A Studio Of One's Own: Fictional Women Painters And The Art Of Fiction 0838640729, 9780838640722, 9781423768685

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A Studio of One’s Own: Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction

Roberta White

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

A Studio of One’s Own

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A Studio of One’s Own Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction

Roberta White

Madison • Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

 2005 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8386-4072-9/05 $10.00  8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data White, Roberta, 1938– A studio of one’s own : fictional women painters and the art of fiction / Roberta White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8386-4072-9 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Art and literature—English-speaking countries. 3. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature—English-speaking countries. 5. American fiction—History and criticism. 6. Canadian fiction—History and criticism. 7. Women artists in literature. 8. Painters in literature. 9. Painting in literature. I. Title. PR888.A74W48 2005 823⬘.809357—dc22 2004029577

printed in the united states of america

For Bruce

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Unfinished Work: The Dialogue of the Novelist and the Painter 1. Opening the Portfolio: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte¨, Anne Bronte¨, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 2. The Painterly Eye: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening 3. Journey to the Silent Kingdom: Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse 4. Figure and Ground: The Portrait Painter in Iris Murdoch and Anna Banti 5. Painters of the Irish Coast: Jennifer Johnston and Deirdre Madden 6. Northern Light: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye 7. Drawn from Life: Jill Paton Walsh’s The Serpentine Cave 8. Space, Time, and a Muse: Mary Gordon’s Spending 9. Servants, Housewives, Artists: A. S. Byatt, Tracy Chevalier, Carol Shields, and Kyoko Mori

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Notes Bibliography Index

242 250 255

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13 33 64 85 109 132 152 174 195

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Acknowledgments FOR THEIR ENCOURAGEMENT AND HELP, I WISH TO THANK CAROL BASTIAN, Denise Marshall, Mickey Pearlman, Jami Powell, John Ward, and Richard Bruce White.

* * * Reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, excerpts from SPENDING by Mary Gordon. Copyright  1998 by Mary Gordon. Excerpts from The Serpentine Cave by Jill Paton Walsh. Copyright  1997 by Jill Paton Walsh Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC Excerpts from TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1927 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1954 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Parts of Chapter 6 appeared in different form in ‘‘Margaret Atwood: Reflections in a Convex Mirror’’ in CANADIAN WOMEN WRITING, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Copyright  1993 by the University Press of Mississippi. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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A Studio of One’s Own

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Introduction Unfinished Work: The Dialogue of the Novelist and the Painter ‘‘Stupid girl,’’ I imagined these men [Picasso, Matisse] saying to me. . . . ‘‘You can be one or the other, a woman who desires and is desired or a painter. Choose.’’ —Mary Gordon, Spending

WHEN A WOMAN NOVELIST PORTRAYS A WOMAN ARTIST PAINTING IN HER

studio, the reader is invited to reflect upon women’s creativity and their struggles to attain a space in which to create. A ku¨nstlerroman, by definition, tells the story of an artist’s intellectual and emotional growth; usually it describes an inward journey leading to a discovery of the artist’s vocation. A critical examination of many such novels, considered chronologically, tells the larger story of women’s long journey into the world of professional art. Although much has been written about portraits of artists in novels by women, most of these critical studies interpret the term ‘‘artist’’ broadly, to include writers and musicians as well as painters. A narrower definition of the ku¨nstlerroman, one that restricts it to works about visual artists, allows for a sharper focus on the many and varied transactions between the sister arts of painting and fiction. In order to portray a visual artist, the novelist is obliged to conjure out of words, literally black print on a white page, the colors of the artist’s imaginative vision and her work. When she creates a visual artist as, perhaps, a rather mysterious sister, the novelist begins an implicit or explicit dialogue between herself as a writer and the fictional painter. Novels portraying women artists and their art invariably dramatize the risks women experience when they begin to work seriously as painters. When Lily Briscoe begins to paint in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, she thinks of herself as venturing down a dark corridor, swimming in high seas, or walking on a narrow plank above water. 13

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The contrast between Woolf ’s hard-won confidence as a novelist and Lily’s timidity as a painter reflects the historical fact that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was more difficult for women to be accepted as painters or composers than as writers. Women could—not without many struggles, of course—enter into the mainstream of novel writing because its tradition and conventions were less firmly established than those of the fine arts. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf points out that the novel was a pliable and inviting medium for Jane Austen as well as other pioneering women writers; the novel, Woolf says, ‘‘was young enough to be soft in her hands.’’1 In contrast, painting, like music and poetry, was more fully steeped in an inveterate tradition that remained the province of male artists. In her history of real-life American artists in the nineteenth century, Laura R. Prieto notes that it is not a woman’s feminine nature that hinders her, ‘‘but rather the cultural prescriptions of femininity that make it difficult for her to see and be seen as an artist.’’2 It is not a woman’s gender but rather ‘‘gender ideology’’ that will not permit her to reconcile her separate identities as ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘artist.’’3 All creative work is risky, but in novels about women painters the risk becomes an integral part of the work itself. In late nineteenthand twentieth-century novels, the risk usually drives the plot; the old marriage plot is supplanted by a dramatic account of the artist’s struggle to create. Thus, these novelists dramatize the difficulties confronted by creative women such as themselves, broadening the scope of the issue by juxtaposing the sister arts of painting and fiction. Fictional portraits of artists are different from the recorded lives of real painters because they are a projection of the author’s idea of art and of women’s claim to a place in the world of art. Unlike a flesh and blood painter, the fictional artist exists in a realm of idea and imagination, a product as well as a creator of art. When the fictional artist is a woman she inevitably embodies the author’s political stance. The word political is used here to refer to the novelist’s presentation of the feminist aspects of the artist’s journey into art, the author’s particular understanding of women’s struggle for autonomy and self-expression. It refers to the external conditions that facilitate or impede the woman painter’s aspirations, especially social expectations having to do with courtship and marriage. The fictional artist’s inner emotional life is also colored by political considerations, especially if she has internalized socially condoned biases against her whole enterprise, like Lily Briscoe in To the Light-

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house, who keeps hearing the voice of Mr. Tansley telling her that women can’t paint, or Monica Szabo in Mary Gordon’s Spending, who inwardly questions the propriety of painting her ‘‘spent’’ lover in the nude. To view the fictional woman artist solely from a political perspective, however, is to minimize or ignore that she is also the projection of a creative mind postulating the working out of an aesthetic enterprise within the contingencies of a fictional setting. The term aesthetic as used here broadly embraces the creative process, the painting itself, the meaning or affect of the painting, and whatever underlying ideas about art the novelist may present. The political and aesthetic aspects of novels about women artists cannot be separated because they constitute a single story. They cannot be separated because the political—the social conditions under which the woman artist works and against which she struggles—predictably will have an effect upon the creative process, the thing made, its meaning or affect, and its reception. Conversely, aesthetic considerations enter into the political aspects of the novel, since the artist is typically driven by a need to overcome obstacles particular to her gender in order to discover her vocation, give form to an inner vision, and express herself through art. To confront and solve whatever painterly problems may haunt and intrigue her, the woman artist must find and claim a space in which to work, and that staking out of a space is, however remotely, a political act. In fiction as in history, woman artists’ working spaces enlarge through time—by uneven steps—from a portfolio in a cupboard to a studio or atelier where work may be completed and prepared for sale or exhibition. This working space is the measure of the claim that she makes upon the world. This study traces the development of women artist figures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels in English, including British, American, Irish, and Canadian writers. The single exception is the Italian writer Anna Banti, whose Artemisia is available in an excellent English translation by Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo. The purpose of this study is, first, to interpret the implied dialogue of the writers with the artist figures they create so as to understand the writer’s view of creativity in both its aesthetic and political dimensions and, second, to explore certain remarkable continuities in the imagery depicting women artists in the novels. Most notably, recurrent images present the artist as liminal and her work as unfinished. One must hasten to add that these are not negative terms.The artist’s li-

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minality means that she is in a state of transition or emergence, and the unfinished nature of her work represents this state of becoming. It is easy to see how an aesthetic of the unfinished accommodates itself to political considerations: a woman artist’s sense of her emerging presence in the world is very likely to be felt in terms of an unfinished story, but one that bespeaks potentialities and possibilities. In addition to the implicit dialogue of novelists with the artist figures they create, a dialogue also can occur between what Rachel DuPlessis calls the ‘‘embedded art work’’ with its implied aesthetic and the aesthetic of the novel as a whole.4 The implied aesthetic of the artist and art within the novel may ironically be at odds with that of the novelist, as in Jane Austen’s Emma, or fully consistent with it, as in To the Lighthouse. Virtually every novel depicting an artist presents a challenge to the novelist to exercise her visual imagination. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, for example, the shortcomings of the painter Edna Pointellier are compensated for by the vivid pictorialism of the novelist. In general, the challenge of portraying a visual artist inspires these novelists to write works that are rich in color imagery and visual description. In novels such as The Awakening, Artemisia, To the Lighthouse, and The Railway Station Man, the political or ideological point of view of the novelist is intensified for the reader through the appealing beauty and vibrancy of the prose. Political considerations come into play immediately when one looks at nineteenth-century novels in which women protagonists attempt to paint with any degree of seriousness. The reader is led to question what causes these women characters literally to lose their grip upon the paintbrush, and the answer is, not surprisingly, that the obstacles they encounter are multifarious. The demands of women’s lives from adolescence through maturity are directly at odds with the demands of art. Even if the painter is able to obtain studio space, a rarity, the needs of children and the duties of domestic life interrupt her work, as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps vividly dramatizes in The Story of Avis. Particularly damaging is the notion prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and persisting even into the twentieth century that it is perfectly acceptable for women to paint so long as that activity is regarded as an ‘‘accomplishment,’’ a parlor skill suitable to whiling away one’s leisure hours. This routine trivializing of the activity of painting, and, by implication, of women’s creativity, undermines any serious ambition to paint that a woman might harbor. Thus, Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse refuses to hold herself or

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her sketches to a very high artistic standard, even though she knows better; her ‘‘art’’ can only be viewed as comical in the context of Emma. Jane Eyre instinctively tries to break out of the mold of the parlor painter and on occasion produces original work, although in the end her art gets lost in the novel’s bizarre marriage plot. Courtship is presented as inimical to art, and vice versa, as though art and ardor could not coexist. Frequently in these nineteenth-century novels commodification of the female image in the service of the marriage market subverts women’s art: the woman at her easel attracts the male gaze and in that moment is transformed from observer to observed, from subject to object. That shift of attention occurs in comic fashion in Emma when Mr. Elton adoringly watches Emma paint Harriet Smith. It is not surprising, therefore, that in novels up until To the Lighthouse, the art in the novel is inferior to the art of the novel. Woolf ’s novel is pivotal in the genre, and she deeply influences the writers who follow her. In later works the artist struggles earnestly to keep her grip on the paintbrush and her eye upon the subject. In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and in The Serpentine Cave by Jill Paton Walsh, the artist must learn to turn her gaze without shock upon a vulnerably nude female model and not look away. Monica Szabo in Mary Gordon’s Spending learns to gaze for hours with a painterly eye upon the nude male body of ‘‘B,’’ her lover and model, in full knowledge that she is breaking a taboo. In instances where the artist’s space must be shared with the sort of character Virginia Woolf calls the Angel in the House, a dialogue occurs or is implied between the artist and the Angel, a virtuous, selfless servant of her family, who represents a socially acceptable idea of womanhood, as originally described in the poem by Coventry Patmore. This dialogue is a subtext of nearly every work under consideration here, and often, although not always, it is a bitter one: the two women, Angel and artist, cannot live in the same house, cannot occupy the same space. In her essay ‘‘Professions for Women,’’ Woolf describes the Angel as an enemy to her creativity: ‘‘whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her.’’5 She eventually seizes the Angel by the throat and strangles her. In To the Lighthouse, however, Woolf moderates the relationship of the artist and the Angel. The artist Lily Briscoe works on her painting as a houseguest of Mrs. Ramsay, the domestic Angel, and she cannot complete her painting successfully until after the Angel dies. At the same time, Lily loves Mrs. Ramsay, mourns her deeply, and needs her spirit to help her

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finish the painting. Woolf also celebrates the genuine creativity of Mrs. Ramsay in the way that she circles her family and friends about her and makes something beautiful of domestic life. The Angel in the House, Woolf implies, could possibly have been a domestic artist all along. In general, a lively array of characters shows up as avatars of the Angel in these novels. In The Story of Avis, the Angel, a homemaking aunt, harbors a secret desire to have been a scientist. In The Serpentine Cave, the Angel is totally transformed: she becomes by the end of the novel the very figure she has resented and misunderstood, a painter. In some recent novels, the Angel joins the religious right in protesting and attempting to obstruct women’s creativity. In Cat’s Eye the Angel embodies Canadian Protestant hypocrisy in the dreaded figure of Mrs. Smeath: Elaine the painter gets even with her childhood enemy by portraying her in humiliating situations. In Spending, the Angel appears in the figure of Alice Marie Cusalito, a member of the Catholic Defense League, who leads a protest outside the gallery where Monica’s provocatively nude Christ figures are exhibited. Interestingly, the Angel in the House is usually not the painter’s mother, for the simple reason that most of the protagonists are motherless; perhaps novelists find it more plausible to launch a character as an artist if she has not been distracted by a mother likely to have pushed her into domesticity. As is frequently the case in novels by women, these motherless characters are left to pursue their own destinies, inventing themselves in the process. Finally, the Angel in the House becomes the central character in several stories and novels that openly challenge the supposedly uncrossable barriers between domesticity and ‘‘high art’’ as well as those between art, crafts, and domestic work. In these various works of fiction, discussed in the last chapter of this study, housewives and their humbler counterparts, servants, are presented as true artists in either a real or metaphorical sense. Virginia Woolf reminds her readers that after killing the Angel in the House a second obstacle that must be overcome by women writers is the difficulty of telling the truth about one’s own experiences ‘‘as a body’’ in one’s fiction.6 For the painter, that truth-telling might assume the form, not so much of self-portraiture, as of taking on subjects or points of view considered indecorous or even indecent for women to handle. The pressure upon women to be polite, modest, and ‘‘nice’’ has been persistent. In all of the novels under consideration here, anger—not necessarily against the Angel in the

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house, but rather against a patriarchy that forces women into that decorous role—is an obstacle which the artist deals with one way or another: by evading or sublimating it, concealing it, transcending it, or perhaps turning it to aesthetic purposes, as in Banti’s Artemisia, where Artemisia’s painting of the heroic and bloody figure of Judith slaying Holofernes arrests, shocks, and amuses the viewer, releasing anger in the form of dark comedy. In addition to interpreting the implied dialogue of the writer and the fictional painter, this study traces some remarkably consistent patterns of recurring imagery in the depiction of women artists and their work. This imagery consists of variations on a theme that can be called the liminal, the suspended, and the unfinished. In a series of lectures published as Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold , Carolyn Heilbrun, focusing in particular on women writers of memoirs, speaks of women’s lives at the present time as characterized by a condition of ‘‘liminality.’’ Heilbrun defines this condition: The word ‘‘limin’’ means ‘‘threshold,’’ and to be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, to be leaving one condition or country or self and entering upon another. But the most salient sign of liminality is its unsteadiness, its lack of clarity about exactly where one belongs and what one should be doing, or wants to be doing.7

One might argue that Heilbrun’s definition of liminality is so broad as to apply to the psychological state of almost anyone, and that it is much too vague to serve as a critical tool in a study of women novelists. A catch-all term can be useful, however, when one is describing a large category of similar things, since it allows for variations and hence comparisons within that category. Still, one might well reject the term liminality out of hand were it not the case that this general term is given local habitation and specificity by the persistence of imagery of seashore and sea throughout the novels discussed here, from Charlotte Bronte¨ to Mary Gordon. In Phelps, Chopin, Woolf, Murdoch, Madden, Johnston, Walsh, and Gordon, the fictional woman painter lives or works at the edge of a sea. The seashore is the place where the painters work, not necessarily what they paint, and as such it can symbolize their social status. The literal seashore, as a line of demarcation between two separate realms, frequently symbolizes the liminality of the life of the woman artist. The seashore also serves as a nexus from which one can examine the connection (or the opposition) of the aesthetic and the political.

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Images of the seashore relate to the marginality of women in society—the possibility of exclusion from or unwillingness to participate in the body politic, with the city and the coast as opposite poles. Although Heilbrun does not say so, liminality can also be seen, however, as one step beyond marginality, in that a woman crossing a threshold may be said to venture out of the margins and begin to enter into the mainstream of culture and art. Imagery of seashore and sea can also symbolize other things than the liminality of the creative woman in Heilbrun’s sense of the word. The image of the artist as poised between two realms may suggest broader symbolic possibilities of the sea as liberating the creative self or, conversely, offering submersion in history and time, or even annihilation. One cannot generalize very broadly because the seashore imagery takes on different metaphorical properties in individual novels. In The Awakening, for example, Edna Pointellier, who drowns in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the novella, is surely a failed liminal woman artist in Heilbrun’s sense of the liminal. But in To the Lighthouse the sea takes on symbolism of time and impending chaos (‘‘that fluidity out there’’), forces that are inimical to both the painter and the domestic artist. Jennifer Johnston and Deirdre Madden invoke a special and very rich history of sea symbolism in Irish literature and life; the sea is, among other things, the pathway of invaders and colonists and yet also the mother of imagination and myth. In The Serpentine Cave, Jill Paton Walsh bathes her entire novel in images of the rugged coast and sea around Cornwall, like an embryonic fluid carrying the figure of a woman who emerges as a newborn painter on almost the last page. A defining event in Walsh’s novel is a real, historical sea disaster in which an entire lifeboat crew is wiped out, and the risks endured by the lifeguards are symbolically paralleled to the risks that the protagonist Marian will take as an artist. The settings described by Phelps, Woolf, Madden, and Walsh also contain conspicuous lighthouses, but the symbolic implications are various. While sweeping generalizations must be avoided, the seashore imagery in these works is continually suggestive; it suggests, among other things, a vital connection between women’s art and the natural world. In addition to the term liminal, describing the condition of the artists depicted, two other terms, suspended and unfinished, prove useful in analyzing novels about women artists. Suspension can refer to both the emotional state of the artist—her affective response to being on the edge or the margin, her sense of the risk of art—and

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to the works of art that she creates. Embarked on a journey toward artistic achievement, the artist may find herself in a euphoric yet dangerous state, like Lily Briscoe walking the plank over deep waters. In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a bridge over a ravine, the scene of Elaine’s worst childhood traumas, becomes a central emblem in Elaine’s last painting, a symbol fraught with emotions of fear, hatred, and eventually triumph. In many instances, the sense of being suspended embraces the artist’s aesthetic aspirations and her social status. It is also the case that an embedded work of visual art in a novel remains suspended in a way that has nothing to do with the gender of the writer or the fictional artist. The writer invites us to envision with the mind’s eye an aesthetic visual arrangement attributed not to the writer but to the painter, herself a construct of words. The writer invites the reader to participate in the creative act, to supply, as it were, the color as well as envision the shape, size, and composition of the fictional work of art. And yet this ‘‘secondary image’’ remains perpetually suspended and unfinished. Even insofar as the reader supplies imagined details to fill out the picture, following from the author’s suggestions, the mind in its economy supplies only what the narrative requires, and the picture remains rather spectral and occluded, reminding us of its own incompleteness. Thus, the rendering of paintings in novels makes us aware of the tentativeness of all art, of all ‘‘takes’’ on the world: to be suspended in space and time is the nature of art. The particular, and somewhat peculiar, status of the embedded work of art in a novel also raises questions about its relationship to the rest of the verbal narrative: can the embedded work be said to exist at all as an aesthetic object and, if so, to what degree does it exercise authority over the text? The status of the embedded work can be interpreted by making use of the rhetorical term ekphrasis, which refers to language that describes a work of art within a literary work, in this case the embedded paintings. In earlier uses, ekphrasis applied exclusively to such descriptions within poetry, where the language already bears special aesthetic qualities and tends to be laden with visual imagery. But W. J. T. Mitchell, in his book Picture Theory, offers a broader definition that may be applied here: ekphrasis is ‘‘a verbal representation of a visual representation.’’8 Mitchell repeats the obvious but important point that a ‘‘verbal representation cannot represent—that is, make present—its object in the same way a visual representation can. It may refer to an object, describe it, in-

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voke it, but it can never bring its visual presence before us in the way pictures do.’’9 David Lodge goes so far as to state as a general rule that ‘‘where one kind of aesthetic presentation is embedded in another, the ‘reality’ of the embedded form is weaker than that of the framing form.’’10 It should not be inferred from Lodge’s statement, however, that ekphrastic passages in a novel necessarily constitute a less immediate form of discourse than the narrative portions of the work. It is not the case that a more elusive or fugitive aesthetic object is necessarily ‘‘weaker’’ in terms of its tidal pull upon the rest of the novel. In my view, the province of an ekphrastic discourse in fiction cannot be determined theoretically; its degree of dominance depends upon the individual literary work. In one instance an ekphrastic passage might seem vague and inconsequential, a mere illusion of an illusion; in another instance it might powerfully create the impression of an arrested moment of visual perception. Passages of ekphrasis are central to the study of novels about visual artists because the reader needs to believe in, if not ‘‘see,’’ the painting within the novel. In instances where the ekphrastic passage provides something more than a mere filling in of visual detail to satisfy the demands of the narrative, the reader will experience an abrupt shift in the flow of the novel’s discourse. If the ekphrastic passage is presented as privileged, revelatory, or climactic within the narrative, the shift from one sort of language to another will signal an evocation of a silent, purely visual world of art. In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, for example, or A. S. Byatt’s story ‘‘Art Work,’’ ekphrasis illuminates the imagination of the artist and justifies the claims made for her creative powers by carrying the reader from the world the artist lives in to the one that she makes. This crossing of the border from narrative to ekphrasis and back again, simulating a shift from fiction to painting, can be a crucial transition that lies at the heart of many works of fiction about artists. The artist is affirmed as authentic if the writer can authenticate her work by means of descriptions that break away from the time-bound sequences of narrative into a replication of the seeming timelessness of visual art. In earlier novels, the ekphrasis often seems perfunctory or uninventive; the painter’s status is also tentative. Later, as fictional artists gain more independence, ekphrasis assumes a larger role in the novels, at once authenticating and completing the portrait of the artist. These are instances where purely aesthetic considerations parallel and reflect the artist’s degree of autonomy; aesthetic and political considerations are united.

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Several different ways can be observed in which an ekphrastic passage acts upon the whole text of the novel. It might simply ornament or supplement the narrative; it might symbolize the events of the novel; it might complement those events; or it might even appear to deconstruct them. An example of a work of fiction where the ekphrastic passages merely supplement the narrative is The Awakening, where Edna Pointellier’s described paintings seem ordinary and rather stiff in comparison to the vital and vividly pictorial narrative surrounding them; the embedded paintings help make the point that Edna’s heart is not really in her art. Jennifer Johnston’s The Railway Station Man is an example of a novel where ekphrastic passages epitomize the events of the novel in a symbolic way: Helen’s serial paintings of a young man gradually disappearing on a beach recapitulate the plot of the novel, which has to do with the fatal violence suffered by men in Ireland’s political clashes. In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, the descriptions of Elaine’s autobiographical paintings complement her telling of her life story in that they fill in the silences: the ekphrastic passages ‘‘say’’ things that Elaine cannot say so well in the rest of her narrative, and thus they threaten at times to take dominion over the rest of the novel. This literary effect is not new; W. J. T. Mitchell points out instances in poetry where ekphrasis becomes dominant, as in Wallace Stevens’s ‘‘Anecdote of the Jar’’ or—the example that theorists of ekphrastic representation always come back to—the description of the shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. Mitchell believes that the shield, in representing Homer’s universe and depicting workaday events, signifies an even larger world than that of the story in The Iliad. A more radical relation of the embedded work of art to the novel as a whole occurs when the work of art threatens to unravel, or deconstruct, the work of the narrative. Mitchell points out that there are moments when the ekphrastic image becomes ‘‘like a sort of unapproachable and unpresentable ‘black hole’ in the verbal structure, entirely absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in fundamental ways.’’11 Presumably this effect will occur when the ekphrastic image calls attention to its own mysteriousness, its alien existence as a totally imaginary visual phenomenon within a world of words. Such is the case in To the Lighthouse, where the progress of Lily’s painting, which the reader never gets to ‘‘see,’’ becomes the focus of the final section of the novel and threatens to overtake it in the sense that the unseen painting contains and consumes all of the aesthetic interest and creative force that the novelist’s narrative

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voice can muster. The pangs of giving birth to the painting threaten to obliterate the world for Lily and for the narrative itself. Thus, it is possible for an embedded work of art and the ekphrastic discourse that describes it to be occluded but at the same time dominant in the text. The very inaccessibility of the work may contribute to its dominance, as in To the Lighthouse, which exemplifies the black hole effect. There is a similar effect in Carol Shields’s Happenstance. Although all embedded paintings are mysterious or obscure to some extent, the author may or may not choose to exploit that fact to create ‘‘moments’’ in the novel in which the reader is invited to ponder the mystery of words construed as pictures. Authors who choose to do so include Virginia Woolf, Jennifer Johnston, Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, and Carol Shields. Although the embedded works of the fictional painters are unseen, they exhibit some remarkably similar traits that can be represented by a hypothesis: the unseen paintings of these fictional painters present a consistent set of aesthetic choices and interests. These choices and interests can be grouped under a general principle that that which is shown as fragmented, unfinished, or suspended in space or time is truer to the experience of creative women than that which is shown as whole, finished, or firmly anchored. The idea of the unfinished pervades these works in so many instances and in such a variety of ways as to suggest a principle of mimesis. A great many of the works of art depicted in these novels are themselves unfinished or else they imply incompleteness in some way. The idea of the unfinished work is represented by numerous images of suspension, fragmentation, or seriality in the work of the painters and by resistance to distinct closure on the part of the novelists, constituting a kind of aesthetic of the unfinished. In earlier novels, such as Jane Eyre, this sort of aesthetic choice is a perhaps simply a reflection of the painter’s sense of incompletion as an artist. In novels written in the twentieth century, this aesthetic of the unfinished is a conscious choice made by both male and female writers. There is nothing particularly gendered about an emphasis on the unfinished nature of the work, but such images occur with great frequency in the fictional women artists and perhaps in actual women artists as well. For example, Linda Nochlin, in her chapter ‘‘Some Women Realists’’ in Women, Art, and Power, identifies the ‘‘diffident cut-off views as synecdoches pointing to a larger whole’’ as characteristic of a variety of contemporary women painters.12 This notion of art as tentative, suspended, or incomplete—a char-

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acteristically modern view—is enthusiastically embraced by most of the writers in their visual descriptions of the artist or her art: images abound of the artist or her subject as suspended on a bridge over water, floating in the air, or presented as unfinished or in synecdochic body parts or in serial form as emerging into existence or disappearing. In Violet Clay, a novel by Gail Godwin, the artist Violet paints a portrait of a woman floating in light. She explains to a gallery owner that the painting ‘‘hasn’t got a name. But I think of her as a suspended woman. She’s suspended in this light, she’s suspended in. . .well, her own possibilities, what she might do.’’13 The gallery owner Charlotte is so taken with this idea that she adopts Violet’s painting as the poster picture for a traveling exhibit of women’s art entitled ‘‘Suspended Women.’’ Serial painting, after the pattern of Monet, also occurs in several of the novels discussed in this study. Serial painting is in a sense an extension of the idea of suspension, since the practice implies that the work of art is incomplete in itself, contingent on other works or part of a work in progress, suspended in time. Lily Briscoe’s attempts at two paintings of the same subject separated by ten years in To the Lighthouse present an extreme example of a series, reminding us that serial painting allows reflection on time and the changing self in the changing world, an unending process to which completeness and closure can only be arbitrary. Lily’s first, unfinished painting lingers in her mind for a decade as an unrealized concept until she begins the second painting; the unfinished work serves as a bridge between her past and her present experiences. To suggest an aesthetic principle of the unfinished is not, however, to claim to establish a general feminist aesthetic theory. Many attempts to establish a feminist aesthetic or poetics have been made over the years, especially in the 1970s and 1980s and, although many of those theories have proven to be enlightening or useful, it is not surprising that no single theory has emerged as dominant, and the enterprise has been somewhat discredited. Whitney Chadwick notes that by the middle of the 1990s ‘‘American cultural historian Janet Woolf could emphatically state that ‘‘there is no ‘correct’ feminist aesthetic.’’14 Instead, feminist critics have applied multifaceted approaches to literary works examined individually within the contexts in which they were produced. Rather than presenting a theory, then, this study observes patterns, images, and variations on themes too various to cohere into a theory but insistently present in the works examined. These patterns chiefly reflect the inner life—

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emotional and intellectual—of the women painters portrayed in their various times and places. The method is empirical; it consists of attempting to discover the aesthetic ideas implied or expressed in individual works rather than to impose a preconceived feminist theory on them. Turning from the embedded works of art to the novels themselves, one finds another kind of resistance to closure in several of the modern works. Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse implicitly addresses a paradox that Woolf sees as inherent in the arts in the twentieth century, the necessity of creating something whole in a world where fragmentation is inevitable. Although Woolf ’s novel may, at first reading, seem like a whole and complete vision, there is a kind of principle of uncertainty woven into the very fabric of the novel, so that it can be said to be both finished and not finished at once. Similarly, Anna Banti’s Artemisia offers the reader several passages that seem like endings, some open-ended and some more closed, so that the effect is of a novel that both is and is not finished. Iris Murdoch argues as a principle of aesthetics that a work of art is necessarily open to the world and contingent upon it, hence, in a way, always incomplete. For Murdoch, the novel in particular is necessarily an open form in the sense that it embraces both the accidents of experience and images of the disordered self. The idea of uncertainty is, of course, not the exclusive province of women writers; many, perhaps most, serious writers of the modern and postmodern periods express the idea of uncertainty or incompleteness in one way or another. It is simply the case that women writers have entered enthusiastically into that particular modernist tradition. Modern and postmodern novelists whose works present or suggest various but overlapping theoretical ideas about art include Iris Murdoch, Jennifer Johnston, Deirdre Madden, Margaret Atwood, Jill Paton Walsh, Mary Gordon, and Carol Shields. Several of these writers, and others, allude to Virginia Woolf or her work either directly or indirectly, paying subtle or overt tribute to her ideas about art. Her influence upon her literary daughters is very great. For one thing, bits and pieces of her language and imagery are dispersed, assimilated, and often transformed in the works of later writers, like scattered pieces of a mosaic. More significantly, Woolf ’s depiction of painting as a silent kingdom, a separate realm arduously created out of love and through a process of committing oneself fully on all levels of the self, including one’s memories and griefs, has its echoes in Murdoch, Madden, Atwood, Paton Walsh, and Shields. Thus, al-

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though Woolf was radically to alter some of her own aesthetic notions after To the Lighthouse and The Waves, the aesthetic ideas she embraced in the 1920s prove to be widely influential well after the modernist period. Although the influence of Virginia Woolf is not the focus of this study, that influence is a strand woven inextricably into the subject. In order to lay claim to certain common features of the female ku¨nstlerroman and to argue for the uniqueness of that subgenre, it is useful to survey some representative novels about visual artists written by male writers to see if they have any of the same characteristics as those written by women. For example, one may well ask whether portrayal of the artist as liminal in Heilbrun’s sense of the word carries over to male writers. In fact, a sampling of some twentieth-century British novels reveals that male writers, too, show art as risky and incompatible with anything like traditional family life, and they portray the artist as radically isolated and living on the edge or borders of civilization. A difference, however, is that the fictional male artist commits a more violent wrenching away from a society of which he is, by birthright, a part. The woman artist’s isolation is different in that, in most cases, she does not choose it, having been excluded by her gender from the centers of power and authority. These novels by men tend to perpetuate the nineteenth-century idea of the artist as a passionate and rebellious Romantic figure, and in most instances the artist’s work is closely bound up with his virility. A distinct type of male artist figure emerges that could be called the artist as Rogue Satyr, an ostensibly heroic character not to be found in novels by women. This figure of the isolated, Dionysian artist who breaks the civilized rules of human behavior raises moral questions about the relative importance of ends and means in art as well as aesthetic questions about the nature of the artistic enterprise. In W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, the artist David Charles Strickland, whose life is based on that of Gauguin, lives down and out in Paris and then works his way on shipboard to Tahiti, where he eventually dies a blind leper after completing several masterpieces. In Joyce Cary’s highly comic The Horse’s Mouth and the other novels of his trilogy, sixty-eight-year-old Gulley Jimson, a derelict and totally antisocial jailbird, paints in a ruined boatshed on the banks of the Thames until he loses even that space to squatters. In John Fowles’s novella The Ebony Tower, the aging modernist Henry Breasley lives with two art students, his mistresses, in a woodland re-

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treat in Brittany behind a padlocked gate with a sign warning visitors not to enter. All of these artists are portrayed as solitary men of genius who find it necessary to withdraw from society in order to produce their unappreciated masterpieces. All of them are abusive to women. Although the novelists do not necessarily condone such abuse, they seem to regard hostility, even violence, against women as an essential ingredient of an artistic temperament, as though women were an external projection of some demonic presence that must be beaten and subdued in order to create. These ideas seem dated, and indeed the novels by Maugham, Carey, and Fowles all invite skepticism about the myth of the Romantic isolated artist at the same time that they perpetuate that myth. Maugham’s Strickland is a misanthrope, a cruel, uncivil, violent man with no redeeming qualities. Driven by a passion to paint, he abandons his wife and children without a thought, causes another man’s wife to kill herself, and finally takes a Tahitian mistress who remains totally devoted despite his beating her from time to time. Maugham’s first-person narrator, a novelist like Maugham himself, enters into dialogue with Strickland, probing his remorseless cruelty. Maugham raises the question of whether the end justifies the means: do great works of art redeem a man’s heartlessness? Because Maugham’s tone is ironic, it is difficult to determine his precise answer to that question, but his very choice of subject suggests that Maugham accepts the myth of the isolated artist as Romantic genius. Both David Strickland and Cary’s Gulley Jimson paint murals of Creation or Eden before the Fall, reinforcing the analogy dating back at least to Thomas Aquinas, that the artist’s creativity is analogous to God’s. Strickland’s last work is a vision of Eden that he paints on the interior walls of his native hut; the work is burned down after his death in compliance with his orders. Jimson’s last work is the Creation he paints on an interior wall of an abandoned church, only to see it demolished, half finished, by the wrecking balls of the Burrough Council, an event that causes Gulley to die of a stroke. The portrayal of the painter as Rogue Satyr is more complex in the case of Gulley Jimson because his darkly comic and witty first person narrative in The Horse’s Mouth turns everything on its head, including the myth of the isolated genius. Derelict Gulley’s sardonic humor turns against himself as well as against society. Like Fowles’s Henry Breasley, he coins irreverent puns that emphasize his contempt for institutions: the middle class consists of ‘‘Boorjaws,’’ and society is always trying to analyze him with its ‘‘pischology.’’ Gulley’s

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anarchist tendencies go hand in hand with his notions about art, ideas which in themselves seem authentic and appealing. For example, he explains to an amateur woman artist the difference between mere dabbling and serious art which expresses ideas. Admitting that his own work may appear technically inept, he insists: Only difference is that it’s about something—it’s an experience, and all this amateur stuff is like farting Annie Laurie through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble. . . . Do some thinking. Sit down and ask yourself what’s it all about.15

Gulley’s plan for his painting of the Fall shows that his imagination, inspired by William Blake, can envision art that is grand, bold, humanistic, and yet primordial: Adam like a rock walking, and Eve like a mountain bringing forth, with sweat like fiery lava, and the trees shall stand like souls pent up in metal; cut bronze and silver and gold. With leaves like emerald and jade, cut and engraved with everlasting patterns sharp as jewels, as crystals, and the sun like a fall of solid fire, turned on a lathe.16

A. S Byatt writes that ‘‘Jimson’s narrative is full of colour-painterly descriptions of skies and flesh, brilliant writing about the act of painting, a wonderful bravura display of the perceptual recomposition of the visual world into artwork.’’17 Cary’s visual imagination echoes that of Virginia Woolf in his striking similes and descriptions of jewel-like colors. Still, Gulley beats his mistresses and wives: Sara was an empress. It was a glory to have that woman, and to beat her. Alexander never felt bigger than me when I thumped that majestic meat upon the nose. Rozzie was a Leah, a concubine. . . . She was a pillow for your head and a footstool for your rheumatism. But of course pillows and mattresses are not the sort of baggage a man wants to carry with him on a long journey.18

This sort of testosterone-driven bluster about a woman as meat, mattress, and baggage reads like a parody, especially coming from the toothless mouth of a frail little old man half the size of either woman. And Cary gives Sara Monday’s point of view in Herself Surprised, where she admits that she lost some of her self-respect after going back to a man who beat her. Yet the reader must wonder why

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violence against women has to enter into the myth of the artistic genius at all. This question and its various implications are debated in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Toward the end of the novel Lawrence introduces a repulsive character, the gnomelike sculptor Herr Loerke, who enters into an argument with the artist Gudrun and her sister Ursula about a statuette he made of a girl on a horse. The horse is rigid and powerful, the girl very young and vulnerable, and Loerke readily admits that he beat the seventeen-year-old art student who posed for the piece ‘‘harder than I have ever beat anything in my life. I had to, I had to. It was the only way I got the work done.’’19 To justify his indifference to the suffering he inflicted upon the girl, Loerke invokes the principle of art for art’s sake and insists that his work exists not in the relative world of human actions but ‘‘the absolute world of art.’’20 Although Gudrun admires the power of the statue and has a morbid fascination with the corruption she sees in Loerke, Lawrence’s implied concept of art is unambiguously humanistic. Lawrence believes that works of art do not exist apart from life but rather are the deepest expressions of life, appealing directly to the unconscious and helping the viewer to attain full selfhood. Because the fine arts have this kind of psychological value, the artist is not acquitted of responsibility for his or her own psychological and moral integrity. A somewhat similar debate drives the plot of John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower. Seventy-eight-year-old artist Henry Breasley, ‘‘a smirking old satyr in carpet slippers,’’ has long ago attained critical acclaim for his representational modernist works, grand paintings that express powerful human emotions and contain echoes of the great masters.21 Nightly drunk, Henry still fights the old battles with the abstractionists, whom he calls names like ‘‘Pick-arsehole’’ and ‘‘Jackson Bollock.’’ Henry is verbally abusive to his young mistresses, but otherwise treats them rather generously, especially Diana, who is his pupil, assistant, muse, nurse, and caretaker. Like Lawrence, Fowles offers sympathetic portraits of the young women artists. David Williams, a young modestly successful Op artist, comes to interview Henry, an adventure he regards as a knightly ordeal, since Henry is bound to taunt him for his abstract work. When David, who is conventionally married, fails to rise (or fall) to the temptation to fall in love with Diana and, incidentally, rescue her from the burdens of caring for Henry, he ultimately sees his failure of will as also a failure of imagination and emotional power within himself and his art. His

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life and career will go on as a matter of pale abstraction. Fowles’s point is clear: for all of Henry’s outrageous flaws and his antiquated Dionysian style of life, his art possesses a vital force that David’s does not, and that force derives from its rootedness in human experience and feeling. This brief sampling of male writers demonstrates that the Romantic myth of the artistic genius as an amoral rogue has been quite persistent; within the last few years, however, male writers such as John Updike and Don DeLillo have themselves offered sympathetic portraits of women artists. This sampling also shows that in their novels male writers have debated the issue of whether or not art can be separated from the moral and emotional life of the artist, whether it exists in some sacrosanct and separate realm. Women writers usually do not debate this issue. At least since Virginia Woolf, who introduced the self-conscious theorizing woman artist, novels about women artists show the painter as seeking aesthetic solutions to aesthetic problems; this problem-solving is a link among the works. But the aesthetic problems are never divorced from, or seen outside the context of, the human problems confronting the artist, particularly the ideological problems implied in the portrayal of marriages and the demands of husbands, lovers, and especially children. These novels debate various issues about art, implicitly or explicitly, but they do not debate this particular issue; women writers take it for granted that art cannot be isolated from the messiness of life. In writers after Virginia Woolf, aesthetic and political considerations—art and life—are also intimately intertwined in that the painter usually sees herself as embarked upon a journey toward independence and self-knowledge that can only be carried out by her daring to risk a life of art. Feminist goals are to be achieved by aesthetic means. The painter protagonists, again following the example of Woolf, also find it necessary to explore their own memories, especially memories of childhood, in order to carry out the creative enterprise. They attempt to see their lives whole, but that is an unending task. The idea of the unfinished is the thread that ties together the argument of this book. The dialogue of the woman artist with her society; the writer’s dialogue with the painter (vividly dramatized in Anna Banti’s Artemisia) and, more broadly, fiction’s dialogue with painting are unfinished stories, no matter what sort of closure the novelist may attempt to put upon them. And in the embedded art of the novel, the presentation of fragmented images, synecdochic body

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parts, persons suspended in air and on bridges, and serial works or unfinished paintings suggest an aesthetic consistent with those unfinished dialogues. These novelists emphasize the process of painting more than the final product, and in most cases, the product is not really finished: the embedded works of art tend to represent a state of becoming rather than a state of being. The white silences of the unwritten page and the unpainted canvas loom large as challenges to the creative woman.

1 Opening the Portfolio: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte¨, Anne Bronte¨, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps I never saw a man so terribly excited. He precipitated himself towards me. I snatched up my palette-knife and held it against him. This startled him: he stood and gazed at me in astonishment; I dare say I looked as fierce and resolute as he. —Anne Bronte¨, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

RARELY, IF EVER, IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL IS THE CONFLICT

between women’s art and men’s ardor represented so graphically as in the brief stand-off between Walter Hargrave and Helen Huntingdon in Anne Bronte¨’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Although a paletteknife is not a very prepossessing weapon, the cowardly Walter gets the point and backs off, leaving Helen at her easel and free from his unwanted advances for the moment. In a less literal way, Bronte¨’s novel and other nineteenth-century novels show how the demands of courtship and marriage undermine women’s attempts at art, not only by distracting them from their easels but also, more insidiously, by infringing on the process of painting itself. Generally low expectations for women’s achievements play a part, of course, but in particular, painting and drawing by women are repeatedly shown to be compromised by the protocols of courtship in a social world where minor ‘‘accomplishments’’ in the fine arts, if not pursued too seriously, add to a woman’s value on the marriage market. It is not just that romance and serious art are opposed to one another; rather, the rituals of courtship invade and corrupt the creative process of women’s art, so that what might conceivably have been genuine artistic expression to be judged on its own merit instead becomes an occasion for gestures and exchanges that must be understood in erotic rather than in aesthetic terms. 33

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The protagonists’ forays into the world of art are curbed by the stringent literary as well as social dictum that women are destined for marriage. The ambivalence about this dictum felt by women writers—artistically gifted themselves but beholden to the literary conventions of the time—manifests itself in recurrent themes of doubleness, duplicity, riddles, mysteries, and misunderstandings. This doubleness is inherent in the culture, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes: ‘‘[u]sing the female artist as a literary motif dramatizes and heightens the already-present contradiction in bourgeois ideology between the ideals of striving, improvement, and visible public works, and the feminine version of that formula: passivity, ‘accomplishments,’ and invisible private acts.’’1 In a culture in which becoming an artist is perceived as incompatible with a narrowly construed and pervasive idea of femininity, women’s art would seem like an inherent contradiction. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte¨ both depict protagonists who are amateur painters. The triumph of Eros over art is treated with high comedy in the first volume of Austen’s Emma, in the episodes involving Emma’s attempt to paint a likeness of Harriet Smith. Jane Eyre, in contrast, offers a somber glimpse into Jane’s inner self by means of her watercolors, which she shows to Rochester in a quietly intense moment when his potential to become her lover, rather than her master, is subtly suggested. Two lesser novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Story of Avis, are of interest because the protagonists attempt to establish themselves as professional painters, at least for a time, yet in both of these novels, courtship and marriage—in particular, the demands of men—eventually overwhelm artistic inspiration and put an end to the painter’s career. In real life, many women succeeded in launching careers as professional artists during the nineteenth century. Laura R. Prieto notes that by the end of the century women had become the majority of art students in America and ‘‘a large percentage of exhibitors.’’2 Whitney Chadwick points out that even as the number of women art students increased, the ‘‘demand that women artists restrict their activities to what was perceived as naturally feminine intensified during the second half of the century.’’3 For example, women were urged to restrict their painting to pastels, portraits, and pictures of flowers. By writing about failed careers, Anne Bronte¨ and Phelps dramatize the obstacles that all such women artists faced. All of the novels discussed in this chapter depict protagonists who

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are motherless. In the case of Emma and Jane Eyre the absence of a mother primarily helps to drive the plot and shape character: Emma and Jane are obliged to pursue their own destinies as best they can without maternal guidance, inventing themselves in the face of social situations they do not fully understand. In Phelps’s The Story of Avis, the absence of a mother in Avis’s life leaves a void but also allows a certain latitude and freedom in which the embryonic artist can dream of a career while at the same time remaining extraordinarily naive about the stresses that marriage will bring into her life. The embedded works of art in these novels seldom offer much stimulus to the reader’s imagination; only the paintings in Jane Eyre are of genuine interest. Thus, a discussion of fictional women painters in nineteenth-century novels necessarily emphasizes political considerations over aesthetic values, for the fictional woman artist is portrayed tentatively. Hedged in as she is by ambivalence and misunderstanding, her art is embryonic, unfinished in several senses of the word. Of greater interest is what the novelists reveal about their own understanding of women’s creativity when they present scenes of painters painting or showing their work to others. In these nineteenth-century novels, the story of the fictional women painter is one of many tentative awakenings to the possibilities of art. Although they are novelists of vividly contrasting, nearly opposite literary sensibilities and aesthetic commitments, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte¨ depict women’s art in similar ways. Both use embedded amateur artwork to shed light on their characters and themes. Especially illuminating are the parallel moments in Emma and Jane Eyre when the protagonists open their portfolios and, in revealing their art, reveal themselves as well: Emma Woodhouse shows her portfolio to Mr. Elton and Harriet Smith; Jane Eyre shows hers to Rochester. Both Austen and Bronte¨ also implicitly criticize the superficial values of the marriage market by means of what can be called ‘‘the portrait of the false rival’’: Emma paints a portrait of Harriet Smith, and Jane paints a portrait of two ‘‘false rivals,’’ Blanche Ingram and Rosamond Oliver. As Anne Higonnet notes in ‘‘Secluded Vision: Images of Feminine Experience in NineteenthCentury Europe,’’ this sort of women’s art was ephemeral: most of ‘‘these pictures that survive now molder in drawers, attics, or flea markets.’’4 The sort of artistic activity encouraged by nineteenth-century etiquette books, while allowing women some outlet for their creative

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aspirations, was essentially a dead end rather than a first step toward serious artistic development. Linda Nochlin points out that it is exactly ‘‘the insistence upon a modest, proficient, self-demeaning level of amateurism as a ‘suitable accomplishment’ for the well-broughtup young woman, who would naturally want to direct her major attention to the welfare of others—family and husband—that militated, and still militates, against any real accomplishment on the part of women.’’5 The lack of prestige granted to such amateur art made it difficult for a woman to cross over into the ranks of professionals. In her study of women artists in nineteenth-century literature, Deborah Barker even argues that the ‘‘female amateur artist . . . functioned in the art world to limit women’s recognition as artists, regardless of their ability, because their work was associated with private, domestic activities.’’6 In the nineteenth century and even later, Barker stresses, the prevailing belief was that ‘‘genius’’ and ‘‘high art’’ were Romantic and masculine. Both Austen and Bronte¨ take the amateur art works seriously enough, however, to use them as markers of their protagonists’ growth toward adulthood. In the hands of literary artists as highly accomplished as Austen and Bronte¨, the embedded work of amateur art bears an ironic relationship to the art of their novels. In the case of Austen, the irony is comic; in the case of Bronte¨ it borders on tragic, for Jane Eyre does show promise of genuine but thwarted artistic aspiration. Whereas many of Emma’s paintings are unfinished, Jane’s are finished but they reveal fragmentation of body and mind. As protagonists, Emma Woodhouse and Jane Eyre begin their stories in almost diametrically opposite circumstances, and the novels proceed from opposite premises. As Austen’s first sentence famously declares, ‘‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence.’’7 Jane Eyre describes herself as ‘‘poor, obscure, plain, and little’’; she has nothing to lose, no real home, and only a rebel disposition to sustain her.8 Jane learns to sketch at Lowood Institution; Emma has been taught by the former Miss Taylor, who has the same social standing as Jane Eyre, although out of affection the family politely refers to Miss Taylor as a friend rather than a governess. Emma begins with everything and Jane with nothing. Both novels portray a young woman on the brink of adulthood, struggling for autonomy: Emma is twenty years old, and the most

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crucial events of Jane Eyre occur when Jane is nineteen and twenty. In both novels the viewing of the protagonist’s portfolio serves as a measure of the protagonist’s mind. The scene of Emma’s portfolio is described with Austen’s characteristic wit; the art in Jane’s portfolio reveals Bronte¨’s gothic imagination and her fragile but intense feminist aspirations. Emma’s work is humorously amateurish. Her paintings of ‘‘landscapes and flowers’’ hang at Hartfield, and some ‘‘figure-pieces’’ are on display in Mrs. Weston’s drawing room, but her work is framed and hung only because her friends and family all dote upon her (27). Similarly, Mr. Elton’s framing of Emma’s painting of Harriet Smith constitutes an amatory, not an aesthetic, statement. Austen’s ironies are thickly layered at the moment when Emma displays her portfolio to Mr. Elton and Harriet Smith: ‘‘Her many beginnings were displayed. Miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours had all been tried in turn’’ (28). Her best paintings are unfinished because of her laziness and dilettantism, as she is well aware. She makes plausible excuses for the unfinished work: exact likenesses are difficult to do, and the five little nieces and nephews will not sit still for their portraits. But the truth is that Emma lacks industry and patience, as Mr. Knightley frequently points out. Emma is also quite willing, however, to have others of lesser taste think of her as a better painter than she is, although she sees the dishonesty of the pleasure she takes in their praise. An additional irony is that her work is better than ‘‘many might have done with so little labor as she would ever submit to’’ (28). Emma secretly acknowledges the gap in standards between serious artistic endeavor and drawing-room amateurism, and she is willing to take advantage of the lower standard while being aware of the higher one and of her own shortcomings. The reader observes Emma’s conscious duplicity as the author probes Emma’s mind with the searchlight of her own wit. The perfection of Austen’s prose style—its finish and polish—contrasts to the imperfection of Emma’s work. This perfection is witnessed in the very sentences with which Austen describes Emma’s art, particularly in a passage elegantly contrasting Emma’s friends’ approbation with Austen’s own sober appraisal of what Emma has genuinely achieved through her slapdash methods: There was merit in every drawing—in the least finished, perhaps the most; her style was spirited; but had there been much less, or had there been ten times more, the delight and admiration of her two companions would have been the same. They were both in extasies. (28)

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Sober appraisal leads to satiric fun as author and reader alike enjoy the silliness and poor judgment of Harriet and Mr. Elton. But the author and reader can also see a modicum of talent in Emma’s ‘‘least finished’’ work and understand that Emma’s creativity suffers from not being held to a higher standard. Emma’s amateur artwork plays a role only in the first volume of the novel, the section dealing with her matchmaking scheme involving Harriet and Elton; in the novel as a whole, music is a more frequent motif than painting. But the scenes in which Emma first brings out her portfolio and then paints Harriet’s portrait are important because they introduce and reinforce the epistemological, aesthetic, and social issues of the novel. Gilbert and Gubar attempt to make a connection between Emma as the ‘‘artist’’ in the novel and Austen as the artist of the novel, claiming that as a ‘‘player of word games, a painter of portraits and a spinner of tales, Emma is clearly an avatar of Austen the artist.’’9 And they argue that Austen, in her ambivalence toward women’s self-expression, punishes Emma for her exercise of imagination. But a connection between Emma and Austen as artists makes sense only if we consider Emma as a parodic avatar of Austen, a spinner of false tales and a far less than meticulous artist. Susan Morgan writes, ‘‘Emma creates from love of power and love of self, but also because she believes that without her imagination acting upon it, the world would be a bore. But it is Austen, and not Emma Woodhouse, who imagines this world and gives life to other characters besides Emma.’’10 Like her drawings, Emma’s scenarios for other people are unfinished; she makes haphazard sketches of reality. Emma has ‘‘a mind delighted with its own ideas’’ (14). Until her reformation at the end of the novel, Emma spins out fictions that are false because of her lack of understanding of human nature and her lack of awareness that people have minds and wills of their own; in contrast, Austen creates fictions that are true because of her splendid insights into human nature. Austen’s famous description sent to her nephew of ‘‘the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after so much labour’’ is a satiric response to the reviewers’ misunderstanding of her work, but it shows that she considered herself a meticulous portraitist, though not really a miniaturist.11 In contrast, Emma Woodhouse cannot be an accurate portraitist because she cannot see people as they are. Her painting is therefore comical, and Austen punishes her not so much for having too much imagination as

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for having an imagination that fails to be guided by accurate observation and common sense. Although arguments have been made for reading Emma as a Romantic novel, one that, for example, expresses Wordsworthian ideas about the growth of the mind, Austen’s treatment of Emma’s runaway imagination and faulty judgment implicitly conveys Enlightenment values of reason, sanity, and balance, values which are reinforced by the comedy of the novel. Emma’s blunders and wrong-headedness make for the comedy throughout the novel, but the picture she paints of Harriet Smith is the very embodiment of her misapprehensions and misguided fancy. Emma’s painting of Harriet reveals her perceptual errors: her distortion of Harriet’s image, her misreading of Mr. Elton’s intentions, and her misunderstanding of her own position as a young woman coming of age in a society that offers her a paucity of alternative occupations and a choice only of marriage or spinsterhood. Aesthetic values at Hartfield are compromised by other, nonaesthetic considerations. As Emma thumbs through her portfolio, we are told that she sketched her family many times over but gave up drawing for a long time because her sister did not consider her brother-inlaw’s portrait to be flattering enough. No such problem arises when she paints Harriet, for Emma increases her height, adds elegance to her figure, and glamorizes her eyelashes. As Emma begins the portrait, she is pleased that her matchmaking scheme appears to be going forth, and gratified with Mr. Elton ‘‘for stationing himself where he might gaze and gaze again without offence’’ (30). Emma is, of course, unaware that Elton is gazing at her, a misunderstanding that makes the situation funny but also potentially dangerous. Emma as the painter is being transformed into Emma as subject at the very moment when she is feeling some satisfaction in her scheming and some superiority to Mr. Elton’s lack of taste: ‘‘She could not respect his eye, but his love and his complaisance were unexceptionable’’ (30). As the painter who attempts to represent Harriet as a marriageable commodity, Emma momentarily tries to evade the role of commodity herself by becoming the controlling wielder of pencil and brush. In assuming the role and stance of the artist, Emma steps outside, so she thinks, of the dyadic relationship of gazing male lover and female love object. The semblance of artistry and control Emma gains is false because she never escapes Elton’s gaze; he adores the painting for his own wrong reason, because it is Emma’s handiwork, and not for Emma’s wrong reason, because it is Harriet’s painted image.

