tamar Garb, 1l'ornen Impressionists, Oxford, Phai-

don Press, 1987. The other two artists involved were Nlaric

Bracquernond and Eva Gonzales.

1 0. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mis-

tresses: ll'omen, Art and Ideology, London, Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1981, 38.

11. I refer, for example, to Edouard Manct, Argenteuil,

Les Canotiers, 1874 (Tournai, Nlusce des Beaux Arts) and

to Edgar Degas, Afar) , Cassatt at the Louvre, 1879-80,

etching, third of twenty states (Chicago, Art Institute of

Chicago). I am grateful to Nancy Underhill of the Univer-

sity of Queensland for raising this issue with me. See also

Clark, op. cit., 165, 239ff., for further discussion of this

issue of flatness and its social meanings.

1 2. See also Berthe Morisot, View of Paris from the

Trocad&o, 1872 (Santa Barbara, Museum of Art), where

two women and a child are placed in a panoramic view of

Paris but fenced off in a separate spatial compartment

precisely from the urban landscape. Reff, op. cit., 38, reads

this division quite (in)differently and finds the figures

merely incidental, umvittingly complying with the social

segregation upon which the painting's structure com-

ments. It is furthermore interesting to note that both these

scenes are painted quite close to the Morisot home in the

Rue Franklin.

13. See, for instance, M. Merleau-Ponty, "Cczanne's

Doubt," in Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L.

Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, Illinois,

Northwestern University Press, 1961.

1 4. Janet Wolff, "The Invisible Fl5neusc; Women and

the Literature of Nlodernity," 7heory, Culture andSocich,

1 985, 2 (3), 37-48

1 5. See George Siinmcl, "The %Ictropolis and Mental

Life," in Richard Sennctt (ed. ), (:lassie Essays in the Cut

GRISELDA POLLOCK

tune of the City, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts,

1 969.

1 6. Richard Sennctt, The Fall of Puhlie Man, Cam-

bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977, 126.

17. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire; Lyric Poet in

the Era of High Capitalism, London, New Left Books,

1 973, chapter 11, "The Fhmeur," 36.

18. Jules Simon, op. cit., quoted in MacNlifan, op. cit.,

37. MacNlillan also quotes the novelist Daniel Lesuer, "Le

Travail de la femme dcclasee," L Evolution feminine: ses

resultats econorniques, 1 900, 5. %4y understanding of the

complex i deological relations between public labor and the

i nsinuation of immorality was much enhanced by Kate

Stockwell's contributions to seminars on the topic at the

University of Leeds, 1984-85.

1 9. Jules %Iicliclet, La Femme, i n Oeuvres completes

( Vol. Will, 1858-60), Paris, Flarnmarion, 1985, 413. In

passing we can note that in a drawing for a print oil the

theme of omnibus travel Mary Cassatt initially placed a

man on the bench beside the woman, child and female

companion (ca. 1891, Washington, D.C., National Cal-

Icry of Art). In the print itself this masculine figure is

erased.

20. Sennctt, op. cit., 23.

21. 77re Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890), intro-

duced by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, London,

Virago Press, 1985, entry for 2 January 1879, 347.

22. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life,"

i n 77ie Painter of Modern Life and Other F,ssays, trans-

l ated and edited by Jonathan Nlaync, Oxford, Phaidon

Press, 1964, 9.

23. Ibid., 30.

24. The pictures to fit the schema would include the

following examples:

A. Renoir, La Loge, 1874 (London, Courtauld Institute

Galleries).

E. Manct, :' Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 1862 (Lon-

don, National Gallery).

E. Degas, Dancers Backstage, ca. 1872 (Washington,

D.C., National Gallerv of Art).

E. Degas, The Cardinal Family, ca. 1880, a series of

nronotypes planned as illustrations to Ludovic Elalcvy's

looks on the backstage life of the dancers and their "ad-

mirers" from the jockey Club.

