Female Beauty in Art: History, Feminism, Women Artists 1443853399, 9781443853392

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Female Beauty in Art

Female Beauty in Art: History, Feminism, Women Artists

Edited by

Maria Ioannou and Maria Kyriakidou

Female Beauty in Art: History, Feminism, Women Artists, Edited by Maria Ioannou and Maria Kyriakidou This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Maria Ioannou, Maria Kyriakidou and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5339-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5339-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Beauty, Feminism, Art: Constructing Female Identity through the Discourse of Beauty Maria Ioannou Part I: Creating Female Beauty: Art, Feminism, Identity in Discourses of the West Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 16 Viewing and Creating Female Beauty: Victorian Fashion Illustrations and Women’s Fashion in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette Maria Ioannou Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 38 Lolita is Set Free: Questioning and Reíinventing Constructions of Adolescent and Preíadolescent Female Beauty in Phoebe Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoirs Olga Michael Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 67 Orlan’s Gruesome Theatre: Religion, Technology and the Politics of Female Self-Mutilation and Violence as Gestus Panayiota Chrysochou Part II: Hellenic Beauty Ideals, Contemporary Politics and Aesthetic Representations Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 100 The Lyceum of Greek Women and the Idealization of Female Greek Beauty Maria Kyriakidou

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 126 Aphrodite’s Heirs: Beauty and Women’s Suffering in Cypriot Public Sculpture Vicky Karaiskou and Adrienne Christiansen Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 180 Female Beauty and Identity Politics: In Search of a “Female Gaze”? Maria Kyriakidou Bibliography ............................................................................................ 192 Contributors ............................................................................................. 195 Index ........................................................................................................ 197

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

3-1. “Phoebe,” p. 4, from A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by Frog Books/North Atlantic Books. 3-2. “An Object Lesson in Bitter Fruit,” p. 47, from A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by Frog Books/North Atlantic Books. 3-3. From A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by Frog Books/North Atlantic Books. 3-4. From The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by Frog Books/North Atlantic Books. 4-1. The Incredulity of St. Thomas – Caravaggio, c. 1601-2, Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam, Berlin. 4-2. Orlan, Black Virgin Wielding White Cross and Black Cross No. 24, 1983. 6-1. Athena statue. Ayios Pavlos quarter, Nicosia. 6-2. Liberty monument. Old city of Nicosia. 6-3. Liberty monument. Larnaca. 6-4. Memorial for the dead and missing. Avgorou village, Ammochostos district. 6-5. Memorial for the Lisi dead and missing. Larnaca. 6-6. Dead partisans’ memorial. Limassol (detail). 6-7. Memorial for the dead and missing. Derynia village, Ammochostos district. 6-8. Liberty. Near Kyrenia. 6-9. Cypriot mother. Aradippou village, Larnaca district. 6-10. Mother and the missing soldier, House of the Missing. Pyrga village, Larnaca district. 6-11. Cypriot mother and EOKA 1955-59 fighters’ memorial. Palehori Orinis village, Nicosia district. 6-12. Mother of the missing. Pyrga village, Larnaca district. 6-13. Memorial for the dead and missing. Latsia, Nicosia. 6-14. Lefkosha roundabout memorial. 6-15. Peace and Freedom Operation monument. Outside Kyrenia. 6-16. Peace and Freedom Operation monument. Inside wall (detail of fig. 6-15). Outside Kyrenia.

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6-17. Bo÷az Martyr’s Cemetery. Outside Nicosia. 6-18. Bo÷az Martyr’s Cemetery. Outside Nicosia. 6-19. Limasol - Girné Martyrs’ memorial. Kyrenia roundabout. 6-20. Memorial for the Morfou dead. Astromeritis village barricade, province of Nicosia. 6-21. The church-like cement tent memorial. Dasaki Ahnas, Ammohostos district. 6-22. The church-like cement tent memorial (detail from the front side). Dasaki Ahnas, Ammohostos district. 6-23. The church-like cement tent memorial (detail from the inside). Dasaki Ahnas, Ammohostos district. 6-24. Commemoration to the mothers of many children. Larnaca. 6-25. The Mother. Nicosia. 6-26. Monument to the Cypriot Farmer. Peristerona village, Nicosia district. 6-27. The Paralimni Mother. Part of the Dead and Missing memorial. Paralimni, Ammochostos district. 6-28. Monument to the Pitsilia Women Fighters. Pitsilia village, Limassol district. 6-29. The SEK monument. Nicosia.