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When Harriet’s portrait is completed, Mr. Elton vigorously defends it against all criticism: ‘‘Miss Woodhouse has given her friend the only beauty she wanted’’— observed Mrs. Weston to him—not in the least suspecting that she was addressing a lover—‘‘the expression of the eye is most correct, but Miss Smith has not those eye-brows and eye-lashes. It is the fault of her face that she has them not.’’ ‘‘Do you think so?’’ replied he. ‘‘I cannot agree with you. It appears to me a most perfect resemblance in every feature. I never saw such a likeness in my life. We must allow for the effect of shade, you know.’’ ‘‘You have made her too tall, Emma,’’ said Mr. Knightley. Emma knew that she had, but would not own it. . . . (30–31)

Mrs. Weston, usually a sensible person, sees the deception in Emma’s cosmetic enhancement of Harriet’s beauty, but because she loves Emma and always defers to her, she loyally transforms Emma’s deception into Harriet’s defect, implying that Emma has indeed improved upon the original, painting Harriet as she ought to be. Even more comically absurd are Mr. Elton’s raptures about the wonders of the portrait, whereas Mr. Knightley, the voice of reason, speaks bluntly and truthfully. Emma will not own up to having increased Harriet’s stature, but this small deception seems minor in comparison to her large self-deception in supposing that Elton’s ardor is directed toward Harriet. Here is a case where, in the context of Austen’s comedy of cross-purposes, the larger issues of the marriage market enter into and distort the amateur work of portraiture. In the novel as a whole, as Christine Roulston writes, ‘‘Emma uses her authority for the singular purpose of organizing the narratives of other female figures, which in turn enables her to become a master narrator and to avoid engaging with the questions of her own gendered subjectivity.’’12 Such an illusion of control, either as an artist or as a spinner of fantasies, is only temporary, for Emma’s fate is far more predetermined than she realizes. Although she is not destined to marry Mr. Elton, she cannot escape from the marriage plot because of social necessity and because—this is Austen’s compromise with that necessity—she does not know her own heart. And even though Emma is misguided, self-deluded, and dilettantish, we can sympathize with her desire for mastery and excitement when she sets out to make Harriet her creative project. Emma spins romances because she is bored by the the daily crotchets of her father and sis-

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ter and the small talk of Highbury: ‘‘every day remarks, dull repetitions, old news, and heavy jokes’’ (168). As a writer portraying an amateur artist, Austen reveals the debasement of art in a world where women’s creativity is preempted by the rituals of courtship. Art is compromised in the world of Highbury when the picture of Harriet is overestimated and also esteemed for the wrong, nonaesthetic reasons. To Mr. Elton the portrait is something extremely precious, capitalized as the ‘‘Picture, elegantly framed’’ (46); it signifies his and Emma’s hyperbolic fantasizing and thus represents the opposite of Austen’s true aesthetic of realism and verisimilitude. It is invested with amorous rather than aesthetic value, producing comedy based on the incongruity of aesthetic value and erotic appeal. Later, after the episode of the painting, Emma declares to Harriet once more that she has no intention of getting married herself. She insists that when she grows old as a spinster, ‘‘Women’s usual occupations of eye and hand and mind will be as open to me then, as they are now. . . . If I draw less, I shall read more; if I give up music, I shall take to carpet-work’’ (58). This declaration is exceedingly funny in its context, and not simply because the reader knows that Emma will never be a spinster. Emma’s equating of drawing, reading, and music with ‘‘carpet-work’’ has a deflating effect, but the deflation of art to the level of drawing-room busywork is so commonly accepted in Austen’s world that it is hardly to be seen as comical. What is comical is to imagine that the restless Emma would ever find satisfactory diversion in confining herself to such handicrafts, that ‘‘carpet-work’’ could hold her interest for long. On this point one is compelled to recall Austen’s own methods of composition. Wearing ‘‘a cap and a work-smock’’ and without a room of her own but protected by her sister and mother from unwanted interruption, Austen habitually wrote in the family drawing room, ‘‘upon small sheets of paper, which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper.’’13 She composed her novels on folded sheets of paper, which she then stitched together into small booklets, ‘‘so that she had a sense of her novel coming physically into being; and the tidy home-stitching of folded pages seems to have been her very early practice.’’14 That a novel as great as Emma—so seamless, rich, and radiant—could be produced by such humble means adds another dimension to Emma’s comment about ‘‘carpet-work.’’ The miracle is that Austen could stitch together such

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highly serious art in the very midst of a domestic world whose ‘‘arts’’ she satirizes in Emma. As an occasion for satire, Emma’s undisciplined painting makes manifest her habitual solipsism and meddlesomeness. The question remains as to why, on the one hand, the reader can see Emma as a comic figure in a world that so severely limits the occupations of her mind and imagination and why, on the other hand, one can sympathize with her at all, given her snobbery, pride, and self-delusion. The answer lies, I believe, in Emma’s irrepressible energy, which challenges the limitations of her life in Highbury and transcends the unattractive qualities of her own character, the snobbery and selfcenteredness. In his theory of comedy, Henri Bergson describes a repeated jackin-the-box effect as a rather childish source of comic delight but one that is capable of sophisticated refinements.15 There is such an effect in the way that Emma immediately bounces back from every perceptual error about the feelings of other people: Mr. Elton, Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith, and Mr. Knightley. The energy that keeps her coming back for more imaginings and more mistakes is the life force of the novel. Thus, it is absurd to think of Emma as settling herself down to carpet-work and, as she proposes, ‘‘repressing imagination all the rest of her life’’ (96). She has the spirit playfully to insist to Mr. Knightley at the end of the novel, ‘‘Oh! I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other . . .’’ (327). Being ‘‘handsome, clever, and rich’’ are great advantages that allow Emma to lay claims upon life and she goes as far as she can in staking her claims. Emma is no artist, but through her attempts at amateur art Austen shows us Emma’s lively imagination and the forces that keep trying to rein it in. Some of these restraints offer salutary intellectual correction: Emma has to learn to exercise judgment and self-control in order to grow up. Also limiting her scope, however, are some stringent social conventions that continually force Emma into her comfortable box (her ‘‘woodhouse’’); the marriage plot prevails in the end. And yet, as Austen says of Emma’s portfolio, ‘‘her style was spirited.’’ Virginia Woolf contrasts the literary imaginations of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte¨ in A Room of One’s Own. Championing Austen, Woolf praises her for having a mind that, like Shakespeare’s, ‘‘consumed all impediments’’ and, conceding that Bronte¨ possibly ‘‘had more genius in her than Jane Austen,’’ Woolf goes on to criticize

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Bronte¨ for allowing her indignation to cause awkward intrusions in the narrative flow of Jane Eyre.16 While more recent studies of Bronte¨’s novel have revealed its artfulness and structural sophistication, Woolf has a point: in comparison to Jane Austen’s novels, Jane Eyre’s wider and wilder emotional range and its curious fusion of realism and Gothicism, of fairy tale and moral fable, make for an uneven if exhilarating narrative. Charlotte Bronte¨’s criticism of Austen, that ‘‘the Passions are perfectly unknown to her,’’ though untrue, also helps to define the difference in the emotional temperatures of the two novels.17 Bronte¨’s Romantic evoking of the passions is supported by her use of irrational materials such as dreams, presentiments, and signs. This difference of sensibility is reflected in the art of the two protagonists. Emma Woodhouse’s painting of Harriet seeks to heighten the literal in order to flatter her subject, whereas Austen’s art brilliantly satirizes her subjects. In contrast, the best of Jane Eyre’s art is phantasmagoric, departing from the literal; thus it appears to represent an extreme version of Bronte¨’s own aesthetic. Carol Christ points out the parallel between the dynamic of Bronte¨’s aesthetic and that of Jane’s psychological experience: ‘‘Jane’s psychological struggle between the containment and expression of passion parallels Bronte¨’s aesthetic conflict between the claims of imagination and the claims of realism.’’18 Bronte¨ uses Jane Eyre’s art to depict in graphic form that struggle between ‘‘containment and expression of passion.’’ There is ample evidence that Charlotte Bronte¨’s literary imagination was essentially visual. In a letter to George Lewes she writes, ‘‘Imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised. . . . When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them?’’19 She was occupied with the visual arts from an early age, drawing and painting under the tutelage of several art teachers whom her father employed for the children, and even writing critiques of engravings and paintings before she reached her teens. And it is well known that she executed many illustrations for the vivid and detailed juvenilia she wrote along with her siblings. Her amateur work in the visual arts was closely aligned to her creative process as an emerging writer. ‘‘The habit of close observation,’’ writes Christine Alexander, ‘‘was fostered by her early lessons in drawing and lies as the basis of her later mastery of character and scene.’’20 Alexander adds that all of ‘‘Charlotte’s experience appears to have arranged itself in pictorial form.’’21 This point is borne out by the descriptions of interiors in

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Jane Eyre, such as the dining room and saloon at Thornfield, which have a painterly quality in their careful delineation of color, light, and angle of observation. The embedded works of art in Jane Eyre are of two kinds. What might be called Jane’s ‘‘parlor art,’’ her portraits of other people, shows her relationships to others and is associated with Bronte¨’s extensive use of physiognomy in the novel. Her surreal art, consisting of the watercolors that Rochester selects from her portfolio, is more deeply tied to her psyche, hinting at her fate in a riddling way and expressing her inner self through imagery. Such imagery proves useful because in Jane Eyre the concept of the self is presented as more problematic, tension-filled, and conflicted than in most earlier novels, and so too, relationships—especially those between Jane and Rochester and Jane and St. John Rivers—involve near-Lawrentian struggles for domination and control between powerful but somewhat amorphous egos. The Gothic elements within the novel, as they impinge upon Jane’s consciousness, evoke and resonate with primitive, chthonic tendencies within her own psyche. For example, in the moment when Jane sits up all night with the severely wounded Richard Mason and listens to ‘‘the movements of the wild beast or the fiend’’ in the next room, unaware as yet that the ‘‘fiend’’ is Bertha Mason Rochester, she inwardly asks, ‘‘What crime was this, that lives incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner?—What mystery, that broke out, now in fire and now in blood, at the deadliest hours of night?’’ (138). This passage, like many, goes beyond mere Gothic titillation in its hints that Bertha the ‘‘fiend’’ may be linked to some barely controllable Dionysian aspect of the psyche, even Jane’s own psyche, which could erupt in fire and blood despite attempts to subdue it. The works of art in the novel are closely aligned with such psychological struggles. In the opening scene of the novel, excluded from the family circle of the Reeds and bullied by her cousin John, Jane as a child hides behind a curtain and takes refuge in Bewick’s book on birds. ‘‘Each picture told a story,’’ and those that most appeal to her imagination in a oddly soothing way are Romantic scenes of shipwrecks, solitary churchyards, and especially the ‘‘bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Sptizbergan, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland’’ and other ‘‘forlorn regions of dreary space’’ (2). This imagery of remote seashores and icy regions, repeated later in her own watercolors, carries her away momentarily from the anger she constantly feels toward

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the abusive Reeds, but it also helps to define what might be called the frigid pole of her life, the side of herself that wants to be driven by duty, moral propriety, and restraint, as opposed to the fire of anger that allows her boldly to assail Mrs. Reed and the fire of passion which Rochester arouses. Much later, when St. John Rivers, described as ‘‘cold as an iceberg’’ (296), offers her a loveless marriage coupled with a sacrificial life as a missionary, Jane is momentarily tempted by the grandeur of his evangelical rhetoric. But when he presses her to marry him, revealing that he wants nothing less than total control over her, Jane asks, ‘‘Reader, do you know, as I do, what terror those cold people can put into the ice of their questions? How much of the fall of the avalanche is in their anger? of the breaking up of the frozen sea in their displeasure?’’ (274). Although she comes to realize that in order to accept St. John she would have to stifle half of her nature, the other half of her nature is drawn to the icy St. John. Images of oceans and ice reappear in the portfolio of drawings that Jane shows to Rochester at his request shortly after she meets him at Thornfield. Some of Jane’s art deals with conventional Victorian classical or sentimental subjects—a naiad’s head, an elf in a hedge-sparrow’s nest—but the sequence of three watercolors that Rochester singles out comes purely from her imagination and includes surreal scenes of a sort not usually found in women’s amateur paintings of the period. Prominent in the paintings are parts of bodies. The first one depicts ‘‘a swollen sea’’ and ‘‘a half-submerged mast’’ on which there sits a cormorant holding in its beak ‘‘a gold bracelet, set with gems’’ (82). Sinking below is a dimly seen drowned corpse whose ‘‘fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn’’ (82). The second painting portrays the bust of a woman against an evening sky, its ‘‘dim forehead . . . crowned with a star’’ (82). The third painting shows an iceberg and, resting against it, ‘‘a colossal head,’’ bloodless and pale, which Jane connects with Milton’s figure of Death. This series of pictures reveals obsessive morbidity but also flashing hints of ecstasy. They seem produced directly from Jane’s unconscious, and as such, they contribute to Bronte¨’s larger deployment of nonrational materials such as nightmares, hallucinations, and gothic spectacle to engage the reader on an intuitive, emotional level. The paintings reveal Jane’s troubled psyche but also her secret aspirations to moments of rapture, symbolized by stars, jewels, and white flames. Critics have interpreted Jane’s paintings in various ways. L. E.

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Moser, for example, identifies the cormorant as Jane and the drowned corpse as Helen Burns or possibly Bertha Mason Rochester.22 Enid Duthie reads the elements of that same painting more symbolically, as representing ‘‘the subconscious dread of being engulfed in unfathomable depths, in the vague hope that something of value might yet be saved from the wreck.’’23 There are also hints that the scenes function as obscure prophesies of Jane’s own future. The shipwreck scene with the bird and the bracelet relates to the episodes with Rochester subsequent to his first proposal. As their wedding day approaches, Jane bitterly resists Rochester’s possessive efforts to make her over as a fine bejeweled lady, denying her real self; it sounds almost like a threat when he insists, ‘‘I will clasp the bracelets on these fine wrists, and load these fairy-like fingers with rings’’ (171). Later, when Jane learns of the existence of Bertha on what was to have been her own wedding day, she feels shipwrecked: ‘‘the torrent poured over me. . . . The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty over me in one sullen mass.’’ And she quotes from the Bible, ‘‘I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me’’ (197). The figure of the deathlike head against the iceberg continues the polar imagery and more obviously foreshadows her episodes with St. John Rivers, whose abode she approaches in a near-death state as a ‘‘poor, emaciated, pallid wanderer’’ (225). The middle picture, showing a woman’s figure in a state of glory in darkness, ‘‘crowned with a star,’’ suggests Jane’s search for fulfillment, her attempts to understand and reach her own potential best self in a world that presents numerous obstacles to that goal. Although Jane’s use of suggestive archetypal imagery entices the reader to attempt to interpret the paintings in light of the novel as a whole, there is obviously no ‘‘correct’’ interpretation of them. Bronte¨ does not supply the reader with enough clues to read them allegorically with any degree of confidence. The reader is therefore invited to interact with the hints and signs, trying out various interpretations of them, while their actual meaning remains indeterminate. If works of art embedded in novels always present a particular challenge to the reader’s imagination as visual constructs existing only in words, then Jane Eyre’s paintings issue an additional challenge: the reader is invited to interpret art works which are not only imaginary but also surreal and mysterious. The ekphrastic passages seem to bear a symbolic relationship to Jane’s narrative, but only in a tenuous and elusive way; they embody an aesthetic of the suspended.

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Looking at Jane’s portfolio, Rochester perceives that, despite her status as an amateur artist or, at best, a quasiprofessional— governesses are expected to teach drawing—Jane Eyre is deeply serious about her art. Whereas Emma Woodhouse is too dilettantish to spend much time regretting what she has not achieved in art, the nineteen-year-old Jane feels deep regret that her work comes nowhere near embodying her inner vision. Jane describes her frustrations: The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking: but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived. (81)

And yet, to paint these pictures, she confides to Rochester, ‘‘was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known’’ (82). Jane’s striving for the unattainable ideal, the image seen with ‘‘the spiritual eye,’’ parallels Bronte¨’s attempts in the novel to suggest the hidden, unconscious life of her characters. Unlike Mr. Elton, Rochester has a genuine eye for art. As he scrutinizes Jane’s portfolio, it seems at first that he is simply investigating his employee’s accomplishments as a governess; his cool, impersonal tone is consistent with his harsh demeanor. Yet he interrogates her as to her methods of work and her feelings about it as if she were a serious artist, conceding that ‘‘the drawings are, for a school girl, peculiar’’ (82). He seems to warm to the works as he gazes at them, commenting on the unusual light in the eyes of the ‘‘evening star’’ figure and asking in an exclamatory way, ‘‘who taught you to paint wind?’’ (82). One could argue that Rochester’s love for Jane dates from this moment, when he discovers in her a kindred spirit. Unlike Mr. Elton, he is really looking at the art rather than the artist. Gilbert and Gubar distinguish between Jane’s ‘‘dreamlike drawings’’ of the portfolio, where we see ‘‘her unconscious impulses emerging prophetically,’’ and her portrait of Blanche Ingram, which they call a form of ‘‘image magic.’’24 Jane’s ivory miniature of Blanche Ingram, the first of two portraits of false rivals, is executed before Jane has laid eyes on Blanche and is based upon Mrs. Fairfax’s flattering description of her. In an act of hyperbolic self-abnegation, Jane gives herself the assignment of creating comparative portraits of herself and Blanche: ‘‘place the glass before you,’’ she instructs herself, ‘‘and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully;

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without softening one defect: omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, ‘Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor and plain’ ’’ (105). ‘‘Afterwards,’’ she tells herself, ‘‘take a piece of smooth ivory . . . , mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints . . . ; delineate the loveliest face you can imagine . . . , remember the raven ringlets, the Oriental eye’’ (105). Jane carries out the selfimposed task: ‘‘An hour or two sufficed to sketch my own portrait in crayons; and in less than a fortnight I had completed an ivory miniature of an imaginary Blanche Ingram’’ (105). Jane’s assertion of her own poverty, orphanhood, and low social standing in the caption of her portrait is a clear indication that the two portraits represent Jane’s perception of the relative marriageability of the two women. What is shocking to the reader is that Jane’s self-esteem could sink so low that she would allow these extraneous values to enter into the quality of her artistry, allotting two hours of work in chalk for herself and two weeks of meticulous labor on ivory for Blanche, as though marriageability could and should be measured out and rendered up in careful brushstrokes. In contrast to Jane’s freely self-expressive watercolors, her portrait of Blanche is a corruption of art because it depicts a woman as a commodity. As Jane well knows, she has painted an imaginary Blanche, a projection of what she expects her rival to be. Even as Rochester uses Blanche as a ruse to tease Jane, arouse her jealousy, and trick her into revealing her love, Jane cooperates by creating an imagined Blanche who no more exists than does Emma’s glamorized version of Harriet Smith. In this case, however, it is in the realm of inner character, not outer beauty, that Blanche falls short. When Jane finally observes Blanche for herself at the party at Thornfield, she sees that although Blanche resembles the idealized portrait in general outlines—she is ‘‘molded like a Dian’’ and ‘‘the noble bust, the sloping shoulders, the graceful neck, the dark eyes and black ringlets were all there’’—her face reveals undesirable characteristics, haughtiness and selfish pride, which Jane can discern through her knowledge of physiognomy (112). Although she still fears that Blanche may be her rival, she no longer sees her as a worthy one, and the only question remaining about Blanche is whether Rochester is equally as discerning as Jane, as indeed he is. The ‘‘image magic’’ works, though not by any supernatural means. Jane’s second painting of a false rival is the miniature of Rosamond Oliver, the woman who infatuates St. John Rivers. Although Rosamond is pleasant, generous, and stunningly beautiful, Jane is

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not much pained by this ‘‘rivalry’’ because she does not really love St. John, although she is tempted briefly by the missionary life which he offers and impressed by his singleness of purpose. Casting off in his own mind his infatuation with Rosamond, ‘‘The Rose of the World,’’ in favor of Jane, whom he sees as unworldly and spiritually strong enough to sacrifice herself for his cause, St. John creates a false opposition between the two women. He does not perceive the passionate, sensuous side of Jane that will call her back to Rochester. Jane’s painting of Rosamond also provides the plot twist which will allow Jane to become independently wealthy even as Rochester becomes helpless, the reversal which makes possible the unusual terms of their marriage, with Jane as the dominant partner of the blind and crippled Rochester. When St. John lifts from the surface of the painting a scrap of paper on which she has been resting her hand as she paints, this scrap reveals her true name and allows him to discover her identity as his cousin and the sole heiress of her uncle’s estate. Thus, in a roundabout and gratuitous fashion, Jane becomes rich through someone’s looking at her art. Jane has also grown beyond her self-abasing obsession with beauty in other women. Prior to painting Rosamond’s portrait, Jane constructs a judicious ‘‘reading’’ of her face: [She was] ingenuous, sufficiently intelligent; gay, lively, and unthinking: she was very charming, in short, even to a cool observer of her own sex like me; but she was not profoundly interesting or thoroughly impressive. (245)

In a few short months and after many hardships, Jane has learned to see marketable beauty and wealth in other women as less threatening to herself and less relevant to her own life. Jane’s art is never mentioned again once she marries Rochester and begins to function as his eyes, but in taking that step toward becoming a ‘‘cool observer’’ who can exercise creativity and control through her art, Jane Eyre makes genuine progress in the fictional narrative of women’s journey toward becoming artists. A curiosity of Jane Eyre is that the book does not close with the account of Jane’s ten years of marriage to Rochester but rather with the apocalyptic ranting of the dying St. John, conveyed to Jane in a letter from India. Sally Shuttleworth interprets this final passage as an indication of Jane’s hidden ‘‘savage discontent’’: ‘‘[j]ust as the eruptions of Bertha had earlier disrupted the surface meaning of

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Jane’s text, so this final vision of St. John, internally torn and violently hewing down external opposition, undercuts Jane’s claims to have achieved harmonious union.’’25 Shuttleworth adds that Jane’s celebration of the fact of young Adele’s having become a ‘‘docile’’ young woman contradicts Jane’s own youthful spirit of rebellion. ‘‘Such statements of happy conformity,’’ she notes, ‘‘sit awkwardly in a text whose power and motivating force lies in its clamour against injustice, its desire to ‘break bonds’ whether of social prescriptions for femininity or the generic conventions of the realist text.’’26 One might add that both the fire-setting animalistic savagery of Bertha and the icy spiritual savagery of St. John are only temporarily subdued within the novel, and they find an echo in the spirit of Jane, who in different circumstances might have fused this fire and ice into forms of artistic expression. In any case, Charlotte Bronte¨ represents painting as one aspect of Jane’s unrealized potential. Two lesser nineteenth-century novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by Charlotte Bronte¨’s sister Anne and The Story of Avis (1877) by American novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, feature protagonists who make the attempt to become professional painters; they both have studios and sell some of their work. In both novels the main characters, infatuated with the beauty of the men they will marry, paint portraits of them; in both cases the husbands turn out to be morally and physically weak, and they die in the course of the novels. The artist figures differ in that Avis Dobell in Phelps’s novel has a genuine vocation and several years of professional training in art, whereas Bronte¨’s character Helen Huntingdon turns from amateur art to professional painting only briefly as a means of trying to cobble together a livelihood. In both cases, however, their artistic careers are aborted when marriage and art prove to be incompatible. Anne Bronte¨ and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps both depict women painters who are continually distracted from their work by the demands of courtship and marriage. In Bronte¨’s novel the institution of marriage is never held up to scrutiny; her protagonist simply has very bad luck in her choice of her first husband. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes, ‘‘Most of the nineteenth-century works with female artists as heroes observe the pieties, putting their final emphasis on the woman, not the genius; the narratives are lacerated with conflicts between femininity and ambition.’’27 Phelps also presents that conflict, but her novel, unlike Bronte¨’s, contains a bitter indictment of marriage and domestic life.

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That these authors perceive an incompatibility between traditional and innovative notions of womanhood—a dissonance beneath the surface and unarticulated in Anne Bronte¨ but explicit in Phelps—is evidenced by the pervasive instances of ambiguity and doubleness in these novels. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has a double plot, allowing Bronte¨ to have it both ways. Helen Huntingdon’s first marriage is depicted as destructive of her spirit, with a professional painting as her means of escape; her second marriage, which ends the novel, is meant to be redemptive, making her painting seem unnecessary. The Story of Avis has a more straightforward plot in which Phelps tests the premise that marriage and a life of art might be compatible. That premise proves false: when Avis falls in love she loses her singleness of purpose as an artist, and subsequently she loses her artistic inspiration entirely under the burdens of marriage and motherhood. Although the narrator of The Story of Avis is ardently feminist, ambiguity arises from the confused feelings that both Avis and her husband Philip have about gender roles in a marriage where the woman is an artist. Launching into marriage, Avis naively believes Philip’s solemn promises of moral support for her career, although Philip has not really thought about the matter at all. A corollary to the ambivalence about women’s artistic careers in the work of Anne Bronte¨ and Phelps is the riddling or two-sided nature of several of the embedded works of art. Paintings often have a double meaning or a hidden side in these two novels, reflecting the fact that the journey toward women’s imaginative expression is not a straightforward quest but one with hidden pitfalls. In fact, all four of the novels discussed in this chapter make use of riddles or mysteries having to do with the protagonist’s destiny. The parlor games— conundrums and charades—played in Emma and Jane Eyre relate to courtship and marriage. In Emma, Mr. Elton offers a verse charade on the word ‘‘courtship’’ for Harriet’s album, a puzzle that Emma readily guesses while Harriet remains literally clueless. Yet Emma herself does not guess the answer to the larger riddle, that the verse is meant for her and that her painting of Harriet will be interpreted contrary to her intentions for it. In Jane Eyre, Rochester sets up a game of charades at Thornfield in which he acts out a wedding scene with Blanche to illustrate the word ‘‘Bridewell,’’ his purpose being to mislead Jane and draw out her jealousy. But Jane’s true nature, her worth, and her potential are likewise a riddle to Rochester, with her paintings offered as suggestive clues. These riddles were

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contrived by men as part of a game of courtship. But in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Story of Avis works of art painted by the women protagonists contain puzzles, hidden images, or hidden meanings that suggest not only the artist’s inner conflicts but also the tendency of others to misread her work. In the courtship scenes in Anne Bronte¨ and Phelps, art is compromised just as it was in Emma, by being coopted for erotic uses, an occasion for flirtation rather than aesthetic contemplation. But the misuse of their art is more grievous in the case of women characters who intend to paint professionally, since the work of art itself is made to be the instrument of its own defeat by acting as an erotic attraction to the suitor. And in instances where the woman paints the man who courts her, her own sense of aesthetic distance is lost as she becomes amorously engaged with the beauty of her subject. Not just the disapproval of society but also the artist’s own desire for love compromises her art. Anne Bronte¨ breaks ground in depicting a woman artist with a studio of her own. The reader is surprised along with the narrator Gilbert Markham when he accompanies his sister to call upon the elegant young ‘‘widow’’ Helen Graham, the mysterious tenant of Wildfell Hall: To our surprise we were ushered into a room where the first object that met the eye was a painter’s easel, with a table beside it covered with rolls of canvas, bottles of oil and varnish, palette, brushes, paints, etc. Leaning against the wall were several sketches in various stages of progression, and a few finished paintings—mostly of landscapes and figures.28

What is surprising is not that Helen is an artist, for Anne Bronte¨ was herself a painter like her sister, but that Helen appears to have established herself as a professional. ‘‘I cannot afford to paint for my own amusement,’’ she tells Gilbert, and her little son Arthur adds, ‘‘Mamma sends all her pictures to London . . . and somebody sells them for her there, and sends us the money’’ (69). Since the events of the novel are set in the late 1820s, this is quite an early portrayal of a professional woman artist. Helen’s career turns out to be a flashin-the-pan, however. Although Anne Bronte¨, unlike Charlotte, writes in a style almost devoid of symbolism, she does invite a symbolic reading of the artist’s space. Helen is living with her little son and her servant Rachel in the one heated suite of rooms in Wildfell Hall, ‘‘a superannuated

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mansion of the Elizabethan era, built of dark grey stone . . . cold and gloomy to inhabit, with its thick stone mullions and little latticed panes, its time-eaten airholes, and its too lonely, too unsheltered situation . . .’’ (45). Within the near-ruins of this old Tudor mansion Helen has established a bright, clean studio, and within the studio she paints various pictures of the old mansion to sell in London. A woman artist symbolically claims a well-lighted space within a ruin of the past and draws upon that same past as subject for her art, a promising situation but one that is highly unstable, for neither Bronte¨’s plot nor even Helen’s own secret desires will allow her to remain an artist for long. A feminist strain in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is revealed not only in the scenes of Helen’s victimization in marriage and her attempt to escape by means of her art but also in the ideas she subsequently develops about equality of education for men and women. Nevertheless, Bronte¨’s compromise with the marriage plot prevents any genuine liberation for Helen. The part of the novel narrated by Gilbert Markham in epistolary form presents a traditional love story in which the honorable Gilbert wins the woman of his dreams, the beautiful Helen, after enduring various trials. The part of the novel narrated by Helen, in the form of diary entries from the past, presents the harrowing story of her marriage to her first husband, Arthur, from whom she eventually escapes. The two parts of the novel are like trains running on opposite tracks: narrated by a woman, the diary tells the story of Helen’s escape from an abusive marriage into a life of art; narrated by a man, the letters tell a story that runs counter to it, in which the abused, self-sacrificing woman finds in him, Gilbert, her own true love. The epistolary narration surrounds that of the diary, privileging romance in the novel and revealing Anne Bronte¨’s ambivalence about Helen’s artistic career. Despite its implausible plot and clumsy narrative techniques, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is of interest because of its stark presentation of the conflict between Eros and art, especially in scenes where the process of sketching or painting is intruded upon by a lover. After visiting Helen’s studio and seeing a mysterious painting of a handsome young man turned face to the wall, Gilbert Markham gradually falls in love with her. Although Helen appears to be serious about her art, admitting enjoyment in what she does and lamenting, like Jane Eyre, that she can never exactly produce ‘‘the various brilliant and delightful touches of nature’’ (104), her art is invaded at every turn by the distractions of courtship. When Gilbert

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finds Helen sketching the branches of winter trees by a brook, he turns his gaze upon her: I stood and watched the progress of her pencil; it was a pleasure to behold it so dexterously guided those fair and graceful fingers. But erelong their dexterity became impaired, they began to hesitate, to tremble slightly, and make false strokes, and then suddenly came to a pause, while their owner laughingly raised her face to mine and told me that her sketch did not profit by my superintendence. (74–75)

Neither the besmitten narrator nor the author appears to regard it as anything other than charming that Gilbert’s Elton-like gaze causes the artist’s hand to tremble and make false strokes. Later, when Helen is sketching on a rock by the sea, Gilbert keeps stealing glances at ‘‘the elegant white hand that held the pencil’’ and insists on carrying her stool and sketch book, although she points out that she can manage them well enough by herself (88). Minor as these moments may be, the deflection of the admirer’s gaze from the art to the artist indicates the author’s deference to the marriage plot. When Gilbert fully declares his love to the mysterious Helen, she rejects his proposal and hands him her diary, and the narration shifts to the story of her past. Although Helen’s diary lacks the immediacy one might expect of the form, just as Gilbert’s letters to his brother-in-law, implausibly written years after the event, also lack immediacy, Bronte¨’s shift in point of view allows for the kind of double vision noted earlier. While Helen’s art is merely compromised in the Gilbert plot, it is demeaned and debased in the story of her first marriage. As a beautiful orphan of eighteen with a considerable fortune, Helen makes a very bad marriage choice. Infatuated by the male beauty and superficial charm of Arthur Huntingdon, Helen sketches his face on the back of several of her paintings, later erasing all but one of the secret sketches. At a house party, Arthur discovers the hidden art, which flatters his vanity: ‘‘I looked up, curious to see what it was, and, to my horror, beheld him complacently gazing at the back of the picture—It was his own face that I had sketched there and forgotten to rub out!’’ Arthur grabs the painting and, thrusting it under his coat, ‘‘buttoned his coat upon it with a delighted chuckle’’ (171). Thus, hidden on the back side of Helen’s art is a graphic illustration of the force that undermines her art, Helen’s love for the worthless, selfish Arthur. In this instance, the author and the narra-

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tor, in retrospect, both regard the situation as bitterly humiliating, but only because Arthur turns out to be a brute, not because Helen’s art is compromised. In another scene, Arthur comes upon Helen in the library working on what appears to be a particularly mawkish painting of ‘‘a young girl . . . kneeling on the daisy-spangled turf . . . her hands clasped, lips parted, and eyes intently gazing upward in pleased, yet earnest contemplation’’ of a pair of amorous turtle doves (175). Dreadful as this painting seems to the modern reader, it is capable of corruption, and Arthur corrupts it, declaring in saccharine tones, Upon my word—a very Hebe! I should fall in love with her, if I hadn’t the artist before me. Sweet innocent! she’s thinking there will come a time when she will be wooed and won like that pretty hen-dove, by as fond and fervent a lover; and she’s thinking how pleasant it will be, and how tender and faithful he will find her. (175)

Helen’s art has been reduced to an erotic stimulus for Arthur, who seems ready to devour her subject like a tender roast dove. In the ensuing scene, Arthur violates the privacy of Helen’s portfolio by examining her unfinished sketches against her will. When he seizes upon a miniature picture of himself, Helen throws it in the fire. Yet despite his violations of her privacy and her art, Helen marries Arthur, who promptly reveals himself to be a shallow, childish wastrel who neglects his wife for months at a time. He has affairs under Helen’s nose, even bringing a mistress into the household as a ‘‘governess.’’ Walter Hargrave attempts to ‘‘rescue’’ Helen into an adulterous affair with him, but she holds him off with her palette knife. When Arthur and his carousing friends begin to corrupt her small son Arthur, teaching him curses and plying him with alcohol, Helen resolves to escape with the child, using her art as a means of support. Working from dawn to dusk in the library, she builds up a new portfolio of works to sell, only to have Arthur discover the plan and burn all of her work. Although he also seizes her money and jewels, Helen manages finally to escape to Wildfell Hall, helped by her brother and a loyal servant, and there she goes into hiding and sets up her studio, keeping Arthur’s portrait turned to the wall so that her son might someday compare his face to that of his corrupt father. Reading Helen’s diary, Gilbert realizes that she is not free to love him so long as Arthur is alive; shortly thereafter, Arthur falls off a horse and Helen returns to him, sacrificially nursing him until his

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death. Rewarded in fairy-tale style, like Jane Eyre, by inheriting all of Arthur’s land as well as her uncle’s, Helen ends up extremely wealthy, no longer a tenant, and free to marry Gilbert, which she does graciously despite the disparity of wealth and class between them. Gilbert, the ‘‘good’’ lover is faithful but impulsive, with the usual violent streak of the Bronte¨an hero; he horsewhips Helen’s brother almost to death, having mistaken him for a rival lover. In the light of these events, Helen’s art appears to be forgotten, although for a time she does send her work off to London under a set of false initials, rather like Acton and Currer Bell. The secrets and ambiguities of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—Helen’s anonymity as an artist, the mystery surrounding her character until her story is revealed in her diary, the doubleness of the plot—suggest Anne Bronte¨’s own anxiety and ambivalence about the real possibility of an artistic career for a woman in the middle of the nineteenth century. While Helen temporarily arranges her studio space in a ruined mansion, Avis Dobell in The Story of Avis, by American writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, has a building of her own, situated in her father’s garden: It was pleasant in the garden studio. The square little building with the Gothic door and porch, and long, low windows, stood within call of the house, yet was quite isolated by the budding trees, an island in a sea of leaves. It gave a sense of solitude to the fancy, which was rather heightened than lessened by the close presence of unseen life.29

With its symmetry and its Gothic ornamentation, Avis’s studio seems like a Romantic symbol of the ideal life of art. Inviting, templelike, surrounded by birds and trees, her studio provides a private space where the fancy can be indulged in peace and solitude. Avis’s plans to establish herself as a serious professional artist are thwarted, however, when she makes the fatal mistake of trying to combine that career with marriage. Phelps’s novel expresses feminist ideas that were implicit or latent in earlier novels. Writing at a time when the feminist movement showed signs of flourishing in the post–Civil War era, Phelps sets out to illustrate the point that marriage is not yet compatible with an artistic career, although she remains optimistic that future generations of women will find a way. Before Avis decides to marry him,

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she explains to her suitor Philip Ostrander her reason for resisting his proposal: Success—for a woman—means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her. I do not say that this was meant to be so. . . . God may have been in a just mood, but he was not in a merciful one, when, knowing they were to be in the same world with men, he made women. (69–70)

Nothing in the novel contradicts this absolutist point of view, although Phelps adds psychological subtlety and texture to the novel by creating in Avis and Ostrander characters who are themselves conflicted about the roles of men and women and lacking full understanding of their own hearts. Avis starts out with a single-minded intention; she is the only character discussed in this chapter who has professional training as well as a burning desire to be an artist. The intellectually bracing milieu of the New England university town where Avis grows up, with its book clubs and poetry societies, is surely more conducive to women’s artistic aspirations than, for example, Edna Pontellier’s uppermiddle-class New Orleans would be. Louisa May Alcott’s sister had even published a book on how to study art on a budget in Europe, and many young women were doing so. Thus, although artistic careers for women were still rare, it is plausible enough that as the novel opens, Avis has just returned from six years of study with the best art masters of Italy and France. It is less plausible, at least to readers of Henry James, that Avis has remained extraordinarily innocent while abroad. A flashback reveals that Avis made the decision to become an artist in an epiphanic moment at age sixteen while sitting in an apple tree reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. When young Avis runs to her father Hegel Dobell with her newfound aspiration, she expresses herself unequivocally: ‘‘I have decided this morning that I want to be an artist. I want to be educated as an artist and paint pictures all my life’’ (33). Her father’s response is typical of the times but uncharacteristically harsh for him: ‘‘ ‘Nonsense, nonsense!’ repeated Professor Dobell. ‘I can’t have you filling your head with any of these womanish apings of a man’s affairs, like a monkey playing tunes on a hand-organ’ ’’(33). In this instance the familiar comparison of a talented woman to a

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performing animal only serves to mask Hegel Dobell’s buried guilt about his dead wife’s thwarted ambitions: she gave up dreams of a career as an actress in order to marry him. When Avis persists in her aspirations, her father reluctantly agrees to send her to Florence and Paris. Returning from her studies abroad at age twenty-six, Avis encounters Ostrander, an attractive young college tutor, at the poetry society. She recollects having seen him once before with a group of tourists in a French cathedral, having been struck by his Nordic beauty. Avis agrees to paint his portrait, their intimacy grows, and when she completes the painting, he blurts out his love for her. Avis vehemently resists her own attraction to him, but history intervenes: stung by her refusal, Ostrander runs off to join the Union Army and is severely injured at the Battle of Bull Run. Nursed back to life, not by Avis but by her rival Barbara Allen, Ostrander literally flings himself at Avis’s feet once he begins to convalesce. Her attraction to him now enhanced by pity and guilt, Avis agrees to marry him, although not without an intense inward struggle. In this part of the novel, as Carol Farley Kessler points out, Avis ‘‘experiences an inner ‘civil war’ between her two natures—the woman socialized to sacrifice, the human being expecting to grow and to achieve.’’30 Ostrander cheerfully promises to encourage Avis’s career after marriage, but her Aunt Chloe, who has selflessly borne the burden of domestic chores in the Dobell family, warns Avis that her artwork will be impossible after marriage. At the same time, even Aunt Chloe, the Angel in the House, admits to her own thwarted secret desire of becoming a botanist or florist. Critic Linda Huf reports an anecdote in which Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, when still a schoolgirl, startled a friend by holding out a thimble and a paintbrush and proclaiming dramatically that a woman must choose between them.’’ Huf adds that ‘‘where Avis Dobell Ostrander goes wrong is that she does not choose the paintbrush.’’31 Misery after predictable misery ensues. Although she sets up a makeshift studio in the attic of their house, Avis soon bears two children, and the overwhelming domestic burdens keep her from painting. The turning point comes one morning when Ostrander nastily complains about the breakfast after Avis has been up all night nursing their fretful child. She mildly chides him, ‘‘remember you didn’t marry me to be your housekeeper, Philip!’’ to which he coldly replies, ‘‘I remember. I don’t know what we were either of us thinking of!’’ (153). An old girlfriend whom Philip abandoned shows up, and

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worse, Avis learns that Philip has deliberately neglected his feeble, dying mother. He loses his job as a college teacher because of inattention to duties and becomes like a third child to Avis, who, though the stronger of the two of them, nearly dies of diphtheria herself. After she learns that Ostrander has been seen in public making advances to Barbara Allen during Avis’s illness, she agrees to send the ailing Ostrander off to the south of France for the winter, at huge financial sacrifice. Before leaving, he tells her frankly that he no longer loves her as he once did. Avis is now driven to paint in earnest in order to pay off Ostrander’s long-standing college debts, but work proves impossible. Phelps presents dramatic moments in which the children literally pound and scratch upon the locked studio door, demanding her attention. After her son Van Dyck dies of pneumonia and Ostrander returns from Europe in an advanced state of consumption, Avis sells photographs of one of her paintings in order to finance their trip to Florida for his health, an early instance of a woman making a profit on the photographic reproduction of her work. Ostrander dies pathetically in a Florida swamp, and, despite his many selfish actions, Phelps softens his character at the end. Narrating the denouement partly from his point of view, Phelps depicts him as a confused victim of his own weakness and conventionality rather than as a brute like Arthur Huntingdon. Ostrander sadly declares, ‘‘I cannot seem to make up my mind to bear it . . . that my wife should not respect me enough to love me’’ (230), and after that confused admission, he and Avis experience at least some degree of reconciliation before his death. The gloomy end of the novel places it in the tradition of American literary naturalism; Avis’s fate seems totally determined by circumstances. Emotionally exhausted, Avis is not able to return to her painting after Ostrander’s death. Her only remaining wish is that her daughter, named Wait, or perhaps her daughter’s daughter, will be able to achieve what she could not. It is not entirely clear why Avis, still a young woman, should have no hope of transcending the hardships she has endured and of finding renewed sources of passion and strength in order to paint, but Phelps obviously means her premise in the novel to have the force of an axiom. In answer to the question, is it possible to avoid the stern either/or choice of art or marriage? is it possible to have both/and? Phelps replies, in effect, ‘‘not yet; wait.’’ As various readers have observed, Phelps’s tone is uneven and her

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style self-consciously ‘‘literary.’’ The Story of Avis should not be regarded as the work of an inferior sensibility, however. On the contrary, the novel reveals an imaginative writer struggling to express radical ideas; the formal lapses imply a dialogue in the writer’s own mind between her anger and her desire to please. As editor Carol Farley Kessler points out, her ‘‘style documents Phelps’s effort to force her voice from hedged-in silence.’’32 Phelps freely makes use of allusion and leitmotifs to add emotional resonance and a larger frame of reference to her story, her efforts foreshadowing some of the techniques of modernist writers. Her recurrent metaphors of bird, lighthouse, and sea anticipate the metaphors of Virginia Woolf, although Phelps’s handling of these tropes is clumsy in comparison to Woolf ’s delicate artistry. Birdlike Avis finds freedom at the seashore, but she is also given to trying to rescue dying birds that fling themselves upon the local lighthouse and then, when she agrees to marry Ostrander, she throws herself upon him ‘‘like the bird to the light-house’’ (110). These images are an attempt to embellish the story and help convey its emotional content in a pictorial way. Phelps foreshadows the works of Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf in her effort to imbue the novel itself with an artistic sensibility—an acute visual sense and an appreciation for color, symbol, and natural forms—similar to the sensibility of the artist in the novel. Or rather, Phelps attempts this kind of artistic writing in the early parts of the novel, which show the growth of the artist, before the domestic drama takes over and stifles art. Avis’s epiphanies are sometimes sentimental, but Phelps does seriously attempt to express the rapture of a young woman’s artistic awakening: ‘‘The whole world had leaped into bloom to yield her the secrets of beauty. She spread the spring showers upon her palette, and dipped her brushes in the rainbow’’ (54). The embedded works of art in The Story of Avis do not particularly evoke an aesthetic response in the reader; they function more in a literary way, as thematic texts to be decoded. Phelps makes use of literary allusions in conjunction with the paintings to offer the reader riddles and hints about Avis’s destiny. Her references to the Arthurian cycle and events in The Faerie Queene also lend an aura of spirituality and knightly heroism to women’s quest for artistic fulfillment. Spenserian allusions provide the reader with the means of interpreting the first of the embedded works, a sketch of Una, and discovering its hidden truth. Avis’s charcoal sketch of Una and the lion

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is presented at the Harmouth Poetry Club just as Avis is introduced to Ostrander after his lecture on Spenser. The drawing illustrates a passage in Spenser where Una has just spied what appears to be her true love, the Red Cross Knight: ‘‘by his like-seeming shield her knight by name / Shee weend it was, and towards him gan ride’’ (9). The young people in the Spenser study group evidently have not been attentive to their readings, for everyone viewing the painting seems to think that Una has indeed spied her true love, whereas even a cursory look at book 1, canto 3 of The Faerie Queene reveals what ‘‘seeming’’ and ‘‘weend’’ suggest: that Una spies not her true love but the duplicitous magician Archimago, disguised as the Red Cross Knight. The point is that Avis’s singleness of purpose, like Una’s, will be deflected by the false knight in shining armor to whom she is introduced at that moment, Ostrander. There is a brief debate about whether Una in the drawing is hastening toward the knight or is poised to run away from him. Ostrander thinks the latter, thus anticipating the difficulty he will have in winning Avis over. He then turns the drawing over and discovers an additional verse from Spenser painted on the back ‘‘in a crimson water-color,’’ lines that speak of how true love does not have the power to look back to the past, ‘‘his eie be fixt before’’ (10). These lines subtly suggest that Avis will be trapped into an irreversible fate. Avis adds somewhat cryptically, ‘‘I put the lion in, so people shouldn’t make a mistake. ‘It is better to be dumb than to be misunderstood.’ ’’ The reference to dumbness anticipates Avis’s later painting of a sphinx (10). The iconography of the lion in Phelps’s text appears to be different than in Spenser, where it represents justice and perhaps Christ. Phelps associates the figure of the lion with women’s unfulfilled aspirations, as for example in her authorial comment on the scene where Avis’s father patronizes her earliest artistic aspirations: ‘‘We pat the sleeping lion at our feet, as if it were a spaniel, offering milk and sugar to the creature that would feed on flesh and blood’’ (34). Later Phelps merges the lion with the figure of the sphinx to symbolize the silence of women and their latent power. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the artist’s hand hesitates and trembles, losing its grip on the brush when she is distracted by her suitor. Phelps makes more elaborate use of hand imagery and combines it with the image of the sphinx to create leitmotifs that underscore the story of Avis’s lost opportunities as an artist. During the weeks when the wounded Ostrander is courting Avis and she finally yields to him, she cannot paint because she has injured her hand in a rowing acci-

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dent on a heavy sea. When she agrees to marry him, ‘‘she passed the length of the silent room, and put both hands, the palms pressed together as if they had been manacled, into his’’ (110). After their engagement takes place, ‘‘she resumed with stiff, strange fingers, her work in the studio,’’ where her principal painting is that of the sphinx. At that moment, experiencing deep regrets, Avis casts off her engagement ring, flings her arms around the painting and, rather amusingly, presses her cheek ‘‘upon the cold cheek of the sphinx,’’ whispering, ‘‘I will be true’’ (120). At the end of the novel, when she can no longer paint successfully, Avis works ‘‘as if I had a rheumatic hand. . . . the stiffness runs deeper than the fingers’’ (244). The motif of the artist’s hand emphasizes both her vulnerability and her skill. A similar double meaning is embodied in the motif of the sphinx, which represents women’s power and their silence. The meaning of Phelps’s sphinx is explicated in an essay in the Independent written some years earlier (1871) and entitled ‘‘The True Woman.’’ The True Woman is essentially the New Woman, the liberated woman of the future who at present is like the sphinx, silent but filled with latent and unknown strength. The last sentence of the essay prophesies the coming of the True Woman in language of near-Yeatsian intensity: Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners will be the face which, out of the desert of her long watch and patience, she will turn upon the world.33

According to Phelps, the answer to the riddle of the sphinx is not ‘‘man’’ but ‘‘woman,’’ and her awakening will have an apocalyptic force. Although Jane Eyre’s paintings are evocative and symbolic and Avis’s are, in keeping with the formulaic purpose of Phelps’s novel, more flatly allegorical, both authors use the embedded works of art in a riddling way to hint at the ideal aspirations and actual destinies of their artist-protagonists. Both authors may well foresee a time when women painters will attain the freedom and autonomy that women novelists have already begun to enjoy, but until such a time it remains difficult if not impossible for writers like Phelps and Bronte¨ to create a meaningful dialogue between the novelist and the painter concerning their various aesthetic interests. The sheer struggle to be seen as an artist tends to overshadow other considerations

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such as the styles and forms of women’s painting or the relationship between the image and the word. The portfolio has been opened, however. And although the works of art described in these major and minor nineteenth-century novels constitute, at best, a rather motley exhibition, the authors have variously dramatized the conflict between art and Eros that, along with existing cultural restraints on women, impeded the progress of their art.

2 The Painterly Eye: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening ‘‘One of these days,’’ she said, ‘‘I’m going to pull myself together for a while and think—try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don’t know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can’t convince myself that I am. I must think about it.’’ —Kate Chopin, The Awakening

IN EDNA PONTELLIER, KATE CHOPIN PRESENTS A PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN whose brief career as an artist affords her little satisfaction. In the end, her art cannot save her. Why Edna cannot go abroad and paint the Parisian studies commissioned by her dealer rather than drowning herself in the Gulf of Mexico is one of many questions raised by the ending of The Awakening. Edna’s career as a painter, though it may appear only a passing occupation of her restless, drifting mind, is a pivotal aspect of the novel because it seems to the reader that art could have saved her. Painting is, after all, the only activity in Edna’s life that offers freedom and creativity, could she but choose to pursue it. Moreover, art is intricately woven into the texture of the novel. In contrast to Edna’s paintings, which leave little impression upon the reader, Chopin’s vibrant descriptions of Edna’s world reveal her painterly eye; through her use of color imagery, visual composition, and the framing of an arrested moment, Chopin presents the literary equivalent of painted portraits and landscapes. The arts, especially painting and music, are also a prominent subject of the novel, which explores as a subtext the ways in which art can transform life or fail to do so and the ways in which art can be debased. Edna’s painting, Mlle. Reisz’s musical performances, and Chopin’s literary descriptions present contrasting perspectives on 64

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the psychological and moral as well as aesthetic dimensions of the arts. In particular, Chopin’s literary art serves as a corrective for the shortcomings of Edna’s visual art. Chopin’s novel bears a few similarities to The Story of Avis: both protagonists are married with children; both have insensitive husbands and in a moment of rebellion, throw off their rings; both sell their paintings. But unlike Phelps, Chopin succeeds in suffusing her narrative with an ambient aesthetic sensibility, and she distinctively evokes a particular milieu: turn of the century Grand Isle with its seashore and sea, and New Orleans with its rich houses and unique Creole culture. Since its rediscovery in the middle of the twentieth century, The Awakening (1899) has been subjected to many kinds of theoretical scrutiny: formalist, feminist, psychoanalytic, new historical, mythic, and others. Despite its elegance, brevity, and the feeling of inevitability conveyed by Chopin’s artistry, this is a puzzling novel. Its fablelike plot and its ambiguity make it amenable to various types of criticism, and no one interpretation has emerged as dominant. Most critical studies of the novel, whatever their method, take a feminist approach, analyzing the complexities of Edna’s psyche or the social strictures which stifle her. It is impossible to ignore the feminist implications of Edna’s dramatic stripping away of all of the restrictive aspects of her life: marriage, Victorian social rules, religion, and finally even clothing. Yet, returning to the text of the novel itself, one experiences with equal force the beauty of the sensuous world Chopin creates. By exploring the role of art in Chopin’s novel, I hope to redress the imbalance between political and aesthetic considerations that has existed in the criticism, not by arguing against the political interpretations, but rather by demonstrating that the political and aesthetic aspects of The Awakening are inseparable. Chopin’s aesthetic as a novelist is embodied, in part, in her narrative technique, which anticipates innovations of the modernists, especially Virginia Woolf. Chopin’s use of numbered sections, most of them short scenes, invites concentration on the moment—its sensations, moods, and colorations—as much as on the advancement of the story. Within scenes, Chopin’s sentences are crisp and discrete; dialogue carries much of the story. The spaces between the scenes invite the reader to reflect upon them. This method of narration calls attention to the author’s selectivity and frames the individual moments. Chopin’s highlighting of the sensuous beauty of selected moments both underscores Edna’s awakening—she awakens to sensuous possibility—and serves as a counterpoint to it, since ultimately

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she chooses to leave the world. By framing blocks of time rather than writing in conventional chapters, Chopin draws our attention to time itself, creating pauses even as the story moves on fatefully to its denouement. This method of narration is suited to tracing the moods and fluctuations of Edna’s unstable but sensitive ego. Although Chopin does not invent or even anticipate stream of consciousness writing, her selected, framed, luminous scenes resemble the workings of memory, and the discontinuities of her narration pattern themselves upon the vagaries of conscious experience. Chopin’s techniques are innovative, if not entirely original; she strips away much of the traditional rhetoric and shapes the aesthetic aspects of the novel, as the modernists also did, to bring the experience of reading close to the conscious life of her characters. A close look at the opening scene reveals that pictorial and political considerations are in tension with one another from the beginning of the novel. The reader is plunged into a world of leisurely resort life and tropical beauty. While young people play croquet under the trees, Mr. Pontellier gazes at the distant gulf ‘‘melting hazily into the blue of the horizon,’’ which he glimpses between ‘‘the gaunt trunks of water oaks and across the stretch of yellow camomile,’’ a long view suggesting a landscape painting (4). Edna Pontellier and her escort Robert Lebrun slowly advance under a pink-lined sunshade, sit down on the steps of the cottage, and lean against the supporting posts of the porch, sharing a private joke. The author’s point of view floats between the husband and the wife, not fully associated with either. The description is picturesque, celebrating the languid beauty of the present moment. Other elements in the scene cause unease, however. The sardonic, persistent voice of the multilingual green and yellow parrot, issuing rude utterances, and the mockingbird who copies him, act as an intrusive chorus in the background. More disturbing is Mr. Pontellier’s proprietary treatment of his wife when he scolds her for getting sunburned, especially his looking at her ‘‘as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage’’ (4). His gesture of dropping her rings into her hand as she returns from her swim reaffirms his ownership of her. This behavior hints at the injustice and inequality of traditional bourgeois marriage. Indeed, Pontellier soon leaves for an evening of billiards at a hotel, awakening Edna rudely when he returns late and probably inebriated. His cheerful indifference to her feelings is as shocking as his ownership of her. Even the presence of the octaroon who

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cares for Edna’s children is a disturbing element in the scene. Elizabeth Ammons comments on the presence of anonymous black servants in the novel: ‘‘the very liberation about which the book fantasizes is purchased on the backs of black women.’’1 Chopin is intuitive enough as an artist, however, to imbue even these marginalized characters with hints of a life of their own. Here, she describes the octaroon as following the Pontellier children about ‘‘with a faraway, meditative air,’’ a phrase that suggests her dignity and alienation. Thus, the elements that comprise the first scene are of two sorts: the picturesque aspects of the scene invite the reader to dwell upon the present moment, while the political aspects propel the story forward and give it complex thematic impetus. The texture of the novel is woven of the warp and woof of these two elements: the social-political and the pictorial components that together constitute Chopin’s vision of experience, her larger aesthetic pattern. The visually arresting moments of framed beauty that pass before the reader, not only in the scenes on Grand Isle but also in New Orleans, tell their own story, counterpointing Edna’s story. Chopin’s vignettes seem to declare that life is beautiful, evanescent, and to be savored, not to be thrown away. That Edna’s suicide feels tragic rather than merely senseless or gratuitous is due in part to the reader’s awareness of all that she loses out on, the lost perceptions and experiences of beauty, as well as the fruits of her newfound desire for freedom and her awakening to her sensuous self. The question of why art cannot save Edna is a corollary to the larger question of why Edna must die at age twenty-nine. In order to understand the role of Edna’s art in the novel it is necessary, therefore, to explore the reasons for her suicide. The riddle of Edna Pontellier’s suicide does not have a simple answer. Manifold factors converge upon her on a sleepless night when she finds that her situation offers no other exit than death by drowning. From the beginning of the novel, Edna’s story is a series of attempted departures and voyages out. Her first brave swim, the idyllic trip to the Cheˆnie`re with Robert, her quests to consult Mlle. Reisz, her moving out of her husband’s house into the ‘‘pigeon house,’’ her romantic affair with Robert and purely sexual one with Arobin, and then her final swim—all of these adventures carry her away from domestic life and her role as wife and mother. She is unable, however, to find a satisfactory destiny or destination toward which to make her way. Edna has a potentially grand spirit; she desires freedom, self-pos-

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session, and passionate life. Her spirit fails her for a variety of reasons. As Chopin once wrote, ‘‘truth rests upon a shifting basis and is apt to be kaleidoscopic.’’2 Strangely enough, Edna chooses death in part because of her children; she knows that she cannot abandon her two little sons, but she refuses to sacrifice herself for them. The bedrock truth of their biological dependency upon her is brought home when she attends Madame Ratignolle in childbirth the evening before Edna drowns herself. The bursting of the bubble of her romantic attachment to Robert Lebrun, which coincides with the eight or nine months of the novel’s time span, is another factor. Ultimately, Robert offers her the same sort of conventional life she has with her husband. Shortly before Robert leaves her, she understands that the aura of romance she has woven around him is an empty dream, no more lofty than her casual sexual encounters with Arobin. Edna is ultimately alone, without a true mentor or a friend who understands her. In addition, Edna dies because of an all-too-human frailty in her own nature. She makes forays into various forms of liberation, but she lacks the singleness of purpose to choose one form. Her inability to find a path in life results from her longing for the infinite and her dissatisfaction with all the finite paths of life. Psychoanalytic critics such as Cynthia Griffin Wolff have noted and explored the regressive nature of Edna’s personality which drives her to unite herself at last with the all-embracing sea as a simulacrum for the nourishing mother who, ironically enough, abandoned her by dying. Wolff writes that Edna experiences ‘‘the haunting memory of this evanescent state [of early infancy] which Freud defines as ‘Oceanic feeling,’ the longing to recapture that sense of oneness and suffused sensuous pleasure—even, perhaps, the desire to be reincorporated into the safety of preexistence,’’ an urge that may explain Edna’s frequent lapses into lethargy.3 Chopin’s expanding, multipurpose symbol of the sea prepares the reader for the tragic conclusion. The sea at first promises adventure, romance, freedom and solitude, but finally offers only oblivion and self-extinction. Chopin’s description of the voice of the sea early in the novel, just as Edna is beginning to discover herself, is itself ‘‘Oceanic’’: The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

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The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. (14)

The s-sounds and other onomatopoeic devices create a rather Joycean sibilance, so that Chopin’s language becomes the seductive voice of the sea with its ambiguous appeal to body and soul, its offer of a paradoxical embrace of solitude. Chopin attempts to convey directly the allure of Edna’s urges through the voice of the sea. Chopin’s imagery also contributes to the reader’s sense of the justness and inevitability of the novel’s outcome as she intuitively draws upon an ancient association of tragedy with the sea, that ‘‘eternal note of sadness’’ that, Matthew Arnold writes in ‘‘Dover Beach,’’ ‘‘Sophocles long ago / Heard . . . on the Aegean.’’ To the traditional association of suffering and the sea Chopin adds the hints of sensuality and maternal embracement which make the image psychologically suggestive in a modern way, hinting at Edna’s unfulfilled needs of body and mind. Her suicide seems fated by the language and structure of the novel, but at the same time it is an act of will brought about by complex motives, including her unhappiness with the restrictions placed on a wife and mother of her social class. Burdened with these social and psychological dilemmas, Edna certainly cannot sail off to Paris and pursue a new life as a painter. Yet in the short span of the novel she does make the transition from a dabbling amateur to a professional artist with an atelier and a dealer. That this career fails to offer her satisfaction is due to the inchoate nature of her longings, her unarticulated desire to merge herself with the infinite. Edna’s inability to express her desire contrasts starkly with the music of Chopin, which, as played by Mlle. Reisz, arouses passions of hope, desire, and despair in Edna’s soul, illustrating that one’s oceanic longings may indeed be articulated in serious art. In its critique of bourgeois marriage and its dramatization of her confused attempts to escape, Edna’s story certainly has a political dimension. But her tragedy is also, in a sense, a failure of her art. She finds no suitable language in her life or in her art to give shape to her desires, which remain inchoate, endless, without bound. She achieves no mastery of her soul’s promptings. Like her namesake the composer, Kate Chopin as author does give voice and shape to Edna’s longing for the infinite. But Chopin the author does something else that counterpoints Edna’s story and serves as a stay against the headlong rush to oblivion. Through her pictorial descriptions, Chopin shows the satisfactions of the finite, the things of

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this world, capturing the luminous beauty of the arrested moment. The art of the novel is superior to the art in the novel. Edna’s art is at first shown in scenes that resemble moments in Emma and Jane Eyre: the sketching of a portrait and the opening of a portfolio. Edna sketches a portrait of a Madame Ratignolle as she sits sewing on a summer afternoon with Robert Lebrun looking on—a threesome of artist, subject, and lover. The scene is one in which ardor disrupts art, as in several of the earlier novels, and Chopin emphasizes that Edna’s art at this point is strictly of the nineteenth-century ‘‘lady’s accomplishment’’ variety: Mrs. Pontellier has brought her sketching materials, which she sometimes dabbled with in a unprofessional way. She liked the dabbling. She felt in it a satisfaction of a kind which no other employment afforded her. (12)

Edna is attracted to Madame Ratignolle, who is soon to become a closer friend and confidante, although the two women are very different. Madame Ratignolle relishes her role of the Angel in the House, or as Chopin calls her, a ‘‘mother-woman,’’ whereas Edna cannot be called a ‘‘mother-woman’’ despite her two children. Pregnant again, Madame Ratignolle appears in Edna’s eyes as a ‘‘sensuous Madonna, with the gleam of the fading day enriching her splendid color’’ (12). At this point Edna is just beginning, as Chopin says, ‘‘to realize her position in the universe as a human being’’ (14). Her relationship with Robert is also changing. Up until now Robert has just been playing his usual summer flirtation game of ‘‘devoted attendant of some fair dame or damsel,’’ but now he is beginning to fall in love with her, as he will show when he abruptly leaves for Mexico to avoid dishonoring her (11). Robert seats himself close to Edna to watch her work, ‘‘giving forth little ejaculatory expressions of appreciation in French,’’ a language which Edna does not understand. Twice he rests his hand upon Edna’s arm, disrupting her painting, and twice she quietly repulses him, indicating that such pesky gallantries will not work with her. The gesture is prophetic in a small way, however, for later, when Edna does begin to develop an artistic career, her work is constantly disrupted by her ever-growing romantic fantasies about the absent Robert. Ironically, the sketch itself is a failure, it does not look like Madame Ratignolle at all, and Edna crumples it up in dissatisfaction, showing, like Emma Woodhouse, more taste than talent in this instance.

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Later, in New Orleans, growing restless and dissatisfied, Edna gathers up a roll of her sketches and takes them to Madame Ratignolle, seeking the same kind of false praise the Edna Woodhouse enjoyed receiving from her friends and family: She knew that Madame Ratignolle’s opinion in such a matter would be next to valueless . . . but she sought the words of praise and encouragement that would help her to put heart into her venture. (53)

The reader sympathizes with Edna’s plan to start over and paint as a professional rather than as a parlor painter, but certain aspects of this scene bode ill for her venture. For one thing, the sketches seem static and irrelevant to her life. One sketch that Madame Ratignolle admires is of a basket of apples and another is of a Bavarian peasant—in the midst of New Orleans where so many splendid subjects must have presented themselves! Edna’s fatal flaw as an artist is that she does not observe the world around her, thanks to her obsessive infatuation with Robert. On the same day that she shows her friend the portfolio she goes walking through the streets: Edna looked straight before her with a self-absorbed expression upon her face. She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic. (51)

Here is where the author and her character part company, for Chopin is sharply observant of the life of the street and carefully records the local, as her earlier reputation as a local colorist suggests, but Edna does not even look at the flowers growing under her eyes, caught up as she is in a cloud of shapeless romantic longing. Edna continues to paint, however; she is next seen seriously at work in her bright atelier, using the children and servants as models. This work seems more immediate and promising, although it may seem troubling that she orders the quadroon and the housemaid to pose for her. Edna really does observe the housemaid, however; she ‘‘perceived that the young woman’s back and shoulders were molded on classic lines, and that her hair, loosened from its confining cap, became an inspiration’’ (55). But even as she begins to paint, the sensuous beauty of the young woman sets up a series of associations in Edna’s mind in which she recollects scenes of her romantic encounters with Robert the previous summer—the sound of the sea,

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the moon on the bay, the gusts of the wind from the south. Edna’s own romantic ardor disrupts her art: ‘‘A subtle current of desire passed through her body, weakening her hold upon the brushes and making her eyes burn’’ (55–56). When she loses her grip on the paintbrushes, the creative process has been short circuited; Edna’s awakened sensuality and passion do not enter into her work but rather distract her from it. Although her work does not express her emotional life, Edna does succeed in an external way as a painter. At the time when she is making plans to leave her husband’s lavish house and move into a small house of her own, she reports that she is working with new confidence and ease and that her paintings are selling well. She finances her new household with income from her art as well as a small inheritance and her winnings at the racetrack, and this outward success continues right up until the time of her suicide. Edna fully makes the transition from amateur to professional artist, establishing her studio on her own, a transition that coincides with her awakening. As Joyce Dyer writes, ‘‘we might wonder why these new strengths, the strengths of the artist, do not give her courage to turn toward shore and all the canvases yet unpainted.’’4 Dyer convincingly argues that it is the issue of motherhood that most pulls Edna out to sea, but one must also note that her failure to connect art and life, her failure even to try to create an artistic expression of her own awakening, means that her art is not enough to lure her back to life. Edna’s career is the ultimate example of women’s art as unfinished. Mlle. Reisz, the pianist who seems to serve as Edna’s artistic mentor, also plays a part in the failure of Edna’s art. She counsels Edna on more than one occasion that genuine art demands courage, words that Edna internalizes. The older woman seems to exemplify sacrifice and singleness of purpose in her devotion to music. Her duplicitous actions contradict her counsel, however. Next to Edna, Mlle. Reisz is the most interesting and complex figure in the novel, and she is extremely difficult to ‘‘read.’’ The reader can only guess at her motives because her thoughts are not revealed, and the motives themselves seem mixed and contradictory. When she first appears, playing Chopin for a musicale at Madame Lebrun’s resort, Mlle. Reisz is described as a shuffling, aging woman, shabby and tasteless in dress, and self-excluded from the fellowship of the other summer visitors due to her imperious and quarrelsome nature. Her playing is much admired, but she agrees to play only in order to please Edna, telling her, ‘‘You are the only one worth playing for.