E. Degas, .l Cafe in Montmartre, 1 877 (Paris, Nlus6c

d'Orsay).

E. Nlanct, Cafe, Place du Thedtre FranCai.s, 1 881 (Glas-gow, City Art N4uscum).

E:. Nlanct, Nana, 1 877 (Hamburg, Kunsthallc)E. Manct, Olympia. 1 863 (Paris, Musec du Louvre).25. Theresa Ann Gronbcrg, "Les Fcnnnes dc brasse-

rie," Art history, 1 984, 7 (3).

MODERNITY AND 'rHE SPACES OF FEMININITY

and even those places which Clark has seen asparticipating in the myth of the popular-such asthe bar at the Folies-Bergcre or even the Moulinde la Galette. A range of places and subjects wasclosed to them while open to their male col-leagues, who could move freely with men andwomen in the socially fluid public world of thestreets, popular entertainment and commercial orcasual sexual exchange.

The second dimension i n which the issue ofspace can be addressed is that of the spatial orderwithin paintings. Playing with spatial structureswas one of the defining features of early modernistpainting in Paris, be it Manet's witty and cal-culated play upon flatness or Degas's use of acuteangles of vision, varying viewpoints and crypticframing devices. With their close personal con-

; Mary Cassatt, Five O'Cloek Tea, 1880. Boston,%tuseum of Fine Arts, \9 Theresa 13 1 I opkins Fund

249

tacts with both artists, Morisot and Cassatt wereno doubt party to the conversations out of whichthese strategies emerged and equally subject to theless conscious social forces which may well haveconditioned the predisposition to explore spatialambiguities and metaphors. 11 Yet although thereare examples of their using similar tactics, I wouldlike to suggest that spatial devices in the work ofNlorisot and Cassatt work to a wholly differenteffect.

A remarkable feature in the spatial arrange-ments in paintings by Morisot is the juxtapositionon a single canvas of two spatial systems -or atleast of two compartments of space often obvi-ously boundaried by some device such as a balus-trade, balcony, veranda or embankment whosepresence is underscored by feature. In The harbor


26. See Clark, op. cit., 296, n. 144. The critic was JeanRavenal, writing in L Epoque, 7 June 1865.

27. See Clark, op. cit., 209.28. The escapade in 1878 was erased from the bowdler-

ized version of the journals published in 1890. For discus-sion of the event see the publication of excised sections inColette Cosnier, Marie Bashkirtseff.- un portrait sansretouches, Paris, Pierre Horay, 1985, 164-65. See alsoLinda Nochlin, "A Thoroughly Modern Masked Ball,"Art in America, November 1983, 71 (10). In Karl Bae-decker, Guide to Paris, 1888, the masked balls are de-scribed but it is advised that "visitors with ladies had bettertake a box" (p. 34) and of the more mundane salles dedance (dance halls) Baedcckcr comments, "it need hardlybe said that ladies cannot attend these balls."

29. Carl Degler, " What Ought to Be and What Was;Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century," Ameri-can Historical Review, 1974, 79, 1467-91.

30. Benjamin, op. cit., 45.31. The exception to these remarks may well be the

work of Gustave Caillebotte, especially in two paintingsexhibited at the third Exposition de Peinture in April1877: Portraits in the Country (Bayeux, Musce Baron Ge-rard) and Portraits (In an Interior) (New York, Alan Hart-man Collection). The former represents a group of bour-geois women reading and sewing outside their countryhouse and the latter women indoors at the family residencein the Rue de Miromesnil. They both deal with the spacesand activities of "ladies" in the bourgeoisie. But I amcurious about the fact of their being exhibited in a se-quence with Paris Street, Rainy Day, and The Bridge ofEurope, which are both outdoor scenes of metropolitanlife where classes mix and ambiguity about identities andsocial positions disturb the viewer's equanimity in com-plete contrast to the inertia and muffled spaces evoked for

267

the enclosed worlds of drawing room and terrace of thefamily estate in the two portrait paintings.

32. Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt, London, JupiterBooks, 1980.

33. Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade;Theorizing the Female Spectator," Screen, 1 982, 23(3-4), 86.

34. Mary Kelly, "Desiring Images/Imaging Desire,"lVedge, 1 984 (6), 9.

35. There are of course significant differences betweenthe works by Mary Cassatt and those by Berthe Morisotwhich have been underplayed within this text for reasonsof deciphering shared positionalities within and againstthe social relations of femininity. In the light of recentpublications of correspondence by the two women and asa result of the appearance in 1987 of a monograph (Adlerand Garb, Phaidon) and an exhibition of works by Morisotit will be possible to consider the artists in their specificityand difference. Cassatt articulated her position as artistand woman in political terms of both feminism and social-ism, whereas the written evidence suggests Morisot func-tioning more passively within the haut bourgeois forma-tion and republican political circles. The significance ofthese political differences needs to be carefully assessed inrelation to the texts they produced as artists.

36. For discussion of class and occupation in scenes ofwomen bathing see Eunice Lipton, "Degas's Bathers,"Arts Magazine, 1 980, 54, also published in Eunice Lipton,Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Woman and Mod-ern Life, University of California Press, 1986. ContrastGustave Caillebotte, Woman at a Dressing-Table, 1873( New York, private collection), where the sense of intru-sion heightens the erotic potential of a voyeuristic observa-tion of a woman in the process of undressing.

?50

6. Berthe Morisot, The //arbor at Lorient, 1869. Washington, D.C.,National Caller), of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection.

CRISELDA POLLOCK

7. Bert11C Morisot, On the Balcony (overlooking Paris near the

8. Claude Monet, The Garden of the Princess, Louvre,Trocadcro), 1 87?. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of

1 867- Oberlin, Ohio, Allen Memorial Art Museum,Mrs. Charles Nctcher in memory of Charles Netcher II, 1933

Oberlin College. R T. Miller, Jr., Fund.(Courtesy of the :lrt Institute: of , Chicago).


at Lorient, 1869 [6], Morisot offers us at the lefta landscape view down the estuary represented intraditional perspective while in one corner, shapedby the boundary of the embankment, the mainfigure is seated at an oblique angle to the view andto the viewer. A comparable composition occursin On the Terrace, 1874, where again the fore-ground figure is literally squeezed off-center andcompressed within a box of space marked by aheavily brushed-in band of dark paint forming thewall of the balcony, on the other side of which liesthe outside world of the beach. I n On the Balcony,1872 [7] the viewer's gaze over Paris is obstructedby the figures who are nonetheless separated fromthat Paris as they look over the balustrade fromthe Trocadero, very near to Morisot's home. 1 2

The point can be underlined by contrasting apainting by Monet, The Garden of the Princess,1 867 [8], where the viewer cannot readily imaginethe point from which the painting has been made,namely a window high in one of the new apart-ment buildings, and instead enjoys a fantasy offloating over the scene. What Morisot's balus-trades demarcate is not the boundary betweenpublic and private but between the spaces of mas-culinity and of femininity inscribed at the level ofboth what spaces are open to men and women andwhat relation a man or woman has to that spaceand its occupants.

In Morisot's paintings, moreover, it is as if theplace from which the painter worked is made partof the scene, creating a compression or immediacyin the foreground spaces. This locates the viewerin that same place, establishing a notional relationbetween the viewer and the woman defining theforeground, therefore forcing the viewer to experi-ence a dislocation between her space and that ofa world beyond its frontiers.