CHAPTER ONE BEAUTY, FEMINISM, ART: CONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY THROUGH THE DISCOURSE OF BEAUTY MARIA IOANNOU

This book collection focuses on the ways female beauty operates as a discourse to create and construct female identity while at the same time operating to expose and elaborate feministic concerns. The function of beauty in women’s identity politics is a novel subject in feminism/ gender and cultural studies upon which not much has been written so far. This collection is unique in that it leads the way in examining the as yet unexplored area of the beauty-as-a-discourse of identity theme. Obviously, the ways beauty influenced women’s self-image have been extensively studied and discussed. In the pioneering work The Beauty Myth (1991), Naomi Woolf explains how prevalent notions of beauty function to define women as defective and, most importantly, to make women themselves internalize the beauty myth. As a result, “women’s identity must be premised upon our ‘beauty’ so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval.”1 More radically, Sheila Jeffreys would like to see the beauty practices of western culture be recognized as harmful cultural practices along the lines of CEDAW (The UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women).2 Sandra Lee Bartky defines beauty as a special variant of Foucauldian discipline so that the body of woman is subordinated within a hierarchy of gender.3 In more recent studies, Peggy Orenstein and Natasha Walter have examined today’s Girly-Girl and princess cultures and how they not only underscore and reproduce sexist stereotypes but also encourage practices of selfobjectification in girls4. For Walter, though the new language of beauty and sexiness (women themselves want to be pretty, desirable and always look sexy) centres around ideas such as empowerment, liberation, choice, adventure, it actually contributes to the current surprising “resurgence of

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the idea that traditional femininity is biologically rather than socially constructed”. Women are still seen as biologically determined: they want to be pretty, sexually alluring, subversive, obedient.5 Women learn that sexual confidence is the only confidence worth having; consequently, the “effect of these choices [i.e. women choosing beauty, prettiness, objectification] … is now to reduce rather than increase women’s freedom.”6 Thus, one aspect of female beauty as discourse is that notions of beauty are produced and circulated by dominant structures in society in various discursive and cultural forms. This sort of production and circulation means that specific norms about femininity and womanhood are reiterated and help define subservient positions within society for women to occupy. In this sense, the discourse of beauty operates negatively for women and is an instrument, if not a constitutive element, of patriarchy. However, the present collection refers to another aspect of beauty as discourse, one which is female-centred and may be employed to facilitate female empowerment. In fact, the notion of beauty as discourse of female identity and/or empowerment is the contribution this collection makes to the area of female beauty in feminism and gender studies. The present volume began from a workshop at the ISSEI International Conference at the University of Cyprus in 2012, which had the central aim of outlining this new and major way of deploying the idea of female beauty. All the same, the notion of femininity in general and female beauty in particular as a form of discourse dates from Kathy Alexis Psomiades in 1997. In Beauty’s Body, Psomiades refers to Foucault and views gender as a dense transfer point for relations of power and considers that Victorian femininity, is shaped by the range of ideologies and practices that make up domesticity; the ideology of separate gendered public and private spheres, the institutions of law, medicine, psychology; and so on. It is also shaped through its association with ‘deviant’ masculinities, through increasing public debates on the woman question, through bourgeois women’s political action as the century progresses.

Beauty in woman refers to “an entire apparatus”7 which conceptualizes what women ought to be like so that “the representation of the beautiful young woman is caught up in larger ideological struggles and historical movements.”8 There are a number of keywords in Psomaides’s analysis, which set the framework for later research in the area of female beauty, including the

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research presented in this volume. These words include “ideology,” “practices,” appropriate “spheres,” “institutions,” an “entire apparatus,” historical time and place. Following Psomiades’s insights, to read beauty as discourse is to read beauty as a sum of forms of expression creating power relations and positions, and to analyze beauty and its representation as a structure of culturally produced texts, images, themes and stereotypes which can be adapted and developed towards new directions. For Elizabeth Langland, discourse refers to “signifying practices of all kinds,” formulated within institutions and organized fields of knowledge; discursive practices regulate “what is sayable,” “who can speak” and “structure the network of power relations in a society.”9 The notion of beauty as (an empowering) discourse targets these elements of discourse –practices, institutions, regulations, social and cultural normative structures—and considers how the representation and embodiment of beauty (art, ideals of the beautiful woman, the presence of beautiful women in various media) can be examined, illuminated and (re)constructed to produce readings which are empowering for women and/or can help to expose the vicissitudes, inequalities and stereotyping which underwrite women within patriarchy. This collection is, to the best of my knowledge, the first to summarize the above notion and begin to work on establishing a theoretical backbone from which further research can be generated. However, other scholars have also engaged with the theme (though not in its theoretical formulation and expression) and I will now proceed to summarize their work. Current scholarship seems to follow five distinct trends. The first is a call for new writing on women both as viewers and as creators of beauty. Peg Zeglin Brand, in the seminal collection Beauty Matters, points out that a woman is never merely an observer on beauty. She must choose to partake in the rites that involve beauty matters. Beauty operates historically, culturally, and politically. We must ask questions like, What is beauty, and how does it operate within the context of our culture? … How do inherited notions of beauty operate on girls who, at younger 10 and younger ages, strive to control their bodies to the point of starvation?