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Those others? Bah!’’ (26). At this point Mlle. Reisz appears to be a representative of pure art, and Edna responds to her playing as she has never responded to music before, not by imagining pictures but feeling the pure passions ‘‘of solitude, of hope, of longing . . . of despair’’ in a somatic way. The passions of the music shake her spinal column and lash her soul ‘‘as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body’’ (26). The sisterhood of Romantic sensibility established between them on the night of the musicale grows more fragile, however, in their next encounter, which occurs after Robert has left for Mexico. Mlle. Reisz seems malevolent when, creeping up behind Edna on a walk to the beach, she appears to read Edna’s mind, asking her if she is missing Robert. She gratuitously imparts to Edna the information that Robert and his brother Victor had once fought over the Spanish girl Mariequita. Edna regards these words as venomous, but the thought of a rival probably intensifies her feelings for Robert, the effect that Mlle. Reisz evidently intends. At the same time, she ‘‘raved much over Edna’s appearance in her bathing suit’’ (47). Even given the modesty of bathing attire at the time, this is curious behavior in an aging woman who cares nothing for fashion herself. All of Mlle. Reisz’s ensuing encounters with Edna hint at hidden, perhaps unconscious, motives underlying her attempts to control Edna’s emotional life. While a hasty reading of the novel might suggest that Mlle. Reisz represents a challenge to live a life of pure art and sacrifice, a challenge that Edna fails to meet, a closer reading shows the pianist as all too human in her emotional needs and frailties. She invites Edna into the life of art with one hand while enticing her away from it with the other. When Edna seeks out Mlle. Reisz in her dingy little garret in New Orleans, it is obvious that she has been waiting and hoping for Edna to come, despite her remarks to the contrary. Edna tells her about her attempts to become an artist: ‘‘Ah! an artist! You have pretensions, Madame.’’ ‘‘Why pretensions? Do you think I could not become an artist?’’ ‘‘I do not know you well enough to say. I do not know your talent or your temperament. To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts—absolute gifts—which have not been acquired by one’s own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul.’’ ‘‘What do you mean by the courageous soul?’’

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‘‘Courageous, ma foi! The brave soul. The soul that dares and defies.’’ (61)

Playing the role of Edna’s artistic mentor, Mlle. Reisz represents art as a matter of character, requiring a pure and brave soul, but her actions direct Edna away from that expressed ideal. Mlle. Reisz proceeds to play Edna like a fish on a line, mentioning a letter from Robert and telling her that it is all about Edna herself, then teasing her by refusing to hand over the letter and offering to play a Chopin impromptu instead. Calling herself ‘‘a foolish old woman whom you have captivated,’’ she finally agrees to gratify Edna with both the letter and the music, which romantically reinforce one another and reduce Edna to helpless sobbing (61). Elaine Showalter suggests that ‘‘there is something more intense than friendship between the two women’’: whereas Edna’s relationship with Madame Ratignolle ‘‘is depicted as maternal and womanly, Mademoiselle Reisz’s attraction to Edna suggests something more perverse.’’ While Madame Ratignolle seems like a surrogate mother for Edna, Showalter says, Mlle. Reisz seems like ‘‘a surrogate lover.’’5 ‘‘Surrogate lover’’ may be too explicit and and narrowly defined a term to describe how Mlle. Reisz sees herself in relation to Edna, and Showalter does not go on to explore what specifically leads to Mlle. Reisz’s subrogation of the role of lover. But the point is well taken, for Mlle. Reisz’s hidden motives seem to include an erotic element, as suggested by the phrase ‘‘a foolish old woman.’’ In that case, the perversity arises, not from her attraction to Edna, but from her devious means of expressing it. She offers up her enthralling music and the letter together to create an irresistible romantic atmosphere so that Edna will come back for more. Evidently she wants Edna’s presence as an auditor of her music but also enjoys the pleasure of manipulating her emotions, seducing her feelings by proxy. In addition to these subtleties, there is the obvious point that the letter compromises the music. Mlle. Reisz uses her art to arouse Edna’s ardor, and by abetting Edna’s fantasies about Robert, she contributes to Edna’s tragedy. Her brief segue into Isolde’s Liebestod from Wagner’s opera in the middle of playing the Chopin piece suggests an uncanny foreknowledge of Edna’s fate. Edna’s next visit with Mlle. Reisz, a similar encounter, is even more rife with inherent contradictions, and again Edna’s attention swerves from her art to her passion for Robert, abetted by Mlle. Reisz. Coming from a conversation with Arobin which upsets her by

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his ‘‘appealing to the animalism that stirred impatiently with her,’’ Edna goes to Mlle. Reisz so that the spiritual power of the music might soothe away her aroused erotic passions: There was nothing which so quieted the turmoil of Edna’s senses as a visit to Mademoiselle Reisz. It was then, in the presence of that personality which was offensive to her, that the woman, by her divine art, seemed to reach Edna’s spirit and set it free. (75)

Again Edna reports on her painting: ‘‘I am beginning to sell my sketches. Laidpore is more and more pleased with my work; he says it grows in force and individuality’’ (76). She also tells Mlle. Reisz about her plans to move into a house of her own—‘‘I know I shall like it, like the feeling of freedom and independence’’—and, Chopin writes, ‘‘she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself ’’ (76). Soon, however, Mlle. Reisz forces Edna to admit her love for Robert, after which Mlle. Reisz suggests, perhaps in secret mockery, that Robert is not a grand enough spirit to be worthy of such a passion, yet she seems amused and pleased enough at this turn of events. Edna’s new declaration of independence is further contradicted when Mademoiselle hands over another letter from Robert and begins to play on the piano: Edna did not at once read the letter. She sat holding it in her hand, while the music penetrated her whole being like an effulgence, warming and brightening the dark places of her soul. It prepared her for joy and exultation. (77)

Her joy and exultation become immediate when Edna reads in the letter that Robert will return to New Orleans. She does not see the incompatibility between her recent resolution to be free and her enthrallment in the romance of Robert, her delirious emotions having been prepared for and fostered, virtually stage managed, by Mlle. Reisz. By presenting two very similar scenes between Edna and Mlle. Reisz, Chopin is repeating a pattern of events and emotions for the same reason that composers repeat their themes: the second occurrence intensifies the effect of the first one and ensures that the audience will not forget the theme—in this case, one of betrayal. Mlle. Reisz leads Edna away from art rather than toward it; she plays her music upon Edna’s spine and upon her emotions, causing her to

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swerve off the path to freedom and enticing her back to the conventionality of a banal and illusory romance. She is much more blameworthy than Robert, who is an honorable and earnest young man but not the fairy tale lover Edna imagines him to be. The elderly pianist willfully contributes to Edna’s tragedy. Mlle. Reisz is rather like some of Henry James’s sinister and manipulative women characters, and her motives remain mysterious. She may be impelled by a range of feelings: among them, her attraction to a passionate and beautiful young woman, her enjoyment of the brightness and beauty of Edna’s presence, a vicarious gratification in prying into her love affairs, and a malicious pleasure in manipulating others. Perhaps she is also jealous. Mlle. Reisz’s musical art is genuine, but, for whatever reasons, she uses it to seduce Edna and foster her delusions, fomenting the tragedy. She uses her art to add to the romantic longings that distract Edna from her own art, affecting Edna’s ability to look at the world in a steady fashion. Although she plays beautifully, her devious use of her music contrasts to the purity of Fre´de´ric Chopin’s expressive Romantic voice. Despite the novel’s brevity, the treatment of art in The Awakening is multifaceted. Edna exemplifies the psychological breakdown of an artist; Mlle. Reisz, a duplicitous misuse of art. Kate Chopin’s own literary art invites the reader to contemplate the value of aesthetic perception. Through her descriptions of landscapes and interiors in the novel, Chopin presents the world of Grand Isle and New Orleans in luminous art that Edna cannot achieve because, caught up in yearning for an absent and dreamlike lover, she cannot focus on and paint the present things of her world. Chopin’s descriptive passages are analogs of painting, composed visual impressions that do more than provide a setting; they arrest moments in time and offer a perceptual point of view separate from Edna’s and more vibrant. Michael T. Gilmore comments that the ‘‘lush, sensuous ambiance of Chopin’s novel is notably similar to that of the world portrayed in Impressionist paintings of two or three decades earlier. The resemblance extends both to subject matter and to technique.’’ Mentioning Manet and Seurat, he adds, ‘‘Chopin also suggests the Impressionists in her interest in creating atmosphere through sensory imagery, particularly color and light.’’6 Although Gilmore attributes an impressionist sensibility to both Edna and the author, overlooking the difference in how they perceive the world, his analogy to the work of the impressionists helps to explain the aesthetic appeal of Chopin’s novel. Edna’s impulse to throw away life itself is

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counterbalanced by Chopin’s preservation of the most vibrant scenes of Edna’s life through these pictorial effects. Several of these scenes—a walk to the beach, Edna’s birthday dinner party, a meeting with Robert in a garden cafe—emulate visual art. These scenes complement and, in a sense, counterpoint Edna’s aspirations as a painter: the novelist’s art is superior to that of the painter she creates. The literary use of such painterly effects is called ‘‘pictorialism,’’ a term coined and defined by Jean H. Hagstrum. According to Hagstrum, pictorialism consists of a literary description which is ‘‘capable of translation into painting or some other visual art.’’7 Visual details ‘‘must be ordered in a picturable way.’’8 Moreover, he notes, pictorialism ‘‘necessarily involves the reduction of motion to stasis or something suggesting such a reduction. It need not eliminate motion entirely, but the motion . . . must be viewed against the basic motionlessness of the arrangement.’’9 Hagstrum adds that the meaning of the scene must come through the visual elements present in it rather than through authorial commentary. Certain scenes in The Awakening fit Hagstrum’s definition exactly, attesting to the presence of a painterly eye. Chopin’s pictorialism can be seen in the description of Edna’s walk to the beach with Madame Ratignolle early in the novel, a composed view that seems serene on the surface but gives hints at underlying conflicts: The walk to the beach was no inconsiderable one, consisting as it did of a long, sandy path, upon which a sporadic and tangled growth that bordered it on either side made frequent and unexpected inroads. There were acres of yellow camomile reaching out on either hand. Further away still, vegetable gardens abounded, with frequent small plantations of orange or lemon trees intervening. The dark green clusters glistened from afar in the sun. (15)

Chopin’s appealing presentation of color and light; her attention to foreground, middle ground, and background, creating a feeling of depth; and her careful composition of the scene, stressing the harmonious interplay of gardens and wild nature—all of these things show her painterly eye. But the scene is not merely decorative, for the inviting long path that lies before Edna leads to the sea and suggests the allure of freedom she finds there, just as the lushness of the landscape seems to echo her own awakening sensuality. In the same scene Chopin goes on to describe the figures of the

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two women—Edna’s more slender and Madame Ratignolle’s more matronly—and the clothing they wear as they make their way to the beach: She [Edna] wore a cool muslin that morning—white, with a waving vertical line of brown running through it; also a white linen collar and the big straw hat which she had taken from the peg outside the door. The hat rested any way on her yellow-brown hair, that waved a little, was heavy, and clung close to her head. Madame Ratignole, more careful of her complexion, had twined a gauze veil about her head. She wore dogskin gloves, with gauntlets that protected her wrists. She was dressed in pure white, with a fluffiness of ruffles that became her. The draperies and fluttering things which she wore suited her rich, luxuriant beauty as a greater severity of line could not have done. (15)

Chopin conveys the textures of the fabrics, their appealing whiteness, and even the way they flutter in the breeze with an attention to detail that, again, suggests a painterly eye. One is reminded of several paintings of women by the impressionist Mary Cassatt, whose work was known to Chopin; Chopin is reported to have viewed her mural Modern Woman at the Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.10 The figures of the two women are linked by the sensuous appeal of their beauty; indeed, a prominent subtext of The Awakening is a celebration of the sensuousness and beauty of women of all social classes. When the two women arrive at the beach, Edna feels their friendship deepen and is moved to confide in Madame Ratignolle about the growing dissatisfactions of her life. At the same time, the difference between the two women is also revealed by Chopin’s physical description of them. Madame Ratignolle’s veiled and swathed appearance, her care for her complexion in contrast to Edna’s sunburn, shows her more conventional femininity; her pure white dress may suggest her singleness of purpose as a ‘‘motherwoman’’; and her entire appearance emphasizes matronly beauty. Edna appears more casually dressed, and the waves in her gown and her hair connect her to the sea. The touches of color in her costume—her hat, her heavy hair, and the pattern in her dress— suggest, perhaps, greater complexity and a different kind of sensuality from that of the fertile, motherly Madame Ratignolle. The two women are framed in arrested motion, a sense of the moment’s pastness adding poignancy to their portrait. To reveal character and enhance thematic ideas through visual description is, of course, a

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tried and true technique of fiction. But Chopin trusts the visual to speak for itself, free of explanatory rhetoric, more than fiction traditionally had done; her reliance on the visual gives the entire novel a painterly feel. The scene of the dinner party that Edna gives on her twenty-ninth birthday, meant to be a grand event and a gesture of beauty, celebrating her leaving of her husband’s house, includes frequent references to the fine arts and can be read as a critique of the state of the arts in Edna’s world. Chopin’s sense of color is again in evidence when she describes the dining room setting in intense hues of red and yellow and the gleam of precious gems: the yellow satin tablecloth and matching silk candle shades, the yellow and red roses, the table heaped with crystal and silver and gold, Edna’s matching gold satin and lace gown and the showy diamond ornament in her hair, the gift of her absent husband. Such lavish materialism and display of wealth seem a curious way to celebrate her plan to liberate herself from her husband’s house and become independent. Other incongruities run through the scene, compromising the beauty and pleasure of the event. Chopin writes, ‘‘a feeling of good fellowship passed around the circle like a mystic cord, holding and binding these people together with jest and laughter’’ (85). Chopin’s ‘‘mystic cord’’ is nothing like the secret bonds that tie the characters together in Virginia Woolf ’s dinner party scenes in To the Lighthouse and The Waves; here, the good fellowship is merely the effect of food and wine, and the evening ends in decadence and disorder rather than communal sharing. Chopin’s dinner party bears a more distinct, if remote, resemblance to the one in James Joyce’s ‘‘The Dead’’ with its air of fin de sie`cle weariness, especially as regards the arts, which appear deflated and debased. Chopin describes Edna as outwardly regal but inwardly distraught: The golden shimmer of Edna’s satin gown spread in rich folds on either side of her. There was a soft fall of lace encircling her shoulders. It was the color of her skin, without the glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in vibrant flesh. There was something in her attitude . . . which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone. (84)

In this description of Edna, the phrase ‘‘myriad living tints’’ signals an instance of pictorialism. Here, however, the outward appearance of harmony and control is belied by Edna’s inward feelings of ‘‘the

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old ennui,’’ ‘‘the hopelessness,’’ ‘‘a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed,’’ and an ‘‘acute longing’’ for ‘‘the unattainable’’ (84–85). The careless self-indulgence of the party and its contrast to Edna’s inner emptiness create an air of unease; the reader begins to anticipate some sort of psychological breakdown. After the dinner Edna will take Arobin as her lover for the first time, an action that is solely a consequence of her sexual awakening and not because of any particular liking or respect for this playboy who can, in his own words, ‘‘assume the virtue of an occupation if he has it not’’ (84). Running through the scene are references to failed art or false art as Chopin mildly satirizes the shallowness of some of the party guests. Miss Mayblunt is ‘‘thought’’ to be an intellectual and it is ‘‘suspected’’ that she writes novels under a pen name, but her observations of the world seem specious: she ‘‘looked at the world through lorgnettes and with the keenest interest’’ (82). At the very least, Miss Mayblunt is undiscriminating in her aesthetic judgments: when they drink a garnet-colored cocktail ‘‘composed’’ by Edna’s father, Miss Mayblunt ‘‘pronounced the Colonel an artist and stuck to it’’ (83). Mlle. Reisz, when asked, ‘‘had only disagreeable things to say of the symphony concerts, and insulting remarks to make of all the musicians of New Orleans’’ (84). Meanwhile, mandolins are playing in the street, perhaps the only harmonious art on the scene, but they are remote like the voice of Bartell D’Arcy in Joyce’s ‘‘The Dead.’’ The party lapses into decadence when Mrs. Highcamp (a prophetic name) places a garland of hectic-colored red and yellow roses on the head of the lascivious Victor Lebrun, transforming him ‘‘into a vision of Oriental beauty’’ with cheeks ‘‘the color of crushed grapes’’ as he holds a glass of champagne to the light, upon which Miss Mayblunt exclaims, ‘‘Oh! to be able to paint in color rather than in words!’’ (85). Victor as Bacchus does resemble a painting— works like Caravaggio’s Bacchus readily come to mind—but another guest, Gouvernail, places the spectacle of Victor in a more recent aesthetic milieu by murmuring lines from a sonnet by Swinburne: ‘‘There was a graven image of Desire / Painted with red blood on a ground of gold’’ (85). Margo Culley points out that ‘‘the allusion to the rather brutal Swinburne poem about the insatiety of fleshly desire and the final victory of time and death over passion, foretells the impossibility of . . . deliverance for Edna.’’11 When Victor insists on singing a song that reminds Edna of her romantic idyll with Robert

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the past summer, she shatters a glass of wine and yanks the garland from his head. As the party ends, the mandolin players have left the street and the voices of the departing guests ‘‘jarred like a discordant note upon the quiet harmony of the night’’ (87). Here, the Romanticism of Chopin’s music which so often speaks to Edna’s spirit is counterpointed by the decadent aestheticism of Swinburne, bespeaking the weariness that comes from overindulgence of fleshly desire. Edna’s mind is disordered at this time because she has experienced a rending apart of the spiritual and the sensual sides of herself, represented by Robert and Arobin. At the end of the novel, her longings of both flesh and spirit will collapse into one and seem futile as she moves toward oblivion. Meanwhile, music and the other arts are deflated in the vacuous little society of people surrounding Edna at the dinner, for they too lack spirit. Only Mlle. Reisz has genuine artistic talent, but she is alienated and embittered and has misused her art. The dinner party makes it more evident why Edna cannot feel artistically inspired in such an environment and suggests the emptiness of an aesthetic far more nihilistic than Kate Chopin’s, who, in other scenes, celebrates the bright possibilities of sensuous life rather than the despair that comes with satiety. Chopin implicitly rejects an aesthetic that would perceive material richness as art. In contrast to the dissipation of Edna’s dinner party, the scene of her second accidental meeting with Robert after he gets back from Mexico seems to promise a return to innocence and another chance for Edna’s ‘‘spiritual’’ love. Robert appears as Edna is eating a quiet dinner in a garden cafe while reading a book and stroking a cat, a scene of contentment and repose, although the reader is well aware that Edna is fatally self-divided; she has been carrying on an affair with Arobin while dreaming of Robert. Nonetheless, Chopin describes the setting as idyllic, very much like an impressionist painting of a garden cafe: There was a garden out in the suburbs, a small, leafy corner, with a few green tables under the orange trees. An old cat slept all day on the stone step in the sun, and an old mulatresse slept her idle hours away in her chair at the open window, till some one happened to knock on one of the green tables. She had milk and cream cheese to sell, and bread and butter. There was no one who could make such excellent coffee or fry a chicken so golden brown as she. The place was too modest to attract the attention of people of fashion,

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and so quiet as to have escaped the notice of those in search of pleasure and dissipation. Edna had discovered it accidentally one day when the high board gate stood ajar. She caught sight of a little green table, blotched with the checkered sunlight that filtered through the quivering leaves overhead. Within she had found the slumbering mulatresse, the drowsy cat, and a glass of milk which reminded her of the milk she had tasted in Iberville. (99)

This description forms a complete picture in which each item is distinct—the tables, the trees, the cat on the step, the old woman in the window—but part of a harmonious whole, a little suburban world of repose and innocent gratification. The secondary colors of green, orange, and gold make the scene attractive, and the blotches of sunlight cast upon the table through the quivering leaves suggest an impressionist’s attention to the play of light upon objects. Chopin’s carefully controlled pictorialism invites the reader to ‘‘paint’’ the scene in the mind’s eye. Although the mulatresse is defined by her racial identity, she does have a name, Catiche, and she seems very much the master of her quiet little world. This description invites the reader into a secluded and self-contained garden space as a painting can do; it offers an interval of poise and repose before Edna’s tragedy unfolds. Robert appears, Edna asks him to come home with her, and for the first time she offers him a passionate kiss. It is then she learns that he hopes to marry her someday if her husband will set her free, to which she responds in horror and anger that she belongs to no one. When she goes off to attend to Madame Ratignolle in childbirth, she begs Robert to wait for her, but he abandons her out of a sense of honor. The end comes because Edna’s dreams are not compatible with commonplace reality, including the reality represented by childbirth, and her powerful impulses of flesh and spirit begin to cancel one another out. The end of the novel is like a picture breaking up. Visually composed scenes give way to synesthesia in Edna’s last moments; she experiences a confused collage of sensations as she sinks down to death. A hasty reading of the last scene might suggest that Edna heedlessly swims out too far and, in fatigue and despair, makes the decision on the spur of the moment not to turn back to shore. A close reading reveals that Edna makes the decision the night before and comes to Grand Isle for the purpose of committing suicide; her ordering of dinner and towels is simply a ruse so that Mariequita and Victor will not grow suspicious and stop her. She moves ‘‘me-

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chanically’’ without ‘‘dwelling upon any particular train of thought’’ because she has already done her thinking during her long sleepless night on the couch (108). The thoughts that drift through her mind are but a recapitulation of those of the night before: her lovers ultimately would not suffice her, her husband does not matter, her children appear as antagonists who would drag her soul down. The last coherent voices that she replays in her mind are those of Robert and Mlle. Reisz, her lover saying goodbye and her mentor sneering about her lack of courage as an artist, representing the two ways in which she sought and failed to find satisfaction, love and art. She exultantly strips naked and swims out too far to return. Her final sensations are of incoherent sounds, resolving finally into a hallucinated scent: She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (109)

Her sensations, recollected from her early days in Kentucky, seem to swirl down to a vortex. These sensations are the incoherent memories of a drowning person as she goes under, and yet they fit together like pieces of a collage. The voices of her father and the sister who was like a mother to her represent the authority figures of Edna’s childhood. The chained dog suggests restraint and her desire to be free. The officer’s spurs allude to her adolescent infatuation with an engaged man: an illusory love for an unattainable lover. The final images are softer, less harsh, evoking nature and fertility—the bees and the odor of flowers. And yet the musky flowers seem funereal, made morbid as the last sensation of a dying person. It is appropriate that the story of a woman who has experienced an awakening to sensuous life but ultimately cannot live in her world should conclude with a dissolution of the sensorium. Coherent thoughts give way to incoherent sounds—mere rags of experience—voices, a hum, and finally an odor, the most ephemeral of sensations. Written on the threshold of the twentieth century, Chopin’s novel speaks to the future more than to her own time. Her bold depiction of a woman’s awakening sexuality and desire for freedom, almost unanimously condemned by the contemporary reviewers, was ahead

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of its time. Chopin’s novelistic technique is also modern, particularly in her willingness to trust her images to carry the political and psychological weight of the novel. Thus she achieves a work suffused with an aesthetic sensibility, the vision of a painterly eye—not that of Edna the painter but that of Chopin the author. Like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chopin shows society’s inability to understand or accept a woman of strong imagination, but she also shows Edna’s tragic failure to find a creative way to focus her longings and shape them. Edna is resourceful enough to attain a studio of her own, but the existence of her atelier is brief. The reader’s sense of Edna as a genuinely inspired artist is limited to that evanescent moment when she perceives the beauty of her housemaid’s elegant figure and begins to paint, that moment before she lapses into infatuated dreaming and loses her grip on the brush. Edna never creates an authentic portrait of a woman; Chopin, however, succeeds where Edna fails.

3 Journey to the Silent Kingdom: Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse After the first shock and chill those used to deal in words seek out the pictures with the least of language about them—canvases taciturn and congealed like emerald or aquamarine—landscapes hollowed from transparent stone, green hillsides, skies in which the clouds are eternally at rest. Let us wash the roofs of our eyes in colour; let us dive till the deep seas close above our heads. —Virginia Woolf, ‘‘Pictures and Portraits’’

FASCINATED BY THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FICTION AND PAINTING, VIRginia Woolf carried on a lifelong dialogue with the painters and aestheticians whom she knew intimately in her family and among her Bloomsbury friends. Although she frequently attended exhibits and wrote essays and reviews on the visual arts, Woolf never felt entirely at ease in the world of painting, which she describes as alien and mysterious to those such as herself who inhabit a world of words. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that she developed the character of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf worried— needlessly, as it turns out—about the reaction of her sister Vanessa Bell to a novel that not only portrayed their parents in thinly disguised form but also presumed to reveal the consciousness of a painter at work. Reading over the completed manuscript, Woolf records in her diary on 21 March 1927, that most of the book seems to her ‘‘pliable’’ and ‘‘deep’’ with ‘‘never a word wrong for a page at a time,’’ but she adds, not ‘‘Lily on the lawn. That I do not much like.’’1 Despite Woolf ’s trepidations, she creates in Lily Briscoe one of modernism’s major artist figures. Although she is a middle-aged woman, older than D. H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel or James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Lily struggles, like them, toward an artistic vision that will free her from the heavy weight of the past. Working in ob85

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scurity, she assumes the burdens of creativity and strives valiantly to achieve a painting that is true to her vision. In the process, Lily makes the transition, at least in her own mind, from parlor painter to serious artist. Lily appears to be the first self-conscious, theorizing fictional woman painter. The progress of Lily’s painting allows Woolf to explore numerous aesthetic and psychological issues that carry some urgency for Woolf herself as a writer. Woolf shows the precariousness of Lily’s task through her recurrent metaphors: Lily thinks of herself as venturing down a dark corridor into the unknown, swimming between the waves of a high sea, or walking a narrow plank above the water. Lily’s work involves risk partly because she is a woman; she hears the internalized voice of Mr. Tansley, who epitomizes the patriarchal opposition, telling her that women cannot paint or write. (Never willing to perpetuate a stereotype, however, Woolf also allows some sympathy for the philosopher Tansley because of his own acute feelings of class inferiority.) In addition to antifeminism, the demands of modernism—or, to use Roger Fry’s term, postimpressonism—also add to Lily’s challenge. Although she is an untaught amateur, Lily feels compelled, like the modernists, not merely to paint what she sees, but also to rethink the basis for representing reality and to ponder the relation of art to life. The reader is served thin slices of Lily’s life. The constraints of Woolf ’s experiments with time and her stream of multiple consciousnesses allow only intermittent views of Lily at age thirty-three in the novel’s first section, ‘‘The Window.’’ In the third section, ‘‘The Lighthouse,’’ Lily at age forty-four occupies a more prominent position, as her painting is balanced against Mr. Ramsay’s journey to the Lighthouse, but again the time span is only a few hours. In spite of these constraints, the reader’s experience of Lily is extraordinarily intimate. Outwardly timid, awkward, and unprepossessing, Lily carefully guards the secret of how much her art means to her. Although overshadowed by the powerful presence of Mrs. Ramsay in ‘‘The Window,’’ Lily’s spirit emerges from its chrysalis in ‘‘The Lighthouse.’’ Through metaphors involving sea journeys and other arduous physical feats, Woolf imbues Lily’s struggle to paint, like Mr. Ramsay’s unfinished efforts to reach the letter ‘‘R,’’ with epic qualities. Lily’s epic struggle, like Mr. Ramsay’s, is an inward one that tests her intellect and spirit; it involves violent and lacerating encounters with grief and a feeling of inner mutilation. Lily’s painting also requires that she face up to baffling paradoxes that seem to inhere in

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twentieth-century art and life, an echo perhaps of the riddles and mysteries surrounding women’s struggles to paint in nineteenthcentury novels. To highlight Lily and her art is, of course, to neglect the delicate balance of characters and images that constitutes the structure of Woolf ’s novel. Disproportionate attention to Lily’s art entails a certain disregard of the novel’s own artistry, in particular Woolf ’s elegant intertwining of the thoughts of her three main characters and her brilliant treatment of the dynamics of the Ramsay family. But given the lavish amount of critical attention that To the Lighthouse has received over the decades, one may tease out the strands of Lily’s story without running the risk of misrepresenting the novel. Highlighting Lily’s story reveals that the journey of the novel is also Woolf ’s journey toward, though not quite into, the silent world of painting, of landscapes ‘‘taciturn and congealed like emerald or aquamarine.’’ To the Lighthouse can be read as a culminating expression of Woolf ’s ongoing engagement with postimpressionism and the formalist aesthetics that accompanied it. Cheryl Mares points out that various ‘‘questions about relationships between painting and literature captivated, stimulated, and tormented Virginia Woolf for more than twenty years.’’2 ‘‘Territorial terms—‘boundaries,’ ‘margins,’ ‘borders,’ ‘raids,’ . . . —are scattered throughout Woolf ’s comments on relationships between literature and painting,’’ Mares adds, ‘‘suggesting that she tended to conceive of them as, in some respects, power struggles.’’3 In her own realm of fiction Woolf was influenced by the aesthetic principles derived from modernist painting, but her views of those principles change over the years. Notably, in later works, such as Between the Acts, she rejects altogether the view that a work of art can or should exist in a hermetic world of its own, exclusive of political realities. To the Lighthouse, however, was written at the time of Woolf ’s closest liaison with Bloomsbury aesthetics and the principles of formalism. Christopher Reed notes that the ‘‘rejection of mimesis and concentration on the play of abstract form: these were the fundamental tenets of Bloomsbury aesthetic theory.’’4 A totally nonmimetic and abstract novel would be an impossibility, of course. By the 1920s, however, Roger Fry, Woolf ’s friend and proponent of Bloomsbury aesthetics, is not at all dogmatic on the issue of whether or not art should be representational. Fry characterizes the postimpressionist movement as ‘‘the reestablishment of purely aesthetic criteria in

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place of the criterion of conformity to appearance—the rediscovery of the principles of structural design and harmony’’—a goal that is consistent with both Woolf ’s scheme for the To the Lighthouse and Lily’s vision of her painting.’’5 Fry famously defends the underlying principles of the postimpressionists’ art: ‘‘They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life.’’6 This statement is also consistent with Woolf ’s program for fiction as set forth in her 1919 essay ‘‘Modern Fiction,’’ in which she derides Edwardian writers for their prolix descriptions and claims the freedom to invent new forms for the novel. Roger Fry’s influence on To the Lighthouse has been noted by many critics. Of particular relevance is the way in which Fry defines the artist’s ‘‘vision,’’ a term that occurs with some frequency in Lily’s consciousness and gains prominence as the last word of the novel: ‘‘I have had my vision.’’7 In his essay ‘‘The Artist’s Vision,’’ Fry distinguishes between ordinary optical vision and what he calls ‘‘creative vision,’’ which carries the artist away from ‘‘the meanings and implications of appearances.’’8 Fry goes on to define how this form of ‘‘vision’’ sets in motion the creative process: Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist this detached and impassioned vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the (aesthetically) chaotic and accidental conjunction of forms and colours begins to crystallise into a harmony; and as this harmony becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm, which has been set up within him.9

Fry’s description can be compared with the fourth sentence of To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf describes the sensibility of James Ramsay: Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. (3)

Fry speaks of a turn in ‘‘the kaleidoscope of nature’’; Woolf alludes to the sensorium as a turning wheel. He speaks of aesthetic impressions as crystallizing into harmony; she refers to a moment of bliss

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crystallizing in memory. Nonetheless, the verbal echoes cannot be ignored. Although James is a six-year-old cutting out paper dolls, he evidently possesses an artistic sensibility, and Woolf uses him to set forth some of the premises of her novel: that the senses are like a bright turning wheel with life streaming into them willy-nilly, that time is inward and pliable, that the future clouds and colors the present, and that time may nonetheless seem to be transfixed, made crystalline. These premises are the basis for Woolf ’s experimental techniques. Her echo of Fry’s description of the creative process appropriately introduces a novel in which Lily’s own creative vision is represented as a positive force against the forces of death, dissolution, and entropy, what Woolf calls ‘‘that fluidity out there’’ (97). Like Fry in his essay, Woolf explores the process of painting, not the finished work; at the moment when Lily completes her painting the novel goes silent. If it seems puzzling that Virginia Woolf, surrounded by the professional painters and aestheticians of Bloomsbury, should have chosen to portray Lily as an untrained amateur who stands awkwardly at the easel and hides her work from those around her, the answer may be that Woolf intends to show the cultural moment when a woman breaks through from the amateurism of the nineteenth-century parlor painters to the achievement of serious art. By the end of the novel, although Lily is still convinced that her painting ‘‘would be hung in attics’’ like the drawings of Victorian ladies, she has come to regard it as her ‘‘work.’’ Another likely reason why Woolf portrays Lily as an amateur is that Lily could not be mistaken for a portrait of Vanessa Bell, which might have seemed presumptuous. The loving but jealous rivalry of the sister artists, which has been the subject of several full-length studies, involved a lifelong dialogue about their work.10 Diane Gillespie points out that in their early years the sisters recognized the ‘‘differences between a medium that is essentially static and one that can embody the actual creative process that results in the finished work of art.11 To the Lighthouse, of course, embodies that novelistic process, and Woolf furthers the dialogue with Vanessa by making Lily a painter rather than a writer. Gillespie adds that the ‘‘sisters observed too that the writer is more interested in the consciousness of color and other visual stimuli than in colors or forms themselves; the writer subordinates the purely visual to human concerns.’’12 The distinction between consciousness of color and color itself is a subtle one. That distinction, however, marks an impassable border for the

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writer, who can bring colors to mind only by means of ekphrasis. Still, when moved to compliment one another’s work, the two sisters both suggest the possibility of crossing over into one another’s realm. Commenting on the fictional portrayal of their parents in To the Lighthouse, Vanessa writes to Virginia, ‘‘So you see as far as portrait painting goes, you seem to me to be a supreme artist and it is so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again that I can hardly consider anything else.13 In turn, Virginia writes about Vanessa’s painting The Conversation, ‘‘I think you are a most remarkable painter. But I maintain you are into the bargain, a satirist, a conveyor of impressions about human life: a short story writer of great wit and able to bring off a situation in a way that rouses my envy.’’14 The Conversation (Courtaud Gallery), a disturbing work in its deliberately unharmonious colors—orange sky, flat blue-green grass and harsh white, yellow, and red flowers outside the window—and the ominous dark bulks of the three conversing women, would presumably arouse Woolf ’s envy because of its compression of a story into a single visual statement. As a narrative painting implying a conversation more serious and alarming than mere gossip, Vanessa’s work would seem to arrest a moment in time. In her longest essay on painting, Walter Sickert: A Conversation, Woolf—choosing a representational and more obviously ‘‘literary’’ painter whose style was remote from Vanessa’s—expresses a yearning to cross over the border into a world of pure painterly expression. The essay, written in the form of a dialogue in which several anonymous dinner guests share their views on aesthetic issues raised by a recent Sickert exhibit, presents various opinions that Woolf debates within her own mind. The essay proposes three ways of looking at art: first, by reacting to color, an immediate and primal stimulus; second, by seeing the painting in a literary way and attempting to express its meaning in words; and third, by trying to experience the painting as artists do in their own wordless realm. Woolf compares this realm to a silent place and also a forest into which literary people cannot venture; elsewhere she amusingly writes that painters ‘‘must weave their spells like mackerel behind the glass at the aquarium, mutely, mysteriously.’’15 Woolf ’s playful metaphors mask her serious longing to enter the painters’ realm, but she adds that literary people must ‘‘recognize the limitations which Nature has put upon us, and so turn back to the sunny margin where the arts flirt and joke and pay each other compliments.’’16 In a sense, Lily Briscoe exists on that ‘‘sunny margin.’’ By tracing Lily’s stream of conscious-

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ness, Woolf attempts to cross over that margin into the inner life of a painter. Still, Woolf portrays the process of Lily’s painting in a novelistic way: it entails risk, involves a variety of emotions, and has a beginning, middle, and an end, unlike Lily’s completed painting, which is silent and unliterary. Another relevant aspect of Woolf ’s essay on Sickert is her startling hypersensitivity to color in art. One of the speakers describes reacting to the colors of the exhibit: I flew from colour to colour, from red to blue, from yellow to green. Colours went spirally through my body lighting a flare as if a rocket fell through the night. . . . Colour warmed, thrilled, chafed, burnt, soothed, fed, and finally exhausted me. For though the life of colour is a glorious life it is a short one. Soon the eye can hold no more. . . .17

This description of a physical, virtually orgasmic, response to color in an art exhibit reflects Woolf ’s opinion that writers need paintings as a stimulus because, as she writes elsewhere, we are ‘‘so starved . . . on our diet of thin black print.’’18 Woolf seems to associate color with self-expression; she drenches To the Lighthouse in color imagery as if to enrich the thin diet of print. Although the painter works with color and the writer with the black and white of the printed page, the two artistic processes have one thing in common: the writer and the painter both must confront a blank white surface, a sheet of paper or a canvas, in order to begin. Woolf laments in her diary while working on a later novel, ‘‘I doubt if I can fill this white monster.’’19 So too Lily ‘‘looked blankly at the canvas with its uncompromising white stare’’; she regards it as a ‘‘glaring, hideously difficult white space’’ (157, 159). In ‘‘The Window’’ Lily is never shown actually painting, only thinking about her work; the act of putting away her brushes for the day is described several times, as one marker of Woolf ’s ‘‘time loops’’ that keep bringing the narrative back to the present moment after a digression into memory or another consciousness. In this section Lily is seen more as a potential artist, and Woolf emphasizes instead the beautiful but fragile domestic order that Mrs. Ramsay creates for her family in the prewar world. Woolf, like Phelps and Chopin, contrasts the artist to an Angel in the House who exudes domestic virtue and misunderstands woman’s artistic aspirations. Transcending the stereotype, however, Mrs. Ramsay is sensitive, loving, deep in wisdom, and possessed of a mystical, intuitive kinship

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with the world and its beauty. That she is also a manipulative, prying matchmaker seems scarcely to matter. Based on Julia Stephen, whose death when Woolf was thirteen was arguably the most grievous of many tragedies in her life, Mrs. Ramsay seems forged out of Woolf ’s deepest emotions. In ‘‘Professions for Women’’ Woolf confesses that in order to survive as a writer she had to kill the Angel in the House within her own psyche, but in To the Lighthouse her attitude is conciliatory rather than violent. Woolf bridges the gap between her mother’s generation and her own, between the Victorian domestic woman and the modern artist, by softening the sharp distinction between the artist and the Angel in the House. Mrs. Ramsay is presented as an ‘‘artist’’ of domestic life, sustaining her family and ordering their world through constant application of her creative powers and strength of will. Woolf epitomizes Mrs. Ramsay’s artistlike sensibility in a rare instance of pictorialism—rare because To the Lighthouse does not have the moments of stasis found in The Awakening; time rarely stands still except in memory or art. Exactly at the turning point, or center, of the dinner party scene, the moment when the candles are lit and disgruntlement turns to celebration, Mrs. Ramsay looks at the centerpiece arranged by her daughter Rose, ‘‘a yellow and purple dish of fruit.’’ In her direct and unmediated way of looking at things, Mrs. Ramsay sees the bowl of fruit as a still life. It is a microcosm, a feast for the eyes, an epitome of all that Mrs. Ramsay’s own ‘‘art’’ provides—sustenance, abundance, a sense of community: What had she done with it, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold. . . . Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb hills, she thought, and go down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them. (97)

While the poet Augustus Carmichael views the arrangement selectively, picking out details here and there, Mrs. Ramsay sees it more

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wholly. Her response to the arrangement roughly follows the three ways of looking at art that Woolf describes in the Sickert essay. She responds to the color, the yellow and purple, then ‘‘reads’’ the arrangement through its associations with myth and ‘‘literary’’ paintings—‘‘Bacchus (in some picture)’’—and finally imagines entering fully into its kingdom, like an Alpinist exploring its topography. The presence of the spirit of Bacchus is far more innocent here than in Chopin’s dinner party scene, for the entire party is under Mrs. Ramsay’s maternal care and control. Edna Pontellier’s dinner party gradually disintegrates into decadence and disorder; Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party progresses from a cheerless mood to one of communal celebration. In supervising the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay is called upon moment by moment to create order out of disparate and conflicting people and things. Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetic way of looking at and arranging her world is not the same as Lily’s artistic ‘‘vision,’’ and Lily must in fact distance herself from the seductive attractions of Mrs. Ramsay and her family in order to paint. In earlier novels the demands of courtship disrupted women’s art and even at times corrupted it; the interplay of art and Eros is more subtle and complex in Woolf ’s novel. On the one hand, Lily is both fascinated and disturbed by the irrational force of erotic love; when Paul and Minta become engaged, she feels ‘‘scorched’’ by ‘‘its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity’’ (102). On the other hand, Woolf, in her search for a unified vision of life, avoids establishing a false dichotomy between art and Eros: how could art avoid sterility without the ardor that traditionally impels it? Although she enjoys the companionship of William Bankes and shyly allows him to look at her painting-in-progress, Lily prefers friendship to romantic love. She often keeps her eyes turned down because of the excitement of ‘‘that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eye of love’’ (46– 47). Excluded, partly by choice, from the world’s endless romantic pairings, Lily, thinking about the Ramsay’s marriage, apprehends a broader, more diffuse kind of love: It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. (47)

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This form of love, ‘‘distilled and filtered,’’ somewhat resembles Iris Murdoch’s Platonic idea of a ‘‘Higher Eros’’ that motivates the best of human endeavors. Lily’s broader view of love is distinct from erotic love but encompasses it as it also encompasses her own creative efforts. Lily’s understanding of love gives her courage to contemplate the appalling gap between ‘‘her vision’’ and the reality of what she has so far accomplished on the canvas. Lily forms her artistic vision of her subject much in the way that Roger Fry describes: the ‘‘jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that’’ (18). Woolf makes it clear that Lily does have a fresh and original vision by amusingly contrasting it to the soft, easy, secondhand impressionism that has prevailed among the painters on the island since Mr. Paunceforte visited three years ago: ‘‘all the pictures were . . . green and grey, with lemoncoloured sailing-boats, and pink women on the beach’’ (13). Lily envisages her painting in striking metaphors: ‘‘She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral’’ (48). Lily’s visionary painting possesses a taut, harmonic tension of surface and structure. Like Kate Chopin, Woolf repeats a theme in order to reinforce it when, in the third part of the novel, Lily is again painting in earnest and again she thinks of that harmony: Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. (171)

Woolf distinguishes between Lily’s artistic vision of the painting and her actual work in progress. It is also possible to distinguish between Lily’s vision and the more general aesthetic principle it suggests. The principle is one of a finely achieved tensile force between overall composition and surface detail, a force that Woof describes through contrastive metaphors. Woolf ’s thought processes are typically and often extravagantly metaphorical, as her diaries, essays, and letters all reveal. Rejecting the metonymies of Edwardian fiction, she evolves in the 1920s a style that depends heavily upon the advantages of metaphor, its appeal to

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the visual sense and its ability to leap across boundaries or categories. In this instance, the metaphor of butterfly wing and cathedral arch violently yokes together disparate aspects of the work of art rather like a metaphysical conceit, suggesting the effort required to attain such a balance. These metaphors also provide a means of bridging the gap between the domains of painting and fiction. The vehicles of the metaphor, butterfly, and arch, are purely visual, but the tenor, the idea of a tensile force, is an underlying principle of the novel itself. Thus Woolf suggests a ratio: as the butterfly wing is to the arch, the color or surface rendering of a painting is to its composition or treatment of space and the flowing style of Woolf ’s novel is to its solid three-part structure. Lily is not a self-portrait of Woolf, but her thoughts embody Woolf ’s own aesthetic principles expressed in nontechnical terms, and through Lily, Woolf conveys her own aesthetic commitments and her desire to bridge the arts. As ‘‘The Window’’ draws to a close, the reader begins to realize how much Lily’s art means to her. She tosses off a ‘‘little insincerity’’ when she tells Mr. Bankes that ‘‘she would always go on painting, because it interested her’’ (72), but three times during the dinner party scene—once when Tansley offends her, once when she decides to abandon her experiment not to be ‘‘nice’’ to him, and once when she is disturbed by the presence of the engaged couple—Lily’s thoughts turn to her art as a means of emotional survival. Although Lily barely appears in ‘‘Time Passes’’—the section begins with her falling asleep and ends with her awakening—this densely poetic section ushers in, among many other things, a new cultural context in which her art must be begun again and remade. At the end of the first section, much has been broken off and left unfinished in both the artistic and the domestic realms. Lily never completes the first version of her painting, and Mrs. Ramsay, who privately celebrates wholeness, whether it be in a bowl of fruit or a Shakespearean sonnet, accurately predicts of the stocking that she is knitting for the Lighthouse keeper’s boy, ‘‘I shan’t finish it’’ (123). Although Mrs. Ramsay’s death is announced only in brackets, its effect upon the reader is profound when Woolf describes her decaying house, her fading clothes in the wardrobe, and her empty mirror. Woolf brilliantly portrays an emptiness that expands to include an entire culture, one which must be filled with new human arrangements and new forms of art in the postwar world. A hypothetical insomniac walking on the beach and having just seen an ‘‘ashen-coloured ship’’ drop a depth charge that stains the sea pur-

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ple, raises abstract questions: ‘‘Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began?’’ (133–34). The answer is negative; the Great War has changed everything. The old Romantic faith in a liaison between humanity and nature has been reduced to mere solipsism: With equal complacence she [Nature] saw his misery, his meanness, and his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken. (134)

The sleep of ‘‘the nobler powers’’ implies the sleep of reason in the midst of war’s barbarism. The broken mirror, which could be the same mirror that stood empty after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, suggests the shattering of a culture and of old ideas of selfhood. The broken mirror also brings to mind the Renaissance notion of art as the mirror up to nature, art as mimetic representation dependent upon accepted notions of reality. As the characters emerge from the dark corridor of years in ‘‘Time Passes,’’ they enter the light of a postwar world that seems dazzlingly alien and unreal. Thus, the third part of the novel, ‘‘The Lighthouse,’’ begins with much unfinished business. Along with Mr. Ramsay’s journey to the Lighthouse—a sentimental journey sternly undertaken—there is a need for a new order and reconciliation in the family, and the reestablishment of art as a source of wholeness and harmony in a the midst of so much disorder. Although Mrs. Ramsay can never be replaced, it seems that Lily’s painting, or the process of the painting, partially fills the vacuum that she leaves behind. In short, Lily’s painting, her need for self-expression, becomes more urgent in the postwar cultural context. It should be added that although the third section of the novel takes the characters into new and uncharted territory, it also subtly recapitulates various events of the first part of the novel, as many readers have noticed. E. M. Forster seems to have been the first to observe that To the Lighthouse follows the sonata form. At the opening of ‘‘The Lighthouse’’ Lily feels numb, chaotic, at loose ends. She is still feigning gestures to hide herself from the gaze of others: sipping coffee, turning her back. Her thoughts remain

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fragmented and scattered until she remembers her painting of eleven years earlier: ‘‘She had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now’’ (147). Desperate to get started on the painting again, Lily is distracted by the demanding presence of Mr. Ramsay, groaning for sympathy and causing the brush to tremble in her hand: there issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the whole world would have done something, said something—all except myself, thought Lily, girding at herself bitterly, who am not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried-up old maid, presumably. (151)

Lily appears bitterly to accept society’s brutal, age-old assumption that an independent, unmarried, nonsubservient woman like herself is ‘‘not a woman’’ at all but rather a desiccated and useless subspecies, an ‘‘old maid.’’ Yet the addition of the word ‘‘presumably’’ in Lily’s thoughts gives her leeway to reject and cast off the social expectations that are prompting her to give herself over, like an Angel in the House, in sympathy to Mr. Ramsay. Lily’s mature sense of humor enables her to distance herself from the impasse and resolve it. Unwilling to give in to Mr. Ramsay as she had given in to Tansley under Mrs. Ramsay’s silent promptings in the dinner party scene, Lily humorously caricatures herself in her own mind as a stubborn, mincing spinster in distress: ‘‘His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet’’ (152). At this point Lily is torn between her desire to paint and the demands of a male ego: ‘‘In complete silence she stood there, grasping her paint brush’’ (153). Holding her ground, Lily hits upon a happy compromise. The ensuing ‘‘boot scene,’’ in which Lily refuses to pour out sympathy for Mr. Ramsay but distracts and pleases him by praising his well-made boots, shows how much Lily has grown in strength over the passing years. By complimenting Mr. Ramsay in an indirect and comradely fashion, Lily is able to offer him some attention without giving in to his demands. As a consequence—almost, it seems, as a reward for standing firm—her own small gesture evokes in her a genuine sympathy for him, a feeling based on common humanity rather than gender roles. She suddenly apprehends his loneliness: ‘‘There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going’’ (154). This scene is crucial, for, unlike the protagonists in earlier

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novels who give in to male demand for attention and put down their paintbrushes, Lily draws upon her own wits to come upon a suitable compromise and get on with her work. After the ‘‘boot scene,’’ the narrative divides as Cam, James, and their father sail to the Lighthouse and Lily begins to paint, and the process of the painting and the narrative processes of the novel begin to intertwine to form a counterpoint. Lily’s first step in the process of painting is to confront once more the ‘‘white monster’’ of empty space. As Lily ‘‘looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare’’ she again faces the most immediate question that an artist—or a writer—must ask: ‘‘Where to begin— that was the question at what point to made the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions’’ (157). In Woolf ’s diary she too anguished over compositional questions of space as well as time when she came to write this section of the novel; moving her characters apart in space, she wanted to maintain an illusion of simultaneity, ‘‘so that one had the sense of reading . . . two things at the same time.’’20 Woolf ’s solution to this problem of creating simultaneity in a linear narrative consists of a carefully planned system of structural arrangements. In keeping with the idea that the formality of art fills a great need for order in the period after the Great War, the third section of the novel has a more insistently formal rhythm and structure than the first part. On the island Lily moves forward in time, learning how to master space on her canvas. The Ramsays in their boat sail along coordinates of time and space to their goal, the Lighthouse. Bearings are taken and distances are measured as though in solemn ritual. There is very little dialogue. Linear distance creates silences between the boat and the island; psychic distance creates silences between the children and their father. Up until the simultaneous completion of the painting and arrival at the Lighthouse, the major blocks of consciousness alternate between the moving boat and the shore in this order: Lily, Cam, Lily, James, Lily, Cam, Lily, James—like the voices of a fugue. By the end of the journey, Woolf has taken the reader to the vanishing points of her characters’ opposite visual perspectives, achieving a sense of elasticity stretched almost to the breaking point, as though ‘‘a team of horses’’ had tried to pull it apart. When the Ramsays reach the Lighthouse, the island appears to Mr. Ramsay, Cam supposes, as ‘‘the frail blue shape which seemed like the vapour of something that had burnt itself away’’

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(207) whereas for Lily ‘‘the Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze’’ (208). These formal temporal and visual patterns induce in the reader an awareness that time and space can be malleable elements within a narrative; if the effect is not exactly that of simultaneity, it certainly evokes the idea of simultaneous events. Woolf ’s stretching of the two parts of her narrative almost, but not quite, to the breaking point illustrates not only an aesthetic principle but also a psychological one: ‘‘so much depends,’’ Lily thinks, ‘‘upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay. It seemed to be elongated, stretched out; he seemed to become more and more remote’’ (191). Distance tests the elasticity of human relations; the Ramsays and Lily drift apart in time and space, but they are bound together by their shared experiences in the past. Woolf ’s experiment with simultaneity has another effect as well. The double ending of the novel allows Woolf to embrace a paradox. Mr. Ramsay’s leap into space gives the novel a feeling of open-endedness, an illusion of life racing on beyond the limits of the story. At the same moment, Lily’s solemn proclamation that ‘‘It is finished’’ as she draws the final line on the painting seems to give the novel a strong closure. The simultaneous events of the last pages imply, at the least, that life is always making endings and always going on. The ending of To the Lighthouse has been the subject of lively critical discussion about Woolf ’s aesthetics, with many critics, Lucio P. Ruotolo and Geoffrey Hartman among them, interpreting Lily’s ‘‘It is finished’’ as ‘‘deeply ironic.’’21 Lily herself recognizes that her painting is destined to be utterly ignored, tossed in an attic. More importantly, the aesthetic of wholeness and ‘‘significant form’’ that the early parts of the novel seem to embrace and embody begins to break down when the reader encounters ‘‘Time Passes’’: there is no patching together what personal loss and the Great War have torn asunder—a new aesthetic is called for. Marianne Hirsch convincingly argues that ‘‘the double plot does not merge and oppositions remain.’’22 Hirsch points out that Woolf ’s refusal to describe the line that Lily places at the center of the painting as anything other than ‘‘a line’’ leaves unanswered the question of whether the masses of the composition have been balanced and whether Lily has attained anything like connection and wholeness in a world of loss. The ambiguity of the line, Hirsch argues, ‘‘illustrates the aesthetic of ‘both/ and’: there is no writing without loss, and writing cannot quite con-

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stitute recovery.’’23 Here Woolf again creates an effect of stretching things to their limits. The ambiguity of the line requires the reader to hold contradictory ideas in mind at once: the painting and the novel both are and are not ‘‘finished.’’ The painting itself is silent, and although the final brush stroke may seem conclusive, nothing can fill the gaping hole of ‘‘Time Passes.’’ In the process of her painting, Lily confronts several other paradoxes. Painting, as Woolf conceives it, is by nature paradoxical or at least hedged round by powerful contrasts, and she implies that the only way to achieve even a semblance of integrity and completion in a work of art is by embracing, rather than evading, these paradoxes. In addition to the strong tensions within the work of art, symbolized by the butterfly and the cathedral arch, the aspirations of the arts are also fraught with paradox, she suggests. In temporal terms, art aspires to make something permanent in a world where nothing is permanent; in spatial terms, art is an attempt to create something whole in a world where fragmentation is inevitable. As Lily begins to paint in earnest, another paradox emerges having to do with art and life: it appears that art is wholly separate from ordinary life and at the same time inextricably bound up with it. These paradoxes pertain to both painting and fiction. The most compelling aspect of Lily’s story, however, is not these intellectual conundrums but rather Lily’s emotions as she confronts them. While ruminating on the nature of art and also attempting to solve the technical problems posed by her painting—color, mass, and such—Lily feels the sweep of extraordinarily powerful emotions ranging from grief and despair to ecstasy. She becomes painfully aware of the presence of the past and its absence. Woolf thus shows the process of art to be a holistic one, involving intellect, technique, deep emotions, and the distillation of all one’s prior experiences. As Hermione Lee observes, ‘‘Lily’s painting does not set up a romantic dichotomy between aesthetic consolation and mortal suffering. The artistic act involves suffering; it sums up the extreme difficulty of giving some moral coherence to the chaotic forms of reality.’’24 Entering into Lily’s art, too, is that broadly defined love which she apprehended in ‘‘The Window,’’ love that radiates from the personal to the communal and embraces all serious creative enterprises. The creative gesture of making the first mark upon the canvas is risky, like crossing a threshold into a different kind of space. To

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move from the vision to the rendering of the actual painting is to plunge into a confusing sea of possibilities: All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made. (157)

As Lily tackles ‘‘this formidable ancient enemy of hers,’’ the empty space of the canvas—Mrs. Ramsay’s enemy, the reader recalls, was time—she feels ‘‘drawn out and haled away,’’ almost reluctant to be driven to the endless risks of art. Poised on the brink of creativity ‘‘before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like a unborn soul, a soul reft of body . . .’’ (158). This feeling of exposure is not necessarily due to the fact that Lily is a woman artist. The soul’s being born in moments of artistic discovery is a prominent idea in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other works of modernism.The emphasis on nakedness, however, suggests that exposure of one’s soul or inner self in this fashion is particularly difficult for women; there are more layers of social expectation and encrusted prejudice to be cast off. Unlike Edna Pontellier, however, Lily is able to survive both the nakedness and the engulfing sea. In the same passage, Lily is still hearing the voice of Mr. Tansley. In her diary Woolf very frequently records similar apprehensions about revealing herself through her work, and her feminist essays explore the historical forces which make creative women feel vulnerable. Later, having gotten further along with the painting, Lily still feels herself to be walking ‘‘on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea’’ (172). The idea of the woman artist in the early twentieth century as someone suspended in space, like a tightrope walker without props, emphasizes the danger, exposure, and solitariness of Lily’s undertaking. It is a sad feature of Lily’s situation that she has no one (except the reader) with whom to share her fears and her achievements, no sister artist, no salon, no Bloomsbury group. By making Lily so isolated within herself, Woolf emphasizes the ultimate isolation of every writer or painter—the real struggle must be carried on alone—but she also epitomizes and highlights what certainly had been until recently the isolation of most creative women. As Lily moves more confidently into her painting, another threshold appears in her imagination: ‘‘Lily, painting steadily, felt as if a

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door had opened, and one went in and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedral-like place, very dark, very solemn’’ (171). In pursuing her vision, Lily crosses over a clear demarcation between ordinary experience, a day in summer in the Hebrides, and what she sees as a sacred space, the cathedral-like palace of art. One of the most striking paradoxes of Lily’s work is that on the one hand her art is sealed off entirely in a separate world of its own, hermetic and isolated, even protected, from the rest of her life, and on the other hand her art is inextricably bound up with and dependent upon her deepest life experiences, her memories and her grief. Although this paradox may not be resolved, it is broadly inherent in the modernism of the 1920s; one thinks of how deeply personal and at the same time impersonal The Waste Land and Ulysses are. Vanessa Bell’s career as an artist also exhibits a paradoxical blending of the personal and impersonal. Quentin Bell notes that his mother painted pictures ‘‘replete with psychological interest while at the same time firmly denying that the story of a picture has any importance whatsoever.’’25 Vanessa’s career shows a vacillation between abstraction and representation as well as between flat decorative design and the illusion of perspective and depth, with both modes often appearing in the same painting. Purely abstract art did not provide the ‘‘sensuous relationship with the everyday world’’ that Vanessa needed, but at the same time she wished her art to be separate ‘‘from concepts of use, value, from sentimental associations and other non-visual content.’’26 This compromise with representation is evident in paintings like ‘‘The Tub’’ (Tate Gallery), in which a stylized female nude, viewed frontally with eyes demurely cast down, stands next to a very large round copper bathing tub. The tub is viewed from above, so that the woman and the tub seem disturbingly to occupy incompatible spaces even though they are juxtaposed. ‘‘The Tub’’ conveys to the viewer a sense of inexorable isolation, a disquiet that, Frances Spalding notes, is ‘‘expressed through the formal relationships’’ of the figures.27 Spalding suggests that ‘‘the strained relationship between the tub and the standing figure in this large painting is an unconscious expression of [Vanessa’s] own sense of incompleteness’’ at the time, in 1918.28 Thus, a painting that appears to be governed mainly by a sense of design and to eschew any effect of narrative is at the same time suggestive of deeply personal emotions. Lily educates Mr. Bankes on postimpressionist principles when she tells him that a mother and child, perhaps the most tender sub-