Proximity and compression are also characteris-tic of the works of Cassatt. Less often is there asplit space but it occurs, as in Susan on a Balcony,

1883. More common is a shallow pictorial spacewhich the painted figure dominates, as in YoungWoman in Black: Portrait of .Mrs. Gardner Cas-satt, 1883 [ 9~. The viewer is forced into a confron-tation or conversation with the painted figurewhile dominance and familiarity are denied by the

9. Mary Cassatt, Young 11 Lnman ir: L'fack. 1'urtrait of Alts.Gardner Cassatt, 1883. Baltimore Museum of Art, on loanfrom the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore.

device of the averted head of concentration on anactivity by the depicted personage. What are theconditions for this awkward but pointed relationof the figure to the world? Why this lack of con-ventional distance and the radical disruption ofwhat we take as the normal spectator-text rela-tions? What has disturbed the "logic of the gaze"?

I now want to draw attention in the work ofMary Cassatt to the disarticulation of the conven-tions of geometric perspective which had normallygoverned the representation of space in Furopeanpainting since the fifteenth century. Since its de-velopment in the fifteenth century, this math-ematically calculated system of projection hadaided painters in the representation of a three-dimensional world on :I two-dimensional surfaceby organizing objects i n relation to each other toproduce a notional and singular position fromwhich the scene is intelligible. It establishes theviewer as both absent from and indeed i ndepcn-c1clrt of the scene while being its mastering eye/I.

25 2

It is possible to represent space by other con-ventions. Phenomenology has been usefully ap-plied to the apparent spatial deviations of thework of Van Gogh and Cczamnc. 13 I nstead ofpictorial space functioning as a notional box intowhich objects are placed in a rational and abstractrelationship, space is represented according to theway it is experienced by a combination of touch,texture, as well as sight. Thus objects are pat-terned according to subjective hierarchies of valuefor the producer. Phenomenological space is notorchestrated for sight alone but by means of visualcues refers to other sensations and relations ofbodies and objects in a lived world. As experientialspace this kind of representation becomes suscep-tible to different ideological, historical, as well aspurely contingent, subjective inflections.

These are not necessarily unconscious. For in-stance, in Young Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878[ 1 0] by Cassatt, the viewpoint from which theroom has been painted is low so that the chairsl oom large as if imagined from the perspective ofa small person placed among massive upholsteredobstacles. The background zooms sharply away,i ndicating a different sense of distance from thata taller adult would enjoy over the objects to aneasily accessible back wall. The painting thereforenot only pictures a small child in a room butevokes that child's sense of the space of the room.It is from this conception of the possibilities ofspatial structure that I can now discern a waythrough my earlier problem in attempting to re-l ate space and social processes. For a third ap-proach lies in considering not only the spaces rep-resented, or the spaces of the representation, butthe social spaces from which the representation ismade and its reciprocal positionalities. The produ-cer is herself shaped within a spatially orchestratedsocial structure which is lived at both psychic andsocial levels. The space of the look at the point ofproduction will to some extent determine theviewing position of the spectator at the point ofconsumption. This point of view is neither ab-stract nor exclusively personal, but ideologicallyand historically construed. It is the art historian'sj ob to re-create it -since it cannot ensure its rec-

ognition outside its historical moment.

GRISELDA POLLOCK

The spaces of femininity operated not only atthe level of what is represented, the drawing roomor sewing room. The spaces of femininity arethose from which femininity is lived as a position-ality in discourse and social practice. They are theproduct of a lived sense of social l ocatedncss, mo-bility and visibility, in the social relations of seeingand being seen. Shaped within the sexual politicsof looking they demarcate a particular social or-ganization of the gaze, which itself works back tosecure a particular social ordering of sexual differ-ence. Femininity is both the condition and theeffect.