For women, beauty “has always mattered;” thus, “we need more women to speak out about beauty and to engage in a productive dialogue.”11 Moreover, beauty always has to be situated in context so that, as Marcia M. Eaton argues, it can be associated with other contextual factors such as health: “It is harder for all of us to fight bulimia as long as we prefer size-six models to size-fourteen models. The beauty that is

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required by healthy societies seems to have eluded us as well.”12 Firmly placing beauty within a framework which investigates and seeks to expose and reverse restrictive or harmful practices is a notion that runs across the collection as a whole so that, as Eleanor Hartney says in the Foreword, “[b]eauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving.” Beauty is “as capable of destabilizing rigid conventions and restrictive behavioural models as it is of reinforcing them.”13 There is, as Claire Colebrook recognizes in a feminist theory special 2006 issue on beauty, “no simple way in which the feminine is aligned with the beautiful.”14 Rita Felski, in the concluding article, significantly points out that “there is a noticeable lacuna in feminist discussions of beauty …”. There has to be more investigation concerning “the ways in which women perceive themselves, or are perceived by others, as more or less beautiful. … Women have created beauty not just in themselves but in the world.” Feminist work on beauty, Felski notes, has followed a trajectory “from the rhetoric of victimization and oppression to an alternative language of empowerment and resistance.”15 Using beauty in art to signify female empowerment – or at least to alert audiences to feminist concerns—is deployed by Third Wave artists and feminist writers. This is the second trend identified in current writing on female beauty. That is, using female beauty imagery and images to provoke critical thinking and awareness while creating a new feminist consciousness. Two central texts here are Gender in the Mirror by Diana Tietjens Meyers and Pin Up Grrrls by Maria Elena Buszeck. The former explains how feminist artists like Mae Weems, Orlan, Claude Cahun and Sam Taylor-Wood (now Sam Taylor-Johnson) use the female facial portrait and the traditionally female instrument of the mirror as an “instrument of the unheralded, everyday chore of authentic selfenactment.”16 Peg Zeglin Brand and Mary Deveraux, who have reviewed the book for the Hypatia special issue on women, art and aesthetics in 2003, say that central to Gender in the Mirror is “the recurring notion of the body and the way women artists have sought to portray themselves in ways that create new forms of agency and identity that promote personal empowerment.”17 Indeed, Meyers urges women to turn their backs on mirrors. “[N]ew woman-with-mirror imagery” needs to be found to “authorize women to turn their backs on mirrors.” Women must “define their own attractiveness.” Feminist artists are showing them the way, for example, Cahun refigures the mirror as a private space and “a receptacle for testing out modes of social self-presentation;”18 Orlan shows the martyrdom involved both in capitulating to feminine norms and in

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standing up for feminist principles;19 Weems shows how mirrors are inscribed with “the alien voices of racism and misogyny.”20 In Soliloquy III Taylor-Johnson suggests that the goddess Venus is “a desireless symbol” of the desire of heterosexual men; women must free themselves from the idealized notions and heteronormative perceptions which are inherent into the reign of Venus, in order to see themselves as beautiful.21 In general, Meyers believes that “feminist counterfigurations [must] supplant patriarchal figurations of misogyny and reconceive their own identities.”22 Pin Up Grrrls is an excellent monograph on how a new generation of feminist artists is subverting stereotypical images of women in order to define and represent their sexuality and exert control over their own images. For feminism and the women’s movement, popular culture is not solely “a reserve of conservative images to rage against, but also … a powerful tool for offering progressive alternatives to these very messages.”23 Familiar conventions of representing women’s beauty and desirability (such as the pin up) are used to create art that disrupts “the patriarchal subjugation of women.”24 The pin up is used in subtle and ambivalent ways to underscore female power and plurality.25 1. A third trend concerning beauty within contemporary feminism consists of various re-readings of beautiful characters in literature to create new, feminocentric meanings for female beauty. Such rereading includes female beauty in the form of literary portraits; that is, the presence of pictorial portraits of beautiful women in works of literature. An excellent example of this is Lynette Felber´s 2007 article in Victorian Literature and Culture on Mary Elizabeth Braddon´s Lady Audley´s Secret (1862) titled “The Literary Portrait as Centrefold: Fetishism in Mary Elizabeth Braddon´s Lady Audley´s Secret.” The article refers to a portrait made of Lucy Audley, the eponymous heroine of the novel. Like the portrait, Lucy is an ambivalent and ambiguous figure, at least in terms of patriarchal ideas of female virtue. As Felber explains, Braddon creates a layered representation of Lady Audley´s beauty in the portrait, so that it “comprises a multivalent critique: it protests the power and authority of the male gaze; it anatomizes fetishistic desire, and it raises questions about the construction of women and their sexuality in Victorian society.” For Felber, the portrait constitutes a “profound feminist statement” 26 because, in describing it, “the narrator claims that it is the artist´s representation” which exaggerates the attributes and makes the