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ject of traditional art, can be represented by a purple triangle without disrespect. Vanessa Bell sometimes painted her friends and even Virginia with blank featureless faces. Lily’s finished painting will very likely appear impersonal in the sense that no recognizable human figures will be visible in it. At the same time Lily’s own emotions affect the very gestures she makes with her brush. Woolf makes it explicit that Lily’s art contains the ‘‘residue’’ of her life. Fiction is different from painting in this regard; fiction cannot take leave of the personal so readily as painting can. Woolf is, after all, drawing upon her own experiences including her grief for her parents, but at the same time she believes, along with her fellow modernist writers of the period, that fiction should be impersonal and detached from the ego of the artist. She addresses this paradox in various essays, most notably ‘‘Modern Fiction’’ and ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.’’ In rejecting the unexamined mimesis of earlier fiction—an approach that assumed an easy, natural affinity between descriptive fiction and life—Woolf proposes a newly invented and more distilled form of mimesis in which life is represented through the ‘‘atoms’’ of consciousness rather than external description, resulting in greater verisimilitude in portraying human experience. To the Lighthouse exhibits this kind of selectivity and abstraction, becoming, in a way somewhat different from Lily’s painting, both personal and impersonal at once. Once Lily gets into the rhythm of her painting, she feels the leisure to contemplate an enormous question posed so baldly as to seem almost comical: ‘‘What is the meaning of life?’’ (161). The process of painting provokes her to question life’s meaning even as it ‘‘hales’’ her away from her everyday reality. Lily’s answer—that there is never to be a ‘‘great revelation’’ but only the ‘‘little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark’’— brings her back to her motivation as an artist, for the small ‘‘illuminations’’ of life include her attempts at art (161). The metaphor of ‘‘illuminations’’ is similar to the ‘‘luminous halo’’ of consciousness described in ‘‘Modern Fiction’’ and to the ‘‘moments of being’’ in ‘‘A Sketch of the Past.’’ The metaphor of illuminations is a spatial one, giving the image of a dark space lighted, although Woolf also stresses its brevity, like a match flame. Lily thinks of art in temporal terms as ‘‘making of the moment something permanent’’ as in her own way Mrs. Ramsay did: ‘‘In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability’’ (161). (Note that

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Woolf ’s sentence itself embodies a contradiction: it declares the possibility of permanence even as the parenthetical statement, which for Woolf usually contains the more insistent truth, proclaims the mutability of all things.) In Lily’s revelation there is nothing particularly mystical: just as Mrs. Ramsay has created an illusion of permanence by the force of her personality, living on in memories of selected moments, so too Lily as an artist can seem to make clouds and leaves, emblems of ephemerality, stand still in her painting. Having made a connection between herself and Mrs. Ramsay and between art and life, Lily experiences a moment of harmony: the thought of Mrs. Ramsay ‘‘seemed in consonance with this quiet house; this smoke; this fine early morning air’’ (161). The word ‘‘consonance’’ echoes Stephen Dedalus’s Thomistic term consonantia, which he translates as harmony, one of the elements required in order for beauty to be apprehended. Roger Fry also speaks of rhythm and harmony as essential elements of the artistic vision. Woolf hints at similar aesthetic principles, but she emphasizes the internal tensions of a work of art more than Joyce and Fry do. And she implies that the internal tensions of the painting represent the distillation of the artist’s psychological struggles as she works to achieve her vision. Woolf allows Lily to experience a temporary sense of consonance—with herself, her art, and her world—before she goes on to do battle with the most menacing obstacles she must confront before completing the painting: death, loss, and grief. Grief, the nexus of the presence and absence of the past, overwhelms Lily while she is painting, almost as though grief were a necessary part of the artistic process. Lily’s work, like the novel itself, has an elegiac pattern: in order to complete the painting she has to descend to the nadir of grief, of longing and emptiness—‘‘to want and want and not to have’’—and temporarily surmount it (202). At the moment when Lily’s grief reaches a climax and she cries out Mrs. Ramsay’s name and bursts into tears, Woolf produces a horrifying objective correlative: in the boat Macalister’s boy cuts a square of flesh from the side of a fish and throws the live, mutilated fish back into the sea. So too, Woolf suggests, life treats all who have suffered loss. Her feeling of psychological mutilation drives Lily back to her painting. It seems that Woolf ’s keen sense of human suffering serves to strengthen, even motivate, her commitment to art. In ‘‘A Sketch of the Past’’ she writes that by putting the shock and pain of life into words she gives reality and wholeness to the ‘‘real thing behind appearances’’ and ‘‘this wholeness means that it has lost its

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power to hurt me.’’29 Lily, feeling that a part of her has been torn out, works on her painting as she simultaneously reconstructs moments of the life of her friend until she finally ‘‘sees’’ Mrs. Ramsay beyond the window pane, knitting and casting a shadow on the step, not as an apparition but as a real person, a ‘‘part of ordinary experience’’ living on in memory (202). Mrs. Ramsay and the past are both present and absent at the same time. The completion of the painting means for Lily, so she hopes, the creation of something whole compounded out of artistry and vision and motivated by love: painters, she thinks, are among the larger category of ‘‘lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays’’ (192). The creative process here, involving selectivity, vision and wholeness, seems straight out of Roger Fry’s essay, but Woolf expands the category of creative people to include Mrs. Ramsay. By making Mrs. Ramsay integral to Lily’s creative process, Woolf acknowledges the creativity of women of earlier generations who never dreamed of becoming artists. Psychologically, Lily’s painting represents a triumph over the voice of Mr. Tansley, and it contains the experience of her grief. Even the formalists never denied the emotional content of a work of art: the ‘‘drawn line,’’ writes Roger Fry, ‘‘is the record of a gesture, and that gesture is modified by the artist’s feeling which is thus communicated to us directly.’’30 And yet Lily’s painting also has a separate existence, apart from the life that inspired it, and it represents an attempt to embody an ideal form. It may be useful here to distinguish between the idea of wholeness and the achievement of it. Up until the moment when Lily completes her painting, she sees it as ephemeral, destined at best to be hung in attics, and yet somehow solid and permanent, like the arch of a cathedral. This paradox is reinforced by Mr. Carmichael’s imagined elegiac gesture of blessing the scene by bestrewing ‘‘violets and asphodels,’’ flowers representing the ephemeral and the eternal. Lily’s painting, Woolf implies, is both ephemeral and permanent. Although Lily finally sees her completed painting, the reader does not. From various hints it can be surmised that the painting depicts a part of the house, including a white wall, the window, steps, a hedge, and trees. The main colors are greens and blues, with touches of violet, brown, and red. The colors are the most vibrantly

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present aspect of the painting. In a close reading of the novel too long and intricate to reproduce here, Jane Goldman intriguingly argues that Lily attains ‘‘colour-based enlightenment’’ emerging from ‘‘the chiaroscuro of the Ramsays.’’ Goldman calls Lily’s new-found aesthetic principle ‘‘feminist prismatics’’: instead of a world of art dominated by the ‘‘masculine’’ sun and its shadows, Goldman writes, Lily finds ‘‘a colourist illumination of the feminine umbra behind the masculine solar subject.’’31 The composition of the painting is more obscure than the color. Lily’s last words in the novel suggest that from her point of view the composition is harmonious, with the final brushstroke providing balance. But the reader cannot see the composition even in the mind’s eye; it is left entirely to the reader’s imagination, like an ekphrastic black hole. And even if Lily’s painting is presumed to be complete, the version which she started eleven years earlier remains incomplete and even more spectral. That Lily’s painting both is and is not complete is consistent with the idea that fragmentation, incompletion, and suspension can be positive values in the paintings of women artists, representing in some sense the truth of their psychological life. Lily’s painting expresses both her feeling of mutilation and her desire for wholeness. Woolf has taken the reader to the threshold of the wordless world of art. Although the reader does not ‘‘see’’ Lily’s painting, it seems more vivid and meaningful than many other embedded works of art because every aspect of it has been negotiated and hard won, wrested by effort from the chaos of experience, and because every shape and color in it is saturated with Lily’s emotions, her private griefs and triumphs. Lily’s painting has a radiance, parallel perhaps to Woolf ’s ‘‘luminous halo’’ of consciousness, because the reader experiences not so much the work in progress as Lily’s vision of it. Throughout the novel it is the visionary painting that matters. Lily has no studio, only her portable paint box and easel, and she is unlikely ever to receive much recognition for her art, but nevertheless she is one of the great protagonists of modernist writing because her ‘‘globed’’ consciousness contains so much—vision and reality, sensibility and wisdom—and because her efforts to paint bring coherence and order to her world. By creating that consciousness Woolf comes as close as she can to the silent kingdom of painting. In the Sickert essay she writes, ‘‘though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much in common. . . . The novelist is always saying to himself how can I bring the sun on to my page?’’32 In novels written prior to To the Lighthouse the portrayal of women

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artists was usually tentative, their aesthetic goals often vague or unarticulated and their achievements spotty at best. Writing in the 1920s, when opportunities for women in the arts were opening up— although painting still lagged far behind fiction in that regard— Woolf captures a woman painter at moments of breakthrough, not into professionalism, but into serious exploration of the emotional and intellectual possibilities of her art. At this time in her career Woolf found it possible to synthesize her aesthetic and political views into a single narrative; that is, to espouse the notion of high art as consistent with a feminist viewpoint. Later in her career her growing anger at the world’s injustice and brutality would cause her to alter the forms and genres of her writing and she would come to reject the idea that art can validly occupy some high plateau above the fray. But in To the Lighthouse Woolf ’s inclusive view of creativity proves to be consistent with a rather moderate feminist stance. Her broad category of all of those who possess creative or artistic sensibilities and love their work, ‘‘that great clan,’’ includes not only modern thinkers, writers, and painters but also women of an earlier generation who exercised creativity and love within the constraints of the domestic realm. Woolf discovers an affinity and continuity between the household manager and the artist, between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily, implying that women always have had creative powers. As Christopher Reed and others have pointed out, modernism was congenial to feminism and to women’s art because the principles of modernism encouraged a certain detachment and inventiveness which tended to preclude older patriarchal conventions. Unlike earlier fictional painters, Lily Briscoe does not allow men to distract her for long; she hangs on to her paintbrush. Lily forms an enduring friendship with Mr. Bankes, resisting Mrs. Ramsay’s silent scheme of matchmaking for the two of them. She internalizes the hectoring voice of Mr. Tansley but eventually triumphs over that voice by proving it wrong. And she successfully fends off Mr. Ramsay’s demands for attention by means of an intelligent compromise: she will give him something, but not her full attention. Choosing to paint, Lily abandons all thought of romantic love, although To the Lighthouse is not so insistent on the incompatibility of love and art as The Story of Avis is. In setting and symbol, The Awakening more nearly anticipates To the Lighthouse, but Edna Pontellier, with her romantic distractions and inattentiveness to the world, seems practically the opposite of Lily Briscoe, with her seriousness of purpose and keen observations of life. Jane Eyre, oddly enough, is the fictional woman

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painter who most foreshadows Lily, albeit in an embryonic way. Both painters show some daring and courage in resisting tradition and in attempting to paint from within themselves and remain true to their artistic visions. Both painters experiment with forms: Jane’s best paintings are surreal and self-expressive; Lily reinvents forms in a modernist context. Jane’s unrealized artistic potential seems like a pent up force in Jane Eyre, a compounding of fire and ice in her soul which never achieves full expression. In her painting, Lily is more fully able to yoke together opposing forces—surface and structure, grief and love—guided by a vision that is steadier and more precise.

4 Figure and Ground: The Portrait Painter in Iris Murdoch and Anna Banti The work of art may seem to be a limited whole enclosed in a circle, but because of contingency and the muddled nature of the world and the imperfections of language the circle is always broken. —Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Her weapons were to paint with ever increasing boldness and ferocity, with heavy shadows, stormy light, brush strokes like the blows of a sword. —Anna Banti, Artemisia

HISTORICALLY, PORTRAITS WERE COMMISSIONED TO DISPLAY ACHIEVE-

ment or rank and to bestow fame rather than to reveal the psyche. Portraits especially engage the viewer’s interest, though, when they illuminate human character and arouse curiosity about the individuality of the sitter. The portrait painter is the type of painter whose task most closely resembles that of the novelist, the representation of human character. A novelist who portrays a portrait painter creates an alter ego, a fictional sister artist who will, in turn, portray the character of her subject. Anna Banti’s Artemisia (1953, trans. Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo) and Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle (1957) both depict professional women portrait painters who succeed in their work but who, like the painters in earlier fiction, find that their artistic careers are incompatible with love and marriage. Banti’s novel relates to the history of art; Murdoch’s, to the philosophy of art. Banti creates a fictional version of the real-life Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, stressing her struggles for recognition, the arduous journeys she undertakes, and the sacrifices she makes for her art. Banti impressionistically evokes the colors and textures of seventeenth-century Europe through 109

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her ‘‘painterly’’ use of color, light, motion, and scenes of daily life. Although almost all of Gentileschi’s surviving works depict biblical or mythological subjects, painted from models, Banti chooses to represent her mainly as a portrait painter, so that, with certain exceptions, the embedded paintings in the novel are imagined ones. Rain Carter, the painter in The Sandcastle, works throughout the novel on a commissioned portrait of a retired headmaster; as in To the Lighthouse the painting and the novel unfold simultaneously. A comic novel with a somber ending, The Sandcastle is narrated mainly from the point of view of Bill Mor, a discontented middle-aged British schoolmaster, married with teenage children, who falls in love with the young painter. Mor and Rain tentatively plan to run away together, but human frailty and a family crisis combine to thwart their romance. Rain Carter ends up, like Artemisia and Lily Briscoe, a solitary figure. As in many of Murdoch’s novels, the eventful plot raises philosophical issues, in this instance issues having to do with duty, honor, desire, and the nature and value of art. Although she is seen mainly through Mor’s eyes, Rain the artist is the most dynamic and spontaneous character in the novel and the one who embodies Murdoch’s own aesthetic ideas. What these two novels significantly have in common, despite their obvious differences, is that both of the women artists have been professionally trained and deeply influenced by their fathers. The father provides the way—in the case of Artemisia, the only possible way—for the woman painter to enter into the male-dominated mainstream of art. By conversing inwardly with their absent fathers, the real Orazio Gentileschi and the fictional Sidney Carter, the painters enter into dialogue with inherited artistic tradition. Like every other fictional artist discussed so far in this study, both characters are motherless. This conspicuous absence of a mother may have something to do with the development of the artist: the half-orphaned girl feels an urge toward self-creation through art, or perhaps she simply escapes strong indoctrination in traditional female roles and therefore can seize an opportunity to make her way in her father’s world. The paternal tutor provides both an entrance into an artistic vocation and the technical expertise upon which the artist can begin to base her own style. Artemisia, both the real artist and the character, assumes the point of view, rules of perspective, and typical subject matter of the male artists who precede her, but she alters the presentation of that

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subject matter—frequently the female body—so as to present a shockingly new and even feminist vision. Although Artemisia, real and fictional, dominates her subjects as male painters traditionally do, by means of a single commanding point of view, Banti the novelist adamantly resists dominating Artemisia as her subject, instead crafting a novel that seems prematurely postmodern in its reflections upon its own deliberate tentativeness and lack of closure. Similarly, Murdoch in her philosophical writings and in The Sandcastle embraces a concept of art as open to the world and necessarily tentative or subject to revision, a variation of the principle of the unfinished. Murdoch characterizes art as a struggle to produce at best a broken circle, but she implies that brokenness may be a saving grace. As mid-twentieth-century novelists, Banti implicitly and Murdoch explicitly reject the notion that art should try to dominate or improve upon reality. Instead, art enters into dialogue with the world. Because Banti in her novel carries on a dialogue with her elusive character, half summoning her spirit and half inventing her, it is useful to compare the historical record of Artemisia Gentileschi to Banti’s recreation of her. No longer an underrated painter, as she was even in Banti’s time, Artemisia is admired today for seizing upon artistic tradition and making it serve her own purposes. That tradition was overwhelmingly masculine. Art historian Svetlana Alpers points out that since the Renaissance the dominant tradition in art and art history has typically been the Italian one. In the Albertian tradition of Italy, a picture is defined, Alpers reminds us, as ‘‘a framed surface or pane situated at a certain distance from a viewer who looks through it at a second or substitute world.’’1 Such a mode of painting assumes the predominance of a single (prior) viewer and makes use of linear perspective to direct the viewer’s gaze and create the illusion of a secondary world. ‘‘In its ordering of the world and in its possession of meaning,’’ Alpers says, ‘‘such an art, like the analysis art historians have devoted to it, asserts that the power of art over life is real.’’2 Alpers significantly adds that the ‘‘attitude toward women in this art—toward the central image of the female nude in particular—is part and parcel of a commanding attitude taken toward the possession of the world.’’3 Although Artemisia Gentileschi’s work follows this Albertian tradition, her heroic female figures of Judith and others resist the possessive gaze of the onlooker because they are anything but passive. Beginning to paint just at the time when Caravaggio was creating a stylistic revolution, Artemisia

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became the only noted Caravaggista. Her father knew Caravaggio in Rome, and, as R. Ward Bissell notes, ‘‘between 1609 and 1613 Orazio transmitted to Artemisia his understanding of Caravaggio’s genius and the more distinguished features of his own art. Artemisia, artistically gifted and vital of spirit, approached his teaching deliberately, and by the age of twenty had become an individual creative personality.’’4 Artemisia’s work was more deeply affected by Caravaggio than her father’s was. In his works, Caravaggio, as Bissell observes, frequently set up ‘‘lines of force which if extended would transcend the limits of the frame and thereby involve the reader in the action.’’5 Caravaggio’s Baroque style, radically wrenching the viewer’s perspective away from the perpendicular and creating new and strenuous angles of sight, was well suited to Artemisia’s heroic presentation of her female figures. As in Caravaggio’s works, her shallow backgrounds and dramatic use of chiaroscuro make the figures loom large. Prior to Artemisia there had been a great many paintings of femmes forte, figures such as Judith, Minerva, and Cleopatra, but Artemisia created large and startling new versions of these women. Art historian Mary Garrard notes that ‘‘unlike the femmes forte framed for moralizing verses and immobilized by their emblematic format, Artemisia’s Judiths are armed with swords that cut, weapons they do not hesitate to use. And unlike the beautiful Susannas, Lucretias, and Cleopatras of men’s art, who wriggle seductively even in extremis, Artemisia’s nude heroines convincingly experience pain and emotional anguish.’’6 Garrard also observes that Artemisia inverts the female stereotypes; her supposedly evil characters ‘‘become heroic’’ and even her saintly characters ‘‘exude a meaty vitality.’’7 In her novel Banti takes liberties with the historical Artemisia while following the major events of her life: the early rape trial in which Artemisia, the fourteen-year-old victim, not Agostino Tasso the rapist, was made to appear the guilty party; the arranged marriage to Antonio Stiatessi and later separation from him; and the many years of painting and travel. In the novel, Banti makes Artemisia seem a more isolated figure by changing her artist husband into a peddler and reducing her two artist daughters to one daughter who detests art. It should also be noted that Banti had access to fewer of Artemisia’s paintings than are known today; several important works, some of which might have been useful or inspiring to Banti, have been attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi since the novel was written. Mainly emphasizing Artemisia’s emotional life, Banti

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does not dwell on the professional difficulties that the patronage system presented for all artists, particularly the rare woman artist. The historical Artemisia’s surviving letters to her patrons, probably dictated to a scribe, show her to be proud, forceful, and businesslike. She complains that male painters are treated better, and she demands a fair price for her work. Banti departs from the historical record in order to achieve her own artistic and thematic purposes. Drawing on the facts of Artemisia’s life, the novel presents her as an artist hero, but it also raises the question of how artistic achievements can be measured against the sacrifices they require and the losses that life inevitably brings. Artemisia suffers many losses, especially of her husband and father, as she struggles to create her art. Banti’s novel describes her own struggles as a writer as well as Artemisia’s as an artist. The opening third of the novel dramatizes the difficulty of crafting a portrait of a historical artist in fiction, using the known materials—historical records and the extant works—plus imagination to create the figure of a believable artistic personality. Anna Banti (the pen name of Lucia Lopresti) appears as a first-person voice in the novel, speaking to Artemisia and cajoling her to come to life. As the novel opens, the author—or rather, her first-person, unnamed persona—is seated in the Boboli gardens surrounded by refugees after the battle for the liberation of Florence in 1944. ‘‘Anna,’’ as she may be called, is grieving over the loss of a manuscript buried in the rubble of the battle, her unfinished first version of the book, which contained ‘‘my companion from three centuries ago who lay breathing gently on the hundred pages I had written’’ (4). As Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo points out in her afterword to the novel, the ‘‘intense dialogue between the author and the artist is thus further complicated by the intrusion of this character from the first version,’’ her own lost Artemisia (217). In the first part of the novel, ‘‘Anna’’ tries to recapture both her lost fictional Artemisia and the more remote historical artist. The author’s relationship to the painter is extraordinarily intimate, but at the same time Artemisia remains elusive and difficult to conjure up; ‘‘I carry Artemisia around with me in fragments,’’ ‘‘Anna’’ says (40). ‘‘Anna’’ sees herself as Artemisia’s storyteller, her spokesperson, and her witness for the defense. The dialogue between the artist and the painter, implicit in the novels of Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf, here becomes explicit, yet it is frustrating because the painter remains silent. Artemisia belongs to a world almost too remote to speak to ‘‘Anna,’’ but she is also silent in the

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sense that she lives most fully in the visual realm of art; she thinks of painting as the language that she speaks. After a difficult search, ‘‘Anna’’ finally conjures up Artemisia as a child in early seventeethcentury Rome. Having endured the horror of the rape trial, Artemisia begins to paint still lifes while living in virtual seclusion in her father’s house at the age of seventeen. (As a victim of rape she would be considered damaged goods, whereas the rapist seems to have gotten off with nothing more than the embarrassment of a trial.) Banti traces Artemisia’s move to Florence and her struggles to survive and to paint on her own. Although most of the embedded paintings in the novel are imaginary portraits, Banti makes notable use of two of the most famous of Artemisia’s actual paintings, her Judith and Holofernes described early in the novel and her self-portrait, described at the end. Although five autograph paintings of Judith by Artemisia have survived, the one Banti obviously has in mind is Judith Slaying Holofernes (c.1620) in the Ufizzi Gallery, the well-known painting in which a muscular, middle-aged, resolute Judith, assisted by her maidservant, strenuously decapitates a foreshortened Holofernes, blood spurting on her dress and seeming to drizzle out of the picture plane. The powerful Judith, the apocryphal Hebrew heroine who slays the Assyrian general to protect the Israelites, was very likely not a real person at all; no historical record exists of her or of Holofernes. Often taken as an allegorical figure for Israel, Judith had been painted many times, but Artemisia’s version was unprecedented. In her Judith, Garrard writes, ‘‘we witness an existential killing, with no heroes and no villains, a murder in the realm outside the law.’’8 The painting shocks, not only because of its violence but also because of the reversal of gender stereotypes in the remorseless, androgynous figure of Judith. Banti imaginatively recreates the scene where Artemisia works on this painting. In her version, the fictional Artemisia paints the beheading as an act of symbolic vengeance upon her rapist, but her motives are more complex than that. In the process of painting she attains a sense of control and perfected technique; this achievement allows her to speak ‘‘the language’’ of her father’s art and also to redeem ‘‘the young Artemisia desperate to be justified, to be avenged, to be in command’’ (46). Banti has Artemisia look into the mirror for the face of Judith, a plausible surmise. As she labors in her studio, five well-dressed women sit around gossiping and watching her finish the painting. Inventing the figure of Anastasio the

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Greek giant to serve as a model for Holofernes, Banti gives the scene a surprising twist when Artemisia glimpses the flash of a knife blade out of the corner of her eye. Inspired by the completed painting, the five visiting gossips are on the verge of attacking Anastasio with the knife. Artemisia screams at the model to put his clothes on and run for his life. This scene is grotesquely comical because of the break with decorum and the total lack of conscious motivation on the part of the women so ready to castrate or murder the gigantic male. This vignette allows Banti to show the subversiveness of the painting and its shock value. Because she cannot reproduce the painting in the novel, Banti provides a moment of black comedy to indicate how radical a work of art it is, nearly inspiring an act of mayhem. While the major struggle of Artemisia’s life is to gain recognition as a painter and praise from her father, who continually distances himself from her, she, like earlier fictional painters, experiences a conflict between art and love. In Banti’s version, the marriage to Antonio is a mere formality to save Artemisia’s reputation, but some time later she returns to him in Rome and spends a couple of years with him and his colorful extended family of pimps, thieves, and fake beggars. The brief interval with Antonio provides Artemisia some short-lived happiness. But unlike most of the works discussed earlier, Banti’s novel shows the conflict between art and Eros to be almost entirely an inward one, a struggle in Artemisia’s own tormented psyche between her restless ambition and her need for love. Antonio, a gentle, innocent fellow who makes his living as a peddler and trader, does not interfere with Artemisia’s work. She lives with him in a hovel, feeling delighted pleasure in belonging at last to someone. He brings her gifts from his trade. But then she receives the offer of a commission for several portraits which carries with it the use of a lavish apartment with a salon, a carriage, and a footman. As Artemisia packs up her portable easel and other belongings, she feels oddly victimized, as though she herself were the subject of injustice. She longs to reach out to Antonio with gestures of affection, but ‘‘it was like hearing heartrending music and not being able to follow it’’ (78). Although Antonio accompanies her to the new home, his sweet nature changes; he is unable to adapt to the lavish surroundings, becoming obtuse and sleeping apart from her. The victim of uncontrollable emotions of anger and spite that she does not understand, Artemisia drives him away with her bitter words, all the time hating herself for doing so.

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Artemisia’s painfully self-contradictory behavior may result from a deep-seated need to protect her artistic career from distractions, including the distraction of her love for Antonio. But also she behaves irrationally and feels oddly victimized in a situation where she has the upper hand because, as a woman artist of the seventeenth century, she cannot entirely comprehend the choices that she is making. For one thing, having learned to seize fortune as it comes, riding up and down with the good times and the bad as professional artists must do, she has little understanding of how totally the class system controls people like Antonio. The seemingly unambitious Antonio cannot rise out of his humble origins to play the role of Artemisia’s consort among the people of rank in her salon. More importantly, Artemisia also has no way of understanding the enormity of the feminist struggle that lies far in the future. Her need to command her own life makes her crazy and causes her to drive her husband away even though she loves him. The major incompatibilities between Artemisia’s artistic gift and the world she inhabits induce this craziness. Pregnant and alone at the age of thirty-three, Artemisia moves to Naples, where she paints portraits and teaches painting to women. When her daughter is born, Artemisia treats her much as she did her husband: inwardly storming with tormented maternal love, she remains outwardly cold to Porziella, who soon comes to prefer the convent school to her mother’s studio. (The cold mother-daughter relationship makes sense in terms of the character Banti has created, but the reader wonders what Banti might have done with the two real-life daughters, who were painters.) Not allowing her child to distract her and not allowing her love to show, Artemisia works to perfect her art, lamenting that she has no female mentor to follow: ‘‘In Naples there is no patron saint for a woman who is mistress of her art’’ (99). Her art expresses the anger and the half-conscious feminist ideas that she cannot express in words. Her style grows bolder; the men she paints are all armed in iron and steel, and she portrays women in glistening black, ‘‘all of them rushing towards the light as though to say, Hey there, blockheads’’ (101). Despite the aggressive nature of her art, Artemisia also possesses, like Lily Briscoe, a sensitivity to her surroundings, and she cleanses her vision by observing elements of the world of nature, ‘‘so blessedly outside herself, to feel them invade and instantly renew her, just as a beach is made clean and smooth again after the pounding of the waves’’ (103). When she is in her forties it comes as a blow to Artemisia to learn

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of the final loss of Antonio; ironically, he has made a lot of money, taken up with a new woman, and now asks to be released from the marriage. Although there is much that she fails to understand about her own emotional life, Artemisia does fully realize why she has been clinging to a dream of a reconciliation with Antonio. She thinks of the situation in painterly terms: ‘‘she never had been and never would be free of her lost husband, just as a figure can never escape from the landscape that surrounds it, relying on it . . . for air and sustenance’’ (143). The love she has sacrificed is to her artistic career as the ground is to the figure; it sustains her even in its absence. With nothing to hold her in Naples, Artemisia marries off her daughter and undertakes a long and adventurous journey to England, where her father has been painting for some years in the court of Charles I. The journey toward her father is fraught with anxious expectation and love; he has always been the person she has most longed for. Their reunion bitterly disappoints Artemisia; he is as remote from her as ever, and for reasons that she should understand. Deeply dedicated to his work even in old age, Orazio does not have time for love or the pain it can bring—like daughter, like father. And yet Artemisia finds vindication and even happiness in the moment when her father looks at her portfolio of mature paintings. As she holds them up one by one for his evident approval, it becomes a joy to her to realize that she and her father speak the same language: ‘‘one noble and secret language was spoken in an exchange of glances, a language that embraced the whole of the visible world over a long span of time, beyond the confines of human life, in an eternal fellowship of artists of which Orazio bore the mark and the wisdom’’ (183). In this moment Artemisia and Orazio share a mutual understanding that transcends all ‘‘the contingencies of age, sex and family ties’’ (183). Soon after, Orazio dies, and the story of Artemisia’s life trails off, as does the historical record. It is not known how or exactly when the historical Artemisia died, although she did return to Naples and painted much more before her death. But in the moment when Orazio and Artemisia gaze at her work, Banti has shown the juncture at which a woman successfully enters into a heroic fellowship of art. To speak of the language of art is, of course, metaphoric; for Artemisia its language is one in which the world is ‘‘translated into earths and glazes’’ (209). Like Woolf, Banti shows the world of art as a silent kingdom, one to be shared beyond contingent emotions and beyond words. Banti could not have known about the work which the historic

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Artemisia and her father collaborated on in the court of Charles I, an ornate ceiling in Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House at Greenwich entitled An Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown (1636–38), an ironic title given what was to happen to the crowned head in the next decade. Although their styles were by then quite different, Artemisia and her seventy-five-year-old father painted figures of the various Muses, working side by side.This work, Orazio’s last, was subsumed under his name, and the figures painted by Artemisia were not firmly attributed to her until after Banti wrote her novel. Had she known about the collaboration on the ceiling, Banti might well have used the incident as another instance of silent communication. Banti’s novel both does and does not possess a definitive ending; as in To the Lighthouse a both/and situation is presented in which some events offer closure while other events deny it. Artemisia’s journey as an artist seems complete in the moment she shares with her father, but then the story trails off. In her preface Banti refers to her ‘‘unfinished story’’ in a context that ambiguously could refer either to the lost manuscript or the present one. Banti denies closure and attempts to open up the end of the novel in a rather puzzling way. She ends with descriptions of Artemisia’s great work known as Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1630). Banti shows Artemisia painting the piece and then, once more stepping out of the frame of the fiction, ‘‘Anna’’ goes to England to view the painting at Kensington Palace. In the actual painting Artemisia portrays herself from a very oblique angle, almost in profile, a position that would have required the use of two mirrors. She is caught in the moment of beginning to paint on a blank canvas that has been primed in red. Her arms form a great arc, the brush poised in her right hand and palette in the left; it is a silent moment of intense drama and concentration. Mary Garrard demonstrates that although Artemisia is very much present in the painting she is also depicting herself as ‘‘Pittura,’’ the allegorical representation of painting, following a long and popular tradition of personifying the liberal arts as women.9 Garrard notes that Artemisia’s accouterments iconographically specify elements of the allegory: her gold chain with a mask pendant signifies imitation, her tousled hair symbolizes ‘‘the divine frenzy of the artistic temperament’’ and the shifting colors of her dress refer to the artist’s techniques.10 As a woman artist Artemisia was in a unique position in that she could combine a self-portrait with the allegorical representation of her art as female. Garrard also convincingly interprets the paint-

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ing as a unification of the material and intellectual aspects of art. Thus the painting ingeniously brings together in one image an example of the artist’s virtuosity, a realistic and dramatic depiction of herself in the process of conceiving and executing the work, and a representation of the idea (and ideal) of art itself. Banti’s treatment of this painting is puzzling. She interprets it, not as a self-portrait, but as the portrait of the young rival artist Annella de Rosa, whom Artemisia paints from memory as if from life; she begins to sketch and the form takes shape and becomes recognizable under her brush. In identifying the figure as the fictional Annella, Banti strengthens her feminist theme. Artemisia pays tribute to an artist whose career was all too brief: Annella was stabbed to death by a raging husband, her art stifled, a fate not unlike that of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. It is true that this painting was not quite so firmly established as a self-portrait in Banti’s time as it is today: various other images of Artemisia, similar in features, have subsequently come to light. But Banti wants it to be a portrait of a fellow artist mainly for thematic reasons: she wants Artemisia’s art to give heart to all creative women, including the author and presumably the reader. When ‘‘Anna’’ sees the portrait in England, however, she becomes more ambivalent about whether or not the subject is Annella: Whether it is a self-portrait or not, a woman who paints in sixteen hundred and forty is very courageous, and this counts for Annella and for at least a hundred others, right up to the present. ‘‘It counts for you too,’’ she concludes, by the light of a candle, in this room rendered gloomy by war, a short, sharp sound. A book has been closed, suddenly. (199)

Subsequent to this passage, which is ambivalent about the painting but appears to provide closure to Banti’s quest for the elusive artist, the novel ends: Orazio dies and Artemisia is left contemplating her own death. In making the picture a portrait of a fellow artist, Banti enhances her theme of female solidarity, but she loses plausibility. Artists in the seventeenth century did not usually work by drawing from memory or imagination; they used sitters or live models for any sort of figure painting. The real-life Artemisia complains in her letters about the cost of models. Moreover, in suggesting that the picture portrays another artist, Banti minimizes Artemisia’s grand achievement in the Self-Portrait. It stands as a proof of her virtuosity, showing

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mastery of the Caravaggesque style in a work of great realism, concentration, and focus. It displays a fusion of artist and art (done with hidden mirrors) and of the ideal and the real. The face she paints as the personification of the art of painting is not Annella’s or Everywoman’s; it is her own face. A bid for fame and glory is what inspired most self-portraits in the Renaissance. Volker Manuth points out that the revival of the notion of ‘‘individual glory’’ gradually carried over into the world of artists, and in particular the evolution of the self-portrait has to do with the artist’s ‘‘desire for improved professional standing.’’11 The historical Artemisia masterfully portrays herself as a master artist. Banti, in trying to universalize her feminist theme, negates the face and hand of the artist depicted in the embedded work. If Artemisia is so readily identified with Judith the destroyer, a somewhat more tenuous connection, why does Banti not connect her with the allegorical artist as well? That Banti doubts Artemisia’s presentation of herself seems particularly ironic in the light of Banti’s own self-portrayal; ‘‘Anna’’ has a strong presence in the novel as a writer deeply engaged in the project of finding and sustaining a vision of Artemisia. The novel ends with Artemisia in bed experiencing a visceral struggle between her new-found strength and the bodily pains and thoughts of death that suddenly arise in her: ‘‘She closed the curtains round the bed, extinguished the lamp. It was a while before she fell asleep: she had a bad night’’ (214). This ending is ambiguous: it is unclear whether Artemisia is simply experiencing loneliness and grief or whether she is undergoing the first twinges of a fatal disease. Banti is evidently deeply committed to a modernist aesthetic that insists upon indeterminacy and multifacetedness. She has in effect given the reader several alternative endings from which to choose: Artemisia’s reunion with her father (a strong completion of her emotional and artistic quest), the painting of the portrait supposedly of Annella (an opening out of the novel to aspiring women), the visit of ‘‘Anna’’ to the painting in England and the closing of a book (a definitive conclusion of the search for Artemisia), or the scene of Artemisia falling asleep (an ambiguous fade-out). These final events imply an underlying aesthetic principle of the unfinished in Banti’s novel. Iris Murdoch embraces the idea of the openness of a work of art in a somewhat different way. Like Virginia Woolf, she carried on a lifelong dialogue with the visual arts. Works of art figure prominently

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in many of her novels, although The Sandcastle is the only one of her twenty-six novels to feature a woman painter. Murdoch also explores aspects of aesthetics in her philosophical writings, but she does not write about aesthetics separately from metaphysics and morals because, as a Platonist of sorts, she sees them as intertwined aspects of one’s journey through life. Murdoch believes that a work of art is necessarily and almost by definition open to the world. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she writes that the ‘‘art object is a kind of illusion, a false unity, the product of a mortal man who cannot entirely dominate his subject matter and remove or transform contingent rubble and unclarified personal emotions and attitudes.’’12 Good art also relates to the psychology of the self, illuminating the lack of perfect wholeness in both the artist and the observer. Murdoch writes: We seek in art of all kinds for the comforting sense of a unified self, with organized emotions and fearless world-dominating intelligence, a complete experience in a limited whole. Yet good art mirrors not only the (illusory) unity of the self but its real disunity.13

Although Murdoch sees any object of art as necessarily imperfect in this way, she identifies the genre of the novel as the most obviously ‘‘open’’ art form. ‘‘The novel form,’’ she writes,‘‘frankly admits, indeed embraces, the instability of art and the invincible variety, contingency and scarcely communicable frightfulness of life.’’14 Rather like Virginia Woolf, Murdoch sees the arts and sciences and even everyday activities as ideally driven by love. But Murdoch describes that ideal universal love in Platonic terms, identifying it with Plato’s Eros, which she sometimes calls the Higher Eros, and which she defines as an orientation to the Good. In her version of the ideal ascent toward the universal Good, one is never to lose sight of the particular: ‘‘We do not lose the particular, it teaches us love, we understand it, we see it, as Plato’s carpenter sees the table, or Ce´zanne sees Mont Ste Victoire or the girl in the bed-sitter sees her potted plant or her cat.’’15 This special kind of seeing requires that one attend to the presence of the other—both terms are important to Murdoch’s thought—and such attention has as much to do with morality as with aesthetics. Obviously, to attend to the presence of the other would not be consistent with attempts to dominate. Murdoch’s view of the function of art is quite similar to the general aesthetic goals of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paint-

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ers of Northern Europe, as described by art historian Svetlana Alpers. Alpers points out that, with some exceptions, in Northern art the world, not the viewer, has priority. A painting, she argues, is not like a window, as in the Italian tradition, but more like a mirror or a map.16 Alpers offers Vermeer as the prime example. His paintings give multiple points of view through reflective surfaces while at the same time preserving the mystery of the subject. Alpers quotes Lawrence Gowing on Vermeer: Vermeer’s work tells us that ‘‘however an artist love the world, however seize on it, in truth he can never make it his own.’’17 Alpers adds that Vermeer celebrates presences rather than grasping meanings.18 In her philosophical writings, then, Murdoch’s view of the nature and purpose of art is closer to the Northern than to the Italian tradition: since art cannot take command of the world, it should celebrate the mysterious presences of things. Because it is always open to the world in this fashion, any work of art is by its nature unfinished. The borderline separating art from reality is arbitrary and subject to seepage. Before examining the ways in which the embedded works of art in The Sandcastle embody this idea of the openness of art, it should be noted that the plot of the novel serves the same purpose as the paintings. Murdoch’s plot, as in all of her twenty-six novels, acts as a mechanism to reveal character. Since Rain Carter’s paintings are all portraits of characters in the novel, they offer us a second point of view on those characters. Murdoch also tells love stories in all of her novels, not only because of the broad appeal of such stories but because she sees love as a great irrational and irresistible catalyst, a disrupter of the status quo. Love produces powerful, psychologically interesting emotions and often confronts the lover with the necessity of making a moral choice when that person is not in the best state of mind to choose wisely. In Murdoch’s novels, love usually leads to complicated tests of character. In The Sandcastle, when the married schoolmaster Bill Mor falls in love with Rain Carter, he faces an anguished choice between love and duty; Rain faces an equally anguished choice between art and love. Rain and Mor’s affair begins in a comic way as events slide out of control. Mor lives in a row of identical semidetached houses in ‘‘conjugal boredom’’ with his wife Nan, a demonic version of the Angel in the House. A 1950s homemaker with few friends and no occupation but housework, Nan, a woman of iron will, devotes herself to the total domination of her husband. She heaps scorn upon Mor’s dream of leaving his teaching post and running for a seat in

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Parliament. When Mor meets the painter Rain, who arrives to paint the retired headmaster Demoyte, he is intrigued by her youth, her childlike smallness, her fierce dedication to her profession, and her wild spontaneity. In a very funny scene, Mor goes on what seems like an innocent spin with Rain in her auto, they turn toward a river on a dirt road, manage to mire the car on the riverbank, and then, thanks to their efforts to free it, the car plunges into the river and overturns. Afterward, Mor writes a letter to Rain explaining why he does not intend to reveal this event to his wife. Mor’s children’s discovery of this letter leads them to believe that he is engaged in an illicit affair before it actually happens, and the children work in secret to keep their family intact. Rain comes to represent to Mor all that is absent from his life: art, spontaneity, nature, and the allure of the warm south—she has lived most of her life on the coast of southern France. His passion for her develops almost unconsciously at first, but he becomes painfully conscious of it when he sees her on top of a ladder dressed in flowing sea-green silk posing for a drawing class at the school. Rain at once intuits his feelings, and she calls his name softly before running off. It is ironic that the acknowledgment of their love occurs at a moment when Rain has surrendered her role as painter to become instead a subject of art, with all gazes upon her, a moment reminiscent of the similar reversal in Emma. For her part, Rain had earlier fallen in love with Mor as, like Avis, she sat sketching him. It is evident that this new-found passion for Mor does her art no good, for she draws him as younger and more handsome than he is. Although both Rain and Mor struggle against their feelings, they end up spending a rather innocent romantic night together at Mor’s house, only to have Nan discover them when she unexpectedly returns from the seashore in the morning. Although the attraction between Rain and Mor seems genuine— she opens a new world to him, and he offers her her first real love—a variety of forces conspire against them, and the events that follow raise issues having to do with the uses of power and with moral choice. Nan is the most willful of the characters in the novel, and in the face of a threat to her marriage and family, she becomes the Avenging Angel in the House. Nan wreaks vengeance upon Rain and upon the incipient affair by means of an after-dinner speech, delivered on the occasion of the dedication of the portrait. In the speech Nan unexpectedly announces that Mor will be running for Parliament in the fall, a possibility that he never mentioned to Rain.

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Rain is crushed that Mor could have made any plans that did not include both of them, and she virtually gives up on Mor at that point. Although Nan’s fierce desire to hold her family together may seem to put her morally in the right, Murdoch’s moral philosophy, like her aesthetics, views such attempts to dominate the other as misguided; the end does not justify the means. The Sandcastle offers variations on the uses of power. Whereas Nan achieves dominance over her husband by sheer determination and force of will, losing it for a time but regaining it at the end of the novel, her children, especially her daughter Felicity, try to control events through magic. In an attempt to exorcise Rain from their family, Felicity performs an elaborate ritual involving herbs, Tarot cards, and a kind of voodoo. Felicity evidently unleashes a real force, for their father’s affair does end after the crisis of his son’s nearly falling from the school’s tower, an event that pulls Mor back into the family circle. Felicity resembles her enemy Rain: she is highly imaginative, creative, and spontaneous. But her magic, though thrillingly dangerous, constitutes a lower form of creativity than art. Magic seeks to dominate: it wants to affect the future and order events rather than to attend to the presences in the world, but it is just the attention to and celebration of presences that, according to Murdoch, is the true power of art. The most important forces opposing the romance of Mor and Rain, however, are internal psychological factors, and it is here that the incompatibility of art and romance becomes evident. The eccentric art master Bledyard tries to warn Mor to stay away from Rain, citing the damage to his family but also adding, ‘‘A painter can only paint what he is. You will prevent her from being a great painter.’’19 Mor is wildly enraged by these words, probably because he sees some truth in them. At the dinner where Nan makes her startling announcement that Mor plans to run for Parliament as a Labour candidate, Mor misses his one opportunity to go to Rain and explain himself: ‘‘A lifetime of conformity was too much for him. He stayed where he was’’ (294). Although Mor’s lack of action at this moment may seem morally right with regard to his family, it feels like a defeat. If Mor is finally so rooted in conformity as not to seize the love offered, he probably would have been a detriment to Rain’s art. Also, he is haunted by the question of whether Rain might be looking for a father substitute. This is a plausible suspicion, since Rain, an only child whose mother died when she was very young, is grieving for her father, who has recently died and to whom she was ex-

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traordinarily close. Rain says that she cannot remember a time when she was not painting with her father, an acclaimed artist, standing at her side. Although Rain is a sophisticated professional painter, she has remained emotionally and romantically inexperienced; her jealous father kept all suitors at bay. Although her feelings for Mor appear genuine and powerful, she is also lonely, vulnerable, and bereaved. Given the intensity of her relationship to the late Spencer Carter, it seems likely that she unconsciously sees Mor as a father figure. Like Artemisia, Rain is attached to her father through her art; her style is so similar to his that Mor cannot tell them apart at an exhibition. Her father has imparted to her both his theory and techniques of portrait painting. When she begins to work on the portrait of Demoyte, she hears her father’s voice speaking to her saying, ‘‘Don’t forget that a portrait must have depth, mass, and decorative qualities. Don’t be so fascinated by the head, or by the space, that you forget that a canvas is also a flat surface with edges which touch the frame. Part of your task is to cover that surface with a pattern’’ (103). Her father’s recollected advice on the handling of figure and ground helps her to get started. The tension that she is aware of between pattern and representation—or, to put it differently, between the painting’s decorative and representational qualities—is somewhat similar to Lilys Briscoe’s tension of butterfly and cathedral arch. Rain needs to discover a motif that, when repeated, will create a pattern in the portrait. She finds her motif in a certain recurrent curve in the old man’s wrinkled face, and this curve, very small and frequently repeated in his lips, nose, and forehead, serves to reveal his character, the point where ‘‘the amusement was merged into tolerance and the sarcasm into sadness’’ (103). Early on in the process, then, Rain discovers a way to fuse representation and pattern. Rain must also find a way to unite figure and ground. For part of the background she will paint the Gothic tower of the school beyond the window, but another part of the background consists of a rich golden hanging rug in Demoyte’s collection of valuable rugs. The rug repeats the curve motif from the face and also shows Demoyte’s aesthetic sensibility, his passion for the ornate patterns of his collection. Like Matisse and other modernists as well as many recent women painters, Rain incorporates decorative art into her painting, blurring the supposed distinction between decorative art and ‘‘high’’ art. She worries that the motif she has chosen may seem too

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sweet but relies upon the strength and mass of the old man’s head to counteract that sweetness. Thus, as with Lily Briscoe’s painting, the work of art that begins to emerge is the result of much questioning, and the tensions that have tugged at the painter will be evident in the finished work: representation versus pattern, figure versus ground, strength versus sweetness. Even though Rain’s father has provided entree into the world of art, and she has already achieved recognition, including an exhibit in London, she has to make extra efforts to establish her credentials because she is a woman. Even Demoyte, referring to her diminutive size, repeats the stale joke about a performing animal, though not in her presence: ‘‘She’s rather like a clown or a performing dog—in fact, very like a performing dog, with a pretty jacket on and a bow on its tail, so anxious to please’’ (199). One recalls that Avis’s father called her ‘‘a monkey playing tunes on a hand organ’’ but then sent her to Europe to study art. The crusty old Demoyte, seeing and secretly approving Mor’s attraction to Rain, is only teasing. Demoyte is, in fact, a closet feminist who even offers to pay Mor’s daughter’s college tuition so that she can have an education equal to her brother’s. Rain also takes pains to establish her credentials with Mor. Alone with him in the art room of the school, she suddenly twirls on her heels, picks up a brush full of red paint, and in the blink of an eye draws a nearly perfect circle on a sheet of white paper. She then mentions to Mor the story of Giotto’s having painted a perfect circle. The story to which Rain alludes, in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, describes how a courtier came to Giotto from the Pope asking for a sample of his work so that he could compete for important commissions in Rome. Taking a sheet of paper and a brush dipped in red, Giotto supposedly drew an absolutely perfect circle with a swift twist of the hand. Although other artists sent drawings to the Pope, Giotto got the commission for paintings in St. Peter’s on the basis of his circle, according to Vasari.20 Rain says that the story impressed her as a child, and ‘‘I used to practice it, as if it were a guarantee of success’’ (50). Perhaps even as a child Rain intuited that she would need a trick or two to establish her right to practice her art; what could be better than a show of virtuosity that also alludes to the great Renaissance tradition that, in a sense, began with Giotto? It may seem surprising that Murdoch represents art here as a closed circle, since the broken circle is her figure for the true nature of art, its openness. But Murdoch never denies that a work of art creates the

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illusion of wholeness and closure, and Rain’s circle is, after all, not quite perfect. The discussions about art in The Sandcastle emphasize the unique qualities of portrait painting as a genre and also underscore the idea of the openness of art. Even before she begins the painting Rain stresses that a portrait is a result of the artist’s vision and not a simple reproduction of what the artist sees: Where the human face is concerned, we interpret what we see more immediately and more profoundly than any other object. A person looks different when we know him—he may even look different as soon as we know one particular thing about him. (45)

Rain believes that in order to create an authentic portrait of Demoyte she must come to understand his inner nature. She engages in a debate with the art master Bledyard, who, evidently more of a theorist than a painter, presents a radical and self-parodying version of Murdoch’s own idea of presences. Bledyard says, ‘‘when we are in the presence of another human being, we are not confronted by an object . . . We are confronted by God’’ (76). A religious man, Bledyard insists that in order to paint a portrait one should be a saint, and saints do not have time to paint. Bledyard is a kind of holy fool. His annual lecture to the school is regarded as a joke because of his tautologies and his stammer, and yet during the lecture Bledyard endearingly falls into silent bewilderment when he stands before a slide of a Rembrandt self-portrait, probably the famous Self Portrait with Two Circles at Kenwood House. He simply acknowledges the painting’s presence and greatness with his silence. And despite Bledyard’s intellectual eccentricities, he will later provide the most telling and useful criticism of Rain’s portrait. Rain and Bledyard agree that ‘‘every portrait is a self-portrait.’’ Rain says, ‘‘In portraying you I portray myself ’’ (106). Rain is, of course, not the first to assert such a hypothesis. An Italian adage going back to the fifteenth century says, ‘‘Ogni pittore dipinge se’’ (every painter paints himself ).21 Rain argues that there is a somatic basis for this hypothesis: ‘‘we feel our own face, as the three-dimensional mass, from within—and when we try in a painting to realize what another person’s face is, we come back to the experience of our own’’ (107). If the artist’s rendering of the subject’s face inevitably contains some element of self-portraiture, as Rain insists, then that is another way in which the work of art is open to the external

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world, not self-contained. As Wallace Stevens writes about an imaginary portrait in his poem ‘‘So-and-so Reclining on her Couch,’’ ‘‘She is half who made her.’’22 When Rain displays the nearly finished portrait of Demoyte, Mor finds it extraordinarily good. He feels that he is really seeing the man for the first time, seeing him as he looks when he is alone, his massive head emerging forcefully from the decorative background. Bledyard insists, however, that although the painting is good, it is ‘‘too beautiful.’’ It reveals Demoyte’s character but not his mortality, and the head is not seen as a conjunction of masses (169). Rain readily agrees with these criticisms. There is no better evidence of Mor’s deleterious effect upon her work than the fact that she is tempted to leave the painting as it is when she becomes involved with Mor. It is only after the dedication dinner and their subsequent break-up that Mor finds her seated on a ladder in her flowing, paintspattered evening gown, tearfully reworking the painting. This scene echoes and reverses the one in which he revealed his love to her as she posed on a ladder as a model; here, the love is defeated but she is back in control of the artistic process. She tells him that she realizes that she can paint wherever she goes, but that wandering would be no life for him. She admits that the death of her father may have driven her into the romance, and she sends Mor away so that she can work. Mor does not see the finished painting until after Rain has departed in the night, leaving it as her final statement. Demoyte’s head is now shown as more solid, uglier, with the expression emerging from within the depths of the face rather than from the surface details. The other embedded paintings in the novel are Rain’s French works, which she and Mor view along with works by her father in a London gallery at a time when their love seems possible. These paintings show the openness of her art, but they also exclude Mor by depicting her private world, a world that he could never inhabit: Almost all were either pictures of the house, or of the landscape near it, or self-portraits, or portraits of each other, by the father and daughter. . . . Mor looked with bewilderment and a kind of deeply pleasurable distress upon this vivid southern world, where the sun scattered the sea at noon-day with jagged and dazzling patches of light, or drew it upward limpidly light blue into the sky at morning, where the white house with the patchy plaster walls was stunned and dry at noon, or shimmering with life in the granulous air of the evening, as it looked one way into

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the sea, and the other way across the dusty flowers and into the mountains. (240)

The serial paintings of the house from different sides and at different times of day provide a variety of angles and points of view upon the world of Rain and her father, suggesting an aesthetic of the unfinished. Rain’s house stands on the edge of land and sea: her position is liminal like that of other artists. To Mor, who had not even realized that Rain had inherited a house, the paintings come as a revelation. He sees her true home, which is also both her subject matter and her studio, as mysterious and multifaceted. The dazzling, shimmering light of the sun, reflected off the sea and the white plaster walls of the house, illuminates her world, making her vision of it seem numinous. One is reminded of the radiance of Lily’s painting and of Virginia Woolf ’s rhetorical question, ‘‘How can I bring the sun on to my page?’’ When Mor asks Rain if there is a path to the house, she replies, ‘‘No, you have to push your way through’’ (239). Rain’s house excludes Mor, not because it belongs to the sunny world of France, but because it belongs to the silent kingdom of art, where he has no place. The paintings reveal what means most to her, and in doing so they foreshadow the end of their romance. The exhibit also includes a self-portrait Rain painted when she was nineteen, showing her leaning over the keyboard of a piano: ‘‘out of a haze of colour her presence emerged with great vividness, bathed in the light and atmosphere of a southern room’’ (238). The self-portrait highlights Rain’s presence, but it also, like Artemisia’s, establishes her credentials as an artist. Another portrait, which Rain did of her father, shows him also surrounded by light, or haloed from behind, as he stands in a doorway wearing a casual white suit, his face in shadow, the brilliant expanse of the sea behind him. He seems mysterious and godlike, the man who occupied the threshold of her world. The last of Rain’s pictures that Mor looks at is complicated and revealing. It is a large canvas, depicting Rain’s father sitting behind a table covered with books and papers. Next to him on the table is a big, gilt-framed mirror that reflects Rain at work on the painting and a foreshortened version of the painting itself. The use of a mirror in a painting reflecting the artist or some aspect of the real world is, of course, an old device, famously employed by Jan Van Eyck in Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami (1434) and by other artists over the centuries. The artist in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye

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frequently paints such mirror images. Whatever else the use of the mirror does in a painting, it opens the painting to the world beyond itself. In this case the world of the painting opens into the illusory ‘‘real’’ world of the novel, defying the border between the arts. The painting also reveals extreme intimacy between the father and daughter, since her reflected face is very close to his as they gaze intently and silently upon each other. At the same time, the mystery of the subject is preserved. The painting is technically open to the world, via the mirror, but emotionally closed to Mor or anyone else, as the viewer observes the totally private world of father and daughter artist. The circle is both broken and unbroken. In both Artemisia and The Sandcastle there exists a conundrum, virtually a paradox, in that although the father and daughter share a secret world of art—hermetic, exclusive—their art is also open to the world in the ways that have been illustrated. Lily Briscoe’s work also exhibited this mysteriousness. Perhaps all representational art shares some of this double nature, offering a glimpse of the artist’s seemingly exclusive private vision, which, as Murdoch says, due to ‘‘contingency and the muddled nature of the world’’ can never be wholly self-contained. Portrait painting and figure painting in particular look both inward and outward, revealing the artist’s version of a human presence that, although it contains something of the artist’s presence, is by its nature mysterious and not her own. Both novels also embody a story of near-mythic proportions in which the father provides an entrance, ‘‘gives birth,’’ to the daughter artist, leading her into the mainstream of artistic tradition—a tradition that he represents. Absurdly counterfactual as the notion of a father giving birth is, that story line has considerable currency in Western civilization via the myth in Genesis as well as the birth of Athena. The daughter later discovers that her newly launched career as an artist is not compatible with romantic love. Then the father artist dies. In Banti’s version—although not historically— Artemisia seems defeated by his death and ready to die herself. Artemisia’s defeat in Banti’s novel may be a reflection of ‘‘Anna’s’’ distress at the defeated and war-torn world around her. Banti does, however, express hope and encouragement for women artists who will come in the future. Rain Carter, on the other hand, seeks a father-substitute in her lover, only to realize sadly but wisely that she must continue on her own. The novel does not end with a Joycean epiphany—in fact it ends with Felicity sobbing helplessly about all that has occurred—but Rain exits the novel and is released into the

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world as a solitary figure: young, independent, talented, rooted in her home but free to wander and to paint. To have a studio of one’s own but also to be free to roam, to be both rooted and errant, may be the ideal condition for an artist, but it is difficult for a woman to achieve. To attain that freedom both Artemisia and Rain pay the price of their isolation in a world dominated by male artists, whether it be in the seventeenth or the twentieth century. In creating a fictional portrait of a portrait painter, the novelist inevitably reflects herself in the subject, as does the painter. What Banti portrays in Artemisia is a hero, a femme forte, like the women she paints, but one who is tormented inwardly and who stifles love for the sake of her art. Art is the silent ‘‘language’’ in which she expresses herself and also enters into dialogue with other artists through the ages. Rain is a deeply serious artist, one who is attentive, like all good artists, to particulars like the rug in the background but also intent upon searching for the deeper meaning of character, the presence of the human figure. And like Lily Briscoe, Rain takes risks with her art; even when her work seems finished she bravely alters it in order to accommodate a finer truth. Paintings were deeply inspiring to Murdoch when she wrote her novels, but her immediate response to a great painting was silence— like Bledyard’s silence. In Elegy for Iris, John Bayley records that on their honeymoon she was greatly impressed by seeing Piero della Francesca’s fresco Resurrection with its powerful expressionless Christ striding from the tomb. Bayley writes, ‘‘I knew the real impression it had made on her lay below the level of speech, like the iceberg below the water. The god whose own physical strength and dark force of being seemed to be impelling him out of the tomb would inspire in the future many visions and creations of her own.’’23 On that occasion Bayley complimented Murdoch on the way she brought the world of art into her novels, and she rather hyperbolically replied, ‘‘You’re right. They’re all just pictures really.’’24 Great paintings seemed to keep Murdoch mindful of the deep power of visual art to penetrate the consciousness directly, beyond words. ‘‘To be mute about pictures,’’ Bayley writes, ‘‘was her way of paying them homage.’’25 Like Rain and Artemisia, Murdoch found her own way of entering into the great mainstream of art. From the master painter Piero and his seemingly self-resurrected god, Murdoch tapped into a source of power helping her to create fictions of her own. By embedding real and fictional paintings in her novels, she carried her fiction, like Woolf ’s, close to that ‘‘sunny margin’’ between fiction and the silent kingdom of art, with its direct illuminations.