How does this relate to modernity and modern-ism? As Janet Wolff has convincingly pointed out,the literature of modernity describes the experi-ence of men. 14 It is essentially a literature abouttransformations in the public world and its as-sociated consciousness. It is generally agreed thatmodernity as a nineteenth-century phenomenonis a product of the city. It is a response in a mythicor ideological form to the new complexities of asocial existence passed among strangers in an at-mosphere of intensified nervous and psychic stim-ulation, in a world ruled by money and commodityexchange, stressed by competition and formativeof an i ntensified individuality, publicly defendedby a blase mask of indifference but intensely "cx-prcssed" in a private, familial context.l s Moder-nity stands for a myriad of responses to the vastincrease i n population leading to the literature ofthe crowds and masses, a speeding up of the paceof life with its attendant changes in the sense andregulation of time and fostering that very modernphenomenon, fashion, the shift in the character oftowns and cities from being centers of quite visibleactivities-manufacture, trade, exchange-tobeing zoned and stratified, with productionbecoming less visible while the centers of citiessuch as Paris and London become key sites ofconsumption and display producing what Sennetthas labeled the spectacular citv.I 6

All these phenomena affected women as well asmen, but in different ways. What 1 have describedabove takes place %within and comes to define themodern forms of the public space changing asSennett argues in his book significantly titled Die

http://context.ls

http://context.ls


s14A

1 0. Mary Cassatt, Young Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878. Washington, D.(,.,National Callerv of Art, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

Fall of Public Man from the eighteenth-centuryformation to become more mystified and threat-ening but also more exciting and sexualized. Oneof the key figures to embody the novel forms ofpublic experience of modernity is the flancur, ori mpassive stroller, the man i n the crowd who goes,in NValter Beniamin's phrase, "botanizing on theasphalt." 17 The flaneur symbolizes the privilege orfreedom to move about the public arenas of thecity observing but never interacting, consumingthe sights through a controlling but rarely ac-knowledged gaze, directed as much at other peo-ple as at the goods for sale. The flaneur embodiesthe gaze of modernity which is both covetous anderotic.

But the flaneur is an exclusively masculine typewhich functions within the matrix of bourgeoisideology through which the social spaces of thecity were reconstructed by the overlaying of thedoctrine of separate spheres on to the division ofpublic and private, which became as a result agendered division.

As both ideal and social structure, the mappingof the separation of the spheres for women andmen on to the division of public and private was

25 3

powerfully operative in the construction of a spe-cifically bourgeois way of life. It aided the produc-tion of the gendered social identities by which themiscellaneous components of the bourgeoisiewere helped to cohere as a class, in difference fromboth aristocracy and proletariat. Bourgeoiswomen, however, obviously went out in public, topromenade, go shopping, or visiting or simply tobe on display. And working-class women went outto work, but that fact presented a problem interms of definition as woman. For instance, JulesSimon categorically stated that a woman whoworked ceased to be a woman. 18 Therefore, acrossthe public realm lay another, less often studiedreap which secured the definitions of bourgeoiswomanhood-femininity-in difference fromproletarian women.

For bourgeois women, going into town andmingling with crowds of mixed social compositionwas not only frightening because it became in-creasingly unfamiliar, but because it was morallydangerous. It has been argued that to maintainone's respectability, closely identified with femi-ninity, meant not exposing oneself in public. Thepublic space was officially the realm of and for

254

men; for women to enter it entailed unforeseenrisks. For Instance, in La Fernme (1858-60) Julesti,lichelct exclaimed,

How many irritations for the single woman! She canhardly ever go out in the evening; she would be takenfor a prostitute. There are a thousand places where onlymen are to be seen, and if she needs to go there onbusiness, the men are amazed, and laugh like fools. Forexample, should she find herself delayed at the otherend of Paris and hungry, she will not dare to enter intoa restaurant. She would constitute an event; she wouldbe a spectacle: All eyes would be constantly fixed onher, and she would overhear uncomplimentary and boldconjccturcs. 19

The private realm was fashioned for men as a

place of refuge from the hurly-burly of business,

but it was also a place of constraint. The pressures

of intensified individuality protected III public bythe blast mask of i ndifference, 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 per-

sonae. 'I he 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 losing one's

virtue, dirtying oneself; going out in public and

the idea of disgrace were closely allied. For the

man going out in public meant losing oneself in

the crowd away from both demands of respectabil-

ity. Men colluded to protect this freedom. Thus

a woman going out to dine at a restaurant even

with her husband present was scandalous, whereas

a plan dining out with a mistress, even i n the view

of his friends, was granted a fictive invisibility.2 °

Tile public and private division functioned on

many levels. As a metaphorical map in ideology,

it structured tile very meaning of the terms mascu-

line and feminine within its mythic boundaries. In

practice as the ideology of domesticity became

hcgemonic, it regulated women's and men's be-

havior in the respective public and private spaces.