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subject (Lady Audley) appear wicked.27 Lady Audley as a femme fatale is a male representation.28 The male gaze and male authority construct women; the figure of Lady Audley will appeal differently to women who “might very well recognize the complex (particularly economic) motivations for Lucy´s immoral and criminal acts.”29 Similar treatment has been given to characters like Rosamond Vincy in George Eliot´s Middlemarch (1874) by writers such as Pam Morris and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar30 and Ginevra Fanshawe in Charlotte Brontë´s Villette (1853) by writers such as Marjorie Garson. The present volume’s chapter on Villette follows this tradition and reads the beautiful woman and female beauty as means through which the text raises themes that escape conventional readings of the text. Ginevra´s erotic beauty allows Brontë to criticize aspects of Victorian ideology and engage the protagonist in fruitful dialogue with elements of the female character which Victorian heteronormativity would rather gloss over and conceal. A fourth aspect of female beauty within the discourse of feminism is related to the third and regards the accoutrements of female beauty and femininity as constitutive elements of female presence and identity. This issue is further elaborated in the Villette chapter. In summary, the approach holds that accessories and accompaniments of femininity such as fashion illustrations, paper patterns for clothes making, mirrors and gloves, aided in the formation of an active female subject and an active female gaze. For example, by making fashionable clothes for herself (copying the paper patterns available in periodicals) a woman rendered herself both an agent and an object of beauty and admiration; by consuming fashion illustrations women learnt to see themselves as objects of desire and formulated their own eroticism. The seminal writers here are Sharon Marcus, Margaret Beetham, Valerie Steele, Ariel Beaujot and Christine Bayles Kortsch.31 A fifth and final trend is the function of beauty and the paraphernalia of beauty in Third Wave Feminism. Girlie Feminists celebrate fashion, beauty rituals and Barbie, arguing that they are all elements of female selfexpression. Girlie feminists embrace fashion, femininity and sexiness; the fashion and beauty industries not only give pleasure to women – they are also populated by women designers, specialists and entrepreneurs. Girlie appropriates girl culture and argues that if women choose to wear make-up and stiletto heels, i.e. if women choose to be objectified, then their choice ought to be respected.32 However, Girlie’s emphasis on beauty and ephemera such as shopping and fashion has been criticized as a distraction

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from political feministic aims. Girlie has no political agenda and seems to move dangerously towards traditional notions of femininity. Besides, is there such a thing as “free” choice? A number of societal influences determine “free” choice, while Girlie assumes that all women have equal access to education, ideas, employment. Buying lipstick does not result in empowerment and, as for choice, as Walter points out, “it is time to look again at how free these choices really are.”33 Real equality still eludes us, says Walter. “Women still do not have the political power, the economic equality or the freedom from violence that they have sought for generations. This means that women and men are not meeting on equal terms in public life.” Choices are neither free nor informed.34 A more politicized approach to female beauty by Third Wave Feminism is that of Riot Grrrl. Riot Grrrls use beauty –blonde hair, lipstick, lace— in parodic or exaggerated forms in order to draw attention to issues like domestic violence, abortion and rape. Riot Grrrls perform a parodic and ironic version of femininity, to suggest new ways of seeing the female self.35 The present book posits itself inside and interacts with these five underlying trends in the area of female beauty and its relation to feminism and femininity. That is, it regards female beauty as a sum total of elements, practices, preconceptions, ideas but also, and most importantly, of innovations and innovative methods of expressing, forming and viewing the female self. Belonging as it does to Third Wave Feminism, it aims to address the ways in which female beauty and identity are intertwined in cultural expressions such as art, literature, cartoon design, and sculpture and how female beauty can be used as the conduit of alternative discourses in order to form an innovative discourse of female empowerment. Female beauty in this book refers to the embodied female figure, and is revealed as a malleable form of discourse, which can be drawn away from oppressive or potentially oppressive structures and practices to constitute a discourse of empowerment and female selfdefinition. The way this process unfolds will become more obvious in the chapters that follow. The first part of the book comprises three chapters about the creation of female beauty in literature, cartoon strips, fashion illustrations and filmic and photographic art. Chapter two, which is my own chapter on Charlotte Brontë´s Villette, suggests that descriptions of female beauty and fashion in the novel function to create a discourse of female identity formation which proceeds through identification, relationship and contrast with other women. Chapter two examines the notion of female beauty in the Victorian era (19th century Britain) and