5 Painters of the Irish Coast: Jennifer Johnston and Deirdre Madden This image of a critically positioned figure, a figure who is neither here nor there, at some notional interface, may be traced back . . . to some deep-seated sense of liminality that was, and is, central to the Irish psyche. —Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I

AT THE BEGINNING OF JENNIFER JOHNSTON’S NOVEL THE RAILWAY STATION

Man (1984) the painter Helen Cuffe is staring at a word in the Oxford English Dictionary: Isolation Such a grandiose word. Insulation There was the connection in the dictionary staring me in the eye. [To] place alone or apart; to cause to stand alone; separate, detached, or unconnected with other things or persons; to insulate.1

The first thing the reader learns about Helen is that she is isolated: her studio is a shed with a wall of windows facing the Atlantic Ocean, a situation that offers a view of the sea and invites her to turn her back upon the land. Like Artemisia Gentileschi and Rain Carter, Helen has learned that isolation is the price she must pay for her art; ironically, however, this isolation affords her no insulation from the violence of Irish political life. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that Jennifer Johnston’s novel and Deirdre Madden’s Nothing is Black (1994) both have as their central characters single women artists of very modest means living alone in isolated cottages and painting on the seacoast in Donegal. Both artists are aspiring professionals preparing for exhibitions, and both find inspiration in the bleakly beautiful seashore setting. Helen lives near a broad bay between a bare 132

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stony headland and a sandy spit, a vista of dunes, rocks, and sparse bushes. Madden’s protagonist Claire (no surname) lives in a small rented stone house that stands on a headland at the end of a road, with hills rising steeply behind it. Claire thinks that to appreciate the bleak magnificence of the Donegal coast requires a special way of seeing. Because of the Atlantic winds, the landscape is always in motion, and ‘‘she liked the colours, not bright, but often vivid, with the contrasts of the low, soft plants against stone.’’2 These fictional painters subsist liminally in a literal sense, living on the periphery of a nation, and in a metaphoric sense, as in Carolyn Heilbrun’s description of creative women existing in a liminal state psychologically and culturally. Helen explains to her lover Roger, ‘‘I like to live on the edge of things’’ (113). The two artists’ sense of living on the edge and their intense awareness of place are not entirely a result of their gender, however; these feelings are echoed everywhere in Irish poetry and fiction. The seashore is a prominent setting in Irish literature: the seas that surround Ireland are drenched in symbolism and historical association.The sea is a path of conquerors and oppressors; a means of escape or forced exile, especially during the famine and Diaspora; and a dwelling place of fairies and Celtic gods. Yeats, Singe, Joyce, and other writers have built in Irish literature an edifice of metaphors describing the sea as the birth mother of thought and speech, the dwelling place of the supernatural, the setting of fervent meditation, and the pathway to death. Johnston and Madden subtly allude to this history of sea symbolism. The artists they portray both collect bits and pieces of things washed up by the sea or found on the beach. Helen draws in her sketchbook ‘‘stones, sand, wings, claws, beaks, sea, an arm, a leg, movement, stillness,’’ which she will later piece together, she hopes, in her paintings (106). Claire collects shards and other sea wrack, and she takes comfort in contemplating the sea with its ‘‘ancient waves crashing over the detritus of centuries: broken ships, coins, bones, weapons’’ (113). In both novels, the sea serves as an implicit trope for the long, tragic history of Ireland and for the fragmentation and disintegration of things brought about by violence or by time’s wasting. To piece together the fragments is a daunting challenge for the Irish artist. This pervasive sense of fragmentation is a major theme in the history of a nation brutally conquered, long oppressed, riddled with fractious warring parties, and partitioned into two separate and unequal realms, with the North further divided in brutal and senseless

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violence. Much of Ireland’s astonishingly rich literary achievement is driven by this awareness of endless strife and division, along with an aching hunger for wholeness and healing. Johnston and Madden both portray this fragmentation in the nation and in the heart. The Railway Station Man depicts art as an enterprise that has the good intention of restoring or renewing Ireland’s broken people and places, a result that it can achieve only as a symbolic gesture, since painting has no effect upon the violence. Nothing is Black depicts art as an arduous process of connecting and of reconciling the world to the heart’s affections, a procedure that Madden represents as synecdochic. The artist Claire paints fragments and tries to make them point toward a whole; most notably, her paintings of anatomical systems are meant to suggest the possibility of a whole body. Both series of works, Claire’s anatomical paintings and Helen’s paintings of a man gradually disappearing on the beach, speak silently of something beyond themselves. Claire’s paintings of bones and muscles suggest a process of integration, whereas Helen’s disappearing man quietly shows the historical destruction—the disappearing and ‘‘disappeared’’ men of Ireland. Almost, it seems, out of historical necessity, the embedded paintings in both novels express the idea of the unfinished. Johnston and Madden’s fictional painters also have in common a clear-eyed realism, verging on cynicism, which is a familiar trait in works by Irish women writers, induced, most likely, by the difficulties of Irish life for women. Although images of powerful women abound in Irish literature, folklore, and legend, these figures may well be, if anything, a hindrance to contemporary Irish woman writers, suffused as they are with a long history of political symbolism. At the beginning of her memoir Mother Ireland, Edna O’Brien sardonically describes this literary heritage: Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare.3

A serious writer like O’Brien might well feel rueful at having inherited such a burden of female symbolism, much of it expressed in demeaning terms that derive from Ireland’s long subservient status. In a country that has until recent times discriminated against women as much as any nation in Europe, it would be difficult for a

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woman writer to take such images seriously or to want to perpetuate them. Instead, Irish women writers have attempted boldly to lay claim to Irish literary traditions by giving them a feminist twist. Johnston and Madden portray their protagonists as strong individuals, resistant to any effort to see them as symbols. When she begins to paint, Johnston’s character Helen Cuffe is about fifty years old and fiercely independent. Her husband, a teacher, was shot by accident in Derry when IRA assassins mistook him for a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Ironically, this event liberates Helen: no longer having to serve as a good housekeeper, she revives her earlier interest in art. Like Woolf, Atwood, and others, Johnston depicts an artist who is middle-aged, a time of life when women are more likely to be free to explore their creativity and also likely to have interesting memories which the novelist can draw upon. Helen Cuffe is a witness to not one but two gruesome events. Having earlier lost her husband to the senseless violence, she loses her son and her lover in the same way in the course of the novel, left at the end with nothing but her art and a gentle young friend Damien, who serves as her handyman and model. The Railway Station Man is a tragic novel that takes its shape from an all too familiar pattern of Irish life: the characters go about their day-to-day activities—falling in love, pursuing creative projects in an illusion of normalcy—only to have their lives interrupted by a deadly explosion that blows their world to pieces. Johnston has achieved mastery of the genre of the short tragic novel in works like How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974), set during World War I, and Shadows on Our Skin (1978), set in Derry during the Troubles, both of which foreshadow the themes of violence and betrayal in The Railway Station Man. The plot of the The Railway Station Man parallels Helen’s series of paintings Man on the Beach, showing a young man gradually disappearing. This series becomes part of her first exhibit in Dublin, which occurs before the book’s prologue but after the main action of the novel, encircling the events. Helen’s new-found British lover Roger Hawthorne, a wreck of a man shot all to pieces in World War II, is an eccentric who restores rural railway stations to working order in places where they will never be used again. Ironically, this man of missing parts, who lost both an arm and an eye in the war, tries to restore now-useless segments of a nonfunctioning system of transportation. Johnston’s novel is, in part, about a dysfunctional nation filled with broken connections: the telephone for example,

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hardly ever works when Helen’s son calls from Dublin. Roger’s ‘‘mad’’ reconstructions parallel Helen’s paintings as actions opposing the disintegration caused by war and politics. Despite their compatible temperaments, however, Helen refuses Roger’s offer of marriage because of her need for her own space to live and paint in. Helen’s son Jack, an aimless and misguided university student, becomes involved in a secret paramilitary splinter group. During an attempt to hide munitions in an empty shed at Roger’s railway station, Jack causes an auto crash and a subsequent explosion that kills Jack, Roger, and two lorry drivers who were transporting the bombs. The immediate cause of this senseless tragedy is Jack’s overreaction to seeing his mother naked with Roger on a couch. In the end Helen is left only with young Damien, the simple craftsman who becomes a kind of substitute son, the other men in her life having disappeared like the man in her serial paintings. The plot of The Railway Station Man is a variation on a persistent thematic pattern that Elizabeth Butler Cunningford has discovered in Irish drama and film, stretching from nineteenth-century plays to several films such as Ryan’s Daughter and The Crying Game. In this pattern, a decent British military type comes to Ireland, usually with goodwill toward the Irish, and a love triangle develops among the Briton, an Irish woman, and an Irish man of strongly patriotic if not radical political leanings. Notable plays that follow this pattern include George Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Brian Friel’s Translations, and others. Invariably the British soldier comes to grief; usually he is killed. The ‘‘Stage Englishman,’’ Cullingford writes, ‘‘is doomed as well as beloved. Blown up on the beach, ‘disappeared’ in the borderlands, suffocated in a cupboard, or squashed by a Saracen, the British soldier in Ireland no longer heads for a happy ending.’’4 This pattern offers a potent mixture of political and erotic possibilities. As in Brian Friel’s Translations, the love affair between the Englishman and the Irish woman, dangerous as it may be, initially suggests the idea of a rapprochement between the two nations. The violent death of the Englishman, however, dramatizes Irish resentment and resistance. The Railway Station Man offers a variation on the pattern: the radical patriot who is a rival for Helen’s attentions is her son rather than a rival lover, but Jack’s Oedipal horror at his mother’s affair confirms the pattern. Johnston’s treatment of the intertwined themes of politics and love, then, follows a well-established motif. In this instance the

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outcome seems fated though senseless: any attempt to love the warscarred, ‘‘mad’’ Englishman is doomed by Ireland’s secret violence. Although the The Railway Station Man deals with the incompatibility of love and politics, its most prominent subject is the opposition of politics and art—a Yeatsean theme, one that creates the tensions in many of his greatest poems. Yeats was continually torn between the life of creativity, art, and contemplation on the one hand and the life of action and politics on the other. Jennifer Johnston uses intertextual references to Yeats to develop her theme of art versus politics. As Jack Cuffe and his coconspirator Manus, a far more radical revolutionary and a socialist, pass the Drumcliff churchyard in a stealthy caravan with their truckload of bombs, Jack begins to recite Yeats’s poem ‘‘Under Ben Bulben,’’ remembered from his school days. Manus responds contemptuously, and a telling dialogue ensues: ‘‘To hell with Yeats.’’ ‘‘Cast a cold eye. . . .’’ ‘‘All poets.’’ ‘‘On life, on death. Horseman. . . .’’ ‘‘The Russians have it right.’’ ‘‘. . . pass by.’’ ‘‘Prison is the place for poets.’’ (122)

It is ironic that in casting a cold eye on poetry even as he passes by Yeats’s grave site, Manus the revolutionary is in a sense doing what Yeats’s epitaph bids him to do. A ‘‘horseman’’—that is, a man of action—he bypasses the arts. Jack has a slightly greater respect for Yeats’s poety—at least he repeats the poem by heart—but his true lack of sympathy for the arts becomes evident when he rudely says of his mother’s painting, ‘‘I presume this is some sort of menopausal madness’’ (127). Helen thinks of Yeats’s poignant lyric ‘‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’’ just as she is beginning to fall in love with Roger, but the Yeats poem that most sheds light upon the role of art in Johnston’s novel is not directly alluded to in the text. That poem is ‘‘Lapis Lazuli,’’ Yeats’s eloquent defense of the fine arts in response to the challenge of activist women who insist that in the face of the threat of war in 1938 all must turn away from art and take action. Referring to all of the arts—drama, sculpture, music—and combining the arts in the single defining image of the ancient Chinese carving in lapis

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lazuli, Yeats concedes that works of art, like everything, are ephemeral. Mentioning the exquisite sculptures of Callimachus that lasted only briefly, Yeats nonetheless insists that it is better to be among the party of artists and builders than among those who aid in bringing civilizations to rack. All things fall to ruin and must be rebuilt, but it is the builders who experience joy. Johnston’s implied view of art is similar to Yeats’s: art serves as a counterbalance to the present terrors as well as to the nightmare of history. When Jack accuses his mother of refusing to assert political opinions and trying to avoid the subject of politics altogether, she becomes evasive: ‘‘Well . . . politics perhaps . . . I’d rather not . . . be forced to make judgments.’’ Jack laughed sharply. ‘‘One day, mother, your ivory tower will fall down. Then where will you be? Then you’ll have to ask questions . . . answer questions . . . draw conclusions.’’ ‘‘If my ivory tower, as you call it, falls down, I’ll build another one.’’ (135)

Although Johnston presents both sides of the debate, she clearly favors Helen, who sees herself as belonging to the party of builders as opposed to those who, like Jack, cause things to fall to ruin. In the novel’s prologue, Helen describes the restoration and fall of Roger’s railway station: Brambles and scutch had grown up on the permanent way and the platforms were covered with thick grass and weeds. That was until the Englishman bought it about three years ago and he and Damien restored and refurbished it until you would never have known that it had suffered nearly forty year’s neglect. It is now derelict again and the weeds are beginning to take over once more. The engine shed by the level crossing was almost demolished when the explosion happened. . . . No one has bothered to rebuild, or even shift the rubble, nor I suppose, will they ever. . . . The buildings stand there, and will presumably continue to stand there until they fall down, as a derelict memorial to the deaths of four men. (3)

The slow ruination, the painstaking rebuilding, and the violent demolition of Roger’s railway station exemplify the process of building and falling that Yeats illustrates in ‘‘Lapis Lazuli.’’ As an artist, Helen is one of the builders. In the course of the

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novel she makes a gradual transition from the housewife that she was to the serious painter that she is to become; the slow flowering of her creativity counterbalances the violent, destructive path that Jack and Manus pursue. Helen’s art is at first rather tentative, her ambitions modest. She paints some pastoral landscapes in watercolor which she offers for sale at a local jumble sale along with various cast-off items donated by housewives of the village. Roger, whom she has just met, admires the paintings and buys them, providing her with encouragement to value her own work more highly; she begins to feel driven to paint in a more serious way. The next stage in her development as an artist occurs in a series of epiphanic events halfway through the novel. Finding a spot on an isolated part of the beach, Helen draws assiduously in her sketchbook, filling page after page with observed fragments of things: weeds on a broken shell, a bird’s beak probing for food, the curve of the bird’s leg, a moment of bursting sea spray. These sketches of fragments of the seashore mark a turning point in her view of herself as an artist. Helen thinks of the careful studies in the notebooks of Leonardo; clearly she has become a much more meticulous student of the world than she was when she painted her earlier landscapes. Having worn herself out with this work, Helen undresses and runs naked into the sea, swimming straight out, heedless of how far out she has gone as she enjoys the sensuous motions of swimming. Suddenly she panics, gasps, and almost goes under when she realizes how far from the shore her courage has taken her, but she soon relaxes, floats, and lets the tide carry her back to the strand. This experience can easily be read as a baptism into her new life as an artist but also as a test of nerve, a trial by water; unlike Edna Pointellier, Helen has the fortitude to swim out and to return. It is in a metaphoric sense that Lily Briscoe swims in high seas and feels herself to be naked and exposed as she embarks seriously into the process of painting; with these metaphors Woolf emphasized Lily’s heroism in her setting out to become a woman artist. Helen literally swims out naked, but the effect is much the same; she is finding her element, making strides into a new life. When Helen returns to the shore, she finds Damien Sweeney there, holding her towel. Bemused, young Damien takes off his clothes and goes skipping into the shallows, twirling and kicking up spray in joyous exuberance. After he gets dressed he discovers that Helen has been sketching him dancing in the water. Thus begins Helen’s first major series of paintings Man on the Beach. Her work

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habits are idiosyncratic: even after she can afford to buy an easel, she paints crouching over a canvas on the floor in her dressing gown, chain smoking, hurrying to make best use of the light. As Helen labors on her first painting in the series, she humorously recalls an argument from her life as a housewife with her late husband Dan. Discontented Helen is anything but an Angel in the House. She complains to Dan that the ‘‘really dreadful, debilitating thing about housework, domesticity, whatever you like to call it, is that over and over again you’re doing the same bloody thing’’ (108). Ignoring what she is saying, Dan vehemently objects to her use of the word ‘‘bloody.’’ Defiantly she continues to use the word to describe her tasks, until Dan finally tells her that she is a slut: ‘‘No,’’ she said sharply. ‘‘I wish I were. If I were a slut I wouldn’t care. I’m just a boring woman with a boring sense of duty. I feel my whole life is rushing down that bloody sink with the Fairy Liquid bubbles.’’ (109)

This memory is rich in irony, for as Helen has exchanged the boring, repetitive labor of cleaning house for the creative, fruitful labor of painting, she has indeed become a slut in the old (and Irish) sense of the word, that is, a careless housekeeper, and she no longer cares. Virginia Woolf expresses her aesthetic principles, and Lily’s artistic efforts, in terms of tensile forces, a stretching of one’s vision to its utmost limit. Johnston’s metaphors are similar, if simpler. She describes Helen’s painting as a natural force, like magnetism or a strong plant thrusting through the earth. As Helen works on her first major painting, her art seems to be drawn out of her, as though by an external agent, but that, of course, is the power of her newly awakened imagination at work. The canvas is like ‘‘a magnet drawing out of her head an implacable coherence that she had never felt before’’ (109). As she works on the figure of the young man, his bones ‘‘became a great stalk growing up through the centre of the canvas, from its own black shadow on the sand’’ (109). This ‘‘implacable coherence’’ of her artistic vision and its powerful organic expression provide a counterbalance in the novel to the explosive destruction brought about by the partisans. As she paints, Helen struggles, like Lily, to hold on to her vision, ‘‘the fear always in her mind that if she faltered, looked back even for a moment over her shoulder, Orpheus-like,’’ she would lose it (109). Helen’s model Damien, her only remaining friend at the end of

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the novel, is also one of the builders in Yeats’s sense of those who choose to create rather than destroy. Damien defects from the secret military organization to which Jack and Manus belong and devotes himself to carpentry, restoration, and work on Helen’s studio. Roger calls him an artist. At the end of the novel, Helen mourns the ‘‘needless dead,’’ but she is not totally bereft because in many ways her painting connects her back to the world: ‘‘On canvas, I belong to the world. I record for those who wish to look, the pain and joy and loneliness and fear that I see with my inward and my outward eye’’ (186). Helen’s confident blending of inward with outward vision shows that she has successfully imbued her paintings not just with external views of the world but also with internal values. She conveys an understanding of the world through her work; her serial paintings tell an Irish story, and they do so silently. Jennifer Johnston focuses on the opposition of art and political violence, portraying art as a positive force working against all that is bitter and destructive in Ireland. Johnston’s novel and the paintings embedded in it attempt to embrace that opposition and transform the bitterness. In Deidre Madden’s Nothing is Black, the discipline of art provides freedom, self-expression, and a rich introspective life for Claire, as it does for Helen. But given Claire’s fatalism and her extreme skepticism, she has to invent for herself the terms on which Irish art seems possible, and these terms are severe. Madden’s novel and Claire’s life and art are, in several senses of the word, economical, an art suited to the life of a woman living on the western edge of an island and on the periphery of European affluence. Claire lives by choice on the economic margin as well as the edge of the sea, painting in her austere stone cottage as she prepares for an exhibition in Dublin. Her rented house has sanded wooden floors, and her studio is spartan, with pale white light streaming in the window from the Atlantic onto the bare white walls. The simplicity of Claire’s surroundings heightens her awareness of how light strikes the world and controls its colors: ‘‘Where she lived provided ample proof of how colour depended on light’’ (27). The austerity of Claire’s life cleanses her vision, giving her, as her name suggests, a certain clarity. Her strong sense of place seems to be the most crucial factor enabling her to work. She has chosen her cottage in part because it is located on a piece of land that, she believes, has never been the scene of an atrocity, although how can one ever know in Ireland that

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blood has not been shed on a particular spot? Another reason why Claire prefers this spartan life is that she considers owning property an encumbrance, an attitude that serves her well since she has little money anyway. There is also a certain philosophical motive for choosing poverty: since life is short, as she is acutely aware, possessions give one a false sense of permanence. She asks herself, ‘‘Why pretend life is anything other than transitory? Why pretend you are anything other than utterly alone in your existence?’’ (109). It is best to travel light through life. Whereas Johnston’s novel is about the opposition of art and political violence, Madden’s novel, more introspective and philosophical, focuses on the meaning and value of art in the context of ordinary life. The two novels share the view of the woman artist as liminal and the aesthetic principle of the unfinished. Madden’s aesthetic values in the novel and those of Claire as a painter are all of a piece, clear and consistent. Madden’s style is lyrical but at the same time spare and metonymic, and the plot is incremental, depending upon small crises and minor but important changes rather than large, dramatic ones. These features are consistent with Claire’s economies of life and thought as well as the simplicity of her artistic aims: Claire believes that things of the world have beauty in their own light, and there is no need of fantasy to enhance them. According to David Lodge’s structuralist binary system of classifying works of literature as either primarily metaphoric (based on similarities) or primarily metonymic (based on contiguities), Nothing is Black clearly falls under the heading of metonymy.5 In Madden’s novel even the meaning of the seashore is seen in literal terms: it is an appropriate place to live and paint, and the bits of bone and shards that wash up from the sea are, in fact, fragments of history rather than metaphors. Nothing is Black deals, in part, with problems that many women face: misunderstandings with relatives, strained or overdependent mother-daughter relations, the difficulty of learning to live as an autonomous, grown-up woman, and the choice between motherhood and a career. The characters all confront some of these problems in their own lives with modest degrees of success. Through the artist Claire, Madden deals with the aesthetic choices that an artist must make and the relationship of art to the rest of life, especially its relation to one’s morality, one’s sense of the drastic challenge of being fully human, and one’s compassion for other human beings. Paradoxically, Claire feels that she must live in isolation and solitude in order to create works of art that are themselves intended to reveal,

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wordlessly, a sense of her connectedness to the world and compassion for its inhabitants. Claire is an agnostic whose aesthetic values are deeply infused with moral values. Art, for her and presumably for Madden, is an expression of love for the world in the face of universal loneliness, knowledge of annihilation, and the force of necessity. Although Madden does not write about Irish politics in Nothing is Black, she has frequently and passionately addressed political issues in several of her other novels. Born in 1960 in Belfast, Madden confronts what it means to be Northern Irish, an artist, and a woman coming of age in the late twentieth century. In her novels Hidden Symptoms, Birds of the Innocent Wood, Remembering Light and Stone, and One by One in the Darkness, the protagonists typically experience a keen sense of the fatal divisions in Ireland and in themselves. These novels explore, in succession, issues of the artist’s engagement in politics; the separateness and silence of women; the task of understanding and accepting one’s Irish identity; and brutal rifts within families wrought by clashes in Belfast. In Nothing is Black, her fourth novel, Madden risks an affirmation: her portrait of Claire offers an extremely cautious, almost grudging endorsement of the life of art, while insisting, as noted above, that severe economies of body and spirit are required of the Irish woman artist. The plot of Madden’s novel parallels the economy of Claire’s life. Madden’s plot is incremental in that the three main women characters—Nuala, Anna, and Claire—each take small, believable steps toward achieving a life of freedom and sympathy. Claire broods over the solitary life she has created for herself as she prepares for her exhibition in the city. Her married cousin Nuala, a successful restaurateur in Dublin but a deeply unhappy woman, is sent for a rest cure with Claire when her husband finds out about her kleptomania. Nuala, a daughter who has lost a mother, befriends the third woman, Anna, a mother who has lost a daughter. A Dutch interior decorator summering in Ireland, Anna anguishes over her estrangement from her daughter Lili, whom she has not seen for years because of a misunderstanding arising from Anna’s divorce. The two unhappy women, Nuala and Anna, help one another in small ways, Anna becoming a mother figure for Nuala, and Nuala teaching Anna that her daughter needs to receive forgiveness rather than to offer it. Although they have some unusual twists, the dilemmas that Nuala and Anna face are common to many women: a midlife crisis, a family breakup, strained relationships between mother and daugh-

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ter. Claire also confronts ordinary problems having to do with how to live, but her character is made more complex than the others by the fact that she lives as an artist and confronts issues having to do with art and life. This triad of unfulfilled daughter, unfulfilled mother, and self-sufficient artist in itself constitutes a modest endorsement of the pursuit of art, since Claire has a richer inner life than the other women do. In another triad, Claire carries on interior dialogues with her former lover Markus and her deceased friend Alice, who represent sides of herself as an artist. Markus is a serious sculptor who compromises himself for financial gain; Alice, a gifted painter of absolute honesty with a nihilistic outlook. Claire’s remembered conversations with Markus and Alice, along with her present thoughts about them, help Claire to explore and solidify her own understanding of the relationship of art and life and of the values that for her constitute ‘‘the good life.’’ Claire recalls her conversations with Markus when she visited him in Germany. Markus tells her that on a recent trip he took to Poland he refused to spend the night in lodgings that once had been a Nazi headquarters and interrogation center; he shares Claire’s sensitivity to places and the atrocities that may have occurred there. And yet Markus becomes conflicted and seems morally to have lost his way when he accepts a lucrative commission for a sculpture for a bank. He sees himself as having sold out to the philistines, something he would not have done when younger, while at the same time he is happy enough to have the money. What is worse, Markus contrives a cynical theory about modern art to justify his course of action: People in Europe now aren’t interested in art because it has to do with death. It teaches you how to die, and people don’t want to know about that. In that way art is religious. There was always, until this century, a distinction between things which were true art, connected with religion, and things which had a social function, where were decorative or for entertainment. Now we have only two divisions: money and entertainment. What matters is making money, and then you rest from that by being entertained with what people like to think of as art. (9)

Claire does not dissent from this view; indeed, she herself is deeply interested in the relationship between art and death, in learning how to die. But the state of art in the modern world does not interest her very much; she simply wants to get on with the work. Moreover,

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she hears the hypocrisy in Markus’s theorizing; he sounds, she thinks, like an adulterer who goes on and on praising his wife. Markus’s more cynical, worldly, and continental view of art provides a challenge to Claire’s idealism. In another recollected exchange, Markus accuses her of being a slave to her emotions when Claire simply makes the point that looking at a work of art should cause you to feel something. Claire persists in the face of his scoffing: ‘‘You must respond to art with your nerves and your heart. . . . When you look at a painting, you should feel something. If not, there’s something amiss’’ (60). Markus’s views act as a foil and a challenge to Claire’s own more humanistic ideas, helping her to shape them more accurately. Claire’s late friend Alice is in many ways Markus’s opposite, and she appeals to Claire’s idealistic side, causing Claire to refine her own views of art and to stiffen her resolve to pursue high artistic goals. Alice is a person of ‘‘relentless integrity’’ whose views on life and art are all fully worked out: her ‘‘aesthetics and morality, her political and religious views were all carefully thought through and were not open to compromise’’ (61). Because of her ruthless candor, Alice was not popular among the students in art school, and even Claire feels some resentment and jealousy toward her friend because she knows Alice to be a better artist. Alice’s integrity and singleness of purpose help Claire to find her own path as an artist and strengthen her resolve to paint. Having gone to convent school like Claire, Alice rebels totally against religion, and when she is told by doctors that she is going to die, Alice holds firmly to her skepticism in the face of annihilation. Claire learns of Alice’s death while hiking in the mountains in Germany with Markus. Moved by the horror of having to leave life, Claire realizes that life is made beautiful by the knowledge of death even as the dusk makes the green of the trees and grass more beautiful in the valley at the foot of the mountains. This moment when she learns of Alice’s death keeps coming back to Claire in memory; from then on, everything that she looks at is ‘‘charged with fragility and tenderness’’ (110). Claire also finds that her own aesthetic commitments have been strengthened by her acceptance of the finality of death; she realizes that she has been evading both the full horror of oblivion and the full beauty of life. It is the knowledge of death that most accounts for Claire’s ability to see the world lovingly and with pity, and to paint it. Claire’s tough, austere life and her solitude paradoxically allow her to express her love for the world and ‘‘the faces of strangers in the street’’ (110).

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Her poverty also relates to her keen awareness of death: following the example of the sculptor Giacometti, Claire believes that material possessions are merely transitory, and anything but poverty and solitude is a pretense. To Claire the life of aesthetic monasticism, ‘‘living in spartan rented rooms, always strapped for cash,’’ can be called ‘‘a good life’’ (112). Claire’s philosophical sense of the good, her way of life, and her understanding of the role of her art are all suffused with humane values; that is, she sees art as a integral part of the moral and emotional life of human beings, not as an activity existing in its own realm for its own sake. Claire’s artwork is crucial to her understanding of the good life, and it celebrates humanity and the body, although in a tentative way. The paintings embedded in Madden’s novel are of two kinds: Claire’s warm-up exercises, which are quick sketches, and her ‘‘real work’’ prepared for the exhibit. Early in the novel Claire’s daily warm-up exercise is ‘‘a quick watercolor of the view from her studio window’’ (19). On successive days she paints a red and white lighthouse, which sometimes dominates the scene, ‘‘bright against the grey sky and the sea’’ and at other times is ‘‘obscured by the heavy rains and mist that came in off the Atlantic’’ (20). Claire is never bored by painting the same scene over and over because the view is always changing; her exercise in concentration requires her to look at the scene each day as though she were seeing it for the first time. Although Claire has little interest in landscape painting per se, her successive views of the lighthouse are instructive as a measure of perceptual shifts through time. By doing these exercises, Claire learns the technical lesson that color depends upon light and the perceptual lesson that not just the appearance of things but ‘‘what one could actually see was dependent on the weather’’—dependent, in a larger sense, on Ireland and her place in it (19). Her practice of serial painting alludes to the impressionists, especially to Monet, as in, for example, Monet’s successive paintings of the same sites in Venice at the same time every day, showing changes in the air and in his own vision of the city. Claire’s successive views of the Irish coast allow her to mingle her own vision with the land and sea, ultimately making Ireland seem more like her proper home. The process of reconciling herself to her home is ongoing and unfinished, like her serial paintings. The seashore setting, the presence of the lighthouse, and the mingling of artistic effort with feelings of grief for a lost friend constitute, not just a nod, but a tribute to Virginia Woolf. There is even a

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moment recollected near the end of the novel when Alice’s ‘‘ghost’’ seems to return, as Mrs. Ramsay’s ‘‘ghost’’ did, to haunt and perhaps inspire Claire as a painter. Such echoes of Woolf are not infrequent in women writers. In The Serpentine Cave, for example, Jill Paton Walsh weaves into her novel several such references to Woolf, to the extent that they constitute a kind of teasing code for the reader to break. In Madden’s novel, the indirect allusions to Woolf, though less explicit than the allusions to Frida Kahlo that will be discussed below, suggest that Madden is building on what Woolf has done, finding her way in her own Irish setting to make use of similar materials and similar aesthetic goals. Madden is showing, for one thing, that a metaphoric style and stream of consciousness technique are not essential to exploring the mind of a creative woman; metonymy and direct description can also serve. It should be noted that allusions to Woolf in later novels by women seem never to show any anxiety of influence, to borrow Harold Bloom’s phrase. Rather, they suggest mutual sympathy and continuity in the effort to depict women struggling for artistic autonomy. Later in the summer Claire switches to the daily exercise of painting the same apple every day until it decays. These serial still lifes reveal the inevitability of death and decay in living things and, although Madden does not make the connection explicit, the reader is reminded of Claire’s earlier admiration of Ce´zanne’s paintings of fruit: they ‘‘expressed knowledge of other things—mortality, tenderness, beauty—in a way that was only possible without words’’ (60). Nonhuman nature is thus intimately approached through wordless expression, language being what most divides humans from it. Claire, and presumably Madden, values art’s extralinguistic expressive power to make a connection to the world. What Claire calls her ‘‘real work,’’ her exhibition paintings, depict the human body. Claire has learned something in the process of moving from her preliminary studies to the finished paintings. In the earlier versions she was trying to counteract the emotionalism of her work by striving for ‘‘pure form,’’ seeing a spine, for example, isolated as ‘‘an extraordinarily complex and beautiful structure’’ (138). That is, she attempted, by a process of abstraction, to depict fragments of the human frame as if they were complete in themselves: the muscle as muscle, the bone as bone. But now ‘‘she painted bones and muscles as though they were not just beautiful abstractions, but also parts of a strong and vulnerable body’’ (138). Although the body parts remain fragmented and have no gender,

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they now are shown as fragments of a whole, and they convey something of the artist’s own strength and her vulnerability. All of the embedded paintings in the novel point toward a holistic understanding of a common frailty and beauty in nature and humanity, but they do so only by suggestion. Madden’s title Nothing is Black alludes to notes on color in the diary of Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, who is quoted again in the epigraph and in the body of the novel. Kahlo celebrates colors for their private emotional associations: e.g., ‘‘Yellow: madness, sickness, fear. Part of the sun and of joy. . . . Black: nothing is black, really nothing’’ (211). This phrase equivocates on the word ‘‘nothing,’’ appearing both to affirm and to deny the supremacy of nothingness or annihilation in life, as Madden’s novel does as well. Madden’s fictional painter is not, however, based on Kahlo, nor do her paintings resemble Kahlo’s. Kahlo is, if anything, an antithetical figure: an artist whose emotional high-wire acts of self-exhibition and contortion, of turning oneself inside out for the sake of art, contrast sharply to Madden’s rather muted, understated fiction and Claire’s subtle, delicate paintings. Rather, the allusions to Kahlo are an instance of interdisciplinary intertextuality that prompts the reader to think about certain personal and cultural themes in the two artists. Madden’s allusions to the Mexican painter invite the reader to think of the artist in terms of place and the accidents of cultural context: specifically, how can the post colonial woman artist attain a sense of cultural identity? Susan Lowe writes that Kahlo had to come to understand herself as ‘‘inscribed in overlapping cultures,’’6 As Lowe says, ‘‘The experience of colonialization, the struggle for independence, and the articulation of an artistic identity free from cultural imperialism’’ were ‘‘always at the center of Kahlo’s art. Her unwillingness to be labeled forced her to confront and reclaim her heritage, to search for political, cultural, and personal identity that is the core of her life and art.’’7 These same themes are also at the core of Madden’s work, if one looks at all of her novels taken together. Despite the vast differences in the two cultures of Ireland and Mexico, the experiences of postcolonial women artists trying to establish a sense of identity within their respective cultures are similar. A more specific parallel is that Kahlo in real life and the fictional painter Claire both suffer miscarriages. Disabled for life by an early streetcar accident that impaled and crushed her body, Kahlo translated the pain of her multiple miscarriages into art in a painting

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called Henry Ford Hospital (1932), stunning the art world with her explicit subject matter. After her first miscarriage, in Detroit, Kahlo began to paint more seriously, eventually making the same bargain with life that Madden’s character Claire makes. After enduring a miscarriage in art school, Claire learns that society extracts a ‘‘hidden contract. You could have your painting and an austere life, or you could have children. You weren’t allowed to have both’’ (52– 53). When young Claire tells her mother about the miscarriage, Claire’s mother is deeply sympathetic, having suffered an even worse experience herself. At the age of fifteen she got pregnant, and her father beat her until the baby miscarried; he then threatened to beat her again if she told anyone what had happened. The repressiveness from which Irish society is only beginning to emerge makes Claire feel, like Phelps’s character Avis, that the rules do not allow both children and artistic freedom. Frida Kahlo’s radical, disturbing images make explicit and iconic that which is implicit in Madden’s writing: the artist’s need to create and assert herself and to mend the losses where possible. As women, Madden and Kahlo share a sense of internal exile, and are aware of cultural layering as a source of identity. In Nothing is Black, Anna and Nuala visit an ancient pagan dolmen and a ring of standing stones, and Anna observes that Irish women live in a society where ‘‘just below this crust of Catholicism’’ is ‘‘pure paganism’’ (127). Anna says that the priests tell the women ‘‘to be like Mary’’ and ‘‘some of them are pretending, and some of them just don’t give a damn because they are in touch with their own reality’’ (127). In Kahlo’s society, a deep pagan source of female strength also underlies the Catholic culture. In The Two Fridas (1939), a life-size oil painting, Frida presents herself as twins and literally bares her heart. The pagan Frida, dressed in the Tehuana costume of her mother, gives a blood transfusion to the European Frida who, dressed in the Victorian costume of her German Jewish father’s homeland and of the imperial Spanish culture, daintily spills blood from her hemostat. Although Kahlo’s vibrant Mexican palette is radically different from the soft Irish greens and greys in Nothing is Black, color and light are for both Kahlo and Madden’s fictional painter the means of expressing without words the identities they have discovered within the different worlds they inhabit. Claire chooses the bare stone house which is her heritage and also the emblem of her art. The subtle light and worn stone of the Irish countryside have a complexity and radiance of their own that coun-

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teract the blackness. From her vantage point on the western coast, Claire can contemplate the oceanic sweep of Irish history, with all its sad detritus, and at the same time inhabit a landscape rich in consonances: she preferred the complexity of the sort of light she found in Ireland. It allowed the land, the sky, and the ocean to each have their own place. She would never live far from the sea again, its vastness a comfort, its anonymous ancient waves crashing over the detritus of centuries: broken ships, coins, bones, weapons. She would never have believed that it would be possible to feel so much at home. (113)

To feel at home in Ireland is not presented as an easy task in either Johnston’s novel or Madden’s. Both authors express a kind of fatalism, a sense, especially in Johnston, that events in Ireland are driven by necessity and are quite beyond the ability of anyone to control them. Johnston sees this driving force of fate in political terms, whereas Madden sees it more philosophically, as a condition of life: Sometimes it was easy to forget that life was driven by necessity. The world today conspired to induce such forgetfulness. What was worth knowing in life? The limits, the severe limits of one’s understanding and abilities, the power of love and forgiveness; and that life is nothing if not mysterious. (151)

These are sentiments that Virginia Woolf would very likely agree with, since she dramatizes the force of fate and necessity—‘‘that fluidity out there’’—in To the Lighthouse and she continually emphasizes the mysteriousness of personality and consciousness. The events of Madden’s novel emphasize approximately the same things. Nuala makes some small progress toward healing; at least she begins to understand some aspects of her illness, although she is still stealing pepper pots from restaurants. Anna makes some progress toward reconciliation with her daughter; she will reach out to Lili in a less defensive manner. And Claire successfully completes a series of paintings in which the parts suggest a whole person. In both The Railway Station Man and Nothing is Black art is offered as a positive counterforce to the operations of fate and necessity. In Johnston, to paint is to build something, metaphorically to restore some broken part of the world, if only a small one. In Madden, to paint is to make a connection with the world and silently to express love. Both writers readily acknowledge the obvious, that art cannot

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really mend things, but they also see that art has a power beyond its material existence. Madden uses the voice of Claire’s friend Alice to express the paradox of painting, that it consists of so little and can be so much: I like the paradox of it. Strength and frailty, don’t you see? People confuse immortality with the indestructible, but it’s not the same thing at all. Take, say, Vermeer’s Portrait of a Young Woman in a Turban. What the painting means is beyond words, beyond time. And yet, in purely material terms, it’s a layer of paint a couple of millimetres thick on a piece of canvas. (139)

Alice adds that the magic of art is the only magic she can believe in: ‘‘To take things and make something charged with that sort of knowledge and energy. It’s worth devoting your life to that’’ (140). Markus may have been right that art no longer has religious meaning for the people of Europe, but Claire, through her memories of Alice, insists that a work of art, defined as a material object ‘‘charged with . . . knowledge and energy,’’ can still speak to the mind and spirit.

6 Northern Light: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye The page waits, pretending to be blank. Is that its appeal, its blankness? What else is this smooth and white, this terrifyingly innocent? A snowfall, a glacier? It’s a desert, totally arid, without life. But people venture into such places.Why? To see how much they can endure, how much dry light? —Margaret Atwood, ‘‘The Page’’ The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air. —Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

FOR MARGARET ATWOOD, THE ARTS ARE A STRATEGY FOR SURVIVAL; WRIT-

ing is both necessary and dangerous. She sees her words as a slender lifeline thrown into the void in hopes that a reader will catch it. Like Virginia Woolf, Atwood is familiar with the terror of venturing into those desert places, the blank page or the empty canvas. The imagery of snowfall and glacier with which she describes the blank page no doubt comes naturally to a Canadian writer, especially one who spent much of her childhood in the bush of the far north. In Survival (1972), her handbook to Canadian literature, Atwood postulates that, just as the frontier is the central theme of American literature, survival is central to the literature of Canada, and she describes the survival theme as ‘‘grim’’ and ‘‘bare.’’1 She then urges her fellow writers to break free of a Canadian literary heritage that usually presents the national sensibility in a negative and somber light. She characterizes earlier Canadian literature as a dreary record of struggle and victimization—death by avalanche, attacking grizzly bears, or lost expeditions—whose ‘‘true and only season’’ is winter.2 Seeing herself as working against a literary tradition as dismal as a continent of snow, Atwood, beginning with her first novel, The Edible Woman, writes novels that are filled with color, wit, delight152

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fully sardonic narrative voices, and vivid transformations. She writes in many different genres including satire, the ghost story, the historical novel, and future fiction. And yet, to quote Wallace Stevens, The natives of rain are rainy men. Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes, And April hillsides wooded white and pink, Their azure has a cloudy edge. . . .3

Perhaps more subtly than the novels of the Irish writers Johnston and Madden, Atwood’s work is inevitably shaped by its place of origin. Various as they are, Atwood’s novels tend to follow the native Canadian tradition as she describes it; she adheres to the theme of survival against difficult odds. Her novels are mostly about women’s struggles and stratagems to survive, sometimes in extremely harsh circumstances, as in Bodily Harm or The Handmaid’s Tale. In Survival Atwood remarks humorously that the ‘‘Canadian author’s two favorite ‘natural’ methods for dispatching his victims are drowning and freezing, drowning being preferred by poets . . . and freezing by prose writers.’’4 Atwood herself makes use of that same imagery; near drowning is a favorite motif in her novels and stories. In Cat’s Eye, for example, Elaine Risley nearly freezes and drowns in a childhood episode of abuse that profoundly shapes her life and art. Near drowning often symbolizes the way that life can overwhelm women in the modern world. Atwood’s main characters exist in a liminal state in the sense that they see themselves as living on the brink— not of some transformative experience, as described by Carolyn Heilbrun—but rather on the brink of disaster. Atwood’s protagonists view their own lives in drastic terms, as a struggle for survival, and their narrative voices tend to assume a wary, ironic tone. Atwood prefaces The Edible Woman with an epigraph taken from instructions for making puff pastry: ‘‘The surface on which you work (preferably marble) . . . should be chilled throughout the operations.’’5 From her first novel on, Atwood’s narrators speak in voices purged of sentiment. For the sake of survival, sentiment must be jettisoned, along with all romantic dreams, including the dream of love. Male-female relations, mother-daughter relations, and friendships between women are all portrayed as problematic at best, tyrannous at worst. Atwood’s narrators are nearly always isolated figures, distanced from others by their most admirable assets: their honesty, desire for autonomy, and need for self-expres-

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sion. It is not surprising, therefore, that in her portrayal of visual artists Atwood focuses, more than other writers, on the psychological struggles of the artist to rise above the surface of life, to avoid permanent submersion and a kind of psychic oblivion. Although Atwood does not suggest that art must have a neurotic source, she assumes that the troubled aspects of the psyche are inevitably involved in the process and will leave their mark. In Atwood’s fiction, women artists have a more difficult struggle than men to achieve autonomy; a career in art requires self-knowledge and, as in other novelists, a radical isolation from what might be called normal life. Atwood’s earlier artist protagonists, those before Cat’s Eye, do not overcome these psychological obstacles, and their art suffers as a consequence. The nameless narrator of Surfacing (1972), sometimes referred to as the Surfacer, lacks self-knowledge; in fact, through much of the book she suffers from a self-imposed state of amnesia in which she has suppressed the facts of her own life story. Yvonne, the painter in the story ‘‘The Sunrise,’’ in Bluebeard’s Egg and other Stories (1983), suffers from such radical isolation from everyone as to be virtually strangled in solitude. Only Elaine Risley in Cat’s Eye (1989) attains the imaginative power which, drawing upon memory, self-knowledge, and necessary isolation, can transform life into art. A victim of circumstances and of a monstrously callous married lover, the narrator of Surfacing has too meager a grasp of reality to achieve much as an artist. She is a commercial artist and book illustrator, having been goaded onto that path by her first lover, who was also her art teacher: ‘‘For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he said I should study something I’d be able to use because there has [sic] never been any important women artists.’’6 When she embarks on her heavily allegorical journey into the wilderness of Quebec in search of her lost father, the narrator takes along her watercolors and acrylics in order to illustrate a book of fairy tales, but her fingers soon grow stiff and feel arthritic. She cannot perform the sort of imitative, insincere art that is expected of her—images of women as idealized princesses. Moreover, the publisher does not allow her to use hot or bright colors, even for a tale of the Golden Phoenix; fire must somehow be painted with a cool tone. It is not surprising that the narrator’s hopes for a career in art are aborted: forced into commercial art because of gender stereotypes, she discovers that the commercial field promotes those same stereotypes. The narrator’s present lover, the inarticulate Joe, is, like the punk artist in ‘‘Sunrise’’ and the ex-

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husband Jon in Cat’s Eye, a creator of ugly art. Joe does violence to his clay pots, mutilating them in seeming contempt for his own craft. Several details of Surfacing anticipate Cat’s Eye, written seventeen years later: the background of the narrator’s family, her childhood in the wilderness, the disastrous affair with her art teacher, and the book illustrations. But Surfacing is not about the narrator’s art; it is about submersion and self-discovery. Atwood calls it a ghost story. The narrator’s denial of her own history—the fact that her lover has forced her to have an abortion—leads her to create in her own mind a false history in which she is married and has abandoned her child. The narrator’s best moments of sanity and control seem to occur when she is floating alone or with her companions in a canoe on the lake searching for her father: ‘‘It’s like moving on air, nothing beneath holding us up; suspended, we drift home.’’7 She navigates well in the wilderness and feels most at home suspended in its beauty. Although it seems for a time that her increasingly intense mistrust of words and language will lead her more fully into a world of visual expression—maps, drawings, photographs—the narrator eventually burns all of her own and her family’s records, including her artwork, paints and tools, along with her childhood drawings and scrapbooks in order to ‘‘clear a space’’ in which she can descend for a time into, literally, an animal existence, devoid of language or civility. These events occur after she mystically ‘‘sees’’ the ghosts of both her parents. Although several of the elements of this story can be found in other novels about women artists—the sensation of suspension above water, the longing to enter into the mysteries of purely visual experience, and even the return of the ghosts—it is obvious that this narrator’s art is a dead end. Atwood’s short story ‘‘The Sunrise’’ provides a sketch, rather than a full-length portrait, of Yvonne, a professional painter of undetermined age, somewhere between thirty and fifty. In this story Atwood’s relentlessly cold, laconic style keeps Yvonne at a distance from the reader, even as Yvonne keeps the world at a distance. Outwardly affecting a jaunty manner, Yvonne has acquaintances but confides in no one. She has developed mechanisms for coping with her own self-conscious fears when in the society of others: she clutches the tablecloth under the table and tells jokes she collects on index cards. Yvonne is the most isolated of the women artist figures encountered in this study. Although isolation is Yvonne’s most obvious problem, Atwood also dramatizes in this story several other difficulties confronted by a woman artist at the end of the twentieth

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century: stereotypes of what a painter should be, the familiar issue of art and Eros, and the destructive, antihumanistic nature of certain trends and fads in contemporary art. In ‘‘The Sunrise’’ Atwood attacks issues of art and gender headon. Yvonne, who has a studio of her own, likes to follow men in the streets of Toronto, not to seduce them but to draw them. The men are flattered. Although she is compulsively hungry to capture men’s souls through her art, her drawings of them seem rather tender. She likes to draw men who look a bit battered and worn out by life. Yvonne’s compulsion to gaze upon strangers and try to capture their essence in her drawings is, of course, a reversal of the traditional gender roles of artist and model. Indeed, earlier in her career Yvonne attained considerable notoriety by painting and exhibiting a series of male nudes with erect penises; amusingly, she became known as ‘‘the penis lady.’’8 Her outrageous boldness anticipates that of the painter Monica Szabo in Mary Gordon’s Spending, although Monica paints only ‘‘spent’’ men. Yvonne finds that her art and her temperament are incompatible with love; she has occasionally fallen in love with one of her models only to discover that her feelings for him drain away her creative energy. More significantly, when Yvonne falls in love with a man he becomes a blur of concentrated light to her; she loses sight of line and contour. Rather than merely making the artist’s hand shake, love in this instance interferes directly with the artist’s ability to see. Images of water, ice, and sharp blades—imagery anticipating that of Cat’s Eye—characterize Yvonne’s psychological states, stressing her liminality. Yvonne sees herself as living at the edge, barely hanging on. She periodically suffers from hallucinatory episodes in which a tsunami, ‘‘a towering wall of black water,’’ comes rushing over her. The water seems very real, and Yvonne has to take to her bed, closing her eyes and ears and mouth and holding on tightly until the wave recedes. On a miniature scale, Atwood’s story reminds the reader of Virginia Woolf ’s powerful metaphor of crashing waves to describe episodes of psychological submersion in The Waves. In addition to her apprehension of the tidal wave at her back, Yvonne is also keenly aware of the fragile, fugitive nature of the present moment, which she thinks of as skating on ice: The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.9

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Atwood emphasizes the knife-blade precariousness of the present moment by narrating her story in present tense. Yvonne also keeps a sharp razor blade on the edge of her bathtub, not for shaving but for suicide: ‘‘the razor blade is there all the time, underneath everything.’’10 Yvonne takes curious comfort in the idea that she can control her death, if not her life. Constant awareness of death and of the terrifying knife-edge existence of the present moment are psychic stumbling blocks that make art difficult. A different kind of obstacle is personified in the young punk artist whom Yvonne takes on as her model and temporary lover. With his half-shaven head of orange hair and aggressively unhealthy appearance, the punk artist looks like ‘‘a welding shop accident.’’11 He is totally sullen and belligerent in demeanor. His motto is ‘‘Art sucks,’’ and his art consists of collages in which he has pasted mutilated photographs of women’s bodies on top of landscapes and further abused the images of women by adding smears of red nail polish. Like Joe in Surfacing and Jon in Cat’s Eye, he practices a faddish anti-art of mutilation. Yvonne’s decision to take the punk artist as a lover, albeit a ‘‘somnambulant’’ one, and then to paint him, brings about a crisis in the story. The predicament is a serious one for Yvonne, because she asks herself, ‘‘if art sucks and everything is only art, what has she done with her life?’’12 By making love to the punk artist is she also embracing his anti-art attitude, or is it the case—which seems more likely—that in painting him she is mastering anti-art by transforming it into her own art? She plans her first real painting in years, a very large canvas portraying the punk artist sprawled on a wine-colored velvet chair wearing nothing but a pink shirt and holding a red poppy. Although the envisioned painting, like her hold on life itself, remains ambiguous, it would seem to have genuine satiric, even comic, potential while offering a vibrant composition of clashing colors. The painting would not say ‘‘Art doesn’t suck,’’ but rather ‘‘This anti-art attitude sucks, and I have made art of it.’’ Another hopeful note in this grim story is that when Yvonne rises every morning to witness the sunrise she renews herself daily with light. The story ends with her breathing in the morning light, which revivifies her and which is also an essential element in her art. Yvonne’s life is precarious, like tightrope walking, and her art seems to be the only thing that stabilizes her at all. Elaine Risley in Cat’s Eye is better able than Atwood’s earlier protagonists to find the means to shape her most painful memories into

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works of art. She achieves what Atwood, in Survival, calls ‘‘creative non-victimhood,’’ but she too pays the price of isolation. Cat’s Eye is Atwood’s most autobiographical novel to date, and she endows Elaine with many of her own memories, particularly memories of a childhood spent partly in the bush with her mother, brother, and entomologist father. The novel beautifully evokes the games, toys, rituals, rhymes, and the cruelties of children in the 1940s as seen through the eye of Elaine’s memory as she prepares for her retrospective exhibit in Toronto sometime in the 1980s. Atwood gradually fills in Elaine’s middle years, so that the portrait of the artist is fairly complete, at least in its chronology. It is not surprising that Atwood should choose as her subject a visual artist. Atwood has all her life practiced various visual arts, including illustrations and cover designs, collages, cartoons and comic strips, as well as watercolors and drawings.13 As in other novels about artists, there are interesting consonances and resonances between Atwood’s verbal art and Elaine’s visual art, although one cannot say with any certainty that Atwood’s writing is animated as much by resentment and grief as Elaine’s art is. Mature, sounding tougher and more sardonic than her true nature warrants, Elaine confides in the reader with such candor and forthcoming specificity that no lacunae seem to exist in her re-creation of her memories. Yet her paintings reveal the existence of gaps and silences in her narrative by alluding to what has been left unspoken, most notably the affective side of her psyche. Her art reveals what she cannot otherwise say, and Elaine refuses to theorize about her work or proclaim its redemptive value. The ekphrastic passages describing Elaine’s paintings at the exhibition stand out from the rest of the text almost like a retrospective commentary on it. Atwood leaves it to the reader to piece together Elaine’s words and her pictures to arrive at an understanding of her artistic motives and her true nature. As the novel begins, Elaine sees herself in the middle of life’s journey, like Dante on his pilgrimage, a position she imagines as ‘‘the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge.’’14 The bridge is a literal one; it crosses a river over a ravine in Toronto, the scene of Elaine’s most extreme duress, where she was systematically bullied by three other girls, her so-called friends, as a child. Returning from Vancouver to Toronto, the city of her youth, to attend the retrospective of her work, Elaine also holds an inner retrospective in which she recalls long sequences of her life in Toronto from early childhood through art school, a disastrous affair with her drawing teacher, and

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her failed first marriage. The middle of life brings to Elaine the usual complaints of middle age: dimming eyesight, a less vigorous body, and an awareness of a large communication gap between herself and the next generation of women, represented by the young reporter who interviews her about her exhibit. As Elaine reflects upon her life, she comes to understand that past time cannot be thought of as a line, a linear record of events. Rather, the extraordinarily complex and reticulated connections among the events of one’s life begin to form a dimension or substance, something that can be dipped into, even though its exact structure cannot fully be described: But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. (3)

Seeing time as like water and memories as like layered transparencies gives a tactile and visual quality to the act of remembering, a first step, it would seem, toward transforming memories into visual art. As Elaine looks back upon her life, her recollections down to the present moment culminate in the exhibition; it is not that the paintings document her life but rather that they prove she has something to ‘‘show’’ for having lived. Her paintings are, as she says, ‘‘drenched in time’’ (161). Elaine’s narration of events in various alternating time sequences is in keeping with her view of time as layered transparencies. As at the end of To the Lighthouse, the artistic effort of the novelist converges with that of the artist in the novel, so that both may rightly say, ‘‘I have had my vision.’’ Only in this case, Elaine’s words are, ‘‘I have said, Look. I have said, I see’’ (427). Elaine cannot work her way progressively through grief and loss to artistic accomplishment in the conscious, internally articulate manner of Lily Briscoe, but her art bears witness to those aspects of her life. Whereas Lily struggles to achieve and inwardly articulate a ‘‘vision’’ as well as a painting, Elaine’s thoughts about art remain in the realm of the purely visual, even though her artistic process and goals are subtle and complex. To the extent that there is a ‘‘theory’’ of the creative process embedded in Cat’s Eye, it has to be read between the lines by looking at Elaine’s total development as an artist. The scenes of a painful childhood are the most vivid part of Cat’s Eye. The novel has been justly praised for its faithful re-creation of

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the sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations of life in Toronto in the 1940s and 1950s and for its dramatic portrayal of the schoolyard victimization of young Elaine. But critics like Judith Thurman, who thinks that Cat’s Eye should have ended ‘‘on page 206,’’ at the moment when Elaine turns her back on her chief tormenter, Cordelia, and walks away, disregard the fact that Elaine’s seemingly selfcontained narrative of her early triumph over victimization bears a causal relationship to the larger confessional narrative that ratifies her career as an artist.15 There is a direct line of cause and effect between Elaine’s experience of cruelty at the hands of Cordelia and her career as an artist who is driven to arrest, transfix, and freeze the people and scenes of her life that have given the most pain. Atwood offers a comprehensive view of the process by which art can arise from the artist’s particular experiences, in this case childhood trauma. An innocent child, reared mainly in the wilderness, is suddenly introduced to the society of other children, with all their entrenched rituals and cruelties. The abuse she suffers causes her to withdraw and become passive and silent. During this period of withdrawal she acquires mechanisms for survival and ways of seeing the world that will later determine the nature of her artistic expression when she finally gives herself back to the world through her paintings. Again, Atwood is not suggesting that art necessarily arises from suffering. Rather, as she wrote in a letter to a friend early in her career, everyone has some sort of neurosis; artists are simply more fortunate than others in having art as a medium in which to work out their neuroses. She suggests that ‘‘the artist is likely to be better adjusted (to his own neuroses) than someone with an equivalent intensity of neurosis who isn’t an artist.’’ Atwood adds that her theory is ‘‘probably a lot of crap,’’ but she prefers it to the notion that creativity requires the artist to suffer.16 In Elaine’s case, the childhood abuse, her first experience of purely gratuitous evil, leads to an early withdrawal into a self-imposed state of impersonality in order to evade an intolerable situation. She achieves the partial displacement of her feeling and perceiving self onto the radiance of the blue cat’s eye marble, which she treasures as a talisman. The transformations of the marble from child’s toy, to talisman, to symbol of radiant art parallel Elaine’s own transformations as she grows up and learns gradually to avoid victimization. A transparent crystal with a flowerlike shape of opaque blue inside, the luminous marble hints at possibilities of vision, energy, and beauty—an instrument to capture the light. Later, it merges with the picture of a con-

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vex mirror as a symbol of a world caught and transformed in the mind and reflected in art. Finally, its blue globular shape suggests a reconciling of macrocosm and microcosm: the eye, the world, and the stars. Learning to see the world as the marble ‘‘sees,’’ Elaine’s visual imagination is shaped so that, in adulthood, she will develop a cool, impersonal, hard-edged style of painting, although it is also a style that celebrates light and sources of light. Elaine’s art is thus a retrieval and a giving back of herself and her feelings, but in encrypted forms that offer a degree of self-protection. It is not surprising that Elaine’s art feels drastic, given that it is based on backward-looking emotions, resentment and grief. One could contrast her paintings to those of Claire in Nothing is Black, where grief becomes the catalyst for love, the true motive of her art. It should also be noted that Elaine paints impressions of memories, compositions inspired by memories, and not pictures from the past like snapshots, which would be quite a different thing. The three stages of Elaine’s development as an artist—withdrawal, the acquisition of a particular way of seeing and a style, and the giving back of her visions to the world—may be paralleled with the three ordeals that she undergoes, the ordeal of childhood abuse, the ordeal in young adulthood of learning to cope with self-centered men as she tries to become an artist, and the ordeal of the retrospective exhibit, which causes her to examine her life. The abuse of Elaine as a child adds a different dimension to Atwood’s ongoing exploration of abuses of power, which begins with her first novel, The Edible Woman. Atwood frequently suggests that power over others always lends itself to abuse. She offers no real remedies except to imply that any chance of freedom from oppression is worth the struggle. In the two novels preceding Cat’s Eye, Bodily Harm and A Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood addresses the issue of abusive repression, by totalitarian governments and a patriarchal ruling class, in the larger social arena. By vividly portraying the meanness, tyranny, and physical abuse of which children are capable—girls’ cruelty to a girl—Cat’s Eye dramatizes the problem of evil on a more primitive and basic level. The techniques that Cordelia and the two other girls use to bully Elaine are the same as those employed by repressive governments: intimidation, isolation, instilling self-doubt by forcing paradoxical questions or imposing impossible tasks, continuous sarcasm, invective, and brainwashing, as well as direct physical threats and torments. Atwood shows that even seemingly innocent children

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are capable of such jack-booted sadism, dramatizing an innate human perversity that her Calvinist forebears would have called original sin. Social evil as depicted in Atwood’s novels frequently assumes up-to-date forms, however. A Handmaid’s Tale, for example, anticipates the revelations about the mistreatment of women under present-day theocratic regimes; Cat’s Eye seems to predict the current preoccupation with the psychological causes of children’s violence. Cat’s Eye also differs from Atwood’s earlier novels in that it raises the question of whether there can be a connection between abuse and art. Having lived in the wilderness, like Atwood herself, while her father did field research on insects, Elaine is innocent even for an eight year old when her family moves to the city. Since she has spent many years playing only with her brother, she has no inkling of the world of girls, with their role playing as housewives or figures of fashion and their different rules of behavior. Elaine has trouble understanding her own femininity, and that factor, along with her innocence, makes her an easy target. She is unprepared when games of jump rope, ball, and marbles yield to a far crueler game of psychological sadism in which Cordelia and the two other girls systematically dominate and brutalize her over a period of about two years. Although Carol and Grace are happy to follow along, it is Cordelia who, with a twist on a motif in King Lear, tells Elaine that she is ‘‘nothing’’; her voice will echo in Elaine’s head for the rest of her life, like the voice of Mr. Tansley undermining the confidence of Lily Briscoe. It is Cordelia who convinces Elaine that the river under the bridge over the ravine carries the souls of dead people, washed down from the cemetery, and Cordelia who digs the deep hole in which Elaine is buried alive. Under such duress, Elaine begins to mutilate her own body, tearing the skin from her feet. Elaine keeps as a talisman the cat’s eye marble, so like and unlike an eye in its crystalline transparency, because it seems beautiful and mysteriously alien, perhaps the first object she has ever looked at aesthetically. The marble’s purity and its gelid look suggest to her the power of disembodiment, of resisting torment by seeing without feeling, a way of freezing out those who have frozen her out. Later, in the respite of an unconfined summer camping out with her parents, Elaine dreams of the marble as a sun or planet falling from the sky into her sleeping body and making her cold, a dream which suggests that unconsciously she is maturing, acquiring new strength. In the next school year, as the torment increases, she holds on to

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the marble as though it were a magic third eye with an ‘‘impartial gaze’’ that allows her to ‘‘retreat back into my eyes’’ (166). As an objective correlative for her own eye and her ego (her ‘‘I’’), the marble enables her to hold on to a core of herself and to cast a cold eye on her tormentors. Through the ‘‘magic’’ of the marble, she imagines that she can perceive the people around her without feeling anything: Sometimes when I have it with me I can see the way it sees. I can see people moving like bright animated dolls, their mouths opening and closing but no real words coming out. . . . I am alive in my eyes only. (151)

In this state of extreme emotional withdrawal, the only one of her senses that Elaine retains and clings to is the visual, her awareness of the shapes and colors of things. It would seem that visual perception is the least threatening and most empowering means of experiencing the world under duress, an early hint of the sources of inspiration for Elaine’s art. But also at this time she learns to faint away altogether, passing out almost at will during some of the most painful moments. The climax of the abuse is an ordeal like a little ‘‘death’’ in which Elaine is exposed all at once to the horrors of freezing water, deep snow, ice, and fear of dying. On a winter evening Cordelia and the others force her to enter the ravine down the slippery hillside under the bridge, and they abandon her there, lying to her mother about where she is. She slips into the creek, waist deep in freezing water amid big slabs of ice, her feet immobile. Gradually regaining the strength to climb from the water, she lies numb and soaked by the edge of the stream, in immediate danger of dying from exposure, and surrounded, so she imagines, by the spirits and whispers of the dead floating down from the cemetery. The hallucinatory vision of the Black Virgin floating over the bridge with her glowing red heart awakens Elaine from her torpor and gives her the strength to survive. After this ordeal and her subsequent illness, Elaine suddenly gains the courage, at age ten, to turn her back on her tormentors, recognizing that they have no real power over her and never should have had any. She is freed from their tyranny by an unexpected perception: ‘‘I can see the greed in their eyes. It’s as if I can see right into them. Why was I unable to do this before?’’ (208). Elaine has by now fully absorbed the cold, indifferent eye of the marble: ‘‘there’s