Presence in either of the domains determined

one's social identity and therefore, i n objective

tcrins, the separation of the spheres problcma-

t1zcd women's relation to the very activities and

GRISELDA POI.LoCK

experiences we typically accept as defining moder-

nity.

In the diaries of the artist Marie Bashkirtseff,

who lived and worked in Paris during the same

period as Morisot and Cassatt, the following pas-sage reveals some of the restraints:

What I long for is the freedom of going about alone,of coming and going, of sitting in the seats of theTuileries, and especially in the Luxembourg, of stop-ping and looking at the artistic shops, of enteringchurches and museums, of walking about old streets atnight; that's what I long for; and that's the freedomwithout which one cannot become a real artist. Do youimagine that I get much good from what 1 see, chaper-oned as 1 am, and when, in order to go to the Louvre,I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion, myfamily? 21

These territories of the bourgeois city were,

however, gendered not only on a male/female po-

larity. They became the sites for the negotiation

of gendered class identities and class gender posi-

tions. 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 arc neither simply those of

masculinity, nor are they those of femininity,

which are as much the spaces of modernity for

being the negative of the streets and bars. They

are, as the canonical works indicate, the marginal

or interstitial spaces where the fields of the mascu-

line and feminine intersect and structure sexuality

within a classed order.

The Painter o f Modern Life

One text above all charts this interaction of class

and gender. In 1863 Charles Baudelaire published

in Le P'igaro an essay entitled "The Painter ofModern Life." In this text the figure of tile flineur

is modified to become the modern artist while at

the same time the text provides a mapping of Paris

marking out the sites/sights for the flancur/artist.

Tile essay is ostensibly about the work of a minor

illustrator Constantin Guys, l nlt lie is only a pre-

text for Baudelairc to %vca%c an elaborate and im-

possible image of leis ideal artist, who is a passion-

MODERNITY AND THE SPACES OF FEAIININI'ry

ate lover of crowds and, incognito, a man of theworld.

Tile crowd is his element as the air is that of birds andwater of fishes. His passion and profession are tobecome one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flan-eur, for the passionate spectator, it is an i mincnsc joyto set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid theebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitiveand the infinite. To be away from home and yet feeloneself everywhere at ]ionic; to see the world and to bethe centre of the world and vet remain hidden from theworld-such are a few of the slightest pleasures of thosei ndependent, passionate, impartial natures which the

tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is aprince and everywhere rejoices in his incognito. Thelover of life makes the whole world his familv.ZZ

The text is structured by an opposition between

home, the inside, the 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 flfincur/artist sets up home.

Thus the flaneur/artist is articulated across the

twin ideological formations of modern bourgeois

society-the splitting of private and public with

its double freedom for men in the public space,

and the preeminence of a detached observing

gaze, whose possession and power is never ques-

tioned as its basis in the hierarchy of the sexes is

never acknowledged. For as Janet \Volff has re-

cently argued, there is no female equivalent of the

quintessential masculine figure, the flfincur; there

is not and could not be a female flfineuse. (See

note 14.)

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 flfineur's gaze.

Woman is for the artist in general . . . far more than

j ust the female of man. Rather she is divinity, a star

a glittering conglomeration of all the graces of

nature, condensed into a single being; in object of

keenest admiration and curiosity that the picture of life

25 5

can offer to its contemplator. She is an idol, stupidperhaps, but dazzling and bewitching.... Everythingthat adorns woman that serves to show off her beautyis part of herself. . . .