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argues that the discourse of beauty allowed women to function as subject as well as object; beauty in the Victorian era participates in the definition of a female subject by examining the problematics which surround the female figure in the 19th century. That is, female beauty discourse is not seamless – it exposes and works with problematic issues and debates. Chapter three is the chapter by Olga Michael on Phoebe Gloeckner. This chapter directly focuses on the sexualization of women which is so insidiously in operation even in contemporary feminist discourses and which has so much concerned critics like Kelly Bean, Rebecca Munford, Natasha Walters and Peggy Orenstein. Michael’s chapter shows how elements of the beauty discourse (sexual allure, an attractive body) can be dismembered and used by Third Wave Feminism to form a discourse which criticizes and interrogates the sexualization of girls. By presenting the alluring female body (which is being raped) from the perspective of the female victim/artist, and female beauty in ways that foreground the damage done to the sexualized girl, objectification is unsettled and passivity deconstructed. A new version of female beauty is introduced, one that is set free from the male gaze. The fourth chapter is Panayiota Chrysochou’s chapter on the subversive artist Orlan. This chapter functions in two ways; first, to give the volume an overall philosophical background and, second, to examine what Chrysochou calls the disavowal of the subjective body. Chrysochou wonders whether an unreserved feminist celebration of Orlan’s work is possible; Orlan challenges rigid perceptions of beauty, yet the cost she has to pay is too excessive; for Chrysochou, Orlan’s art entails the literal defragmentation of the body in an area (female beauty and embodiment) where this is absolutely not possible, if not perilous and undesirable. The second part of the book concentrates specifically on Hellenic beauty ideals. While the contribution of Greece and Cyprus to beauty philosophy and beauty mythology (Cyprus is even the traditional birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love) both countries are also firmly placed within a strong patriarchal tradition which operates to keep women in their subservient position. Maria Kyriakidou, in Chapter five, offers an insightful examination into how beauty discourse can be used for adversative purposes–both to define women as powerful and independent, and as socially compliant figures, with motherhood as their major life mission. While Kalliroi Parren, a renowned Greek feminist and founder of the Lyceum of Greek Women, linked her account of the beautiful female figure to powerful femininity (without excluding motherhood and the support of national endeavours) and equal rights, her beautiful and graceful Lyceum

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counterparts at contemporary Panathenian festivals were encountered in dominant public discourse as docile and virginal; the ancient female characters which they invoked (e.g. the Amazons, or the goddess Artemis, all unconventional as well as powerful) were rather “tamed and adjusted to the contemporary docile, feminine ideals of the early 20th century” in order “to conform to social expectations for women” (page 103 in this book). The chapter by Vicky Karaiskou and Adrienne Christensen is a detailed case study on Cypriot public sculpture since the 1974 Turkish invasion of the Cyprus Republic and the subsequent occupation of 30% of its territory. The representation of the female figure in relation to the 1974 disaster sometimes refers to ancient Greek beautiful goddesses or other powerful presences; most commonly, however, the female figure is represented as notably not beautiful. She is in mourning, a widow, a grieving mother. Female beauty and sexuality are symbolically eradicated to define women only in relation to patriarchal precepts and sentiments. A grieving mother or wife cannot be beautiful; she must forego her beauty and embrace the role patriarchy has drawn for her. Grief for the men must define the woman absolutely. Beauty is erased along with the self; though beauty is absent, or perhaps because of its very absence, beauty becomes the self. The bodies and faces of the women in Cypriot Public Sculpture are made to mirror the sacrifice of the men; facial features lack individuality; women are represented as obedient and in mourning – even the heroic female is asexual and idealized. The concluding chapter brings together ideas expressed throughout the volume, to raise the all-important issue of an emerging female gaze. Kyriakidou explains the rewards and challenges involved in the process of defining a female gaze, arguing that it is best to consider the possibility that the female gaze might be multiple rather than uniform and standardized. Correspondingly, the important contribution of this collection to feminist/gender/ cultural studies lies in the underlying and emerging theme of the use of beauty as a discourse which illuminates the formation of a powerful female self. Rather than pointing to women´s conformity, beauty and the beautiful female figure can be deployed to point towards and combat the problems and ambiguities that beset women within patriarchy. This way, the present volume may operate as a theoretical framework for Third Wave Feminists who would like to see the concept of beauty be extended to embrace a political agenda for women. The volume shows how beauty can work well within a political agenda and sets female beauty itself as an instrument for political power: female beauty can easily be

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appropriated by women in ways that not only undermine patriarchy but also pose specific questions for the female subject to answer.