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something hard in me, crystalline, a kernel of glass’’ (208). After physically surviving the ordeal of near drowning and near freezing (Canadian deaths), Elaine psychologically overcomes the abuse and walks away because she has finally learned to see through the eyes of the other girls into their now obvious motives. She has learned that survival depends upon perception. The first half of Cat’s Eye builds suspensefully to that moment when Elaine turns her back on Cordelia. The struggle against the Cordelia within, a voice that urges both cruelties and self-doubts, takes Elaine a very long time, however; she is still wrestling with that dark angel at the end of the novel. Her bitter experience with Cordelia also prepares the adult Elaine to cope with the main ordeal of her young adulthood—the familiar dilemma of art versus love— while at the same time trying to find her way as an artist. The pattern of Elaine’s life in the 1960s and 1970s shows the growth of an artist in the social contexts of those times. Her life takes several wrong turns, and she has to learn to cast off destructive relationships while working by uncertain steps toward an understanding of what her art should be. Elaine’s first lover Josef Hrbik and her first husband Jon, both artists, both self-centered, weak, and undependable, deflect her from the path of her artistic career. When Elaine shows her portfolio to Josef, he sees more promise in her biological drawings than in her paintings, but he tells her that her work lacks passion and advises her to try for more passion. Josef ’s definition of passion includes her having an affair with him, which Elaine does, accepting for a time Josef ’s presentation of himself as a romantic lover. He wants to turn her into a Pre-Raphaelite woman (not a Pre-Raphaelite painter), and yet something within her urges a resistance to becoming his fair object: ‘‘Would you do anything for me?’’ he says, gazing into my eyes. I sway toward him, far away from the earth. Yes would be so easy. ‘‘No,’’ I say. This is a surprise to me. I don’t know where it has come from, this unexpected and stubborn truthfulness. It sounds rude. (325)

Where this truth comes from, of course, is Elaine’s experience with Cordelia; like Lily Briscoe with Mr. Ramsay, she finds that something within her can resist falling under the sway of the emotional needs of another. Elaine’s instincts are proven correct when Josef virtually self-destructs before her eyes. Josef responds in a totally inappropri-

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ate way when his former lover, Suzy, nearly dies of a self-inflicted abortion: he expects Elaine to pity him and console him for the pain of it all. Elaine’s marriage to fellow art student Jon more seriously interrupts her progress in art. Even as Jon drifts from one trendy art fad to another, Elaine has no time to paint at all in the first year after their daughter is born. Still constrained by old notions about a woman’s place, Elaine feels that she ought not to win in their marital battles, which are mostly about Jon’s infidelities: ‘‘If I were to win them, the order of the world would be changed, and I am not ready for that’’ (361). The world order is changing, of course, and a little more than a year later Elaine becomes so fully exasperated that she finally utters the words that Avis Dobell could not have uttered a century earlier: Jon sits in the living room, having a beer with one of the painters. I am in the kitchen, slamming around the pots. ‘‘What’s with her?’’ says the painter. ‘‘She’s mad because she’s a woman,’’ Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. . . . I go to the living room doorway. ‘‘I’m not mad because I’m a woman,’’ I say. ‘‘I’m mad because you’re an asshole.’’ (366)

Elaine’s frustration with her marriage leads her to cut her wrist theatrically with a tool of the trade, an Exacto knife, but later she regains control of her life and moves west with her daughter. With her second husband Ben, whom she eventually meets in Vancouver, Elaine enjoys the only relationship of her adult life not tainted by a victor-victim struggle of wills. Significantly, Ben, the most dependable, attractive male in any of Atwood’s novels, stays off on business in Mexico and never appears in the novel at all; he phones in his lines. With Ben, Atwood makes the point that decent, supportive men may occasionally be found, but she also keeps him out of sight so as not to dilute the novel’s pervasive cynicism about men. During the time that Elaine makes these missteps with men she also moves with unsteady progress toward becoming an artist, first by discovering her vocation, then achieving a degree of technical expertise—precision of line, naturalistically rendered surfaces, and so on—and ultimately developing a style, the unique character of her work which will empower it and make it expressive. Elaine’s progress follows a familiar pattern that dates back at least to The Story

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of Avis: a dazzling revelation of her destiny as an artist is followed by a series of little epiphanies in which she confronts the numerous obstacles faced by women in pursuing that goal. The initial revelation comes during a botany examination when Elaine, having mastered scientific drawing under her father’s influence, realizes ‘‘like a sudden epileptic fit’’ that she wants to be a painter, not a biologist (274). One obstacle soon presents itself in her life drawing class, when she is expected to draw a nude female model: . . . this woman frightens me. There is a lot of flesh to her, especially below the waist; there are folds across her stomach, her breasts are saggy and have enormous dark nipples. The harsh fluorescent light, falling straight down on her, turns her eye sockets to caverns, emphasizes the descending lines from nose to chin; but the massiveness of her body makes her head look like an afterthought. She is not beautiful, and I am afraid of turning into that. (288)

At this point Elaine has not yet acquired the impersonal gaze that will serve her well as an artist. Although she observes in passing certain painterly features such as mass and line, her attention is captured by the woman’s alarmingly unglamorous fleshy presence, so that the model becomes a kind of bogey of aging. Another problem that Elaine encounters is the ambiguous and belittling way that women artists are defined and labeled. When young men in the Life Drawing class make fun of housewives in the class, calling them lady painters, Elaine raises the question: ‘‘If they’re lady painters, what does that make me?’’ I say. ‘‘A girl painter,’’ Jon says, joking. Colin, who has manners of a sort, explains: ‘‘If you’re bad, you’re a lady painter. Otherwise you’re just a painter.’’ (297)

Although Colin may have ‘‘manners of a sort’’ he evidently takes pleasure in what he sees as the male prerogative to assign labels. Elaine’s degree in art history and her studies in commercial art serve her well when she begins to arrive at her own style, since her paintings allude glancingly to the past and also have some of the properties of commercial art, hard edges and shiny surfaces. In contrast to the career of Jon, who slavishly follows every movement from abstract expressionism to op art and pop art, and who ends up doing special effects for chain-saw-massacre films, Elaine follows the more difficult path of painstakingly crafting her own style. First, she be-

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comes fascinated with painting reflective surfaces, ‘‘pearls, crystals, mirrors’’ and such domestic items as ginger-ale bottles, ice cubes, and frying pans (347). Oddly enough, and contrary to usual artistic practice, she begins to paint objects from memory rather than from life, although the images are clear and sharp, not fuzzy-edged. She paints kitchen appliances from her childhood, and these objects, she says ‘‘are suffused with anxiety,’’ but she insists, ‘‘it’s not my own anxiety. The anxiety is in the things themselves’’ (357). Perhaps Elaine has learned to project her own anxiety about domesticity so fully upon the painted images that she can claim that she no longer possesses that anxiety. She also rejects the use of impasto, presumably because impasto can record the fervent touch of the artist in a way that a flat surface does not. Turning away from even the use of textured brushstrokes in favor of seemingly pure color and reflectivity, Elaine teaches herself the ancient art of mixing tempera, colors suspended in a water and egg emulsion. It is evident that the vision of the cat’s eye marble, the ‘‘kernel of glass,’’ has been absorbed into a painterly eye which leads her to depict ‘‘objects that breathe out light’’ (346). Thus, the first stage of Elaine’s artistic growth is the rejection of textured, self-expressive art in favor of an optically precise art of painting the light as it strikes the surfaces of things. The next and more difficult task is to bring the vision of a world of radiance to bear upon her own emotions and memories. Her rejection of impasto and of brushstrokes that betray the artist’s hand leads to a cool, dispassionate presentation of subject matter, but the subjects themselves are drenched in passion, her own most memorable moments of being. Elaine becomes fascinated with Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage not so much for its pellucid rendering of the wedding couple as for the framed convex mirror in the background, which reflects the figures of two people who exist in a different world outside the picture. ‘‘This round mirror,’’ she thinks, ‘‘is like an eye, a single eye that sees more than anyone else looking’’ (347). The surrogate eye intrigues her because it shows the outside of the painting’s inside, peeling back its reality and revealing the presence of the artist. By trickery, the artist is both concealed and revealed. For Elaine, I believe, that mirror, which, art historians tell us, symbolizes the spotlessness of the virgin, externalizes the artist’s vision, the eye and the ego, cleansed and made spotless by the will of the artist. Elaine’s cool style in the visual medium is complemented by the literary style of her first-person narrative. Elaine’s is the voice of one

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who talks back to life, witty, epigrammatical, ironic to the point of sarcasm. Her sentences do not flow into one another but rather stand out sharply, like pieces of glass in a mosaic. Her tone is the opposite of romantic; she frequently dismisses sentimental or romantic notions as lies. The seeming objectivity of her paintings and the irony of her narrative tone go hand in hand, and the impersonality seems as much a survival technique, a refuge, as an aesthetic choice. Elaine protects herself from falling prey to sentiment and, more importantly, to abuse such as she suffered as a child. Elaine’s skeptical, impersonal tone is also consistent with her early training in science and the scientific points of view of her astrophysicist brother and biologist father. To the extent that the intellectual grounding of her art may be inferred from the novel, her art is evidently more rooted in a scientific than a religious perspective. Although she visits church with the Smeaths for a time, religion— except for her vision of the Virgin—has a short-lived effect upon her. Stargazing with her brother as a child, Elaine thinks, ‘‘His stars are different from the ones in the Bible; they’re wordless, they flame in an obliterating silence’’ (110). The fiery, wordless light of the stars seen from a modern, scientific perspective influences the images of radiance and light in her paintings more than religious illumination does. The novel ends with a reference to the stars as echoes of an old light shining out of nothingness. In a review of The Blind Assassin, John Updike aptly sums up the worldview that can be inferred from Atwood’s novels: the ‘‘cosmos above us and underneath our feet is void; in our poor neediness we are as carnivorous and blind as the gods.’’17 Although Elaine is a persona quite distinct from Atwood, the painter in the novel and the author of the novel evidently share this attitude of stoic, not quite hopeless, cynicism. At the retrospective exhibit Elaine speaks of time as bending back upon itself, like an ocean wave. The fact that sections of the novel are named for paintings in the exhibit also gives the final section of the book a backward-looking perspective. The exhibit, occupying three walls of the gallery, is like a palace of memory; it is a reflection on her life though not a mirror of it. As Elaine describes the paintings on each of the walls, the reader witnesses the stages of her life: early anxieties, the hatred that once liberated her creativity, her affections, the loss and grief that come with the middle years, and finally her attempt to offer a comprehensive map of her inner world. The east wall displays her early works, the paintings of appliances; the end wall contains works from her middle period, including the

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series of paintings of Mrs. Smeath; and the west wall shows her five most recent works. Whereas the viewers in the novel have only the speculative gallery notes of Charna, the gallery manager, to rely on, Elaine gives the reader a guided tour of the show, moving around the fictional gallery from east to west. Atwood provides far more extensive passages of ekphrasis than other novelists in this study do. Elaine’s descriptions of her own work are cool, straightforward, detailed, and uncluttered by personal comment. In describing each painting she moves systematically from right to left or from top to bottom, inviting the reader’s ‘‘eye’’ to take in the elements of the composition. The lack of emotion in her tone is all the more telling in that the paintings depict the most grievous and moving moments of her life. The effect of the exhibit is vivid, providing a fitting climax to the novel, and the paintings take on a presence of their own, even a dominance in the narrative. Elaine’s ekphrastic passages attempt to translate the events of the novel into a visual form, and they become separately memorable from the rest of the text. The reader is invited to puzzle out the meaning of the events depicted and, on a more abstract level, to ponder the mysteriousness of words construed as pictures. Displayed on the end wall is the series of paintings of Mrs. Smeath, some of which are narrative sequences, and all of which depict her in fantastic and humiliating situations. Although she has painted Mrs. Smeath more than any other subject, Elaine claims more than once that she does not know why she hates her so much, even though the paintings make it evident that the hatred has liberated and inspired Elaine’s creativity. The reader must therefore try to piece together the reasons for Elaine’s hatred of this obviously symbolic woman, and not surprisingly those reasons are complicated; Mrs. Smeath carries a good deal of cultural and moral significance as well as personal meaning for Elaine. The fact that Grace’s mother countenances the other girls’ torment of ‘‘heathen’’ Elaine and lets Elaine know that she countenances it is one of Elaine’s bitterest memories, filling her with hatred and shame. It is in that moment that Elaine first learns that adults can also be evil and that evil can mask itself under the guise of holiness. The pleasure that Mrs. Smeath displays in feeling spiritually superior to Elaine offers a glimpse into her meanness of spirit. Her bourgeois life is unredeemed by imagination, beauty, or vitality. Moreover, Mrs. Smeath’s appropriation of God unto herself robs Elaine of any hopes she might temporarily entertain of embracing Christianity. As a child

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Elaine sees the potential for exclusiveness, smugness, and, by extension, violence in Canadian Protestant culture. Ironically, she is told that Mrs. Smeath has a ‘‘bad heart.’’ In the paintings Elaine satirically represents the moral ugliness of religious hypocrisy as physical ugliness and lack of grace. Culturally, then, Mrs. Smeath represents the part of Canadian society that is dull, narrow-minded, middle class, and smugly Protestant. Mrs. Smeath, her name a portmanteau of ‘‘Smith’’ and ‘‘Death,’’ represents the forces of anti-art, though in quite a different way than the punk artist in ‘‘The Sunrise’’ does. When a woman dashes into the gallery and throws ink on one of the Smeath pictures, Elaine momentarily mistakes her for Grace Smeath. In a sense the misapprehension is correct: the persons who violently oppose ‘‘indecency’’ in art are all children or clones of Mrs. Smeath. Mrs. Smeath is also a particularly repulsive version of the Angel in the House; Elaine portrays her over and over in serial paintings in order to kill the Angel. The combination of religious hypocrisy and ferocious, discontented domesticity is depicted in a painting called AN EYE FOR AN EYE, in which Mrs. Smeath is shown violently peeling a potato with a mean-looking paring knife. Elaine also paints her posing as an odalisque in her Sunday hat with her rubber plant, symbol of stodgy domesticity. And, since the Mrs. Smeaths of this world lay claim to decency, Elaine makes her indecent through various humiliating poses, nude or in her underwear, or copulating with her husband in the posture of flying insects. In the painting that is defaced by the ink, White Gift, there are four panels showing Mrs. Smeath being unwrapped from tissue paper and stripped down to her underpants, with one big breast cut open to reveal a reptilian heart. These images reveal a savagely satiric purpose that is seen nowhere else in Elaine’s work but that seems to add animation—and animus—to her more gentle, later visions. Elaine ruthlessly exposes, reveals, then dissects and sections her victim, drawing upon her former expertise in laboratory illustration. Surely, no other writer has pilloried the Angel in the House with such bitterness and glee as Atwood has done. In its distaste for the supposedly corrupt flesh of her subject, Elaine’s satiric art seems neoclassical in spirit, at least remotely reminiscent of the practice of Swift and Hogarth, and, again, she presents a world where no pity or sentiment may enter. Sentiment does threaten to seep in at the edges of the five paintings on the west wall of the gallery, Elaine’s most recent work, in that the paintings are themselves individually retrospective and also highly

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personal; they ‘‘tell’’ her life visually. But Elaine keeps sentiment at bay by assiduously sticking to her impersonal style. The paintings themselves are too reticent to arouse any easy or automatic responses. The five paintings are Picoseconds, which depicts her now-dead parents as small figures in a landscape; Three Muses, in which three friends who were kind to her when young now offer a ritual gift of spruce budworm eggs; One Wing, a symbolic tribute to her brother, who was killed by terrorists; Cat’s Eye, showing herself with her childhood enemies; and Unified Field Theory, which attempts to map Elaine’s emotional and aesthetic world. In contrast to Elaine’s verbal narrative, these paintings are cryptic and surreal; they contain elements of displacement and deliberate rearrangement in order covertly to express an emotion or judgment. These paintings do not preserve moments in time; rather, they combine elements that could not have been present in the same moment. Like the artist in Spending, Elaine also draws upon materials and ideas from past ages of art, such as a virgin, a triptych, a convex mirror, and the use of tempera, the old monks’ medium, tying her private visions to a public tradition or historical and religiously significant art. Like Atwood herself, Elaine rejects the label of postmodern because it makes her work sound belated and derivative, but the reworking of bits of historic art in a boldly innovative style certainly gives her work a contemporary feel. In Picoseconds Elaine paints a landscape depicting her parents picnicking in the bush above an iconic band of old gas pump logos—a red rose, a maple leaf, a shell—signs of their traveling days transformed into mysterious images. The parents are tiny and painted in the position of Bruegel’s disappearing Icarus. They are painted in a different light than the landscape, as if belonging to another dimension, and, as Elaine points out, the logos ‘‘call into question the reality of landscape and figures alike’’ (428). These are the parents who have twice abandoned her, most obviously by dying—she cannot bring them back for a trillionth of a second—and less obviously by her father’s obliviousness and her mother’s mute bafflement in the face of Elaine’s torment at the hands of her supposed friends in childhood. The positioning of the small figures of the parents so as to remind the viewer of Icarus, if only subliminally, suggests that they too have vanished from sight to the utter indifference of a busy, self-absorbed world. One Wing, Elaine’s tribute to her brother, who was randomly killed by terrorists in an airplane hijacking, shows a man falling from the sky brandishing a child’s sword. In the triptych the suspended, fall-

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ing man is flanked by representations of his hobbies and interests, a World War II airplane in the style of a cigarette card and a lunar moth. Although these metonymic emblems presumably have deep and grievous personal meaning for Elaine, there is no way that a visitor to the gallery could read the painting as a tribute to a brother murdered by terrorists without knowing Elaine’s family history. The same is true of the gas pump logos, the marble, and the image of the virgin in the other paintings; the reader is privy to the private code, but the viewer is not. Thus, Elaine has it both ways: the combination of her narrative and her paintings both reveals and conceals her private feelings at the same time. The last two paintings described, Cat’s Eye and Unified Field Theory, allude to their own making and contain the artist’s presence through images of the mirror and the cat’s eye marble. Again, the artist’s presence makes itself known in encoded form. Both paintings refer to the crisis at the ravine, and both represent objects suspended against the sky without visible support, suggesting a precariousness, an uneasy balance; suspended objects are central to Elaine’s art. Cat’s Eye depicts not the marble but the convex mirror, ornately framed and hung against a blue field. Facing forward in front of the mirror is the upper half of Elaine’s middle-aged face, while the convex mirror shows the back of her head at a younger age and, beyond it, the reflection of her three childhood tormentors advancing through the snow. This painting is highly ambiguous. It may be read as witnessing a triumph: since Elaine’s back is turned to the image of the girls, she may be said to have put the childhood crisis behind her by capturing it in her art. On the other hand, the mirror reflection in the painting indicates that the tormentors are actually in front of her, a forever-approaching reminder of their false friendship and her lonely pain. Unified Field Theory is ironically titled. Elaine is well aware that she is far from possessing a unified, comprehensive theory of space and time as she has experienced them. Rather, this long vertical painting is like a map of Elaine’s psychological and aesthetic world, holding in delicate balance several of the emotionally significant elements of her life and bracketing them in a single vision. The background of the painting shows the sky and stars blended together with the earth and roots in Escher-like fashion. This interpenetration of galaxies and stones is a poetic conceit suggesting the unity of existence and, perhaps, the fragility of the ecosystem. Stretching laterally across the painting is the familiar bridge over the ravine, under which runs the

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stream that flows from the cemetery, the world of the dead. Since the beginning of the novel, the bridge has represented Elaine’s life span, the structure that holds her up above the icy river. The sky and the bridge thus create space-time coordinates, the field of life and a symbolic representation of her life’s journey. Floating over the bridge is the Black Virgin, Elaine’s self-generated hallucination that saved her from freezing. The Black Virgin, who in Mexican folklore restores lost things, levitates over the bridge bearing in her hands an oversize cat’s eye marble. In part, she is a figure for memory, proffering the marble of luminous vision, now enlarged to suggest a globe. The levitating Virgin seems to be the opposite of the dreaded Mrs. Smeath, and indeed Unified Field Theory is the most hopeful and comprehensive of Elaine’s paintings, despite its references to fear and suffering. This painting also exhibits, more fully than any other embedded painting discussed in this study, the imagery of the liminal, the suspended, and the unfinished. What Unified Field Theory might imply about Atwood’s own art of the novel is problematic. It suggests the necessity of transforming those events that are most wounding, to turn them to some account in works of art. But Atwood’s own opinions and feelings are only hinted at in the novel: the device of a narrator who addresses the reader in brisk staccato rhythms, usually assuming an ironic stance, effectively removes the brush strokes that betray the artist’s hand. Unified Field Theory also conveys the precariousness of one woman’s modern existence as a fragile bridge across the void, unsustained by institutions or external props. The Black Virgin, detached from Christianity, is projected from Elaine’s own heart and mind like a photographic negative, back-lit against the sky, not only a symbol of memory but also a dark portrait of the artist. Cat’s Eye ends with a stronger sense of closure than some of the other novels in this study. Elaine forgives Jon and at least partially lays to rest the ghosts of her parents and her brother, although she never can rid herself of the haunting voice of Cordelia. She attends the retrospective in which her life work is brought together and displayed. But the paintings themselves illustrate the aesthetic of the unfinished found in other novels. They include serial works, prominent depiction of suspended or floating figures, displaced and stylized objects, and fragments of her life presented ambiguously. In the paintings, old grievances are brought back and made to hang literally suspended on the walls. And, although the last painting in the gallery, Unified Field Theory, is tinged with light and hope of deliverance, it also reconstructs an old, cold time of suffering.

7 Drawn from Life: Jill Paton Walsh’s The Serpentine Cave The nature of the task was to discern the exact position of the intersection between a physical object and the light, and draw a line round it. —Jill Paton Walsh, The Serpentine Cave

LIKE MARGARET ATWOOD, BRITISH WRITER JILL PATON WALSH PONDERS

questions about the artist’s way of seeing, about the interactions of eye, hand, and light, and about the presence of the artist in her work. How can these artistic phenomena best be understood and described? Like Atwood, Paton Walsh also makes use of her main character’s memories to draw a causal connection between stressful events in childhood and the practice of art. Marian Easton, the middle-aged protagonist of The Serpentine Cave (1997), searches, like Elaine Risley, for a pattern in her experiences. The Serpentine Cave also has in common with Cat’s Eye and To the Lighthouse the quality of being a highly organized literary work with reticulated systems of visual imagery. Images of a cave, the sea, a lighthouse, and a lifeboat serve as clues in Marian’s search to learn the identity of her father, the better to understand her own identity. She discovers that the secret of her origins is connected to a lifeboat disaster that occurred off the Cornish coast in 1939, the year she was conceived. In that actual historical event, a lifeboat capsized three times in a heavy sea, drowning all but one of the men aboard. Following the clues, Marian becomes totally preoccupied with solving the mystery of her past, but at the same time she is, unbeknownst to herself, moving into her own future as an artist, an occupation that she never imagined for herself. Marian’s self-discovery in middle age occurs as a result of her search for her father and for a better understanding of her mother, who has just died. Although Marian’s mother Stella Har174

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naker was a painter, Marian has always desired to lead an ordinary life and steer clear of the arts. Separated from her husband, who has gone off to America with a younger woman more willing to cater to his need to be the center of attention, Marian makes her living as a dispensing chemist and relies upon her two grown children for emotional support, never dreaming that she can be drawn away from her old life into a life of art. Marian is inexorably pulled toward the rugged seashore of Cornwall, the place where she was conceived, to be reborn as an artist in the second half of her life. Although Marian’s mother always refuses to identify the lover who fathered her, Marian has a vague memory from early childhood of a man who rescued her and saved her life when she was trapped by the tide in ‘‘the serpentine cave’’ at some unknown seashore. These mysteries occupy the reader’s attention as well as Marian’s, so that for a long time it is not evident that the real subject of The Serpentine Cave is the ‘‘birth’’ of an artist in middle age. The novel ends, and its true subject becomes clear, when Marian applies her first brushstroke to a canvas on the last page. Paton Walsh implies that the facts of one’s identity—one’s origins, perceptions of the world, and most deeply held ethical values—are a part of art. She shares with Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and Deirdre Madden, among others, the idea that art cannot be separated from other aspects of life, existing in a lofty realm of its own. By the very structure of her novel—the ‘‘birth’’ of an artist resulting from her middle-aged search into things past—Paton Walsh insists upon the relationship of art to one’s deepest self. For Marian, to retrieve the distant past from the deep layers of time is to reconstruct herself as a freer, more creative being. A mystery writer as well as an acclaimed mainstream novelist, Paton Walsh makes use in The Serpentine Cave of many of the classical elements of a detective story: suspense, tantalizing clues, surprising revelations, and recognition scenes. At the opening of the novel, Marian’s discovery of her mother lying unconscious from a stroke on the path to her studio at her home near Cambridge leads to Marian’s tragic realization that it is too late to establish communication with her mother and to ask her about the past. Since Stella never regains the power of speech, Marian, who has not been close to her mother in her adult life, is left with only unanswered questions. Her memories of the terrifying events at the cave, somehow linked to her father, are revived by two paintings of beaches among those left to her by Stella in her studio, a renovated barn. Clues to Marian’s past

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are also provided by Leo Vincy [sic], a sculptor and painter who comes to collect a large sum of money for a sculpture Stella commissioned from him. As Stella’s former pupil, Leo is able to identify the beach paintings as a setting near St. Ives, and he identifies the subject of a portrait as Tommy Tremorvah, Marian’s putative father, a man disgraced in St. Ives because he missed the lifeboat the night of the disaster. Journeying to St. Ives with her son Toby, Marian is suddenly flooded with memories of early childhood. She finds a house for lease with a grand view of the sea, and immediately she realizes that she and Stella once lived there for a while. Discovering her mother’s spilled paint still unfaded on the floor of the upstairs studio, Marian rents the house on the spot and almost immediately begins to think of it as her true home. The sudden move to St. Ives is the first stage of Marian’s transformation. After revisiting the cave and investigating the events surrounding the long-ago lifeboat disaster, Marian eventually locates her aging father Tommy, a retired sea captain, although at first he is reluctant to acknowledge her at all because of the disgrace of having spent the night with Stella rather than responding to the rocket signal that led his mates to their watery death. Beyond the literal mystery of her parentage lies the mystery of Marian’s selfhood, for she does not truly know herself until after her mother’s death and the events at St. Ives. The completion of Marian’s search for her father gives closure at the end of the novel, but the end is also a beginning as Marian discovers a new self and attacks a blank canvas. Paton Walsh uses this plot as the framework for a novel of psychological depth and richness. Paton Walsh implies that failure to understand, or even to know, a parent can seriously retard one’s attainment of self-knowledge and creativity. The novel seemingly centers around Marian’s quest to locate and identify her father in order to fill a gap—or, as she sees it, a gaping hole—in her own sense of who she is, her father’s daughter. ‘‘There he is,’’ she thinks, ‘‘running in my bloodstream and in my children’s bloodstream, and we don’t know a thing’’ (48). But in reality Marian’s understanding of herself hinges much more dramatically and complexly upon the mystery of her mother. Stella’s death is the crisis that sets the novel in motion, hitting Marian like a great weight crushing upon her: ‘‘all the upheaval, the appalling sight of une femme peintre laid low like a fallen tree, weighed her down’’ (37). Her mother’s death instigates a retrospective examination of Marian’s own life, especially of the unstable dynamics of her interactions with her mother in her early years. Marian’s lifetime of

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exasperating relations with her mother, a story familiar enough in its general outlines, provides the psychological background for her belated emergence as a painter in middle age. Because Stella’s deepest passions are invested in her art, and because she protects that investment by erecting impenetrable barriers around herself, thick walls that say ‘‘Keep out,’’ Marian grows up with very little understanding of what goes on in her mother’s mind. She sees art as a rival for her mother’s attention, a rival against which she has no recourse or weapon except her own determination to express her resentment by constructing herself as her mother’s opposite, a nonartist. Marian comes to realize that the great danger in trying to define oneself as the opposite of a parent is the distortion of one’s own true nature. In reaction to what she perceives as her mother’s indifference, Marian represses her own creativity, choosing to become a pharmacist, a career that demands scientific exactitude but that presumably allows for little self-expression. Moreover, because of Stella’s seeming indifference to Marian during much of her childhood, Marian has little understanding of who Stella really is. A better grasp of Stella’s inner being might have allowed Marian to carry out openly the mother-daughter struggle that is natural to girls as they grow into adulthood. Stella’s constant preoccupation with painting offers Marian nothing to do battle with as an object of resentment except the act of painting itself. It should be noted that these events are narrated exclusively from Marian’s point of view. Stella’s art certainly does bring a degree of neglect and disorder into her daughter’s life, but later in the novel Marian is afforded a glimpse of her mother’s true love for her, the question of her mother’s love having been the one looming uncertainty in her life that drives all of the others. She also learns that her mother has left her a much richer legacy than she has imagined. Marian’s inner life takes the form of a sort of dialectic. The thesis, or the given, in her childhood is Stella’s art; the antithesis is Marian’s own definition of herself as she grows up as an anti-Stella, the daughter who dislikes art. The crisis of Stella’s death and subsequent period of self-examination leads to the hope of a synthesis at the end of the novel, as Marian takes up art. When Marian is a schoolgirl, she understandably resents the nomadic life she lives with Stella, traveling from one city or country to another and, just as Marian has settled into a new language and school, moving on to find a different set of landscapes for Stella to paint. The messiness of Stella’s painting and her utter lack of interest in the domestic arts offend

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Marian’s innate sense of order, a trait that appears to be inherited from her father. Stella occasionally sells a painting, but her lack of financial responsibility means a hand-to-mouth existence at best. Marian also hates the sense of isolation and eccentricity that their life brings about. When she asks Stella, wailing, why she cannot be like other mothers, Stella replies, ‘‘You find something to live for . . . and it takes priority. It must. Painting, for me. Only that’’ (27). Stella’s dedication to painting rather than to her home and her daughter irritates Marian to the point that she determines, above all else, that she wants to be ordinary herself—if not exactly the Angel of the House at least a woman dedicated to children and family. She thinks of her mother as une femme peintre, as if somehow the embarrassment of her career will be more bearable in French than in plain English. During Marian’s adolescent years and young adulthood, when moods and opinions tend to change frequently, the situation becomes more complicated. Marian’s attitude toward her mother takes unexpected turns. Pride replaces shame when the students in Marian’s art class at school express admiration for Stella and her way of life. Shame returns when a boyfriend whom Marian brings home from college expresses pity for Marian because she has to live with such atrocious paintings. Marian decides that she can tolerate her mother’s art if indeed it is good, but that their life together is intolerable if so much has been sacrificed for mere dabbling, work that constitutes no more than an obsessive hobby. In assuming that Stella’s work has to be either good art or mere dabbling, Marian naively bases her judgment of her mother—and even of herself—on the unreliable criterion of artistic reputation. The ultimate embarrassment comes on the occasion of Marian’s wedding, when Stella wanders off to work on a painting. Although it is typical of adolescents and young people that they tend to take their cues from others and to be easily embarrassed in social situations, the young Marian goes so far as to define herself and her opinions in terms of how Stella appears in the eyes of the world. The crisis brought about by Stella’s death leads Marian suddenly to realize, almost with a guilty sense of a neglected duty, that she has failed to shape her own character and to understand her own mind because she has defined herself entirely in terms of her mother, as an anti-Stella and anti-artist. Perhaps because she has no father with whom to triangulate, and to negotiate a sense of identity, Marion has always seen herself as a photographic negative of her mother. Stella’s death leads to a lengthy self-examination:

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To be the shadow of every light in her mother’s life, the light to every shadow. To be practical, to be tidy, to be dutiful, to be attentive and kind, to choose a place and live in it, to stay put lifelong, to have no interest in art, no opinions on anything intellectual—it was loving her mother that had laid these heavy shackles on her, as though she could by being at the opposite pole in some way pay her mother’s unpaid debts, make up her mother’s shortfall, pay her mother’s unpaid tribute to convention, to normal conduct, to uncontroversial judgement about how to live. (51)

Marian suddenly recognizes that she has taken on a false burden, and further, she has the poignant realization that she has done these mistaken things out of love for her mother, as though there were debts to be paid for her mother’s eccentric life. Marian then remembers with a jolt that Stella once reminded her that an unexamined life is not worth living, and that moment sets in motion a long process of self-examination. A part of the disaster of Stella’s short illness before her death is that her stroke renders her unable to speak. Marian finds her in a grotesque condition on the path to the studio, ‘‘the slumped body, alive and making awful noises—a monologue of groans and garbled ramblings’’ (10). Stella’s wretched state as she lies in the hospital means that Marian is denied any opportunity for some sort of deathbed sharing of affection or even information. When Stella soon falls utterly silent, Marian comes to realize that the situation is like a parody of their lives together. Her mother was always silent, at least about some matters, and now Marian feels her own words to be hemorrhaging into the silence. When she confesses to the mute Stella, with guilt and horror, that she will have to invade Stella’s privacy, read her papers, and sell her house, Marian invokes the novel’s principal metaphors of sea and shipwreck: ‘‘I’m so at sea in your life, I’m going to make horrible mistakes’’ (49). It is ironic at this point, practically at the moment of her mother’s death, that Marian imagines herself at sea in Stella’s life rather than in her own. With Stella gone, Marian attempts, with Leo’s help, to sort out the pictures in the barn studio that are her legacy and a clue to her identity. Stella’s art represents the aesthetic of the unfinished in two ways. Some of the paintings act as intriguing, almost teasing clues to Marian’s past and her incomplete knowledge of herself. She has to try to scrutinize them and supply further information from her own memory in order to know her past. But also, many of the embedded

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paintings themselves appear to be unfinished as a deliberate aesthetic choice. Stella has scrawled ‘‘For Marian’’ on the back of the portrait of Tommy Tremorvah, the man who turns out to be Stella’s father. Tommy is portrayed sitting nude on a wooden chair with his back to a window and facing into a room so that he is both aureoled and cast in shadow; this is the same position in which Marian will unconsciously pose herself when she comes to paint her first selfportrait at the end of the novel. The positioning of his hands over his genitals at the center of the painting actually calls attention to his sexuality; it is easy to assume that he was Stella’s lover. His eyes are ‘‘unreadable, watchful, dark,’’ but there are hints of his profession in his rough hands, wiry frame, and the sketched-in stylized boat in the background: the portrait both conceals and reveals. Other paintings containing clues to Marian’s past are a series of three seascapes depicting the forgotten beaches that Marian wants to rediscover. Leo helps her identify the setting near St. Ives, and she is able to connect the paintings to her memory of having been trapped in the cave of serpentine marble, caught by the tide, and rescued by a man, presumably her father, who protected her all night from the cold Atlantic on an islanded rock until they could be rescued. When Marian arrives at St. Ives and meets her mother’s old friend Violet, Violet shows her photographs that offer additional clues. A picture of Violet in a flowered dress that Marian remembers provides her the information that it was Violet who once made love on the beach with Tommy during the war and thus Violet, not Stella, who neglected Marian as a toddler and irresponsibly allowed her to be trapped by the tide. Violet shows Marian another photograph in which Stella is obviously exhibiting her love for her young daughter. These images help reconcile Marian to her dead mother. Clues to the painter’s inner life were present in Jane Eyre’s surreal paintings, Avis’s sphinx, and Elaine Risley’s mysterious logos and icons. In Marian’s case, her mother’s paintings offer clues to the mystery of her past, her paternity, and her childhood trauma. Here, ekphrastic passages play an essential role in unfolding the narrative rather than arresting its flow. The remainder of Stella’s paintings in the studio are mysterious in other ways. At one end of the barn are quite a few raw-colored, semiabstract paintings that appear to express rage against the world; they seem to Marian like acts of existential anger. Although Marian and Leo agree that these paintings are not sellable, they express a hidden side of Stella, perhaps her private vision of darkness or a

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godless universe. Although these works are not deemed appropriate for living room walls, the reader wonders if they might not appeal to connoisseurs of the avant garde. Their dark anger seems to balance the brightness of Stella’s beach paintings. At the other end of the barn is a smaller group of paintings—seascapes, boats, and harbor scenes—that radiate calm and the persistence of memory. These paintings, the sellable ones, all appear to be ‘‘half finished.’’ They are described as cool, with gray lines against a white ground. The colors are only partly filled in, and many of the forms—boats, lighthouses, and so on—run out of the picture plane or are rendered only with an outline. Several of these embedded paintings are framed by a window casement, which offers ‘‘a broken and irregular frame to a view of part things’’ (71). Paton Walsh leaves it to the reader to interpret this rich array of works depicting partial or oblique views of things. Certainly they show Stella to be a modernist, but beyond that they may suggest Stella’s sense of the ‘‘partial’’ life that her art forced her to live or perhaps her sense that all views are partial and all lives unfinished. On some unconscious level Marian may sense that her mother’s life and work remain an unfinished story that she must pick up and continue on her own. Here, the ekphrastic passages offer an early hint of Marian’s legacy of a career in art. It is ironic that throughout the course of Marian’s story she is becoming the very thing that she has despised and misunderstood, a painter. Her progress is rather like a pilgrimage, with stages of discovery along the way, but the journey is in part an unconscious one. Paton Walsh creates dramatic irony by giving the reader clues to Marian’s destiny before Marian herself is aware of it. One such moment occurs when Marian, as a teenager, accompanies her mother on a painting expedition in the South Downs. Having brought along an extra easel and sized board, Stella proffers her daughter a paintbrush and a palette, inviting her to try painting for once. Marian refuses to take the brush in hand, but before she does so she casts her eyes over the panorama before her: Marian had looked at the huge prospect, the stilled movement of the crests and troughs of land, the heat haze just faintly now beginning to soften outlines, the light silken movement of wind running on the bowing grass under a sky like translucent bright shadows . . . She remembered the hours of labour, the misery, the striving, the painting over, the abandoned canvases, the subjects tackled again and again which characterized her mother’s life. (29–30)

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The ‘‘huge prospect’’ of the scene takes on a symbolic quality for Marian: she regards the sacrifices of a painter’s life as too great a price to pay. Although she does not admit it to herself, she is also afraid of the enormous challenge. The oxymoronic terms in which she thinks about the vista as she gazes at it, however, seem to hint that, despite herself, Marian has an unusually sensitive and artistic way of perceiving the natural world. She sees the contours of the land as a ‘‘stilled movement,’’ which could be a movement in geological time that only appears to be arrested. Or perhaps she is thinking of the movement of the eye as it passes over the ups and downs of the still landscape; in that case, it would not be much of a leap to go from the movements of the eye to the rhythmic movements of a paintbrush. Another oxymoron is present in the ‘‘translucent bright shadows’’ of the sky. Marian is not looking at the scene in a conventional way; rather, she perceives the contrary forces that make this moment in nature unique. She apprehends the inscape of the natural scene, to use Hopkins’s term. Even at the moment when she refuses to accept the paintbrush, thinking that she and her mother are ‘‘cast away helplessly on the flood of the beauty of the world,’’ Marian reveals to the reader, if not to herself, that she possesses a painterly eye (30). The metaphor of being cast away on a flood ties the scene to the pervasive boat wreck imagery of the novel, and it also suggests that Marian herself will be cast away until she realizes that it is possible for her to tame the flood of beauty by arresting it in art. Paton Walsh’s choice of words consistently provides clues to the deeper or broader meaning of the events described. Marian instinctively looks at the world in an aesthetic way when she is not preoccupied with other concerns. In these moments she composes a scene in her mind as if it were a painting. Her eye is not photographic, but rather artistic. That is, she does not merely frame a scene in her field of vision but she also thinks in terms of arrested movement, takes note of contours and colors, observes perspective, and even performs a process of abstraction whereby some details are eradicated in order to create a more readable and pleasing composition. This painterly eye evidently does not come from her mother’s direct influence, since Marian as a child continually deflects her eyes from her mother’s work. When Marian arrives at St. Ives with Toby she walks about the town and seashore, viewing the scene from different perspectives, and each of these views reveals her aesthetic sensibility. First she looks out of her hotel room to the lighthouse:

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There were the headlands, the near one green, the further one lilac. And the sea that began beneath her a modest green like the glass of a white wine bottle, deepening to turquoise in the middle distance, had gathered at the horizon a concentration of bright blue fierce enough fully to deserve the name ‘‘ultramarine.’’ (80)

Marian’s sensitivity to color, her observation of atmospheric perspective, and her use of painterly terms such as ‘‘middle distance’’ and ‘‘ultramarine’’ reveal her painterly way of seeing. Windows frame the world for her, a first step toward art. Later, when she walks on the beach and turns her back to the sea, observing the panorama of the town, the town seems to consist of a geometry of roofscapes and windows floating above the bay. Her eye automatically analyzes what it sees and performs the kind of reduction to angles and planes that a painter would do. She is unconsciously composing a view of the town rather than simply taking in the scenery. Marian thinks, ‘‘I have come too far,’’ referring to her walk on the beach, but in fact she is well on her way in her journey toward art. Later still she climbs to a hilltop, the place where she is about to rediscover her home in St. Ives, and again looks out to sea: Remembering, dreaming, and experiencing had become fused. She did not know what she was doing. From here she could see the sea above and behind the houses round the harbour, and was looking down at and beyond it all. The vista had the wildness of landscape and the open, dangerous seas as well as the nested safety and friendliness of human habitation. (82)

Although Marian does not know what she is doing, it will eventually become evident that she has found the perfect place to begin the vocation that she unconsciously desires, a home with two stories of triple windows overlooking a grand vista of the sea. Like other fictional women artists, she finds her ideal locus on the margin of the seashore and the sea, the nexus of civilization and wild nature. The importance of St. Ives in the novel cannot be exaggerated; the term ‘‘setting,’’ with its suggestion of stagecraft, does not apply. Here, and in her other novels, Paton Walsh evokes a sense of place and weaves it into the heart of her techniques in a way reminiscent of the techniques of Virginia Woolf or Eudora Welty. Welty describes this special sense of place:

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Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel’s progress.1

In The Serpentine Cave the gathering place of St. Ives ties together the past and the present because Marian is seeing everything double, both as it presently appears and as she saw it as a child. She can even be said to see everything threefold, since many scenes of the locale also appear in Stella’s paintings. Although the town is not always picturesque—in some ways it has gone downhill like other English coastal resorts—St. Ives represents layers of time and experience in one place much as Margaret Atwood’s Toronto and Deirdre Madden’s Donegal do. At the same time that she develops the story of Marian’s selfdiscovery, Paton Walsh also shows Marian’s single adult children, Toby and Alice, making discoveries of their own in St. Ives which echo and complement Marian’s story. Toby, a stockbroker in trouble and adrift in his life, willingly accompanies his mother to St. Ives in order to escape from London, where he has been living under the shadow of suspicion of insider trading. Desperately needing renewal and a new path to follow in life, Toby, like his mother, receives clues to his true identity from the ambience of St. Ives and the vista of the seashore and the sea. He discovers a cousin who is a near twin in St. Ives, along with a whole family of Cornish relatives. Eventually he will decide to abandon his life in the City and use his money to buy a boat in order to revive his cousin’s fishing operation. Like his mysterious grandfather, Toby will become a man of the sea; like Marian, he will find that St. Ives has given him both his past and his future. Alice’s life is even more confused than her brother’s, but her artistic temperament links her more deeply to her grandmother Stella and, eventually, to her mother. A professional violist and member of a string quartet in London, Alice lives entirely for her music. She is dismissed from the ensemble by her on-and-off lover Max when she misses too many rehearsals because of her grandmother’s death and funeral. Moody and disconsolate, Alice spends her days in St. Ives endlessly practicing; the sound is a groaning and mournful sound, not simply because Alice has lost both her job and her lover but also because the viola seldom gets to carry the melody. Alice’s music is always partial and dependent on the consort. One night Marian discovers Alice playing in the darkness at the very edge of the cliff above the sea, risking her life. Although she is invited back to the

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quartet, Alice finally realizes that her affair with Max will go nowhere. Music is what really matters to her, and like her grandmother Stella she chooses the life of art over love and domesticity, but she will always be sad because of the choice she has had to make. Whereas Alice’s discovery is that she must reaffirm and live with the commitment she has made to music above all else, Toby learns that his life must take an entirely new turning. Both of these realizations echo Marian’s story, which will culminate in a pursuit of art, but first she must learn to look and to see, to renew her vision, and this is the process that blossoms when she comes to St. Ives. She begins to learn what serious art is and to establish a sense of her own tastes and preferences. When she looks at bad art in the shops of St. Ives, her reaction is emphatic: Unpaintings. They wouldn’t clean your eyeballs, and sharpen up your view of the world, they would clutter them, with a double whammy of awfulness. First with a sort of stupid prettification, an intent to show even this spectacular place in the light of any old beauty spot, and then with technical incompetence, so that the intended selective realism was botched and only half achieved. (91)

Marian implies that good art cleanses the vision and clarifies the world rather than attempting to prettify. It requires intelligence and technical mastery. As opposed to bad art, the ‘‘unpaintings,’’ Violet Garthen’s engravings and lithographs are merely ordinary in Marian’s eyes: her street scenes, sea scenes, and moored boats are literal and unchallenging, restful to have on the wall. Although they reveal a technical expertise beyond that of the bad art in the shops, they do not arrest the mind or cleanse the eye. Violet’s role as an artist is similar to that of Mr. Paunceforte in To the Lighthouse, to serve as a foil to the serious artist who labors, sometimes hopelessly, to give expression to a unique vision. While taking a critical view of Violet’s work, Marian chastens herself by thinking that she has no right to criticize, since she herself possesses neither mastery nor technique; previously she had shown no particular desire for such talents. On that same day Marian, while gazing at the harbor, feels a sudden urge to draw the surf with pastels and she begins to speculate about color, wondering if there exist pieces of chalk bright enough to capture the silver and the lilac of the branching rivulets of the tide receding across the sand in the sunlight. Later, returning to Stella’s studio to arrange for the sale of the paintings, Marian res-

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cues Stella’s paint box, just as an afterthought, and brings it back to St. Ives. She discovers inside the box ten thousand pounds that Stella left to pay for the sculpture she commissioned from Leo for Tommy’s grave, a bronze showing a small castaway man engulfed by a huge wave. (Stella mistakenly thought that Tommy had drowned in the North Sea during World War II.) Rushing to give Leo his money, Marian stumbles into his life drawing class and, finding it easier to stay and draw than rudely to make an exit, she begins the final phase of her journey toward art. Specifically, Marian feels compelled to draw because of the presence of the nude model in the studio: It was not that Marian had never seen a naked woman before; it was that she never had—how could one have, except alone with a lover?— permission to stare. And that permission, of course, was conditional on an intention to draw. To have walked off the street to stare, to see a naked stranger like a sideshow would have been intolerably squalid. And the woman was posed exactly between Marian and the door. To leave publicly would have been intolerably insulting. (157)

Humorously rationalizing that the rules of good manners require her to remain in the studio rather than give offense by walking past the model and leaving, Marian launches herself into the difficult task of drawing. Like the young Elaine Risley, she must learn quickly to be the woman who gazes rather than the one gazed upon; unlike Elaine, she botches her first drawing, not because she is repelled by the reality of the flesh of a very real and unremarkable woman, but because she is dazzled by its mortal beauty. As Marian continues with the life drawing classes along with other women students, Paton Walsh uses metaphors of the sea to describe the arduous nature of the task: ‘‘they were islanded, each marooned on the difficult shores of art’’ and she ‘‘struggled to keep her feet in waves of misplaced emotion . . . before arriving at something cool and hard: simple attention’’ (181–82). Viewing her own portfolio of drawings, Marian realizes that she has gradually learned to cast a cold eye upon her subject, to focus entirely on the business of seeing, like Elaine with her cat’s eye: ‘‘Marian had stared with an ice-cold vision. An almost cruel accuracy of view’’ (180). She can never decide whether the seeing or the actual rendering is the more difficult task. Whereas Cat’s Eye ends with a rich and varied gallery display of Elaine’s life work, The Serpentine Cave ends with Marian’s applying the first brushstroke to begin her first oil painting. Even so, Marian’s

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painting, like Elaine’s, is complex and symbolic. The novel’s final scene, in which she attempts the painting, presents a crescendo of the novel’s imagery and themes. Marian goes to her second-floor studio and sets up a heavy full-length mirror facing the three-part window with its grand view of the bay. She then poses herself with her back to the window, so that the painting will include the mirrored reflection of the scene below, in a triptych, and a silhouetted dark version of herself against the bright ground. The painting will thus be both a bright, mirrored seascape and a dark self-portrait, appropriate for one who is only beginning to know herself. Modern writers and painters often do not think of art in the straightforward way of Hamlet’s ‘‘mirror up to nature’’ but rather in terms of some sort of deflecting or distorting device whereby the artist’s mirror on the world gives expression to the artist’s subjective vision. Elaine’s mirrors speak of memory or alternate realities; Marian’s mirror— tilted so that it provides its own deflected angle on the exterior scenery—reflects a vision of the dark unknown self juxtaposed upon a quirky and partial view of the St. Ives seashore.The cut-off view echoes her mother’s paintings in expressing the aesthetic principle of the unfinished. Marian’s painting will contain a moral as well as a psychological dimension, since it includes the lighthouse and the lifeboat, which have come in the course of the novel to symbolize altruism and caritas. The moral dimension of art is reinforced by Marian’s memory of a line from Siegfried Sassoon in a poem about a Bach fugue: ‘‘I gaze at my life in a mirror, desirous of good . . .’’ (221). Marian repeats the line to herself, internalizing it: ‘‘For she was desirous of good; she desired it now more than she feared chaos or failure’’ (222). The desiring of the good and Marian’s thought of the task before her as a steep ascent are reminiscent of Iris Murdoch’s brand of Platonism, Murdoch’s idea of the arts as ideally assisting the soul’s journey to the Good, or the Higher Eros, and her admonition that attentiveness to the presence of the other is required for both the moral life and the life of art. Marian, who has learned just such attentiveness in her life drawing classes, now attempts something even more arduous in oils: ‘‘she wanted to see . . . truth naked, like the rocks in the tide’’ (221). She thinks of her body as an echoing cave filled with memories, having made the connection of the flesh with a cave at the serpentine cave, whose reddish marble horribly reminded her of dead bodies she had seen as a child during the Blitz. The notion of the body as a cave also gives an underlying hint of

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Platonism in Marian’s view of the process of painting. For Paton Walsh, then, art is inextricably tied to experience, memory, and the moral life, a vehicle for discovering oneself. Despite the idealism and lofty humanism of Marian’s view of art, her actual attempt is tentative and fraught with anxiety. Never has a fictional woman artist better illustrated the idea of the artist as liminal, Heilbrun’s ‘‘betwixt and between.’’ Marian is standing at a window, between the indoors and the outdoors, between the land and the sea, and also she is ‘‘standing between the mirror and the light, cast into shadow so that she could discern herself only dimly’’ (221). And then she realizes at once that she herself has been the missing element in her own life: ‘‘it was neither her father’s absence, nor her mother’s abstraction that had hollowed out that cavernous void—it was she herself who had gone missing’’ (221). Marian applies a single vertical line on the canvas, and the novel ends with the sentence ‘‘And if she could bring her picture to any sort of completion, this first mark would represent a vision of the distant lighthouse’’ (222). The echo of To the Lighthouse is obvious: Marian Easton makes her first brushstroke, as Lily Briscoe makes her last brushstroke, on the final page of the novel. And both novels end with a sentence emphasizing the primacy of the artist’s ‘‘vision.’’ This unmistakable allusion is more than a casual tribute to Woolf as author of the premier woman artist’s novel of the twentieth century. Paton Walsh imaginatively weaves in elements of Woolf ’s life and work, even more than Madden does, so that the spirit of Woolf is present on nearly every page of The Serpentine Cave. Although some of the allusions to Woolf are obvious, such as Marian’s brushstroke and a trip to the lighthouse as a recurrent motif, others are subtle and encoded. The references to To the Lighthouse enlarge the compass of The Serpentine Cave, adding to its range of meaning. In particular, the intertextuality enriches Paton Walsh’s theme of the gradual gestation and ‘‘birth’’ of a visual artist by allowing her to embrace several Woolfian ideas. One idea shared with Woolf is that small sensations, especially those embedded in memories of earliest childhood, are the building blocks of an artist’s sensibility. Another is the idea that the artist must achieve a double vision, grounded in both imagination and reality, symbolized in both novels by the lighthouse as an object of perception and desire. A third Woolfian idea is that the mature artist must work in full awareness of time passing, ephemerality, and loss, which is symbolized in both novels by a journey to the lighthouse

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with an aging father. Finally, Paton Walsh arrives at a mutual understanding with Woolf that the purpose of art is, above all, a cleansing of the eye and mind, and in this purpose visual art and the art of fiction are conjoined. Unlike Michael Cunningham, who deeply explores Woolf ’s sensibility and extends her world forward in time in The Hours, Paton Walsh does not try to ‘‘become’’ Woolf; she does not write in stream of consciousness nor attempt to ‘‘record the atoms as they fall upon the mind.’’ Rather, she offers variations on themes by Woolf, and she appears to draw upon her as a kind of power source as so many creative women have done since Woolf exhorted them in A Room of One’s Own to pay heed to the growing power of their creativity: ‘‘Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes.’’2 In Paton Walsh’s novel the dialogue of the writer with the painter is enriched by this secondary dialogue with Virginia Woolf and her character Lily, a dialogue that indirectly alludes to the pent up force of women’s creativity. In The Serpentine Cave the encoded references to Woolf ’s life are subtle. It dawns upon the reader at some point that Paton Walsh has named several of her main characters after people whom Woolf particularly loved—Stella, Violet, Leonard, and Toby—and while these characters bear no particular resemblance to the real-life counterparts, this naming has the effect of making them seem more familiar. More deeply encrypted are the references to Woolf ’s early memories as she describes them in ‘‘A Sketch of the Past.’’ One of Marian’s early memories, vague but persistent, is that of a woman in a dress ‘‘printed with bright blotchy flowers’’ who carries her down a cliff face at St. Ives. Although this turns out to be a false memory of her mother (it was Violet who wore the pansy-flowered dress that day at the serpentine cave) it nonetheless echoes Virginia Woolf ’s very first memory, that of her mother’s flowered dress as she sat on her mother’s lap on the train to Talland House in St. Ives, the setting that gets transported to the Hebrides in To the Lighthouse. This echo might seem coincidental, and in any case trivial, were it not followed by another incident in which Marian, rediscovering one of her mother’s paintings of the seashore at St. Ives, begins vividly to reexperience auditory sensations from early childhood: She knew that behind her was home—the windows and doors standing wide, and the blind billowing stiffly in the breeze, like a salt-encrusted

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sail. She could hear the tapping of the little acorn-shaped head on the dangling drawcord on the blind, as it flew in and out across the sill. The knowledge filled her with joy . . .