No doubt woman is sometimes a light, a glance, aninvitation to happiness, sometimes she is just a word.z 3

Indeed woman is just a sign, a fiction, a confec-

tion 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 kN 7 °O°M*A''N, which is pro-duced by and for another social group, which de-

rives its identity and imagined superiority by man-

ufacturing the specter of this fantastic Other.\']'OMAN is both an idol and nothing but a word.

Thus when we come to read the chapter of Baude-laire's essay titled "Women and Prostitutes," in

which the author charts a journey across Paris for

the flfincur/artist, where women appear merely to

be there as spontaneously visible objects, it is nec-

cssary to recognize that the text is itself construct-

i ng a notion of WOMAN across a fictive map of

urban spaces-the spaces of modernity.

The flaneur/artist starts his j ourney i n the audi-

torium, where young women of the most fashion-

able society sit in snowy white in their boxes at the

theater. Next lie 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 I nitnicry of their elders. Then he moves on

to the lowlier theatrical world, where frail and

slender dancers appear in a blaze of limelight ad-

mired by fat bourgeois men. At the cafe 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 prac-

tically nothing is practically 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 pro-

tean i mage of wanton beauty, the courtesan, "tile

perfect image of savagery that lurks in the heart

of civilization." Finally by degrees of destitution,

llc charts women, from the patrician airs of young

and successful prostitutes to the poor slaves of the

filthy, stews.

~5G

Baudelaire's essay maps a representation ofParis as the city of women. It constructs a sexual-ized journey which can be correlated with Impres-sionist practice. Clark has offered one map of Im-pressionist painting following the trajectories ofleisure from city center by suburban railway to thesuburbs. I want to propose another dimension ofthat map, which links Impressionist practice tothe erotic territories of modernity. I have drawnup a grid using Baudelaire's categories andmapped the works of Manet, Degas and othersonto this schcrua. 24 From the loge pieces by Re-noir (admittedly not women of the highest soci-ety) to the Alusique aux Tuileries of Manet,Monet's park scenes and others easily cover thisterrain where bourgeois men and worsen taketheir l eisure. But then when we move backstage atthe theater, we enter different worlds, still of menand women but differently placed by class.Degas's pictures of the dancers on stage and re-hearsing are well known. Perhaps less familiar arehis scenes illustrating the backstage at the Operawhere members of the jockey Club bargain fortheir evening's entertainment with the little per-formers. Both Degas and Manet represented theworsen who flaunted cafes, and as Theresa AnnGronberg has shown, these were working-class

GRID I

Ladies

women often suspected of touting for custom asclandestine prostitutes. 25

Thence we can find examples sited in the Foliesand cafes-concerts as well as the boudoirs of thecourtesan. Even if Olympia cannot be situated ina recognizable locality, reference was made in thereviews to the cafe Paul Niquet's, the haunt of thewomen who serviced the porters of Les Halles anda sign for the reviewer of total degradation anddepravity. 26

W'onien and the Public Modern

The artists who were women in this cultural groupof necessity occupied this map but partially. Theycan be located all right but in spaces above adecisive line. Lydia at the Theater, 1879, and TheLoge, 1882 [11), situate us in the theater with theyoung and fashionable but there could hardly bea greater difference between these paintings andthe work by Renoir on this theme, The First Out-ing, 1876 (London, National Gallery of Art), forexample.

The stiff and formal poses of the two youngwomen in the painting by Cassatt were preciselycalculated, as the drawings for the work reveal."Their erect postures, one woman carefully grasp-

GRISELDA POLLOCK

theater(loge)

park

debutantes; young womenof fashionable society

matrons, mothers, children,elegant families

RENOIR

MANET

CASSATT

CASSATT

MORISOT

Fallen Women

theater dancers DEGAS

( backstage)

cafes mistresses and kept women MANET

RENOIR

DEGAS

folies The courtesan: MANET

.protean image of wanton DEGAS

beauty - GUYS

brothels .. poor slaves of filthy stews" MANET

GUYS

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