Bibliography Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990. Baumgardner, Jennifer, and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Bean, Kelly. Post-Backlash Feminism: Women and the Media Since Reagan-Bush. Jefferson: Mc Farland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2007. Brand, Peg Zeglin. “Introduction: How Beauty Matters.” In Beauty Matters, edited by Peg Zeglin Brand, 1-23. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Brand, Peggy Zeglin, and Mary Deveraux. “Introduction: Feminism and Aesthetics.” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (fall/winter 2003): ix-xx. Buszeck, Maria Elena. Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Colebrook, Claire. “Introduction.” Feminist Theory 7, no. 2 (2006): 131142. Eaton, Marcia M. “Kantian and Contextual Beauty.” In Beauty Matters, edited by Peg Zeglin Brand, 27-36. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Felber, Lynette. “The Literary Portrait as Centrefold: Fetishism in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.” Victorian Literature and Culture 35, no. 2 (September, 2005): 471-488. Felski, Rita. “Because it’s Beautiful: New Feminist Perspectives on Beauty.” Feminist Theory 7, no. 2 (2006): 273-282. Garson, Marjorie. Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2007. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2000. Hanna, Kathleen and Bikini Kill. “Riot Grrrl Manifesto.” In The Essential Feminist Reader, edited by Estelle B. Freedman, 394-396. New York: The Modern Library, 2007. Hartney, Eleanor. “Foreword: Cutting Two Ways with Beauty.” In Beauty Matters, edited by Peg Zeglin Brand, xiii-xv. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

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Ioannou, Maria. “Dora Spenlow, Female Communities, and Female Narrative in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” Dickens Studies Annual 44 (2013): 143-164. Jeffreys, Sheila. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Hove: Routledge, 2005. Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Marcus, Sara. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Meyers, Diana Tietjens. Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women’s Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Morris, Pam. Literature and Feminism: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Munford, Rebecca. “ ‘Wake Up and Smell the Lipgloss’: Gender, Generation and the (A)politics of Girl Power.” In Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, edited by Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, 266-279. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Orenstein, Peggy. Cinderella Ate my Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2011. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997. Scott, Linda M. Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Walter, Natasha. Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. London: Virago Press, 2010. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. London: Vintage, 1991.

Notes 1

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (London: Vintage, 1991), 14. 2 Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (Hove: Routledge, 2005), 28-29. 3 Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 74. 4 Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella ate my daughter: Dispatches from the front lines of the new Girlie-Girl culture (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2011), 130.

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Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (London: Virago Press, 2010), 11. 6 Walter, Living Dolls, 37. 7 Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 4. 8 Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, 5. 9 Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 3. Like Bartky, Langland also follows Foucault. 10 Peg Zeglin Brand, “Introduction: How Beauty Matters,” in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 3-4. 11 Brand, “Introduction,” 5. 12 Marcia M. Eaton, “Kantian and Contextual Beauty,” in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 35. 13 Eleanor Hartney, “Foreword: Cutting Two Ways with Beauty,” in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), xv. 14 Claire Colebrook, “Introduction,” Feminist Theory 7, no. 2 (2006): 138. 15 Rita Felski, “‘Because it is Beautiful’: New Feminist Perspectives on Beauty,” Feminist Theory, 7, no. 2 (2006): 280. 16 Diana Tietjens Meyers, Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women’s Agency (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 141. 17 Peggy Zeglin Brand and Mary Deveraux, “Introduction: Feminism and Aesthetics,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (fall/winter 2003): xi. 18 Meyers, Gender in the Mirror, 138. 19 Ibid., 134. 20 Ibid., 133. 21 Ibid., 143. There is also a bleak side to the painting, see Ibid., p. 144. 22 Ibid., 28-29. 23 Maria Elena Buszeck, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4. 24 Buszeck, Pin-Up Grrrls, 7. 25 Such as Marlene McCarty’s matchbox pinups which carry unconventional messages (p. 334) or Peregrine Honig who “uses the genre [of the pin up] to address not women’s beauty, but rather the ugly realities that lurk beneath women’s desirable facades” (p. 351). 26 Lynette Felber, “The Literary Portrait as Centrefold: Fetishism in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35, no. 2 (September 2005): 473. 27 Felber, “The Literary Portrait”, 474. 28 Ibid., 484. 29 Ibid., 480. 30 See also my own article, Maria Ioannou, “Dora Spenlow, Female Communities, and Female Narrative in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” Dickens Studies Annual 44 (2013): 143-164. 31 Details for the books are to be found in the Villette chapter bibliography.