Although Paton Walsh may have imbued Marian with a memory of her own, since the author’s grandmother had a home at St. Ives, the memory is also, unmistakably, an echo of Woolf, with the little acorn, the wind, and the blind as connecting links. Woolf ’s memory from childhood is ‘‘of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out’’ and this moment provides her with ‘‘the purest ecstasy I can conceive.’’3 These events and the intertextuality that occurs cannot be viewed as trivial or slight, since Woolf theorizes that her entire sensibility, her essential self, grows from these earliest ‘‘moments of being’’; they are foundational memories. This reaching into earliest memories is for both writers an attempt to know the world without words, not unlike venturing into the silent kingdom of art. Moreover, these small sensations such as the wind in the blind and the acorn tapping have serious aesthetic significance: Woolf and Paton Walsh are profoundly aware that little sensations reflected through the eye of memory are the building blocks of larger artistic visions and constructs. These allusions to Woolf thus help to shape and intensify one of the aesthetic implications of Paton Walsh’s novel, the idea she shares with Woolf that art finds its source in the simplest and earliest of sensations. That these sensations can impart the purest joy, or ecstasy, shows both writers’ deep appreciation for the world of sensation, Woolf ’s ‘‘luminous halo’’ of consciousness, and their desire to give that joy back to the world through their art. With the many echoes of To the Lighthouse, Paton Walsh offers the reader moments that, because they have a history in the earlier text, cause the reader to pause and to ponder. The most obvious of these involve the lighthouse. When Marian expresses a desire one day to go to the lighthouse, her son Toby takes on the role of Mr. Ramsay: ‘‘I’d like to go there,’’ Marian said softly. ‘‘Where?’’ asked Alice. ‘‘To the lighthouse. To land there.’’ ‘‘Oh, I asked about that, the other day,’’ said Toby, looking up from his book. ‘‘No such trip. They gave me two reasons. No demand, and dangerous water. . . . That’s a half-tide reef; that’s what the lighthouse warns of. So it probably is dangerous.’’ ‘‘I expect altruism usually is,’’ said Marian. (100)

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For Marian as for the six-year-old James Ramsay, the lighthouse becomes the focal point of an ardent desire for adventure and discovery, a desire that is squelched by the voice of practicality. The lighthouse steadfastly stands as a symbol of altruism in Paton Walsh’s novel, whereas the symbolism of the lighthouse is far more complex in Woolf, connected as it is with the ‘‘luminous halo’’ of consciousness and with the deep hidden radiance of Mrs. Ramsay’s innermost being, the sweeping light that brings her moments of ecstasy. When sixteen-year-old James Ramsay approaches the lighthouse in the boat with his father, he comes to see the lighthouse in two opposite ways: through the eye of memory and imagination and through the eye of realism. Marian’s views of the lighthouse are so similar that, again, the interweaving of the two texts cannot be ignored. When Marian first arrives in St. Ives she finds herself ‘‘looking past the harbour quay, and out over bright blue water to the lighthouse, both suddenly seen and suddenly remembered, mistily white in a hazy morning distance’’ (80). ‘‘Mistily’’ is the word that ties Marian’s perception to Woolf ’s text: when James Ramsay approaches close to the lighthouse in the boat with his father, he remembers the way it had appeared across the harbor long ago when his mother was alive: ‘‘a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye.’’4 In both instances, the lighthouse invokes memories from childhood and a world of imagination; its mistiness imbues it with dreaminess and desirability. In Marian’s case, the lighthouse is associated with sexual desire and her need for a life of deeper and more satisfying sensations. Although she scoffs, ‘‘Oh rubbish, son,’’ when Toby suggests that she loves lighthouses because they are phallic—as Woolf, too, invites such an interpretation with one hand while seeming to dismiss it with the other—Marian thinks about the sounds of the surf in explicitly sexual similes (97). The sounds that invite her to open the curtain and view the lighthouse are ‘‘the clamorous shouted whispers, sighing and slushing with a rhythm of thrusting and withdrawing like sexual play . . . each soft climax an audible ejaculation half a mile wide’’ (80). Her bemused but seemingly prodigious sexual longing is thus projected upon the sea and the lighthouse and dispersed throughout the scene before her, imbuing it with desire, and finding within it an irresistible ecstasy that will be a powerful drawing point for the artist she is to become. As Marian draws nearer to meeting her father, who lives nearby, she finds the lighthouse imposing but devoid of allure when viewed more closely:

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Godrevy lighthouse, standing up stark and near, stripped of the charms of distance. The white tower was octagonal, the round garden at its foot was dark green with clumps of gorse, it stood grimly admonitory on a rough pyramid of black jagged rock fretted over by breaking water. (165)

‘‘Stark’’ is the linking word that ties Marian’s view to James Ramsay’s: He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?5

James’s close-up vision of the lighthouse is linked to his father’s stern fatalism and unrelenting insistence upon literal truth; Marian’s close-up view of the lighthouse is soon to be linked to her father’s cynicism and lonely sense of exile, brought about by a single act of cowardice. James immediately recognizes, however, that both lighthouses are equally valid, the grimly true one associated with his father’s way of seeing, and the soft, imaginative one associated with childhood and his dead mother. Both Marian and James have this ability to see doubly, indicating that they both possess a balanced sensibility. The fathers also provide connections between the two novels. Like Cam and James, Marian is finally taken to the lighthouse by her aging father, in this case on foot as they cross the exposed reef at low tide. Her father Tommy looks back across the bay to the town of St. Ives, from which he is forever self-exiled, pointing out the various features of the place. Having arrived at the lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay also looks back toward the island, which now is almost totally indistinct in the distance, and although his children cannot tell what he might be thinking, he appears to be looking to the past and assessing his losses. One further intertextual link is the image of a castaway as a memento mori and a reminder of human solitariness in each of the novels. Mr. Ramsay recites over and over the line ‘‘We perished, each alone’’ from William Cowper’s tragic poem ‘‘The Castaway.’’ In The Serpentine Cave the castaway appears as a work of art, Leo’s large bronze sculpture of a wave bearing a small figure of a man overwhelmed by the sea, a piece commissioned for Tommy’s grave. An additional link occurs when the reader remembers the final lines of Cowper’s poem, which Mr. Ramsay also recites: ‘‘But I beneath a rougher sea, / And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.’’ In Cowper’s

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poem, the survivor, who looks on helplessly as his shipmate is drawn away from the ship and under the sea, suffers a worse fate than the drowned man in that he must live engulfed in the memory of that horror. The line applies more precisely to Paton Walsh’s novel than to Woolf ’s. True, Mr. Ramsay has to live on after the overwhelming disaster of his wife’s death, but Tommy Tremorvah has to live with the knowledge that another man literally drowned in his place in the lifeboat disaster. The reworking of these details in an encoded way causes the reader to undergo an act of remembering, of fetching up from memory a prior reading, and thus the reader experiences something like Marian’s sense of doubleness when she feels the presence of the past and present at once in St. Ives. Even the house where Marian begins to paint resembles Talland House, the setting of Woolf ’s childhood memories at St. Ives. Paton Walsh’s intertextual references invite the reader to revisit Woolf ’s expanding symbols of the house, the lighthouse, the journey, and the sea in a new context. As. T. S. Eliot asserted, a new literary work can alter literary tradition by adding to it, and by means of that alteration the present can influence the past as well as vice versa. The art dealer who assesses Stella’s work for Marian wisely says that there is ‘‘a tendency to call artists derivative when they influence each other, and yet the influences can produce wonderful things. Cross-fertilization would be a better word, I think’’ (147). Paton Walsh’s borrowing from Woolf ’s creative fertility enriches her novel. Paton Walsh implicitly agrees with Woolf ’s idea that the process of art is a comprehensive one, involving intellect, fine technique, deep emotions, and the distillation of one’s prior life. And she shares Woolf ’s desire to capture the brevity and the beauty of the present moment. In Paton Walsh’s novella Unleaving (1976), the companion volume to Goldengrove (1972), a grandmother watches her grandchildren spontaneously dancing naked in the rain at a beach house in St. Ives: And in her mind the rain is an element of eternity, showing in its brilliant light-catching instant of fall the eternal aspect of the momentary now. Just let it catch the light in such a way, and the whole world shows this double aspect, an immortal brevity, an infinite particularity.6

Paton Walsh’s allusions to ‘‘Spring and Fall: to a young child’’ in her titles emphasize the brevity of innocent youth and the subsequent

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long, sad knowledge of human mortality. Like Woolf, she is moved and inspired by the sadness of time passing, and she incorporates that awareness into her aesthetics. She expresses her aesthetic idea in oxymoronic terms: she seeks to arrest and capture that which is infinitely particular, like Hopkins’s inscapes, the exact nature of the mortal moment in its ‘‘immortal brevity.’’ Both Paton Walsh the novelist and her painter-protagonist believe that, like the rain, a work of art should have a cleansing effect upon the eyes, upon the vision, revealing the radiance of the world. The reader is reminded of Virginia Woolf describing how it is that reading great books affects her: ‘‘one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life.’’7

8 Space, Time, and a Muse: Mary Gordon’s Spending Certainly I believed that if a woman painter was going to be serious, not an embarrassment, not a painter of chocolate box or calendar art or her own menstrual or menopausal nightmares, she had to be distant. That, because she was a woman, she had to work extra hard to prevent the hot fluid of desire from steaming up her glasses. —Mary Gordon, Spending

MONICA SZABO, THE FIFTY-YEAR-OLD PAINTER IN MARY GORDON’S SPENDing, is in fact totally unable to assume an objective stance for long or to prevent herself from steaming up in the presence of her male model, patron, and lover, known as ‘‘B.’’ The question of aesthetic distance takes a comic turn in this novel, along with other issues faced by women artists. Through the narrator Monica, Gordon assumes a breezy, ironic approach to recurring aesthetic problems such as how to manifest one’s vision, achieve clarity, and attain a distinctive style. She humorously dramatizes familiar problems of the woman artist such as the struggle to find her place within the mainstream of art, the difficulty of attaining recognition, and, above all, the need to claim a space in which to paint. In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf asks what conditions are necessary in order to be a writer, and she answers: a room, a quiet place, and an adequate supply of the material necessities of life. Spending offers a scenario of what could happen, hypothetically, if an artist were provided these things in great abundance. Freed by the fanciful premise of her novel from the strictures of social realism, though not from those of internal plausibility, Gordon creates a comic portrait of an artist who is allowed to indulge in the many and various gratifications of wish fulfillment. 195

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While giving a slide lecture on her work in Provincetown, Monica Szabo raises what she supposes to be a rhetorical question: ‘‘Where, I ask you, lovers of the arts, where are the male Muses?’’ And he stood up, just there, in front of everyone, and said, ‘‘Right here.’’ (16)

The stranger, B, a wealthy commodities trader who has been collecting Monica’s paintings, takes her out for an evening of dining, dancing, and lovemaking, followed by an offer to become her patron, supplying her with all of the space and money she needs, including a salary so that she can quit her teaching job. He invites her to paint on the deck of his modern glass house by the ocean, and he finds her an apartment in Manhattan with excellent light and a view of the river. He tells her that this largess is an experiment to see what she can achieve given more than adequate space and time. Soon this ideal patron becomes her model as well. Gordon interweaves issues of gender, desire, and art in unprecedented ways. The title of Spending is a pun on sex and money: not only is B willing to spend great amounts of cash on Monica and her work but also she soon begins a series of paintings to be called Spent Men, in which contemporary figures of post-orgasmic men are presented in the postures of various deposed Christs in paintings by Italian Renaissance artists. Commenting on a figure of Christ by Carpaccio in the Metropolitan Museum, Monica remarks, ‘‘he doesn’t look dead. He’s just had it for now’’ (58). She adds that Northern European Christs, unlike those of Italy, always appear convincingly dead to her. To paint the spent men in the pose of Christ figures is more an act of profanation than of blasphemy; as a witty but serious contemporary painter, Monica reduces the sacred to the worldly. Moreover, although she was raised as a good Catholic girl with medals to prove her devotion, her painterly eye trumps all else, including the possibility of blasphemy. Her profession demands that, like Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi, she must always see and paint flesh as flesh, even if it may be the body of God. The novel’s subtitle, A Utopian Divertimento, is playfully misleading, for Monica’s utopian dream of having the perfect male muse lasts less than twenty-four hours, only until the moment when she begins to think of herself as a whore. This moral ambivalence continues to trouble her through much of the novel, for although Monica inhabits a comical world, she is deeply serious about the moral and aes-

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thetic issues facing her. The idea of a divertimento, a light, festive composition containing marches, dances, allegros, and such, is also misleading in that it suggests a looseness contrary to the actual structure of the novel. Gordon’s novel is a traditional sort of comedy designed along age-old comedic lines. In accordance with classic definitions of comedy, Spending is mirthful and it has a happy ending. Reminding the reader of the Commedia, Gordon makes use of the number three with an almost Dantean obsession befitting the grounding in Christian art that underlies Monica’s, and Gordon’s, contemporary work. Three major crises occur in three years in the three parts of the novel, each ushering in a reversal of fortune. The crisis of the first section is the appearance of the male muse with proffers of money. The crisis of the second section is that B loses his entire fortune in unlucky commodity trading even as Monica achieves critical success and public acclaim. In the third section a new patron, Peggy Riordan, magically appears, commissions a painting, and gives Monica two million dollars, which Monica in turn invests in B’s business, allowing him to recover his fortune. Meanwhile, Monica completes a series of nine paintings of spent men, the last of which is a triptych. The three years of her love affair are celebrated with a communal feast at the conclusion, a traditional ending for a festive comedy in which holiday, license, and luxury are the norm. ‘‘The comic mode,’’ writes Robert Polhemus, ‘‘is historically, psychologically, and metaphorically grounded in the physical experiences of laughter, sex, and eating,’’ all of which are regenerative.1 In keeping with the comic spirit, Spending includes scenes of sexual excess, descriptions of gourmet meals, and violation of taboos bordering on blasphemy. Although Monica is entirely serious about her art, Gordon’s comedy grants the reader license to laugh at the serious problems that plague the artist. Monica’s first-person narrative, irreverent and confessional, establishes the comic tone. She addresses the reader conversationally, providing shocking and intimate details of her many nights and afternoons in bed with B. Flesh triumphs over spirit, and laughter dispels pretension, ill-spirits, and taboos. In the later parts of the novel when Monica exhibits her controversial work in a New York gallery, satire deflates the forces of repression and censorship. Comedy therefore serves the cause of freedom of expression for both the fictional painter and the novelist. An honest, wry, free-spirited narrator, Monica becomes an unpretentious spokesperson for creative women.

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Monica announces on the first page that the three subjects of her story are money, sex, and art, a heady triad that causes most of the tensions in the novel. Mary Gordon invites the reader to ponder their interrelations. By combining money and sex, B’s patronage causes Monica to worry about compromising herself in a way that, she realizes, only a woman would have cause to regret. On the other hand, money, art, and sex all provide spectacular gratifications that would seem to dispel these misgivings. B’s money affords her luxuries and travel; Monica’s art eventually brings her fame and copious cash of her own; and her affair with B gives pleasure. Not only does Monica’s Catholic upbringing make her chronically mistrustful of such excesses, but also the mingling of money and art, though necessary to her career, makes her queasy: When I thought about money, I could see my brain turn from a healthy white, a cauliflower, something steady and stable, to a writhing mess of eels, blood red, or the color of intestines, the color of disease. Poussin to Francis Bacon, in one quick leap. (238)

Perhaps it is because so few women artists have attained wealth through their art that Monica, much as she wants to sell her work, experiences discomfort when contemplating the idea of money in connection with her artistic vision. She wants her vision to remain earnest and uncompromised despite her quirky subject matter. Although the tension between art and money makes Monica uneasy, Eros turns out to be surprisingly compatible with her art, perhaps because they both can aim, in different ways, at ecstasy and celebration of the body. Unlike earlier novels in which the painter’s marriage or other involvement with men was directly at odds with her career as an artist, Spending proposes a more positive, if complicated, relation between sex and art. Although Monica neglects her lover and everything else when she is in the throes of her work, she always returns to him and his lovemaking as an acknowledged source of inspiration and renewal, a confirmation not only of her desirability but also of her vitality. Monica’s nights with B are voluptuous, involving baths, showers, fine soaps, wine, and melons; she draws a connection between erotic love and the act of painting, which she also sees as voluptuous. As male artists have done in the past, Monica lays claim to a connection between aesthetic expression and the libido, in that desire animates and enlivens, in both life and art. There is no incompatibility between Monica’s art and their

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affair because Monica has no intention of marrying B. Divorced, with twin daughters finishing college, Monica has no use for a husband; her last one was useless. B makes few demands upon her; their affair is designed from the beginning to suit her needs, and for most of the novel it is a matter of sex and mutual enjoyment. The word ‘‘love’’ is not mentioned until the final scene of the novel, at Monica’s party, when B. surprises her with a toast to the love that has gradually grown between them. In that scene she also reveals to the reader his true name, Bernie. In the course of the novel Bernie gradually emerges as a real person rather than a figure of fantasy: he injures his back and suffers pathetically for days, and he falls into despair after losing a fortune on the market. By gradually revealing Bernie as a three-dimensional character, Gordon implies that such generous men as Monica’s muse actually can exist in the real world and that art and lasting love are compatible, if only under special circumstances. The descriptions of sexual acts throughout the novel amusingly counterpoint the descriptions of painting and passages of ekphrasis; the reader is invited to compare and contrast the two kinds of activity as well as the limitations of language in describing them. The sexual acts seem wholesomely lascivious; they are described in explicit detail but without kinks, winks, or nudges to the reader. Just as censoriousness is deplored in the world of art, guilt is ruled out in the sexual affair, since Monica and B are consenting adults. But the pleasures of the text in the erotic passages are different from the pleasures of the text in the ekphrastic passages in that the former are kinetic and the latter static. That is, as Stephen Dedalus proposes in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, contemplation of an aesthetic object produces in the onlooker a fine stasis, whereas contemplation of the pornographic produces a kinetic effect. The erotic passages in this novel add to the comedy because tales of the flesh are, for the most part, comic, just as tales of the spirit tend to be tragic or at least serious. More specifically, the erotic writing is funny because of the inadequacy of language to capture the somatic feelings of lovemaking; it is seemingly easier to describe a work of art than an erotic act. As Monica relives in memory her first night of lovemaking with B, she humorously struggles with language to recapture the event. She begins with visual descriptions—the white tiles of B’s elegant bathroom, the admirable triangle of his back—but the visual naturally gives way to accelerating tactile sensations that are much more diffi-

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cult to capture in language. Monica haplessly reaches for descriptive words (‘‘thrum’’) and hackneyed allusions (The Song of Solomon). Such erotic writing is comical, or tends to be, because it is doomed to repetition. In the sexual act, repetition leads to a climax, but in language it leads to anticlimax, or at least an inadequate representation of the event. Monica’s narration circles round and repeats with increasing pace, and then orgasm is represented by a full stop: ‘‘Then suddenly you’re there’’ (31). The orgasmic event has no adequate verbal equivalent. The reader has to laugh at the full stop, that pitiful period. Bliss is its own silent kingdom, unlike the silent kingdom of art, and any connection between pleasure of the flesh and pleasure of the text has to be metaphoric, a leap from one category of experience to another. Later, after the lovemaking has gone on and on, Monica, intolerably overheated, runs to the kitchen and pours a pitcher of ice water over her head, the lemon slices clinging to her hair. It is a part of the comic scheme of the novel that Monica and her lover are never spent for long; whatever reversals of fortune they experience, their ardor always returns. The regenerative and comic nature of the insistent presence of the erotic in the novel contrasts to the condition of the spent men in Monica’s paintings. Although the spent men as figures depicted in art exist in a perpetual stasis of detumescence, their ‘‘little death’’ suggests the possibility of resurrection. This profanation of a spiritual concept seems consistent with the worldliness and material pleasures of the lovers’ life together. Gordon’s novel is, in part, about luxury. Monica, touched by the lingering lessons of her Catholic upbringing, worries about the excesses of their life together: the expensive lingerie, a trip to Milan to look at one painting, a weekend in Rome on a whim. And yet Gordon hints that pleasures of the flesh and ecstatic sensations can be building blocks in the process of attaining an artistic vision. The extravagant array of food that Monica serves to all of the characters in the final party scene in the novel expresses an appreciation of community and the good life, as in traditional festive comedy. Monica is celebrating that ‘‘I was a painter who had done the thing she meant to do,’’ but also ‘‘I was creating a celebration in praise of prosperity’’ (296, 294). Monica thinks of the lavish foods she sets out as a landscape she is creating. Her panicked doubts as the dinner party begins: ‘‘I thought to myself what I always think at such moments: why have I done this, no one likes parties, no one needs them.’’ (298) are reminiscent of Mrs. Ramsay’s doubts at the begin-

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ning of the dinner party in To the Lighthouse : ‘‘There was no beauty anywhere. . . . Nothing seemed to have merged. . . . And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.’’2 Monica resembles both Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe in that she can paint and also organize a successful party, and Gordon implies, as Woolf does, that women’s mastery of domestic life can itself be noble and artistic. The elements of fantasy and wish fulfillment in Spending allow Gordon to provide a hopeful, definitive conclusion to the novel without making the ending seem pat. The festive celebration is an appropriate culmination of the comic pattern of the novel. Gordon’s novel as a whole implies that art is best nourished when it is grounded in a life of hearty enjoyment of the world’s sensuous pleasures. Moreover, comedy is not at odds with the serious task of the artist portrayed in the novel, since comedy celebrates the same categories of things that art makes notable: the plenitude, fruitfulness, and fleshiness of things. Robert Polhemus writes that ‘‘growing out of a transitory pleasure, comedy does not disparage or devalue the passing joys and victories of the world.’’3 Within the comic context, Gordon describes the process of Monica’s art as arduous and mysterious, to be captured only by means of metaphor. The events of the novel parallel those of Atwood’s Cat’s Eye: Monica completes a series of paintings and has a successful show, yet, like Elaine Risley, she is misunderstood by interviewers and picketed by would-be censors. In its descriptions of the creative process, however, Spending is closer to To the Lighthouse, especially in its metaphors of swimming, digging, and other forms of strenuous activity. As Lily Briscoe feels herself being haled away or entering into a domed space, Monica also feels herself drawn across the threshold into an entirely different, nonlinguistic world when she begins to paint: ‘‘You enter a universe entirely absorptive, or centrifugal, pulling everything it needs into itself. I’m not saying this right because words don’t serve; this isn’t about language’’ (152). Monica feels terror when she starts putting the first marks on the canvas, even when she is working on the cartoon of a big painting which could easily be changed; it is the commitment to the work which frightens her: I was at the terrifying point of putting the first marks down, the marks that I knew weren’t final, weren’t irrevocable, but which implied so much. It was like diving into a very cold lake; you could get out, you didn’t have to stay there until your blood froze or your heart stopped

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beating. On the other hand, it might be exhilarating. You had to dive in to find out. You had to make those first marks. (152)

Monica’s words echo Lily Briscoe: Where to begin?—that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions.4

The verbal echoes, ‘‘first mark’’ and ‘‘irrevocable,’’ suggest that Gordon had Woolf in mind when writing this passage. Lily, a landscape painter and presumably a modernist, and Monica, a postmodernist who devises ambiguous figure paintings, share exactly the same trepidations when it comes to the business of getting started on their work. Making a mark on the canvas means laying a claim to the space it represents and asserting one’s right to do so. The metaphors of swimming and diving employed by both authors also emphasize the risks that the artist takes. In the very early stages of her work on Spent Men, Monica spends hours at the Metropolitan Museum arduously copying triangles from a painting of Christ by Carpaccio. In contrast to the idea of art as a difficult upward ascent, as represented in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Jill Paton Walsh, Monica thinks of this kind of work as a descent down into the cellar of her imagination to get at the genuine item, the ding an sich: When I work the way I’d been working at the museum, I feel like I’ve been in a filthy cellar with little puddles where God knows what might be breeding, hidey holes thick in sooty dust. I have to go rooting in; I have to come on all kinds of things. Bottles half filled with unrecognizable liquids, potatoes going soft, the carcass of a bird or rodent, then at the bottom, I see the thing I was looking for. The thing itself. (61)

Monica adds that although the process makes her feel dirty, she also feels ‘‘incandescent.’’ Amusingly hyperbolic, Monica’s catalog of rotten and distasteful items provides a psychologically accurate metaphor for the creative process. She is describing a feeling of disgust, after exhausting and repetitive labor, at all the failed attempts, but also a feeling of triumph like a bodily illumination when she discovers the thing she seeks, the genuine item. To ‘‘go rooting in’’ is to delve into the creative self, for even the humble act of copying triangles requires imagination. It is also a search for the roots of

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things, that is, their most elemental and rudimentary components. The reduction of Christ’s image to a body and of the body to a series of triangles is a natural and necessary process for the painter; as Lily Briscoe explained to Mr. Bankes, a subject as sacred as a mother and child may be represented by a triangle. As a fundamental building block of traditional painting, the triangle carries its own symbolism in religious art and in Gordon’s novel, with its many playful uses of the number three. Monica obsessively draws the triangles over and over because her style relies heavily upon careful drawing and perfection of the line. She remarks that her lines are clear and definite ‘‘because using line to describe the world was my first love’’ (111). Even as a child Monica preferred to draw trees in the winter rather than the summer because of the greater visibility of the lines of their branches. Lines are like a language that speaks for her, a language that describes the individuality and uniqueness of each observed thing, its inscape: I like my line to make a kind of clear sentence. So that, for instance, if I’m painting a tulip, instead of saying, ‘‘Beautiful tulip,’’ it’s saying ‘‘Apricot parrot that budded three days ago and is now half open with the light hitting it at two o’clock on an April afternoon.’’ I like that complete clarity. Clarity, not precision. Precision implies painstakingness, but that’s not what I mean. (111)

This passage reveals and exemplifies Monica’s aesthetic goals. Through Monica’s description, the hypothetical painting of the tulip takes on a clarity of its own in the reader’s imagination. Monica’s careful attention to lines leads to clarity of expression, and the imagined painting comes to possess a kind of radiance, or claritas. To achieve this refined, heightened, and luminous effect in whatever object she paints, the artist must hold herself to a pleasurable but strict discipline of looking at the world, in effect drinking it in and allowing it to permeate her. Drawing the perfect line is a skill that depends upon repeated practice, but Monica’s sense of color derives from her intuitive assimilation of color from the world of nature. Like Claire in Nothing is Black and Marian in The Serpentine Cave, each on their separate shores, Monica stands on B’s deck on the shore of the Atlantic taking in its sublime prospect; her position is liminal. In a process resembling meditation, she tries to empty out her mind of everything but the color of the ocean: ‘‘Sometimes it actually happened; lan-

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guage stopped and I would lose myself in pure color, pure expanse. The silence itself took on color . . .’’ (127). Like Marian Easton, Monica trains herself in the art of looking. She is afraid of not looking at the world enough, afraid of not paying sufficient homage to the things of the world and of allowing her attention to falter so that she would fail to learn all that she should by looking. She is also afraid of looking too much, of allowing herself to be so totally absorbed in the visual experience that she might lose consciousness of everything else and neglect her art. If line is like a language that can be spoken, color is a mysterious and silent kingdom to be entered. While making marks on the canvas—drawing lines and sketching in the composition—is a matter of some trepidation and anxiety, applying color is for Monica more primitive and more playful: When I give myself over to color, I’m back in a time before words, a time of childish delight. Who understands green better than a baby crawling through grass, surrounded by green grass but without the words for either green or grass. When I’m working with color, I become that child without words. Everything is more alive; everything seems saturated with and by color, and I’m saturated. (133)

Like Virginia Woolf, Mary Gordon understands that color is the aspect of art most remote from language, that the word green cannot invoke anything akin to the primitive, unmediated experience of the color itself. Color enlivens the world and the onlooker. When Monica is working with paint she is most fully carried away into a silent world of color that her narrative cannot truly describe; color saturates her imagination. Whereas the drawn line is amenable to metaphoric description in terms of the sentence, visual and literary experiences become alien to one another when it comes to color. Color separates the artist from the novelist. Monica adds that she understands Rothko and is drawn to his work, although she could never be an abstract expressionist herself because she is too interested in drawing figures and in the relation between subject and form. For Monica, as for Claire in Nothing is Black, Vermeer is the consummate artist’s artist who inspires her to discover what she wishes to achieve in her own art. Through the influence of B, Monica is invited to a private viewing of the 1996 Vermeer exhibit, and she comes away feeling, not that she wants to imitate Vermeer’s techniques—his use of perspective or his opalescences, for example—

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but that she can learn from him about the representation of space and about the presence or absence of the painter in the painting. The uncluttered quality of Vermeer’s rooms appeals to her, along with his representation of emptiness as volume. But what she especially derives from Vermeer is a desire to create paintings that somehow, seemingly magically, provide a space for the onlooker in which to view the work, as if the artist’s hand, once having completed the many gestures of the painting, were withdrawn forever without a trace: What I wanted was more an example of something I would have to call moral; that sense of his getting out of the way of his own vision, of not coming between the spectator and what the spectator wanted to see, the graciousness of a withdrawal so complete that there was space between the viewer and the image that made room for the whole world. I was thinking about how to bring silence into my paintings. (162)

Thus, Monica describes two kinds of silence, the silence of color and Vermeer’s achievement of silence. Vermeer’s silence sounds like a visual equivalent of Keats’s ‘‘negative capability,’’ a self-imposed absenting of the artist in deference to the subject. That Monica sees this lesson learned from Vermeer as a kind of moral knowledge and the artist’s act of withdrawal as a moral gesture implies that she means essentially the same thing as Iris Murdoch does when she speaks of the artist’s moral obligation to honor the presence of the subject. Vermeer honors his subjects most fully by representing them in works that seem untainted by the artist’s ego. Although Monica shares Elaine Risley’s desire for clarity, her aesthetic goals are different from those in Cat’s Eye. Unlike Elaine, she wants her paintings to be complete in the sense that the artist’s hand, eye, or reflection cannot be detected in the work. In this sense her paintings do not represent the aesthetic of the unfinished, but they do possess a kind of doubleness and a unique suspended quality that is consistent with the aesthetics of other fictional women painters. Not only in the creative process but also in the presentation of the subject, Monica encounters aesthetic problems and arrives at solutions similar to those of other fictional women painters. Like Yvonne in Margaret Atwood’s story ‘‘The Sunrise,’’ she is preoccupied, almost obsessed, with the challenge of painting male bodies. As she begins to work on Spent Men, Monica observes that her ‘‘subject was the sexual male, the stilled male, the weighted male, the nondy-

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namic, postdynamic male’’ (78). She wants to present men, not disrespectfully but at their most vulnerable, impassive, and lonely moments. She wishes to cast a cold eye on the male body, rather like Atwood’s cat’s eye, although that task becomes difficult when she takes her lover as her model. In the particulars of representation as well as in the novel as a whole, Mary Gordon raises the question of whether love and artistic expression are compatible or mutually exclusive, and she implies that they can be made to coexist, although, again, the task is difficult. Monica questions the aesthetic position, stated by Rilke among others, that art should somehow get past love, into some further vision of the subject. Why, she wonders, should there be anything beyond love? In choosing to base her paintings of spent men on selected Renaissance paintings of deposed Christs, Monica runs two kinds of serious risks: the risk of being misunderstood and even reviled for blasphemy and the risk of openly revealing her postmodern belatedness, as though she were reduced to playing tricks with images from the great art of the past. Unlike Elaine Risley, Monica accepts the term postmodern as applied to her work and acknowledges that being postmodern means that you have ‘‘to deal with the temptation to be apologetic’’ (80). On the one hand, she does not feel able or inclined to try to invent genuinely new forms for art, and on the other hand, she does not wish to resort to jokes or parody. The only remedy for this dilemma is to focus on the process of art and to pursue her own visions without so much regard for the status of contemporary art. In another sense, though, Monica feels a deep kinship with the great and nearly great artists of the past. Traveling to Milan with B to examine a painting by Mantegna, a radically foreshortened Christ, she begins to reassess the issue of postmodern belatedness: And I was with them. I wasn’t measuring myself against them. What they did before me buoyed me up in the ocean of shared labor in which we, separated by hundreds of years, yet breast to breast, dove, were overwhelmed, clung to the sides of a boat and had our hands beaten by oarsmen, and then, sometimes, occasionally, confidently, swam. (87)

The feeling that she is swimming in an ‘‘ocean of shared labor’’ with the artists of the past shows that Monica, rather than standing in paralyzed awe before those artists, honors them by understanding and sharing the enormity of their labors. The metaphor of the artists’ hands beaten by oarsmen, humorously hyperbolic in this context,

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ruefully acknowledges the artists’ common struggle for survival and recognition. They are all cast overboard from the same boat and forced to sink or swim. The trope of the artist as a swimmer and a castaway is prominently featured in both To the Lighthouse and The Serpentine Cave, but Gordon expresses it in more communal terms through Monica’s notion that all artists’ struggles are, in a general way, the same. In Spent Men Monica’s solution to the problem of addressing the burden of tradition is a unique one. She paints her spent men in postures and settings similar to those of the Renaissance masters, but with less regard for balanced composition and in her own modern style. Then, overlaying the modern figure but skewed at a different angle, she draws in white paint an outline of the classical figure, the deposed Christ. The white outlined figures, which look like etchings on the surface of the painting, seem suspended above the contemporary figures, like hovering ghosts of the past. This technique gives the paintings a doubleness of master and modern, sacred and profane. The paintings also have two subjects: the male body and the artist’s conception of her relation to the art of the past. They cause the viewer to do a double take. The playfulness of the paintings is consistent with Gordon’s comedy in the novel: as comedy reduces spirit to flesh, Monica reduces Christ to his eroticized body. But she also includes the image of the ghostly spirit lingering over the figure of the spent modern man. Here, the aesthetic principle of the suspended provides a solution to the problem of postmodern belatedness. Monica is well aware that these paintings invite controversy. Once she mounts her show and her work enters the public arena, Spent Men achieves instant notoriety. Predictably enough, the show provokes two opposing kinds of reactions. Her work meets with excited approval by critics and connoisseurs, and the show sells out. At the same time, an angry group from The Catholic Defense League turns up to picket the gallery with signs reading ‘‘God is not mocked’’ and similar sentiments. In this part of the novel, Gordon, like Atwood, satirizes the various inhabitants of the art world—the critics, selfappointed censors, interviewers, and journalists—who have their distinct opinions about Monica’s work without necessarily understanding it at all. Dazzled and confused by all the attention, Monica manages to steer her way through these events, momentarily tormented by residual Catholic guilt but staunchly defending her artistic vision.

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Like many of the events in this novel, Monica’s greatest public triumph, a glowing four-column review of her show in the New York Times, turns out to be double-edged. On the one hand, it is a coup for Monica that such an influential figure in the art world as the Times reviewer actually understands and describes her work more accurately than anyone else has done. On the other hand, Gordon cannot resist satirizing what seems to be the inevitable pomposity of the eminent journalists who write critiques of the gallery shows. The review reads like a subtle parody: In a time of postmodern emptiness, this painter dares to combine wit and feeling, a line that takes it clarity from the Renaissance Masters, and its intelligence from the best feminist revelations of the seventies. (178)

The reviewer gets its right: the yoking together of wit and feeling is the aesthetic goal of Monica’s paintings as it is of Gordon’s novel. Still, the reviewer’s rhetorical flourishes, kind as they are to Monica, give away the fact that he is in love with his own words yet careless in his use of them. The slight but ludicrous hint of personification in ‘‘a line that takes its clarity from . . .’’ seems pompous, even though the reviewer has astutely discerned that clarity of line is exactly what Monica is trying to achieve. More egregiously, the phrase ‘‘best feminist revelations of the seventies’’ is almost entirely devoid of meaning, since the reviewer does not specify what those revelations might be or why they are ‘‘best,’’ nor does he explain how Monica’s line derives its ‘‘intelligence’’ from such revelations. Again, the parody is humorous and double-edged: the reviewer’s allusion to feminism is appropriate, since the underlying assumptions of Monica’s work are, in fact, profoundly feminist, especially in her claim of the right to represent men in any way that pleases her. But the reviewer is obviously just tossing off a gesture in the direction of political correctness, and he muddies his sentence in the process. He is not necessarily to be blamed for his shallow rhetoric, however; Gordon implies that such language is the coin of the realm in the world of art criticism. The satire continues as the raggle-taggle group of picketers from the Catholic right wing blocks the sidewalk in front of the gallery and accuses Monica of blasphemy. Ironically, the protesters can do Monica’s show no real harm, since it is an axiom in the world of contemporary art that any kind of publicity is good publicity, and a public outcry of immorality is the best kind of all. Yet the appear-

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ance of the picketers forces Monica to defend herself and to reexamine her own conscience. A charge of blasphemy is no laughing matter even to a lapsed Catholic. Monica’s short-lived guilt turns to indignation when she recognizes the leader of the group as Alice Marie Cusalito, her old archenemy from parochial school who was known as a self-righteous, mean little tattletale. Now a former nun and foolish busybody, Alice Marie bears a physical resemblance to Atwood’s Mrs. Smeath. She has frizzy gray hair, dowdy clothes, and a face that looks like ‘‘a failed pineapple upside-down cake.’’ She carries a poster that says, ‘‘Stand up to visual blasphemy. Jesus is not a joke’’ (181). The physical unattractiveness of Alice Marie and Mrs. Smeath is meant to represent moral repugnance in keeping with a satiric tradition that goes at least as far back as Chaucer. Whereas Elaine Risley derides the Canadian Protestant middle class with her ludicrous metamorphoses of Mrs. Smeath, Monica shocks the New York right-wing Catholics with her images of Christ. Although Monica’s subject matter is riskier than Elaine’s, it is not the purpose of her art to give offense. She also believes that Jesus is no joke, but she cannot give in to a view of art that is narrowly intolerant of playfulness and innovation. In fact, what Monica does with the divine image is far less provocative to the religious right than many other works that have appeared in the real world of art in recent years. Her quarrel is with the protesters’ smug self-righteousness and gloomy aura of martyrdom. When the sidewalk controversy escalates to a debate on a popular television talk show, the Defense League wisely pulls Alice Marie off the case and replaces her with the much more photogenic Regina McArdle, whose attractive appearance—perfect hair and skin, size five figure, preppie clothes, and good manners—disguises the pettiness of a person who makes it her business to deprive others of pleasure. The mother of seven children, all of them ‘‘wanted,’’ Regina is a late avatar of the Angel of the House. Monica’s task is to appear equally as attractive, feminine, and charming in her own way on the television show while standing up to this formidable opponent. All these years after Virginia Woolf ’s ‘‘Professions for Women,’’ creative women are still having to do battle against the Angel and, if possible, kill her. The debate appears to be a standoff between Regina’s simple dogmatism and Monica’s more complex but frustrated attempts to explain and defend her art. Monica finally wins the day when the host of the program, Charlie Rose, suggests that his viewers go down to the gallery on Fifty-seventh Street and make up their own minds

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about the paintings, advocating an open-minded approach that is exactly what Monica has been asking for. Like Elaine Risley, Monica also has difficulty explaining her work to a very young woman journalist, in this case one from The Village Voice, who comes armed with theory and preconceived ideas. Again Gordon’s satire is double-edged: she mocks the reporter’s humorless earnestness and lack of aesthetic understanding, but at the same time Monica makes a fool of herself when, frustrated and impatient, she responds to the reporter’s questions with facetious jokes and trivial remarks. The reporter registers nothing when Monica states that what she really is painting is vision, a way of looking at her subjects. To explain, Monica adds that her works make a comment about women looking at men in a way that has not been represented very much in the history of art. The reporter naively responds by asking Monica if she thinks that men and women are different. The miscommunication occurs because Monica’s point of view is aesthetic, the reporter’s shallowly political. When the reporter brings up Lacan and asks Monica about ‘‘the female gaze,’’ Monica pretends that she is talking about lesbianism (194). And when the reporter goes on to ask a question about ‘‘a new phallic center,’’ Monica giddily imagines a gymnasium for penises. Monica’s feeble jokes are meant to inoculate her against the jargon of academia and trendy journalism. She concedes to the reader that on the whole she agrees with the reporter’s feminist views. It is the language of the Voice reporter, like that of the Times reviewer, that invites parody. As a figure painter, Monica speaks in the language of flesh; abstraction and, to a large degree, theory, are inimical or at least irrelevant to her art. She thinks in bodily terms and uses her wit to ward off any invitation to think in abstractions. At the same time, however, Monica’s sarcastic responses to the interviewer are more than a bit hypocritical. All along she has been preoccupied with that very thing, ‘‘the female gaze,’’ brooding and fretting about how best to lay claim to her right to gaze at will at the male body and represent it naturalistically in her work without losing her aesthetic distance. And she has in fact put the phallus literally at the center of her art. After the Spent Men show, Monica takes her new friend and patron, eighty-year-old Peggy, to the women’s Russian baths. Seeing dignity in Peggy’s nakedness and in the assorted women around her, Monica is suddenly reminded of Ingres’s well-known painting The Turkish Bath and she decides to paint her own version, to be called After Ingres: The Russian Baths. In shifting her subject from the male

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body to a group of female nudes, Monica will continue her agenda of re-envisioning the human form: having shown men through the eyes of female desire, as they were seldom shown in the past, she now intends to depict women’s bodies as they appear to her, not filtered through the lens of male desire. Her choice of Ingres as her new source of inspiration makes sense in that Ingres is known for his careful drawing and clear lines, skills that she shares. It seems highly unlikely, however, that she would share his view of the female form. Since they are based on real paintings, Gordon’s ekphrastic passages readily evoke images in the mind’s eye of the reader. The reader can view the real painting or a reproduction of it and then imagine the fictional one. Ingres’s harem scene certainly portrays women’s bodies as the objects of male desire; one critic calls it a ‘‘fleshscape.’’5 Although Ingres borrows several faces of real women selected from his earlier portraits, the eighteen or so figures seen frontally in The Turkish Bath exhibit an unnerving sameness in their languorous poses, perfectly round breasts and bellies, oval faces, and almond eyes. With the exception of the lute player in the foreground and the dancer in the middle ground, they appear impassive, distant, and melancholic. Art historian Norman Bryson goes so far as to say that although the painting is ‘‘about male desire’’ it also shows ‘‘the replacement of desire by inertia’’; he interprets the work in Freudian terms as representing the death instinct in the guise of ‘‘the mask of nirvana.’’6 If the painting represents male erotic desire, then, it does so in a rather perverse way, given the passivity and drugged appearance of the female figures. When she borrows from the Renaissance masters, Monica reduces the spiritual to the erotic, but in the case of Ingres, she wishes to revise a male idea of the female form, replacing it with images of real women as she sees them. She will surely reanimate the women in the process. She will include ghostly suspended white outlines of Ingres’s composition, but even as her work continues to be influenced, even shaped by an artist of the past, she wishes to ‘‘resee’’ the women as individuals, various and exposed in their own persons, apart from the desires of men and playing their own parts in the human comedy. The nude women she sees in the Russian baths are much more distinctly individuated than the replicating bodies of Ingres. Some look like courtesans, to be sure, but some resemble abbesses, generals, or even various animals such as cats and birds. Monica wants to paint them as unselfconscious and relaxed but pre-

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sumably not torpid. She wants to paint women, she says, ‘‘as a painter who was one of them’’ (277). She even considers painting herself into the painting as Ingres’s lute player in the turban whose back is turned to the viewer, the one figure who seems to possess primacy, mystery, and the full flush of life. To paint herself into the painting would be a violation of her own code of hands-off anonymity, although her face would be averted. To paint herself as the lutenist would be to proclaim the presence of the artist in the art in a covert, encoded fashion. Like Monica’s paintings, Gordon’s novel yokes together wit and feeling. She is comical and serious at once about the rather fantastical adventures of a woman artist in midlife and at the peak of her creative energy. Gordon writes humorously about sex and about the ironic reversals in Monica’s life, but she is serious about art and she expresses optimism about the possibilities for innovation in art even in the latter days of postmodernism. Exuberant, funny, and bold, Monica serves as a realistic exemplar of a woman artist making her way in the world. Through Monica’s conversational narrative, Gordon achieves, within the genre of the comic novel, something akin to Vermeer’s silence. She does not come between the narrator and the reader. At the same time, the unfolding narration of Spending is based on a clear and significant conceptual premise: Gordon poses the question, what if the woman artist were to receive everything that she needs? And she provides some plausible if startling answers. By no means does possession of a studio of her own and an abundance of material necessities protect Monica against life’s vicissitudes or the twists and turns of fate. But having her material needs met provides a foundation for giving shape to her creative vision, as Virginia Woolf said it would. When the woman artist gets what she wants—time, space, and even a male muse—it seems like a true luxury, a richness long sought by women artists and well worth spending.

9 Servants, Housewives, Artists: A. S. Byatt, Tracy Chevalier, Carol Shields, and Kyoko Mori Well, it all just comes to me in a kind of coloured rush, I just like putting things together, there’s so much in the world, isn’t there, and making things is a natural enough way of showing your excitement. —A. S Byatt, ‘‘Art Work’’

THE TITLE OF A. S. BYATT’S STORY ‘‘ART WORK’’ IS A PUN OF SORTS, SINCE

the main character in the story transforms herself from a cleaning lady into an artist by using the materials and skills she has acquired in her work of sewing and cleaning. Byatt’s is one of several stories and novels in which traditional domestic work of women—cooking, cleaning, spinning, weaving, and sewing—unexpectedly opens a door to the world of art in one way or another. A. S. Byatt’s stories ‘‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’’ and ‘‘Art Work,’’ Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Carol Shields’s Happenstance, and Kyoko Mori’s Stone Field, True Arrow portray women who appear to be mere Marthas, performers of domestic chores, but who turn out to be artists in some potential or metaphorical, if not literal, sense. In both Byatt’s story ‘‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’’ and Chevalier’s novel a servant girl meets a great seventeenth-century artist and experiences an awakening of her creative sensibility, although she does not become a painter. In ‘‘Art Work,’’ a pivotal story for this chapter, all hierarchies are overturned and the servant becomes the artist. In Shields’s Happenstance and Mori’s Stone Field, True Arrow, women who work with textiles, quilting, and weaving, gradually come to understand the artistic value of what they do. Mori’s protagonist Maya first thinks that having chosen to be ‘‘a weaver was to be like Martha, who chose busywork over truth’’; but after attempting to exorcise the ghost of her father, a painter, 213

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she realizes that serious aesthetic principles underlie her own work.1 All of these protagonists are to a greater or lesser degree transformed by discovering art. In recurrent tropes, all of these characters move from dark spaces into the light and they come to see with renewed vision. These stories and novels carry forward Virginia Woolf ’s suggestion, illustrated in Mrs. Ramsay, that there is not a strict dividing line between the domestic arts and serious art; they challenge the supposedly uncrossable barriers between traditional domestic activities and ‘‘high art,’’ adding another chapter to the story of women artists in fiction. By coincidence, two works of fiction published within a year of one another feature a real-life master painter of the seventeenth century who befriends a servant girl possessing unusual skills and an eye for aesthetic arrangements. In both A. S. Byatt’s short story ‘‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’’ in her collection Elementals (1998) and Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), the girl who serves the painter becomes a model for a figure in a well-known Baroque painting. In both works, the girl learns to see the world with new eyes as a result of knowing the artist. Byatt’s story, which she refers to in her acknowledgments as an ‘‘ekphrastic tale,’’ weaves a short narrative around the creation of Vela´zquez’s painting of 1618, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, which depicts an old woman and a cook in the foreground and a vignette of Jesus’s visit to Mary and Martha in a rectangle in the upper right rear wall. In Byatt’s story, the painter befriends Dolores, a surly young cook, and uses her as a model for the cook in his painting. As a result of the painter’s recognition of her, Dolores undergoes a small but significant change, a shift in status that brings her out of the margins of her world—literally the dark corners of the kitchen—and closer to the center of creativity and light. Dolores’s anger at the beginning of the story is not, as the older servant Concepcio´n believes, the stereotypical irascibility of cooks, nor is it envy of the well-to-do family for whom she works. Rather, Dolores is angry that God has made her overweight, unbeautiful, and a servant. She thinks of herself as ‘‘a heavy space of unregarded darkness, a weight of miserable shadow in the corners of the room’’ that Vela´zquez is painting.‘‘I want to live,’’ she insists. ‘‘I want time to think. Not to be pushed around.’’2 In terms of class, gender, and her station in life, Dolores is virtually the painter’s opposite, and yet he takes notice of her, first by showing appreciation for her artistry

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as a cook and then by painting her as a figure of power and dignity. Dolores’s life is not materially changed by these events, but at least the painter, by granting her such recognition, offers a challenge to the hierarchic thinking that keeps her at the bottom on the scale of human esteem both in the world she inhabits and in her own mind. He treats her as a colleague who works toward mastery of her own craft as a cook, and he immortalizes her presence and her anger in his painting. Illiterate, Dolores is unfamiliar with the story from Luke represented within the painting until Vela´zquez tells it to her, whereupon Dolores scoffs at Mary and identifies with Martha, the sister ‘‘cumbered about with much serving.’’ Surprisingly, the painter agrees with her unorthodox interpretation of the biblical narrative, and he goes on to assert that both he as a painter and Dolores as a cook are concerned with ‘‘loaves and fishes.’’ His remark is ambiguous, since loaves and fishes are both material objects and the instruments of a biblical miracle. He seems to suggest that both cookery and painting are sacred arts or at least that the sacred is present in the material world where these arts are practiced. Just as the painter rejects the superiority of Mary to Martha, he also collapses, or at least disregards, the hierarchy of social classes by offering a new, aesthetic hierarchy. As he tells Dolores, the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning.3

Vela´zquez invites Dolores to think of herself as among the group of the interested; evidently he sees her as an individual, not a typical servant, since he paints her that way. He sees her anger, her goddesslike physical strength, and he reveals her as ‘‘a presence.’’4 Byatt admires Iris Murdoch, having written a short study of her work. It therefore seems safe to assume that Byatt shares Murdoch’s belief that both art and morality require us to attend to the presence of others. Observing the painter’s attention to the presences of small things, such as the eggs and fish in the foreground of the painting, Dolores learns an aesthetic lesson. She learns that painting can make the eggs and fish seem more real than they appear in life and that their enhanced reality comes about because the painter reveals beauty and light in these objects that were not seen until he painted them.

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The gist of the aesthetic ideas in the story, then, is that there is a broad distinction to be made between those who take a lively interest in the world and those who do not, and that creative people who belong to the group of the interested, like Virginia Woolf ’s ‘‘great clan’’ of sensibility, are naturally attentive to the presences of things and their multiplicity. In the story, Vela´zquez tends to play down the symbolic or hieratic aspects of his work, laying emphasis instead upon the immediacy of the task at hand. He tells Dolores that the objects he paints are not sacred to him because the eggs represent the Resurrection and the fish represent Christ, but rather because they are ‘‘full of life and light.’’5 The painter works with the visual but, as he reminds Dolores, she works with several other senses as well: taste, smell, and touch. Although she is tempted to accept the idea that her work as a cook is in some sense akin to that of the painter, Dolores makes the objection that the results of her work disappear in a flash, at which point the painter reminds her of the ephemerality of all life. Just as the cook’s work disappears quickly, so Byatt’s story is very short—it flashes by in a mere twelve pages. The conclusion of the story is festive and communal, like a comic ending. Viewing the finished painting in the artist’s studio, Dolores, her friend, and the painter share tortillas and salad, wine, and laughter, a little celebration of life, art, and culinary art as well. Byatt’s story is about the rootedness of art in the real world, its people and objects, an idea consistent with the practice of much Baroque art. But it is also about a transformation, albeit a small one. By meeting the artist, having him appreciate her cookery, and sitting for him, Dolores is inwardly changed when her strength and her skill are recognized. The story is artfully contrived. The narrative within the story, the passages of ekphrasis, and the painting to which they allude are interwoven, so that the verbal discourse and visual images complement one another. The result is a story that is complex enough to preclude a restrictive, orthodox reading of the painting, a reading that would consign the cook to the inferior role of a Martha. Byatt’s fictional narrative interprets the painting in an effort to explore its implications. The New Testament narrative of Mary and Martha inspires the painting that inspires Byatt’s story, but the situation is made more complex in the story when, in the process of working on the painting, the painter tells Dolores the biblical story, reinterpreting it, and then makes her the central figure in the painting. While Byatt’s story insists on a rather unorthodox reading of

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the painting, making its meanings multivalent, aspects of the actual painting likewise invite deconstruction of its ostensible didactic purpose. As a narrative work in its own right, Vela´zquez’s painting can be read as a portrayal of the passage from Luke illustrating two theological points: one, that the contemplative life of Mary is superior to the active life of Martha, although both are ways of serving God, and two, that a Martha should heed that lesson, cheerfully carrying on her own tasks while knowing that she hath not the better part since the active life is transitory and therefore of less ultimate value. The placement of objects and figures in the painting and the manner of their portrayal make such an orthodox reading difficult, however, so that Byatt appears to have picked up on the painting’s own evident ambiguities. For one thing, there is in the painting, as art historian Jonathan Brown points out, a certain ‘‘lack of narrative clarity’’ despite the great care given to color and textures in the work.6 In the past, observers had difficulty determining whether the scene of Christ with the two sisters is a window, a mirror, or a picture on the wall. Subsequently, art historians have determined with some certainly that it is indeed a window or hatch in the wall opening onto an adjacent room. The visual effect remains puzzling to the eye, however, and other ambiguities appear as well. Despite the fact that the painting is influenced by earlier works with similar subjects, it defies a simple reading, blending together as it does the biblical and the contemporary, the sacred and the profane. By their sheer size and presence, the solid, three-dimensional bodies of the old woman and the cook far outweigh the biblical story depicted in its boxed position in the upper right. The two women are vivid and individualized, the cook’s resentful eyes turned toward the viewer and not toward Christ. The old woman’s hand points didactically toward the sacred vignette and echoes the admonitory gesture of Christ as he points to Martha, but the position of her arm also rhythmically echoes the muscular arm of the cook working with her mortar and pestle. The cook’s face is flushed, sensuous, introspective, and dignified. It is difficult to see her, as some art historians have, as a figure for ‘‘the bad servant,’’ since her face is so alive and expressive of mixed emotions. Under the window and prominently bathed in light are the four silver fish, two eggs, garlic, and a dried red pepper. The onlooker cannot help but ask, are these sacred objects or are they simply prominent metonymic representations of the world of the cook? Thus, Vela´zquez presents three pictures in one: the background bib-

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lical narrative, the two foregrounded female figures, and the still life. The triangulation of the individual women servants, the theological vignette, and the beautiful culinary ingredients creates a tension between the sacred and the profane and foregrounds the frustrations and the beauties of the cook’s work. Byatt’s entire story is ekphrastic, since it translates the painting into a fiction joining together the artist, the models, and the finished work; the author extends her creative imagination into the painting and retrieves a plausible, animated narrative. The story emphasizes the elements within the painting that lead the eye and mind away from the biblical vignette and cause one to ponder the portrait of the cook. These interpretive issues are significant because the story brings out the beauty, rebelliousness, and challenge to hierarchic values that were incipient in the painting itself. The reallife painter has made the cook heroic, and the painter in the story has named her an artist. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier recreates the milieu of Johannes Vermeer through the first-person narration of a teen-aged girl, Griet, who becomes a servant in the Vermeer household and, eventually, a secret apprentice to the painter. The daughter of Jan, a tile painter who has been blinded in an accident, Griet is sent into service because of her family’s extreme poverty. When Vermeer and his wife first visit her home to engage her services, the painter observes that Griet has laid out vegetables for soup in the order of a color wheel. As their servant, Griet enters an environment where her status is anomalous: although she remains the lowliest person in the household, suffering like Jane Eyre numerous humiliations because of her low rank and poverty, Griet is secretly drawn into the painter’s studio, becoming first his helper and then his model. Certain gestures and attitudes suggest that he is attracted to Griet, as she is to him, but in the end his dedication to his work is stronger and, in effect, he sacrifices her to his art. Although the plot follows a familiar pattern in which Griet’s romantic attraction to the painter overcomes, or is fatally blended with, the force of her awakening aesthetic sensibilities, she is above all a victim of circumstances as well as of her own precociousness. Her native intelligence and unusual aesthetic understanding set her apart from the rest of the household and ally her for a time with the great painter. Griet feels estranged in the large Catholic family whose house is filled with sacred paintings, and she senses the hostility of Vermeer’s

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wife Catharina, an ill-tempered Angel in the House whose only satisfaction consists in having children; she eventually has eleven. Griet’s duties include cleaning Vermeer’s studio, where no one else is allowed, not even Catharina. Griet shows her ingenuity by taking precise measurements before she moves objects, so as not to disturb the artist’s still life arrangements by her cleaning. She becomes intrigued by the mysterious and distant painter who works so silently and slowly, and she is dazzled by his work. Vermeer’s patron van Ruijven, a fictional character, begins to show an erotic interest in Griet and eventually sexually harasses her in secret; this interest causes the painter to become more distant with her, as if angry. In the second year, Vermeer orders Griet to assist him, first by fetching colors from the apothecary and later by grinding the colors for him. She sleeps in the attic in order to have access to the studio, and for a time her work as an apprentice is kept strictly secret from the rest of the family, although eventually they get wind of it. Only Vermeer’s mother-in-law, the real-life figure Maria Thins, is savvy enough to see the possible usefulness of Griet, that she could speed up the meticulous painter’s work and thus indirectly help with the family’s debts. The closest Griet comes to having an effect upon Vermeer’s work is when she rearranges a cloth on a table in order to bring an element of disharmony into a painting that is otherwise highly ordered; Vermeer accepts the rearrangement, expressing wonderment that he could learn something from a maid. A radical reversal takes place in the second year, when Vermeer requires her to sit for his famous painting. Although she is flattered to have his gaze upon her, Griet loses something—a slim chance, at least, to have become an artist—when she becomes his model. There were, after all, a few successful women artists in the seventeenth century, such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith Leyster, and Griet has revealed a sharp eye for aesthetic arrangements as well as a fascinated interest in the work. The painter’s strong will and the force of erotic attraction quickly overshadow those interests, however. Griet feels exposed when the painter accidentally sees her hair, which is usually hidden under a cap, and she feels violated, if excitingly so, when he forces her to pierce her ears and wear his wife’s earring. Vermeer’s friend, the optician van Leewenhoek, warns her that Vermeer will sacrifice anything for his art, dramatically adding, ‘‘The women in his paintings—he traps them in his world. You can get lost there.’’7 Although she poses for a great work of art, that event leads to her downfall, as she knows it will. Once Griet becomes

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the face in the painting, her world is irredeemably changed. As she poses, Griet is thrilled by the erotic tension of their mutual gaze, but that gaze destroys the secret apprenticeship. The completion of the painting instigates the climactic scene of the novel. Seeing Griet painted wearing her earring, Catharina falls into a rage and attempts to mutilate the painting with a knife, giving birth the same day to a child who does not survive. Catharina’s rage, ostensibly about the earring, really has to do with the fact that Vermeer has admitted Griet to his private world, which Catharina is not allowed to enter. The novel is not tragic, but the end is sadly ironic. Griet has the potential to experience the world through new eyes, but the world defeats her and she ends up as a butcher’s wife, with animal blood, not paint, upon her apron. Class and gender are important considerations in this novel as they are in Byatt’s story. As a servant, Griet has no rights, not even to an opinion, but like Dolores she is proud, bold, and dignified. She refuses to pose dressed as a fine lady in silks, but she also does not want to be shown holding a mop. Vermeer invites her to create the unique blue and yellow headpiece, signifying no particular rank. The classlessness suggested by the headpiece is consistent with Griet’s anomalous position in the novel. The painting Girl with a Pearl Earring also differs from most of Vermeer’s other paintings of women because there is no interior scene, just a black background surrounding her face and shoulder. Thus, the girl in the painting, sometimes called the ‘‘Dutch Mona Lisa,’’ has no context as she gazes in sensuous innocence at the viewer and the painter. Her seeming classlessness and lack of social milieu invite the viewer to see her as a singular individual, like Dolores, a radiant presence, and not a representative type. Although Vermeer’s studio is a dangerous place for Griet, what she learns there about art draws her for a time into his world. Here, as in the novels by Deirdre Madden and Mary Gordon, Vermeer is the consummate artist’s artist. In Nothing is Black, Claire recalls her artist friend Alice’s marveling that Vermeer could create something transcendent, beyond space and time, using nothing but minutely thin layers of paint. For both Claire and Alice, the sheer magic of his paintings represents the aesthetic ideal. Monica Szabo in Spending also reveres Vermeer; she believes that he knew how to withdraw his ego from the work, allowing space for the viewer to enter in, and that he could bring silence into a painting. Chevalier attributes to Vermeer these same qualities of silence and transcendence. Ver-

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meer’s interior scenes with figures of solitary women take the viewer into a space that is different from ordinary reality, a place of harmony, order, and mystery, reminiscent of Woolf ’s ‘‘silent kingdom.’’ Chevalier picks up on that effect by describing Vermeer’s studio as a similarly special space, as though it were part of some other house than the one it occupies. Going in and out of the studio is almost, for Griet, the equivalent of entering a painting, and, in fact, her firstperson ekphrastic passages show her engagement with and understanding of Vermeer’s art. The ekphrastic passages, direct and unembellished, link the novel to Vermeer’s works, without naming titles, and they show the advancement of Griet’s aesthetic understanding. The first painting that she sees is Woman with a Pearl Necklace, in which a woman dressed in a yellow satin jacket trimmed with ermine gazes at herself in a small mirror as she ties on a string of pearls. Familiar with the objects on the table in the painting, items which she has been dusting, Griet is transfixed by the painting and sharply observant of it. She sees not just what is painted, as an inattentive viewer might, but also how the subject is represented in terms of composition and light. For example, she sees the light ‘‘falling across her face and tracing the delicate curve of her forehead and nose.’’8 This kind of observation is simple enough to be plausible, but it shows that Griet’s untrained eye is learning to look, a skill seemingly elicited by the painting itself. Contemplating this painting within the setting where it was painted, Griet observes, ‘‘Everything seemed to be exactly the same, except cleaner and purer. It made a mockery of my own cleaning.’’9 Griet would not understand the Neoplatonic idea of transcendent harmony and order that art historians have glimpsed in Vermeer’s work, but she intuitively grasps the pure intensity and radiance of the painting. The rueful reference to her own work of cleaning in connection with the painter’s cleansing of the world—or, more accurately, of the observer’s eye—creates a haunting though ironic metaphor in which acts of earnest work are momentarily brought together in a single thought. The metaphor connecting art and cleaning as two kinds of work recalls Byatt’s more whimsical metaphor connecting painting and cooking. The seventeenth-century fascination with eyesight and optics is reflected in the novel with repeated references to eyes, beams of light, bright jewels, the camera obscura, and above all, Griet’s learning to see as an artist might see. On Sundays at home, Griet describes Vermeer’s paintings to her blind father. In the work called Young Woman

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with a Water Pitcher, which she knows only as the painting of the baker’s daughter, Griet remembers primarily the light, the girl’s posture, and the colors of her clothing. She tells her father that the white in the girl’s cap is actually a composite of other colors, including blue, yellow, and violet, a fact that she has learned first from Vermeer himself and then simply by looking. The tile painter, who always worked with flat colors, does not understand, nor does it make sense to him that Vermeer’s paintings do not tell stories. It is evident that Griet has a keen visual memory. But her greatest involvement with a painting comes when she deliberately disarranges the cloth on the table that appears in A Lady Writing, thus indirectly having a hand in the composition of the work. As she explains to Vermeer, such an orderly work should contain some disorder, and, indeed, the arrangement of the tablecloth provides one of the few diagonal lines in the painting. Through this gesture of disarrangement, Chevalier cleverly creates a nexus between her novel and the painter’s work, at the same time allowing Griet to enter Vermeer’s world in a more radical, if minor, way. Chevalier’s novel constitutes a tribute to a great artist while at the same time offering a feminine perspective on his world. The ingenuity of the novel is evident in Chevalier’s own carefully researched view of Delft, her blending of fact and fiction, her invention of stories and imagined moments to go with individual paintings, and, above all, her creating the life and words of the girl with the pearl earring. Although the servant girls in ‘‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’’ and Girl with a Pearl Earring are touched by the genius of the artists whom they encounter, both of them end up as models, not artists, beautiful and dignified as their images may be. In sharp contrast, the image of a servant cleaning and dusting in the artist’s studio undergoes a surprising and comical transformation in A. S. Byatt’s ‘‘Art Work,’’ in which a cleaning lady becomes a highly acclaimed artist in the trendy London art scene, creating a spectacular installation by using her talents for sewing and working with textiles. The story is darkly comic, but not because the idea of a cleaning lady succeeding as an artist is funny; Byatt does not condescend to her character. Rather, the story is comical because of the sudden reversal of fortune and because of Mrs. Brown’s flamboyance and largerthan-life appeal. Having been their cleaning lady for ten years, Mrs. Brown virtually holds together the London household of Robin and Debbie Den-

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nison and their two children, self-described as an ‘‘artistic family.’’ Robin, a fussy painter of impersonal still lifes, resents the presence of Mrs. Brown in his studio, while Debbie depends on her desperately to make order possible in their daily life. Debbie, the breadwinner in the family, works full time as design editor for a magazine slyly named ‘‘A Woman’s Place,’’ although she would prefer to spend her time making woodcuts. A woman from Callisto Gallery comes to view Robin’s paintings for a possible exhibit but leaves unimpressed. Mrs. Brown makes contact with the gallery woman, however, and the comic climax of the story comes when Debbie goes to cover the show for her magazine, little suspecting who the artist is. Mrs. Brown’s art expressively conveys her anger as a woman and a domestic servant, but it does so lightly, inventively, and with wit. Her art unites a feminist point of view with an unconventional but authentic aesthetic purpose. Having achieved a new life for herself, Mrs. Brown goes on to provide a replacement cleaning lady for Debbie. The story raises feminist issues, since both of the women characters are resourceful and intelligent, and in different ways they are both misused by men. Debbie, like many modern women, has to juggle her family and career, relying desperately on Mrs. Brown’s help and fearful of losing her. Married to a childlike, demanding husband who indulges in full-time painting in his spacious studio, Debbie sacrifices her own art out of family necessity. Mrs. Brown has been physically abused by the estranged father of her children, named Hooker, who beats her numerous times and even causes a concussion. Forced by necessity to keep house for others, she turns her anger in a positive direction through her satiric art. At her place of employment Mrs. Brown is known only by her surname, although it is revealed in the art show publicity that her first name is Sheba. The name Mrs. Brown alludes to Virginia Woolf ’s well-known essay of 1924 in defense of modernism, ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.’’ Woolf ’s Mrs. Brown is a threadbare old lady encountered briefly on a train, but she represents the mystery of human nature, the real humans whom the popular Edwardian novelists like Arnold Bennett fail to represent in their work. Woolf insists that novelists should be faithful to Mrs. Brown and never abandon her. Woolf says, she is ‘‘capable of appearing in any place, wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what.’’ She is also, Woolf adds, ‘‘the spirit we live by, life itself.’’10 When Mrs. Brown shows up in Byatt’s story as a secret artist wearing parti-color clothes, Woolf ’s Everywoman is transformed into a postcolonial, multicultural woman. It is revealed

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in the review of her show that Sheba Brown, in her forties, is of mixed Guyanese and Irish ancestry and lives in a council flat; thus, as a product of two former British colonies, she represents the ethnic diversity of modern-day England. Her face, with amber-colored skin, a crown of twisted scarves, and a ‘‘carved look’’11 contrasts vividly with Robin’s ‘‘very English face, long and fine and pink and white, like a worried colt’’ (48). Robin and Mrs. Brown represent the old England and the new one, a land of immigrants. These two characters are antagonists in the story: her presence, when she cleans his studio, is a constant irritation to Robin, and he childishly whines to Debbie about her trivial rearrangement of objects. Robin’s antagonism to Mrs. Brown is, in part, an automatic expression of his inherited contempt for people supposedly beneath him in rank and gender: ‘‘His father . . . behaved in much the same way, particularly with regard to his distinction between his own untouchable ‘things’ and other people’s, especially the cleaning-lady’s ‘filth’ ’’ (56). Despite his dislike of Mrs. Brown, which, Byatt suggests, may also be rooted in a displaced resentment against his wife because of his dependency on her, Robin does take the time to teach Mrs. Brown something about art when she shows curiosity. The rivalry between them ultimately goes deeper than differences of gender and ethnicity: she becomes a rival artist, one who is superior in the eyes of the world, and the two of them represent opposite ways of doing art and thinking about art. Their works of art and their theoretical ideas about art, especially about color, provide contrast and tension between the artists in the story. Robin teaches Mrs. Brown some standard things about color: how colors are subject to rules, how complementary colors work, and so on. In his studio he keeps his ‘‘fetishes,’’ a bowl, a candlestick, a pincushion, and other small objects of various sorts, each representing a pure color, ‘‘small icons of a cult of colour’’ (60). Cleaning the studio, Mrs. Brown arranges the fetishes in a rainbow spectrum, like Griet’s vegetable color wheel, showing that she has absorbed the lesson in color theory. She has her own ideas about color, however, which consist in knowing the rules and breaking them for her own purposes: They always told us, didn’t they, the teachers and grans, orange and pink, they make you blink, blue and green should not be seen, mauve and red cannot be wed, but I say, they’re all there, the colours, God made ’em all, and mixes ’em all in His creatures, what exists goes together somehow or other, don’t you think? (58)

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Mrs. Brown’s art is motivated by a desire to express an appreciation for the variety and plenitude of things in the world; like Dolores, she is one of the interested. The contest between the two ways of doing art constitutes a subplot of the story, as Byatt’s extended ekphrastic passages make clear. Although Robin is an irritating, close-minded character, his art should not be dismissed as pointless or simply as a foil to Mrs. Brown’s art; it has a legitimate purpose. Robin is a serial painter, trying over and over to solve problems of color and light that present themselves to him. He lays out neutral-colored surfaces, resembling metal, wood, or plaster, and on each of these surfaces he paints one small luminous object, such as a glass ball or a paperweight as a focal point for the eye. Debbie, who articulates Robin’s purposes better than Robin does, thinks his paintings show ‘‘nostalgic emptiness containing verisimilitude’’ (51). Robin’s is therefore an art of reduction and vacancy, whereas Mrs. Brown’s is an art of expansion and plenitude. Robin’s art is not entirely cerebral, however. For one thing, his passion for pure color induces in him a kind of terror and ecstasy: his paintings are ‘‘about the infinite terror of the brilliance of color, of which he could almost die,’’ a feeling reminiscent of Virginia Woolf ’s desire to dive into paintings and drown oneself in color (70). Robin, like Lily Briscoe, secretly desires to create the illusion of time standing still in his paintings. Robin is amazed that Debbie perceives this quality in some of his serial paintings when she says ‘‘they are like those times when time seems to stop, and you just look at something, and see it, out of time, and you feel surprised that you can see at all, you are so surprised, and the seeing going on and on, and gets better and better’’ (51). Therefore, although the gallery owner suggests that Robin is stuck in a rut and needs to move on, Byatt attributes to his work certain qualities of luminosity and power over the viewer’s eye that have an affinity with the work of greater artists. The description of Mrs. Brown’s gallery installation is the climactic revelation of the story. The entire interior of the gallery is covered with her work, as though it were a fantastical house or, as Byatt calls it, an Aladdin’s Cave. The walls are hung with tapestries, described as ‘‘elegant and sinister,’’ which show rivers of color with strange, demonic faces peering out (74). The ceilings are draped with crocheted cobwebs bearing numerous insects, a literal expression of the idea of the suspended. The furniture, some of which is knitted, seems organic and alive; it includes chests of drawers and

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treasure chests laden with wild collections of miscellaneous things. The centerpiece of the installation consists of a very large knitted dragon, resembling both a millipede and a Hoover, and beside it a woman with a wrenched, broken body chained to a rock by various underclothes and other items of twisted laundry. This Andromeda figure has five breasts, but her face is incomplete, representing the aesthetic of the unfinished: her embroidered face is ‘‘half-done, a Botticelli Venus with a chalk outline, a few blonde tresses, cut-out eyeholes, stitched round with spiky black lashes’’ (77). The incompleteness of the figure and her empty eyes suggest that she is a victim of abuse. Nearby are two very small, scarcely noticeable Perseus figures, a toy soldier with a broken sword and a tiny plastic knight. This centerpiece is formidable, comic, and satirically feminist, but the rest of the installation surrounds the satiric centerpiece with a world of magical invention and color. The article in Debbie’s magazine points out that Mrs. Brown gets her materials by scrounging and that her work, though ‘‘full of feminist comments’’ is ‘‘absurd and surprisingly beautiful with an excess of inventive wit’’ (80). Even though Byatt lightly satirizes trends in postmodernism in both Robin’s art and Mrs. Brown’s, she treats their opposing motives seriously. His art is neorealist; hers is fantastic and mythical. He paints to solve problems; she makes her art out of an exuberant need to create and express herself. His focus is on the singularity of the individual object; hers expresses appreciation for the multiplicity of things. Mrs. Brown wins the day, since she gets the gallery show that Robin had dimly hoped for. Mrs. Brown’s emergence as an artist has an influence on both Robin and Debbie. Debbie is inspired to return to her woodcuts, illustrating fairy tales, and Robin, amusingly, produces a savagely colorful geometric painting with a central figure of Kali the destroyer, who resembles Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown’s total command of the space of the gallery also constitutes an ironic reversal, since of the three artists she has had the least space of her own in which to work. Robin has a whole floor of the house for his studio. Debbie works in a tiny home office so cramped that she cannot write and do art work at the same time. Mrs. Brown, however, has been delighted by her recent good fortune in obtaining a lockup room in the basement of the flats as a place to store her larger pieces. She cheerfully comments, ‘‘Once I had the room, I could make boxlike things as well as squashy ones’’ (80). With a lockbox of her own, this ‘‘weaver of bright webs’’ emerges from obscurity into the light (86).

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Writing in an energetic, hyperbolic style, Byatt uses ekphrasis and onomatopoeia to convey the vibrancy of Mrs. Brown’s art, appealing to the reader’s visual and auditory imagination. She opens the story with a brief description of a late painting by Matisse of a domestic interior, noting that the painting is reproduced in Lawrence Gowing’s Matisse only as a small grayish black and white image. Byatt invites the reader to color the painting: one ‘‘may imagine it flaming, in carmine or vermilion, or swaying in indigo darkness, or perhaps . . . gold and green’’ (32). Byatt, like Woolf, is attempting to bring color onto the black and white print of her page. In a sense she is rehearsing or preparing the reader for the acts of visual imagining, especially of colors, which her ekphrastic passages will demand. Matisse, like Vermeer, is brought in as an earlier master against whom contemporary artists, even fictional ones, can be measured. Since color is so much a subject of ‘‘Art Work,’’ it is appropriate that Byatt chooses Matisse, whose work depends so substantially on color. Color images abound in the story even before the description of the exhibit, notably in the striking colors of Mrs. Brown’s homemade clothing such as ‘‘a magenta and vermilion overall over salmon’’ pantaloons or ‘‘bird-of-paradise upholstery trousers and a patchwork shirt in rainbow colours, stitched together with red featherstitching’’ (57, 68). Mrs. Brown sews similarly eccentric clothes for the Dennison children. The clothing foreshadows the revelation of her rainbow art. After the reference to Matisse, Byatt introduces the Dennison household by describing at length the sounds of domestic appliances, the washing machine, clothes dryer, television, and vacuum cleaner. Using rhetorical tools such as repetition, alliteration, and onomatopoeia, Byatt attributes to domestic life a noisy, repetitive violence; there is a menace in the machines that foreshadows the darker, satiric side of Mrs. Brown’s art. The washing machine is ‘‘tossing its wet mass one way, resting and simmering, tossing it the other’’ (32). Inside the dryer the ‘‘mass of cloth . . . flails, flops with a crash, rises, flails, flops with a crash. An attentive ear could hear the difference in the texture and mass of the flop and the sleeves and stockings are bound into sausages and balls by the fine straps of petticoats and bras’’ (33). The sounds of the laundry are significant because these same items wind up in Mrs. Brown’s art, where the Andromeda figure is bound to her rock with twisted bras and ‘‘demented petticoats.’’ Mrs. Brown is then introduced by means of the Hoover that she is operating on the stairs:

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Up and down the stairs, joining all three floors, surges a roaring and wheezing noise, a rhythmic and complex and swelling crescendo, snorting, sucking, with a high-pitched drone planing over a kind of grinding sound, interrupted every now and then by a frenetic rattle, accompanied by a new, menacing whine. (38)

The onomatopoeia and personification make the Hoover seem like a wrathful, mad creature, and, of course, it will be comically metamorphosed into the grotesque dragon in Mrs. Brown’s exhibit. The agitated wrath of the Hoover represents the transferred anger of Mrs. Brown, who keeps her anger hidden until she expresses it in her art. Her art work comments sardonically on the horrors of physical abuse, and it transforms the violently repetitive tedium of domestic work into something rich and rare. In ‘‘Art Work’’ Byatt creates a character large and vibrant enough to carry off a comic plot with serious overtones, both feminist and aesthetic. Brenda Bowman, the quilt maker in Carol Shields’s novel Happenstance, has aesthetic interests similar to those of Mrs. Brown: an affinity for vivid, startling color; a desire to express the rich multiplicity of things, and a willingness to incorporate the idea of the unfinished into her art. Like Mrs. Brown, she draws on her feminist anger as a positive impetus to creativity. Advertised as ‘‘two novels in one about a marriage in transition,’’ Happenstance is a witty domestic situation comedy in sixty chapters, half narrated from Jack Bowman’s point of view and half from Brenda’s. The two stories are printed back to back and upside down to one another so that neither one takes precedence. Published in 1980 and set in 1978, the novel covers five wintry days in January when Brenda exhibits quilts at her first national crafts convention in Philadelphia while Jack stays at home with their teenage children in suburban Chicago. Jack’s story is darker than Brenda’s because his career as a historian is foundering while her career as a professional quilt maker is beginning brilliantly to take off. Jack, a bumbling, self-conscious person, undergoes a series of minor crises—he wanders miles in a snowstorm, his friend attempts suicide, and he almost abandons a book he has worked on for years. In the end, Jack will survive and so will the Bowman marriage, but he never understands that his wife has become an artist. He initially encouraged her quilting as a kind of occupational therapy when she was depressed after the death of her mother. Secretly astonished at

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her success in selling her first work, he is grateful that she does not call her workroom a studio or, worse, an atelier. He inwardly manufactures preposterous reasons to feel condescending about her art, claiming that she is hopelessly materialistic, since she makes things while he deals with ideas. Jack will not listen to Brenda’s friend Hap when she describes to him the Van Gogh-like qualities of Brenda’s prize-winning quilt. Jack refuses to acknowledge that the battle has already been won and that by 1978 traditional women’s crafts, especially quilting, have come to be considered serious art. A turning point came in 1971, when the Whitney Museum of American Art launched a dramatic exhibition of quilts hung on walls like paintings, emphasizing their graphic rather than functional qualities. But Brenda herself is just coming to the revelation that she is an artist. Brenda has a buoyant, cheerful spirit, appropriate to a modern Angel in the House, but underneath there lies a streak of cynicism and unrealized passion. Her story has a series of events in common with Cat’s Eye, Spending, and ‘‘Art Work’’: the preparation, the show, unexpected success, and an interview with the media. Shields even includes some light satire on academic quilt theory, especially of the Freudian variety. Happenstance also tells a rather gentle love story in which through a series of comic circumstances Brenda is thrown together with Barry Ollershaw, a metallurgist attending a conference in the same hotel. Shut out of her room because her roommate, the famous quilter Verna of Virginia, is entertaining a lover in bed, Brenda ends up spending a romantic interlude with Ollie. Because Verna has taken Brenda’s coat, she must walk through the street to an interview wearing only her prize quilt. She gets very drunk at the interview, but in the end she remains faithful to Jack, returning to her normal life more confident and with her work honorably mentioned. The title Happenstance links together the political and aesthetic implications of Brenda’s story. Happenstance, in the sense of accident, is the machinery that drives the plot of the situation comedy, and in this way Brenda is tested and tempted in a variety of trying and embarrassing circumstances while away from the shelter of her home. Happenstance, in the sense of historical circumstance, also does much to determine the nature of Brenda’s experience. As a forty-year-old housewife in the late 1970s, she is aware of having missed out on the social upheavals that took place during her youth, but recent changes in the status of women make it possible for her to be taken seriously as an artist. Happenstance is also an element

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in her aesthetic. Brenda makes the point that her art is unpremeditated, relying upon elements of chance and sudden inspiration. Her stitching seems to spring from her hands rather than from her head. Brenda’s transformation from a seemingly ordinary suburban housewife, an Angel in the House, into an artist takes place gradually and, ironically enough, before Brenda herself is fully aware of it. Like Helen Cuffe and Marian Easton, she undergoes stages of transformation. Brenda’s Polish mother, poor and unwed, taught her to sew out of necessity, though always emphasizing fashion and quality. Brenda studies to be a typist and, a child of the 1950s, she gets married because she longs for a pink kitchen. In the 1970s she begins, like many women, to feel unfulfilled with a new sense of growing, unspecified anger; at this time she turns from the domestic craft of sewing to the art of quilting. She converts the guest bedroom into her studio and decorates its walls in the colors of Van Gogh’s bedroom. Later, at the crafts convention, Brenda learns that many other serious quilters have undergone a similar transformation, and they pay appropriate tribute to Virginia Woolf: ‘‘I finally laid down the law and got myself a studio. What about you, Brenda?’’ ‘‘Well—’’ ‘‘A room of one’s own. Good old Virginia. She had her head screwed on right.’’12

The comical but dramatic climax of Brenda’s recognition of herself as an artist comes at the moment in Philadelphia when, left without a coat, she has to rush through the wintry streets of Philadelphia wearing her quilt The Second Coming. She strides along in the snowy streets as if floating, feeling a new rush of confidence, power, and purpose. She thinks of herself as having been creeping along for forty years, years that were a waste, she feels, but also a preparation for her new self: ‘‘There was something epic in her wide step, a matriarchal zest, impossibly old. She was reminded suddenly of The Winged Victory of Samothrace’’ (123). Literally cloaked in her art, she sees herself as a heroic figure, connected to the oldest tradition in Western culture. As Brenda grows into the role of an artist, her work also evolves. Her quilts are like paintings, and yet, unlike painting, quilting has a rich historical tradition among women, and women may readily enter the stream of that tradition if they have the inclination and

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ability. Brenda’s earliest work makes use of representational folk motifs but soon evolves into more inventive pieces as she discovers an inner reservoir of inspiration. Like Woolf, Shields uses water imagery to describe the creative process: ‘‘an inner pool of colour and pattern which was oddly accessible and easily drawn upon. It pumped naturally and steadily’’ (17). In the second phase of her work Brenda takes inspiration from the natural world, producing quilts like Spruce Forest and Rock Splinter. In her third phase she turns to abstract inventions. Her work becomes more radically unconventional and seemingly metaphysical, though deeply sensuous as well. Disregarding old rules, she breaks through borders and even creates irregular edges. The Second Coming, the quilt that wins honorable mention at the exhibition, is mostly done in yellows and greens, with a feel of intense heat rising from one corner and stainlike purple shapes around the edges, resembling mouths. It is risky but not a total departure from traditional design. The fourth phase of Brenda’s art is represented by The Unfinished Quilt, which she cannot take to the exhibition. This piece, which arises out of a growing feeling of ‘‘restless anger,’’ is a ‘‘cauldron of colour’’ in yellows (44). Composed of hundreds of pieces, some of them minute, it violates the orderliness of traditional quilt making as well as the orderly calm of her own earlier work. Brenda thinks of it as ‘‘a pulse of life traveling atop a torrent of private energy’’ (45). Brenda’s aesthetic of the unfinished causes her to reach toward the outer boundaries of her own creative potential: She had felt a wish to trap this torrent in stitches but had put off the moment of completion. The quilting frame seemed altogether too rigid to contain what she wanted. . . . She was, in fact, uncertain about how to finish it, and feared that the weight of her hand might be overly heavy. She wanted a pattern that was severe but lyrical; she would have to be careful or she might rush it toward something finite and explanatory, when all the while she wanted more. Perhaps . . . she wanted more than mere cloth and stitching could accomplish. Nevertheless, more was suddenly what she wanted. What she spent her time thinking about. More. (45)

Brenda fears giving finite completion to the work because it might fall short of what her avid imagination desires: More. Critic Sarah Gamble notes that Shields frequently uses a technique of ‘‘blank spots’’ within her narratives to point to objects or experiences that are resistant to description in language; The Unfinished Quilt is one

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such ‘‘blank spot.’’ Gamble writes, ‘‘this quilt remains a piece forever in suspension between language and form: it will either remain unfinished, in which case it will not really be a quilt, or it will be finished, and thus exceed the linguistic parameters set by its designation.’’13 If the name of the quilt causes it to be perpetually suspended between the word and the form, then Shields’s description of this particular work of art stands out as an example of the kind of ekphrasis that creates a ‘‘black hole’’ effect in the narrative, as in To the Lighthouse. Brenda’s aesthetic of the unfinished is shared in a different way by a very elderly Eastern Kentucky quilter at the conference, Dorothea Thomas, who makes narrative quilts, an old and distinctly American art form. Dorothea has come to realize that there are at least four endings to every story, the real one, the one hoped for, the one dreaded, and the counterfactual might-have-been. Having arrived at an aesthetic of the unfinished, she regrets having given a single ending to so many of her earlier story quilts. Shields’s use of the back-toback alternate narratives in her novel would appear to add further endorsement to this aesthetic principle. In a more tentative and problematic way, Kyoko Mori’s novel also portrays a craftsperson’s gradual recognition of herself as an artist. Stone Field, True Arrow is about a weaver who is deeply dedicated to her creative work but feels herself unworthy to be a ‘‘pure’’ artist like her father, a painter, and sees herself as a humble artisan, a Martha. Mori’s semiautobiographical novel is the story of Ishida Mayumi, called Maya, a Japanese-born American living in Milwaukee whose occupation is spinning, dyeing, and weaving cloths for the garments that she makes. In Japanese, the pictorial figures that spell out Maya’s name have the meanings of stone, field, true, arrow, suggesting the hardships she suffers all of her life and the possibility of a new direction for her life at the end of the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Maya at age thirty-five is trapped in a dismal, burnt out marriage with an English teacher, Jeff. The nearly total lack of communication between the couple is at least half Maya’s fault, for she has always been an extremely solitary, silent, inward person and she sometimes retreats to her studio for days. Like the Lady of Shallott, Maya does her weaving in a state of loneliness and isolation manifested by her physical surroundings: Maya’s weaving studio is upstairs from the boutique where she works during the day. The building is a remodeled barn twenty minutes north

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of the city, in countryside that’s as quiet at night as it must have been a century ago. Alone at the loom by the window overlooking the gravel parking lot and the cornfields beyond it, she will think of her father and wonder how she ended up so far from him, in a landscape he never saw.14

Alienated from her husband, Maya confides only in her lifelong woman friend Yuko. The novel becomes increasingly lyrical and psychologically complex as Maya meets and falls in love with Eric, a painter, extricates herself from her marriage to Jeff when he shows signs of returning to his first wife, and moves into her weaving loft. That Maya keeps her relationship with Eric totally secret constitutes a betrayal of Yuko, whom Maya comes close to losing as a friend. Maya very nearly betrays Eric as well when, convinced that she is destined to be alone, she stubbornly rejects the happiness he offers her and urges him to leave her and take a job in New England, which he reluctantly agrees to do. She tells him, ‘‘I need to start being alone. It’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my life’’ (214). Only at the novel’s end does she send Eric a signal of her love for him, in the form of a collage. Maya’s loneliness, which she sees as an essential part of her nature, stems from her troubled childhood. Maya’s life, emotionally and artistically, is saturated with her obsession with her silent father who sent her away from Osaka to America at age thirteen to live with her mother, subsequently returning all of her letters unopened. Her learning of his death sets in motion all of the events of the novel. Maya’s Americanized mother Kay, who abused her as a teenager, remains a problematic and hostile figure in Maya’s life but not a haunting presence like her father. So obsessed is Maya with this absent father, Ishida Minoru (stone, field, harvest), that every significant event in her life, even making love to Eric, carries with it thoughts of the father whom she has idealized. As the novel moves forward, it circles back again and again to what Maya sees as the defining moment of her emotional life, the moment when she was compelled to enter the tunnel of the jetway to be carried away from her father, as though he had delivered her out of his world. Upon his death Minoru leaves her a drawing of that same moment, with the father protecting the daughter from demons and hellfire as she enters the tunnel to leave him. The warm, rather delicate love story at the end of the novel is not sufficient to counterbalance the emptiness, solitude, and terrible

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separateness of people and things that Mori dramatizes throughout the novel. Maya’s consciousness, like the novel itself, is filled with a bleak, sad beauty expressed in natural images of flying birds, stone fields, and such. Emotionally fragile yet very strong willed, Maya faces the difficult task of weaving together the extreme opposites of her life. Always, she has seen herself as caught between her brutally abusive mother and her absent, revered father: ‘‘her father with his long silence and her mother with her bitter words—both of them consumed by one kind of despair or another’’ (257). And caught between two countries and two cultures, representing her past and her present, she always feels like an outsider. Although Maya achieves a great deal of self-understanding, she is slow to come to the realization that she is an artist in her own right, with her own aesthetic ideals, and that weaving is not only an art she has mastered but also a metaphor for her emotional life. In looking at the connection between Maya’s emotional life and her art, it is useful to refer to Kyoko Mori’s memoir The Dream of Water (1995), which anticipates the autobiographical elements in the novel and provides a surprising perspective upon Mori’s portrait of the artist. Possessing all of the emotional complexity and descriptive beauty of the novel, the memoir describes a highly intense sabbatical tour in which Mori returns to Japan to encounter the places she left behind and to try to reconcile herself to her painful childhood, if possible. It is remarkable to see how Mori has transformed the most important people and events of her life, so that her real life relates to the novel as a negative does to a photograph. If nothing else, A Dream of Water reveals how deep-seated and intimate to the author are the tragic family dynamics depicted in the novel. Stone Field, True Arrow is a kind of reverse biography. In real life, it was Mori’s mother, not her father, who took her to art exhibits and encouraged her love of beauty. Her mother embroidered landscapes on cloth wall hangings and decorated her daughter’s blouses with flowers and butterflies. The suicide of her mother when Mori was twelve years old was the greatest loss of her life. Even more surprisingly, in real life her father is not an artist but a cruel, hateful businessman whom she cannot forgive, along with her mean-spirited stepmother, for the extreme physical and psychological abuse she endured as a child. Her father frequently threatened to kill her with a butcher knife for even appearing to be sullen or disobedient. Mori had to leave Japan in order to escape him. Upon her return visit to Japan, she finds her father as cruel and uncommunicative as ever.

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She gradually comes to realize that his neglect and unfaithfulness also caused her mother’s deep unhappiness and suicide. She has to go on living with the knowledge that her father never loved her and that she cannot forgive him but must always carry the burden of hateful resentment inside herself. It was a bold act of redemption of life by art for Mori to turn this monster into the loving father in the novel who steeps his daughter in art, imparting to her the delights of fairy tales and myths, and then mysteriously sacrifices her. The lost mother is transformed into the fictional father, and yet it is to her mother that Mori attributes her lifelong practice of the arts, weaving as well as writing: Knitting or weaving, I like to feel my fingers making something that is more than useful . . . Everything I do is a passion . . . I don’t do things halfway. Choosing to be a writer, weaver, spinner, I want to take what could only be an afternoon’s entertainment for my mother and make a life out of it. I want to be immersed in what she could not have enough of.15

In the story of Mori’s life, as in Carol Shields’s novel, the handicrafts and skills of the dead mother are passed on to the daughter, who consciously turns them to art. Although Mori sees a continuity between her own work with textiles and her writing, as though these activities existed on a single spectrum, she portrays the weaver Maya as doubting the value of her work. Mori emphasizes the ambiguous nature of Maya’s craft—existing somewhere between the aesthetic and the utilitarian—if only to dramatize Maya’s dawning, tentative realization that she is after all an artist. Like other artists, Maya displays her work in a show, but in this instance the venue of the show reveals the ambiguous nature of her work. On the one hand, her dresses, shawls, vests, and scarves are displayed as items for sale in an upscale Evanston boutique, not an arts space. On the other hand, the show has a formal opening with a poster and invited guests, and Mori refers to the shop as a ‘‘gallery.’’ There is even some brief theoretical discussion at the show when a specialist in Japanese textiles from the Art Institute asks Maya whether she has considered experimenting with traditional Japanese combinations of color. He is surprised when she replies that her influences are not Japanese weavers but major Western artists such as the impressionists, Rothko, Pollock, and others. Even though she is denying at this point that she is an artist, she repro-

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duces in her garments the colors of the European landscape paintings that she viewed with her father in the museums of Kyoto. In part, Maya is deeply troubled because she holds contradictory ideas in her mind: the idea that she is unworthy to be an artist like her father and her emerging sense that she is worthy. In art school, her senior show, consisting of small oil paintings of bare fields and rocks, was awarded second prize; nonetheless she used the prize money to buy a loom and a sewing machine so as to pay tribute to her father by engaging in more humble work than he. Later she thinks that it was cowardly of her to choose not to paint, that she has chosen a comfortable craft rather than doing the work which would allow her to return to the moment of departure from her father and meet him again on some level. She also imagines that the products of her work are somehow less truthful than the art of her father: the ‘‘garments she makes cover up the sadness he laid bare in his drawings and paintings’’ (96). At the same time that she supposes her work to be less worthy, Maya acknowledges that her father taught her to see as an artist sees, he ‘‘taught her the language of colors and light, of shapes and lines and angles’’ (205). That legacy remains with her: she ‘‘never looked at any landscape without noticing the fields of color, the shapes of light, the alignment of the world’’ (205). Since Maya’s father sent her away while she was still a child and never communicated with her thereafter, except to leave her one drawing, the reader may feel justified in wondering whether Maya’s obsession with this silent artist is a projection of her own needs—a need to be loved and to look up to a master as well as some deep-seated, shameful need to feel herself unworthy. Minoru seems like an emotional cipher. To the reader of Mori’s memoir he is a figment of the imagination, yet these mysteries add to the psychological richness of the novel. When Maya concentrates on her weaving, her thoughts about her work and about the creative process reveal her sophisticated sensibility as an artist. On her loom she weaves wool for a jacket in colors that will move in subtle transitions from blue to purple to pink. The jacket she plans to make reminds her of a Japanese fairy tale, told by her father, in which a magical garment gives a female spirit the power to fly home to heaven, leaving her earthly lover behind as she dances her farewell to him in the air: The colors move in fine increments, each bar the width of a piano key. If the shades could make music as they moved toward pink, they would

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sound like the waves of the sea. The notes would glide across the blue silence, one wave overlapping the next until they reached the shore and found the pale pink of seashells. . . . the jacket is already flying in her mind. In time, her fingers will set it free into the sky over the sea. (26)

Maya’s synesthetic ekphrasis reveals her unified sensibility. Infused with literary meaning, related to the art of music, and displaying a transformative process in the strips of analogous colors that echo the shades of the sea and seashore, the cloth, and the jacket it will become, are not mere utilitarian things but a unified expression of creative ideas drawn from nature and art. Maya’s understanding of the desired effect of a work of art echoes, somewhat more simply, Virginia Woolf ’s ideas about composition and stylistic rendering. Mori writes, The trick in drawing and painting is first to get the foundations right— all the major horizontal and vertical lines of the overall composition— but that is not an end in itself. Laying out the foundation allows the painter the freedom to move, to capture the shifting light that flickers across the strict gridwork of the world. Even in her weaving, Maya hasn’t forsaken that principle. (275)

Whereas Woolf used the metaphors of bolts of iron and butterfly wings to represent her desire to achieve solid structure while capturing the world’s evanescence, Mori speaks of ‘‘strict gridwork’’ and ‘‘shifting light’’ to refer to solid composition and surface rendering. The collage that Maya sends to Eric at the end of the novel is, except for a few sketches, the only nontextile art she produces in the novel, and as such it suggests that she will now feel liberated to work in other media. The collage begins with a tracing of a map of the Wisconsin countryside where Eric grew up on a farm. Maya adds drawings of various landmarks in colored pencils, and then she draws pictures of the many species of birds that she spotted on a solitary bird-watching trip to the land of Eric’s childhood. She pastes this semitransparent map over the letter from Japan announcing her father’s death. She also glues on a piece of fabric from the jacket she wore on the fatal day when her father sent her away. She sends this collage to Eric as a coded message that she cannot give him up; the collage is a blending of the two lovers’ cultures and of their deepest private memories. Pieces of Eric’s life enter into Maya’s art almost as if the two had collaborated. Maya also thinks of the collage as having hidden meanings:

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Like the song of a bird she recognizes before dawn or when the bird is hidden in thick summer foliage, the combined images announce the presence of something she cannot see or fully understand. Familiar and yet mysterious, the shapes from their separate pasts intertwine. . . . (273)

Rather like the painting Unified Field Theory, described at the end of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, the collage includes symbolic fragments of Maya’s life story: a map, drawings, birds, a letter in Japanese, and a piece of cloth. The ekphrasis is clear enough, but even so, the reader has difficulty ‘‘seeing’’ exactly what this complicated, multilayered piece looks like, as in Maya’s metaphor of the song of a hidden bird. It is a personal and intimate message rather than a work to be viewed by strangers. Along with the pictorial letter to Eric, Maya also puts into the envelope extra, unattached pieces of paper and cloth that did not fit into the collage, suggesting an aesthetic of the unfinished, but also hinting at the hope that pieces of the past may somehow be retrieved and made to fuse. While gazing at the night sky, Maya remembers the story of the weaver star. In a Japanese folk tale told to her by her father, Vega, a weaver, and Altair, a farm worker, neglect their work because they are too much in love. As punishment they are placed as stars on opposite sides of the River of Heaven (the Milky Way) and they are allowed to meet only once a year by crossing the river on the wings of a swan; on this occasion they have the power to grant human wishes for happiness. The story reflects the emotional tensions of Maya’s life. When she thinks of the figure of Vega, Maya emphasizes Vega’s loneliness along with her heavenly artistry: ‘‘Separated from her lover for an eternity, the weaver is still at her celestial loom. Maya imagines her weaving a silver cloth of starlight, an indigo garment of the night’’ (218). Yet the starry lovers are granted their annual meetings after all. Maya, although she will always remain a lonely soul, is left at the end of the novel on the threshold of a surer art and a deeper love. In this bleakly beautiful novel, in which loneliness seems so much like a natural condition of humans, especially artists, Kyoko Mori is, like Virginia Woolf, Mary Gordon, and others, holding out the possibility that art and love are compatible in the end. A domestic artist is apotheosized in Mori’s tale of the weaver who becomes the star Vega. In fact, all of these stories and novels about housewives and servants feature striking and vibrant images of women: Byatt’s powerful cook; the servant Griet arrayed in her tur-

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ban and earring; Mrs. Brown in her bird-of-paradise trousers and rainbow shirt; Brenda striding through the streets of Philadelphia like a Winged Victory, cloaked in her quilt. These heroic images emphasize the radical transformation of characters who have become artists or have begun to see themselves as artists. Their artistry is also a transformative process by which ordinary materials from the domestic world are made into works of art that seem luxurious, beautiful, or luminous: Mrs. Brown’s knitted dragon in its cave of treasures, Brenda’s Unfinished Quilt like a torrent of energy, Maya’s woven woolen jacket with colors that sound like the waves of the sea. Simple materials are transformed into what Deirdre Madden calls objects ‘‘charged with . . . knowledge and energy.’’ The creative expression of these workers in cloth is as authentic as that of any other artist; it constitutes a transference of the self into the world by creating objects infused with human thought and vitality.

Epilogue The ku¨nstlerroman is especially well suited to women writers and their feminist concerns because, as a record of someone’s efforts to become an artist, the genre necessarily involves moments of transformation and growth. Where the protagonist is a visual artist rather than a writer, the interactions of the two art forms—the implied dialogue of the writer with the painter—enrich the theme of creativity in the novel. The novels and stories in this study dramatize an ongoing struggle against obstacles and a gradual throwing off of constraints. Historically, these obstacles included the interruption of the creative process by suitors, the trivializing of women’s art, and the difficulty of combining a professional career with women’s domestic duties. Acquiring a studio of their own is a serious practical matter as well as a symbolic attainment, signifying artistic autonomy. Recent novels and stories have shown women artists still confronting the Angel in the House and still occupying a liminal position vis-a`-vis their society. Liminality itself can offer a kind of freedom, however, when the artist experiences a sense of openness and possibility. Chopin, Woolf, Johnston, Madden, Paton Walsh, and Gordon all portray artists painting at the seashore. Perhaps writers choose to describe painters facing the panoramic vastness of an ocean because it implies a continuing expansion and enlargement of vision; the seashore setting can suggest liberation as well as liminality. Carolyn

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Heilbrun defines liminality, in part, as a condition of leaving one self and entering another; the artist at the edge of the sea is frequently depicted as on the threshold of new self-discovery. So, too, a writer crosses a threshold into another kind of reality when she explores the mind of an artist. Even when serving as the narrator or central consciousness of a novel, the artist figure retains a certain otherness because she works in a medium beyond words. A writer ventures into the world of visual art by creating the character and the inner life of a painter but also, more directly, through ekphrasis. Passages of ekphrasis are the places where the dialogue of the writer with the painter most intimately occurs. Most of the embedded works of art in the novels considered here are described by means of what John Hollander calls ‘‘notional ekphrasis,’’ that is, the works of art are imagined by the writer, although there are a few instances of ‘‘actual ekphrasis’’ in the novels of Banti, Byatt, and Chevalier.16 In instances of notional ekphrasis the writer assumes total control over the embedded work of art, inventing and describing it. Despite this controlling authorial imagination, there exists in ekphrasis a power struggle of sorts between literary and visual art. James A. W. Heffernan writes that ‘‘ekphrasis stages a contest between rival modes of representation: between the driving force of the narrating word and the stubborn resistance of the fixed image.’’17 Ekphrasis manifests the dialogue between the writer and the painter and embodies the tension between them. The reader apprehends that tension in passages of ekphrasis as an abrupt crossing of borders back and forth between a literary experience and an imagined visual one. These writers deliberately create such disjunctions in their narrative in order to expand their medium, to stretch the fabric of fiction to make it include extralingual experience.The authors want their fiction to provide something akin to the aesthetic responses only obtainable in another medium, to cross what Woolf called the ‘‘sunny margin’’ between the arts. It is evident that the dynamics of ekphrasis are essential to the genre of the female ku¨nstlerroman. When women novelists describe the artists’ work, a remarkable continuity manifests itself in their aesthetic choices. These choices embody the general principle that that which is shown as fragmented, unfinished, or suspended in space or time is truer to the experience of creative women than that which is shown as whole, finished, or firmly anchored. As expressed in the embedded works of art, these elements elicit tension and anticipation in the ‘‘viewer.’’ Works conveying an image of

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suspension, such as Elaine’s Black Virgin ascended in the air above the middle of a bridge or Monica’s ghostly suspended Christs hovering above her male nudes, create a feeling of tension, as if one were watching a high-wire act. Works which are fragmented or otherwise unfinished, such as Claire’s body parts, Helen’s disappearing man, or Stella’s cut-off seascapes create a feeling of anticipation; they ask the reader mentally to assemble the pieces or to imagine a completion. The author invites the reader’s interaction with the embedded painting in two stages, first as an act of imagining the painting and then as an act of anticipating what comes next or of mentally completing it. In requiring such exercises of the imagination, the novelist draws the reader more deeply into the painter’s world and into the novel. When it comes to the question of imagining color, the writer depends even more fully upon the reader, for here the writer is under the most severe constraints. Color exists in its own silent kingdom which the writer can only suggest, relying primarily upon the reader’s imagination to assist in bringing color to the black and white page. When the author succeeds in these various descriptive feats, the fictional artist is authenticated, and the novelist has provided her with a fictive space in which her work can be exhibited, a studio of her own.

Notes Introduction Epigraph. Mary Gordon, Spending (New York: Scribner, 1998), 80. 1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 80 2. Laura R Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 5. 3. Ibid. 4. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 5. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘Professions for Women,’’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams et. al., 7th ed, vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 2216. 6. Ibid., 2217. 7. Carolyn G.Heilbrun, Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999), 3. 8. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 152. 9. Ibid. 10. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonomy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 37. 11. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 158. 12. Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power; and other Essays (New York; Harper and Row, 1988), 98. 13. Gail Godwin, Violet Clay (New York: Ballantine, 1978), 337–38. 14. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 379. 15. Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 155–56. 16. Ibid., 179. 17. A. S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), 70. 18. Cary, The Horse’s Mouth, 262–63. 19. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Viking, 1920), 424. 20. Ibid., 421. 21. John Fowles, The Ebony Tower (New York: New American Library, 1974), 50.

Chapter 1. Opening the Portfolio Epigraph. Ann Bronte¨, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848. (New York: Penguin, 1979), 363. Further page references are cited in the text.

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1. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 84. 2. Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4. 3. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 41. 4. Anne Higgonet, ‘‘Secluded Vision: Images of Feminine Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe,’’ in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), 171. 5. Linda Nochlin, ‘‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’’ in Women, Creativity, and the Arts, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Lucinda Ebersole (New York: Continuum, 1995), 58. 6. Deborah Barker, Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 17. 7. Jane Austen, Emma, 1816 Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 1. Further page references are cited in the text. 8. Charlotte Bronte¨, Jane Eyre, 1847 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 162. Further page references are cited in the text. 9. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 158. 10. Susan Morgan, ‘‘Emma and the Charms of Imagination,’’ in Jane Austen’s ‘‘Emma,’’ ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 71. 11. Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987), 354. 12. Christine Roulston, ‘‘Discourse, Gender, and Gossip: Some Reflections on Bakhtin and Emma,’’ in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 45. 13. Honan, Jane Austen, 352. 14. Ibid. 15. Henri Bergson, ‘‘Laughter,’’ in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 105. 16. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 71–72. 17. Morgan, ‘‘Emma and the Charms of Imagination,’’ 69. 18. Carol T. Christ, ‘‘Imaginative Constraint, Feminine Duty, and The Form of Charlotte Bronte¨’s Fiction,’’ in Critical Essays on Charlotte Bronte¨, ed. Barbara Timm Gates (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 65. 19. Elizabeth C. Gaskell. The Life of Charlotte Bronte¨ (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 275. 20. Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte¨ (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1983), 234. 21. Ibid, 237. 22. L. E. Moser, ‘‘From Portrait to Person: A Note on the Surrealistic in Jane Eyre,’’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20 (Dec. 1965): 279. 23. Enid L. Duthie, The Bronte¨s and Nature (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 138. 24. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 433. 25. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Bronte¨ and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 181.

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26. Ibid., 181–82. 27. DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, 87. 28. Ann Bronte¨, The Tenant, 68. 29. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis, 1877, ed. Carol Farley Kessler (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 56. Further page references are cited in the text. 30. Phelps, Avis, 259n. 31. Huf, Linda. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature (New York: Frederick Unger, 1983), 46. 32. Phelps, Avis, xxiii. 33. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, ‘‘The True Woman,’’ Independent 23, no. 1193 (12 Oct. 1871), in The Story of Avis,1877, ed. Carol Farley Kessler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 272.

Chapter 2. The Painterly Eye Epigraph. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Margo Culley, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 79. Further references are cited in the text. 1. Elizabeth Ammons, ‘‘Women of Color in The Awakening,’’ in The Awakening, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Margo Culley, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 310. 2. Cristina Giorcelli, ‘‘ Edna’s Wisdom: A Transitional and Numinous Merging,’’ in New Essays on The Awakening, ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 126. 3. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, ‘‘Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,’’ in The Awakening, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Nancy Walker (Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1993), 255–56. 4. Joyce Dyer, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings (New York: Twayne, 1993), 99. 5. Elaine Showalter, ‘‘Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book,’’ in New Essays on The Awakening, ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 46. 6. Michael T. Gilmore, ‘‘Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening,’’ in New Essays on The Awakening, ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 64. 7. Jean H. Hagstrom, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of English Pictorialism from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), xxi–xxii. 8. Ibid., xxii. 9. Ibid. 10. Emily Toth, Kate Chopin (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 221. 11. Margo Culley, ‘‘Edna Pontellier: A Solitary Soul’’ in The Awakening, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Margo Culley, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 251.

Chapter 3. Journey to the Silent Kingdom Epigraph. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘Pictures and Portraits,’’ quoted in Diane Filby Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 76.

NOTES

245

1. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 3 (1925– 1930) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 132. 2. Cheryl Mares, ‘‘Reading Proust: Woolf and the Painter’s Perspective,’’ in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1993), 58. 3. Ibid., 61. 4. Christopher Reed, ‘‘Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf ’s Relation to Bloomsbury Aesthetics,’’ in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1993), 11. 5. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1965), 12. 6. Ibid., 239. 7. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 209. Further page references are cited in the text. 8. Fry, Vision and Design, 51. 9. Ibid. 10. Studies of the sister artists include Jane Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (Boston: Little Brown, 1990); Diane Filby Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,1988); and Panthea Reid, Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). A useful study of Woolf ’s aesthetic influences is David Dowling, Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985). 11. Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts, 8. 12. Ibid. 13. Letter cited in Lisa Tickner, ‘‘Vanessa Bell: Studland Beach, Domesticity, and ‘Significant Form,’ ’’ Representations 65 (Winter 1999): 75. 14. Virginia Woolf, The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 1912–1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth, 1976), 400. 15. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘Pictures,’’ in The Moment and Other Essays, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948), 176. 16. Virginia Woolf, Walter Sickert: A Conversation, 1934, limited ed. (Letchworth, Eng: Richard West, 1979), 26. 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts, 89. 19. Virginia Woolf, Diary, 3:287. 20. Ibid., 106. 21. Geoffrey Hartman, ‘‘Virginia’s Web,’’ in Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Margaret Homans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), 37. 22. Marianne Hirsh, ‘‘The Darkest Plots: Narration and Compulsory Heterosexality,’’ in Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Margaret Homans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), 208. 23. Ibid. 24. Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977), 136. 25. Quoted in Tickner, ‘‘Vanessa Bell,’’ 65. 26. Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (New Haven: Ticknor and Fields, 1983), 126. 27. Ibid., 171. 28. Ibid.

246

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29. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘A Sketch of the Past,’’ in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 72. 30. Fry, Vision and Design, 33. 31. Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 185. 32. Virginia Woolf, Walter Sickert, 22.

Chapter 4. Figure and Ground Epigraphs. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1992), 88; Anna Banti, Artemisia,1953, trans. Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 101. Further page references are cited in the text. 1. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), xix. 2. Svetlana Alpers, ‘‘Art History and its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art,’’ in Feminism and Art History, ed. N. Broude and M. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 187. 3. Ibid. 4. R. Ward Bissell, Orazio Gentileschi and the Poetic Tradition in Caravaggesque Painting (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), 64. 5. Ibid., 14. 6. Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 171. 7. Ibid. 8. Garrard, Artemisia, 321. 9. Garrard, Artemisia, 337. 10. Garrard, Artemisia, 337–38. 11. Volker Manuth, ‘‘Rembrandt and the Artist’s Self-Portrait: Tradition and Reception,’’ in Rembrandt by Himself, ed. C. White and Q. Buvelot (London: National Gallery Publications, and The Hague: Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, 1999), 41. 12. Murdoch, Metaphysics, 87. 13. Ibid., 88. 14. Ibid., 96. 15. Ibid., 497. 16. Alpers, The Art of Describing, 188. 17. Ibid., 197. 18. Ibid., 198. 19. Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1957), 214. Further page references are cited in the text. 20. Giorgio Vasari, Artists of the Renaissance, a selection from Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (New York: Viking, 1978), 35–36. 21. Manuth, ‘‘Rembrandt,’’ 40. 22. Wallace Stevens, ‘‘So-and-so Reclining on her Couch,’’ in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1972), 295.

NOTES

247

23. John Bayley, Elegy for Iris (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 120. 24. Ibid., 120. 25. Ibid., 122.

Chapter 5. Painters of the Irish Coast Epigraph. Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8. 1. Jennifer Johnston, The Railway Station Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), 1. Further page references are cited in the text. 2. Deirdre Madden, Nothing is Black (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 3. Further page references will be cited in the text. 3. Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland (New York: Penguin, 1976), 1. 4. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘‘Gender, Sexuality, and Englishness in Modern Irish Drama and Film,’’ in Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, ed. A. Bradley and M. G. Valiulis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 176. 5. See David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 6. Susan M. Lowe, Frida Kahlo (New York: Universe Publishing, 1991), 50. 7. Ibid.

Chapter 6. Northern Light Epigraphs. Margaret Atwood, ‘‘The Page,’’ in Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1983), 44; Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 473. 1. Margaret Atwood, Survival (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), 54. 2. Ibid., 49. 3. Wallace Stevens, ‘‘The Comedian as the Letter C,’’ in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1972), 37. 4. Margaret Atwood, Survival, 55. 5. Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (New York: Fawcett, 1969), epigraph. 6. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Bantam, 1972), 49. 7. Ibid., 64. 8. Margaret Atwood, ‘‘The Sunrise,’’ in Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1983), 280. 9. Ibid., 293. 10. Ibid., 298. 11. Ibid., 294. 12. Ibid., 296. 13. Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Biography (Toronto: ECW Press, 1998), 168. 14. Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (New York: Bantam, 1989), 14. Further page references are cited in the text. 15. Judith Thurman, ‘‘When You Wish upon a Star,’’ New Yorker, 29 May 1989: 110.

248

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16. Cooke, Margaret Atwood, 17. 17. John Updike, ‘‘Love and Loss on Zyrcron,’’ New Yorker, 18 September 2000: 145.

Chapter 7. Drawn from Life Epigraph. Jill Paton Walsh, The Serpentine Cave (New York: St Martins, 1997), 181. Further page references are cited in the text. 1. Eudora Welty, ‘‘Place in Fiction’’ in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Vintage, 1990), 122. 2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 91. 3. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘A Sketch of the Past’’ in Moments of Being; Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 64–65. 4. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927), 186. 5. Ibid. 6. Jill Paton Walsh, Unleaving (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 70. 7. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 114.

Chapter 8. Space, Time, and a Muse Epigraph. Mary Gordon, Spending (New York: Scribner, 1998), 80. Further page references are cited in the text. 1. Robert M. Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 9. 2. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927), 83. 3. Robert M. Polhemus, Comic Faith, 22–23. 4. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 157. 5. William Fleming, Arts and Ideas, 9th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 536. 6. Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 157.

Chapter 9. Servants, Housewives, Artists Epigraph. A. S. Byatt, ‘‘Art Work,’’ in The Matisse Stories (New York: Vintage, 1993), 82. 1. Kyoko Mori, Stone Field, True Arrow (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1995), 95. Further page references are cited in the text. 2. A. S. Byatt, ‘‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,’’ in Elementals (New York: Vintage, 1998), 220.

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249

3. Ibid., 226 4. Ibid., 228. 5. Ibid., 226. 6. Jonathan Brown, Vela´zquez, Painter and Courtier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 16. 7. Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring (New York: Penguin, 1999), 186. 8. Ibid., 36. 9. Ibid., 36. 10. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’’ 1924, in The English Modernist Reader, 1910–1930, ed. Peter Faulkner (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 128. 11. A. S. Byatt, ‘‘Art Work,’’ in The Matisse Stories (New York: Vintage, 1993), 78. Further page references are cited in the text. 12. Carol Shields, Happenstance (New York: Penguin, 1980), 80. Further page references are cited in the text. 13. Sarah Gamble, ‘‘Filling the Creative Void: Narrative Dilemmas in Small Ceremonies, the Happenstance Novels, and Swann,’’ in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, ed. Edward Eden and Dee Goertz (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003), 51. 14. Kyoko Mori, Stone Field, True Arrow (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 13. Further page references are cited in the text. 15. Kyoko Mori, The Dream of Water: A Memoir (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1995), 99. 16. John Hollander, ‘‘A Circle of Representations,’’ in The Eye of the Poet: Studies in the Reciprocity of the Visual and Literary Arts from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Amy Golahny (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996), 224. 17. James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 6.

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Vasari, Giorgio. Artists of the Renaissance. A selection from Lives of the Artists. Translated by George Bull. New York: Viking, 1978. Welty, Eudora. ‘‘Place in Fiction.’’ In The Eye of the Story; Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Vintage, 1990, 116–33. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. ‘‘Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.’’ In The Awakening, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, edited by Nancy Walker. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1993, 233–58. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Vol. 3 (1925–1930). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. ———. ‘‘Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown.’’ In The English Modernist Reader, 1910–1930, edited by Peter Falkner. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986, 112–28. ———. ‘‘Pictures.’’ In The Moment and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948. 173–78. ———. ‘‘Professions for Women.’’ 1942. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M. H. Abrams et. al. 7th ed. Vol. 2. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000, 2214–18. ———. The Question of Things Happening. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol.2: 1912– 1922. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. London: Hogarth, 1976. ———. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929. ———. ‘‘A Sketch of the Past.’’ In Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 61–137. ———. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. ———. Walter Sickert: A Conversation. 1934. Limited edition. Letchworth, Eng.: Richard West, 1979.

Index Alpers, Svetlana, 111, 122 Angel in the House, 17–18, 239; in Atwood, 170; in Chevalier, 219; in Chopin, 70; in Gordon, 209; in Johnston, 140; in Murdoch, 122–23; in Shields, 229–30; in Woolf, 91–92, 97, 239 Arnold, Matthew, 69 art and Eros, 17; in Anne Bronte¨, 52–55; in Atwood, 164–65; in Banti, 115; in Chopin, 70–72; in Gordon, 198–200; in Murdoch, 124; in Woolf, 93 Artemisia (Banti), 15, 19, 26, 109–20 ‘‘Art Work’’ (Byatt), 213, 222–28, 239 Atwood, Margaret, 152–73; Bodily Harm, 153, 161; Cat’s Eye, 153–54, 157–73; echo of Woolf in, 159; Surfacing, 154–55; Survival, 152–53; The Blind Assassin, 168; The Edible Woman, 152– 53, 161; The Handmaid’s Tale, 153, 161–62; ‘‘The Sunrise,’’ 154–57 Austen, Jane: Emma, 16, 35–42 Awakening, The (Chopin), 64–84, 107 Banti, Anna (Lucia Lopresti): Artemisia, 15, 19, 26, 109–20 Barker, Deborah, 36 Bayley, John, 131 Bell, Quentin, 102 Bell, Vanessa, 85, 89–90, 102–3; The Conversation, 90; The Tub, 102 Bergson, Henri, 42 Bissell, R. Ward, 112 Bloomsbury group, 89 Bronte¨, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 33–34, 50–56 Bronte¨, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 34, 36–37, 43–50, 107–8

Brown, Jonathan, 217 Bruegel, Pieter, 171 Bryson, Norman, 211 Byatt, A. S.: ‘‘Art Work,’’ 213, 222–28, 239; ‘‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,’’ 213–18, 238; influence of Woolf on, 223 Caracciolo, Shirley D’Ardia, 15, 109, 113 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 80, 111–12 Carpaccio, Vittore, 196, 202 Cary, Joyce: The Horse’s Mouth, 27–30 Cassatt, Mary, 78 Cat’s Eye (Atwood), 153–54, 157–73 Ce´zanne, Paul, 147 Chadwick, Whitney, 25, 34 Chevalier, Tracy: Girl with a Pearl Earring, 213–14, 218–22, 238–39 Chopin, Fre´de´ric, 69, 72, 74, 81 Chopin, Kate: The Awakening, 64–84, 107 Christ, Carol, 43 ‘‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’’ (Byatt), 213–18, 238 Cowper, William, 192–93 Cunningham, Michael, 189 Cunningford, Elizabeth Butler, 136 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 16, 50 Duthie, Enid, 46 Dyer, Joyce, 72 Ebony Tower, The (Fowles), 27, 30–31 ekphrasis: definition of, 21–22, 240; in Atwood, 22–23, 158, 169; in Byatt, 22– 23, 216, 218, 225, 227; in Charlotte Bronte¨, 45–47; in Chevalier, 221; in

255

256

INDEX

Chopin, 23; in contrast to narrative, 23–24, 240; in Johnston, 23; in Mori, 237–38, in Paton Walsh, 180; in Shields, 24, 232; in Woolf, 23–24, 106 Emma (Austen), 36–42 Forster, E. M., 96 Fowles, John: The Ebony Tower, 27, 30–31 Fry, Roger, 86, 94; The Artist’s Vision,’’ 87–89, 104–5 Gamble, Sarah, 231–32 Garard, Mary, 112, 114, 118–19 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 109; Judith Slaying Holofernes,114; Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 118–20. See also Banti, Anna Gentileschi, Orazio, 110, 117–18. See also Banti, Anna Gilbert, Sandra M., 38, 47 Gillespie, Diane, 89 Gilmore, Michael T., 76 Giotto, 126 Girl with a Pearl Earring (Chevalier), 213–14, 218–22, 238–39 Godwin, Gail, 25 Gordon, Mary: influence of Woolf on, 201–2; Spending, 14–15, 17, 156, 195– 212, 220 Gowing, Lawrence, 122, 227 Great War, the (World War I), 95–96, 99 Gubar, Susan, 38, 47 Hagstrum, Jean H., 77 Happenstance (Shields), 213, 228–32 Heffernan, James A. W., 240 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 19, 153, 239–40 Higonnet, Anne, 35 Hirsh, Marianne, 99 Hollander, John, 240 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 182, 193–94, 203 Horse’s Mouth, The (Cary), 27–30 Huf, Linda, 58 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 210–12 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte¨), 34, 36–37, 43–50, 107–8

Johnston, Jennifer: How Many Miles to Babylon?, 135; Shadows on Our Skin, 135; The Railway Station Man, 132–41 Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 85, 101, 104, 199; ‘‘The Dead,’’ 79–80 Kahlo, Frida, 147, 148–49; Henry Ford Hospital, 148–49; The Two Fridas, 149 Kessler, Carol Farley, 58, 60 ku¨nstlerroman: definition of, 13; male writers of, 27–31; women writers of, 239–40 Lawrence, D. H., 85; Women in Love, 30 Lee, Hermione, 100 liminality, 15, 239–40; definition of, 19–20; in Atwood, 153–156, 173; in Chopin, 20, in Gordon, 203; in Johnston, 133; in Madden, 133, 142; in Paton Walsh, 188 Lodge, David, 22, 142 Lowe, Susan, 148 Madden, Deidre: Birds of the Innocent Wood, 143; Hidden Symptoms, 143; influence of Woolf on, 146–47, 150; Nothing is Black, 132–34, 141–51, 220, 239; One by One in the Darkness, 143; Remembering Light and Stone, 143 Manuth, Volker, 120 Mares, Cheryl, 87 Matisse, Henri, 227 Maugham, W. Somerset: The Moon and Sixpence, 27–28 Mitchell, W. J. T., 21, 23 Monet, Claude, 25, 146 Moon and Sixpence, The (Maugham), 27–28 Morgan, Susan, 38 Mori, Kyoko: echo of Woolf in, 237; Stone Field, True Arrow, 213–14, 232–39; The Dream of Water, 234–35 Moser, L.E., 45–46 Murdoch, Iris: aesthetic theory of, 26, 94, 187, 215, 120–22; Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 120–22; The Sandcastle, 109–10, 122–31

INDEX

Nochlin, Linda, 24, 36 Nothing is Black (Madden), 132–34, 141– 51, 220, 239

257

240–41; in Atwood, 172–73; in Byatt, 225; in Charlotte Bronte¨, 24, 46; in Gordon, 207; in Woolf, 101, 106 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 80–81

O’Brien, Edna, 134 Paton Walsh, Jill: Goldengrove, 193–94; influence of Woolf on, 188–194; The Serpentine Cave, 174–94; Unleaving, 193–94 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart: The Story of Avis, 16, 34–35, 50–52, 56–62 pictorialism, 16, 77–82, 92 Piero della Francesca, 131 Polhemus, Robert, 197, 201 political aspects of art, 14–15, 64–67 Prieto, Laura R., 14, 34 Railway Station Man, The (Johnston), 132–41 Reed, Christopher, 87, 107 Rembrandt van Rijn, 127 Roulston, Christine, 40 Sandcastle, The (Murdoch), 109–10, 122–31 Sassoon, Siegfried, 187 sea symbolism, 19–20, 133 serial painting, 25, 135, 139, 146, 169–70 Serpentine Cave, The (Paton Walsh), 174–94 Shields, Carol: echo of Woolf in, 230; Happenstance, 213, 228–32, 239 Showalter, Elaine, 74 Shuttleworth, Sally, 49–50 Spalding, Frances, 102 Spending (Gordon), 14–15, 17, 156, 195–212, 220 Spenser, Edmund, 60–61 Stevens, Wallace, 128, 153 Stone Field, True Arrow (Mori), 213–14, 232–39 Story of Avis, The (Phelps), 16, 34–35, 50–52, 56–62 ‘‘Sunrise, The’’ (Atwood), 154–57 Surfacing (Atwood), 154–55 suspension in women’s art, 20–21, 24–25,

Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The (Anne Bronte¨), 33–34, 50–56 Thurman, Judith, 160 To the Lighthouse (Woolf ), 13–15, 17, 23–24, 26–27, 85–108, 188–94 unfinished, aesthetic principle of the, 15–16, 24–25, 31–32, 35, 240–41; in Atwood, 173; in Austen, 37; in Banti, 26, 120; in Byatt, 226; in Johnston, 134; in Madden, 134, 142; in Mori, 238; in Murdoch, 111, 129; in Paton Walsh, 179–81, 187; in Shields, 228, 231–32 Updike, John, 168 Van Eyck, Jan, 129, 167 Vela´zquez, Diego: Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 214–18 Vermeer, Jan, 122, 151, 204–5, 218–22; Girl with a Pearl Earring, 220; Woman with a Pearl Necklace, 221; Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, 221–22 Welty, Eudora, 183–84 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 68 Women in Love (Lawrence), 30 Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own, 14, 42–189, 194–95; ‘‘A Sketch of the Past,’’ 103–5, 189–90; Between the Acts, 87; Diary, 85, 98; influence of, 26–27, 31, 146–47, 150, 188–94, 201–2, 223, 230, 237; ‘‘Modern Fiction,’’ 88, 103; ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’’ 103, 223; ‘‘Professions for Women,’’ 17–18; To the Lighthouse, 13–15, 17, 23–24, 26–27, 85–108, 188–94; Walter Sickert: A Conversation, 90–91,93, 106. See also Angel in the House Yeats, William Butler, 137–38