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13

For a complete account of Girlie see Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and Linda M. Scott, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 33 Walters, Living Dolls, 33. My summary of the critique on Girlie is based on the following works: Kelly Bean, Post-Backlash Feminism: Women and the Media Since Reagan-Bush, (Jefferson: Mc Farland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2007) and Rebecca Munford, “ ‘Wake Up and Smell the Lipgloss’: Gender, Generation and the (A)politics of Girl Power,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, 266-279 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 34 Walters, Living Dolls, 33-34. 35 For Riot Grrrl see Maria Elena Buszeck, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010) and Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill. “Riot Grrrl Manifesto,” in The Essential Feminist Reader, ed. Estelle B. Freedman, 394-396 (New York: The Modern Library, 2007).

PART I CREATING FEMALE BEAUTY: ART, FEMINISM, IDENTITY IN DISCOURSES OF THE WEST

CHAPTER TWO VIEWING AND CREATING FEMALE BEAUTY: VICTORIAN FASHION ILLUSTRATIONS AND WOMEN’S FASHION IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S VILLETTE MARIA IOANNOU This chapter examines the function of female beauty in various forms of Victorian cultural production, and argues that it operates as a dialogue between object and subject, and as a way to negotiate aspects of female identity and gender/ identity formation. Firstly, the chapter considers the ambiguities surrounding the meaning of female beauty in the Victorian era, especially in the context of art and artistic creations; then, it elaborates on this concept of female beauty in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), a novel which deals with female beauty in ways that are both unsettling and unique, while also investigating how female beauty and identity interact with fashion, theatricality and other practices of signification. The subject of women’s beauty in the Victorian era in Britain is multifaceted and ambiguous, because it was tied with prevalent notions of appropriate female behaviour and morality. On the one hand, women were urged to look good; in fact, it was imperative for them to consider their appearance, since marriage was the only way for a woman to have a sexual life and a family. Marriage was regarded as a woman’s one and true destination. Thus, a number of studies have appeared which examine how Victorian women tackled what can be called the limits and limitations of beauty; how to be beautiful while also avoiding to appear vain or overtly sexual. For example, Leigh Summers, in her historical investigation of Victorian corsetry, has pointed out that, “the corset’s ubiquity might indicate that it provided women with a culturally sanctioned eroticism in an era of competing sexual discourses that denoted female sexuality as either negligible or demonic.”1 The corset was on the other hand both feminine and respectable2. Fashion historian Valerie Steele concurs. Victorian women used the corset to simultaneously construct “an image of

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irreproachable propriety and one of blatant sexual allure,” and “articulate sexual subjectivity in a socially acceptable way.”3 Thus, the middle-class ideal of femininity was partly erotic. “The Victorian woman played many often contradictory and ambiguous roles, but she cannot be characterized as a prude, a masochist, or a slave. Her clothing proclaimed that she was a sexually attractive woman,” although, as Steele herself points out, “this has a particular meaning within the context of the culture.”4 This context demanded that women remain inconspicuous,5 yet the desire to be seen and be considered beautiful created a struggle, very well articulated in 19th century fiction.6 Moralist writers such as Charlotte Mary Yonge saw dress as “the greatest temptation to the greatest number of women in existence,” arguing that the woman’s adornment lay “in her meek and quiet spirit.”7 Sarah Stickney Ellis was stricter than that, equaling physical beauty with vapidity.8 The ideal woman was ethereal, “a creature of disinterested love and nurture, the moral centre of the home and of society as a whole.” Women had to “downplay every aspect of their physicality including (but not limited to) their sexuality,” as Anna Krugovoy Silver has explained.9 Therefore, beauty had to be negotiated, in order to be made into a form that could be adjusted to cultural expectations and norms. Female beauty and sexuality needed to be filtered through acceptable channels. For instance, women could use mainstream fashion plates and illustrations to visually enjoy their own sexuality. Produced by women, for women, fashion plates solicited a female gaze for images that put women, their bodies and the objects that adorned them on display. Fashion imagery objectified women as sexually attractive figures designed to be looked at […].10

For Sharon Marcus, who has analyzed the figure of the female Victorian viewer of (female) beauty, “the most overt pleasures Victorian fashion offered women was looking at other women and being looked at by them.”11 What Marcus’s analysis suggests, is that Victorian female beauty (and its accoutrements such as fashion and adornment) comprised an active interplay between object and subject, action and passivity. Margaret Beetham has also brought forward the capacity of beauty to include two very different roles for women, saying that the paper patterns to be found together with fashion plates in women’s magazines, “was a brilliant device for bridging the gap … between the reader as household manager on the one hand and fashionable lady on the other.” The meek, domestic woman, the angel in the house, could recognize “herself as the woman of the

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fashion plate. The ‘same’ woman could not only accomplish two different feminine identities in her dress, but could move from one femininity to another.” The woman could turn herself from a “skilled manager,” and “actor” and “subject,” to a “desired object.”12 Fashion “produced the female body as the subject/object of desire;” femininity was at once “artful and natural … desired object and desiring self.”13 Interestingly, a corresponding exchange between subject and object is reflected in the Pre-Raphaelite circle and in the arts and crafts movement. One way of looking at 19th century art is, as John Berger has pointed out, as an “absurdity of … male flattery.” Paintings featured numerous naked or semi naked women of saccharine beauty, functioning to remind the male spectator that “he was a man,” and the painting’s sexual protagonist.14 Berger refers specifically to “the public academic art of the 19th century,”15 but it is nonetheless true that even subversive, much maligned Pre-Raphaelite art16 can also be seen to inscribe gender difference, that is to reinstate public discourse on what men and women are/ ought to be.17 What is denied in the Rossetti drawings of Elizabeth Siddall, for example, says Griselda Pollock, “is their status as work, as being worked, the products of history and ideology. Instead they are made to proclaim that the masculine artist, in love, reveals the truth of the feminine model.” This relationship inscribes “a hierarchy of power in which man is the owner of the look.”18 However, Pollock herself says that Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca breaks the mould of the Rossetti work and is a towering, powerful figure,19 while Virginia M. Allen has argued that in Lady Lilith, Rossetti has produced a “modern” narcissistic woman in a private moment in a private space20 embodying in the image 19th century fears of female emancipation and comprising an attempt to exorcise “a demon of his [i.e. Rossetti’s] own,” i.e. Lizzie.21 Though both Pollock and Allen attribute only vicariously to Rossetti the potential to upset gender boundaries, current focus on the female members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement has highlighted the ways object and subject can relate to each other in Victorian artistic production. Both Lizzie and Gabriel took Lizzie’s own artistic work seriously; Lizzie had a “dual role” in the movement, says Jan Marsh– “she was both model and artist.” In portrait sketches, she is repeatedly “shown concentrating at her own easel.”22 Even Millais’s Ophelia, “the best known image of Lizzie”23 and her subsequent illness are testimony to Lizzie’s professionalismíthe determination to keep her pose and stay inside the bathtub where she floated for Millais to paint her, although the water was becoming dangerously cold. When she was artistically creative, Lizzie felt “emotionally energized and alive.”24

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Similarly, Jane Morris, model for countless paintings, valued her reputation as a working embroiderer highly. Her work was magnificent; “Mrs. Morris’s chief occupation was embroidery,” Marsh observes.25 Thus, 19th century embroidery is also being studied for its contribution to the formation of female identity and female agency. Needlework was part of a woman’s “complete education,” among her achievements and, as Kathryn Ledbetter argues, “the most significant of a young, middle- to upper class woman’s accomplishments.” It also took up a large section of a woman’s time and activity.26 Additionally, needlework, embroidery and the sister art of sewing, are considered a special type of feminine knowledge that “could be utilized as an alternative to mainstream, patriarchal discourse. It could offer women a private language and culture, understood to be traditionally feminine.” Literacy in dress culture “would function simultaneously as an alternative discourse and a traditional one”27 and gave women a kind of authority and cultural capital.28 Scholarship posits handicraft as a naturalized metaphor for writing,29 an “antidote to the mass produced commodities of the industrial era”30 and as an element to “the production of self,” giving us, today, “unique insights into the production of self-identity and self-display through things.31 It connoted skill, accomplishment, imagination, sentiment, and contained a message as well as a woman’s “close observation and reintepretation of nature.”32 Elizabeth G. Gitter also spoke about the close connection between weaving, story-telling and plot-creating in the Victorian imagination,33 listing the connection between thread and female narrative as a constitutive element of the “mythology of women’s magically powerful golden hair” developed by the Victorians.34 Women were often active agents in the production of beauty. Jane Morris, says Wendy Parkins35 is usually associated with beauty, the model, with immobility, with desire. Jane Morris is, quite often, “the silent muse”, the girl who modeled, the object of the gaze, later the wife and mother. This association ignores Jane’s creativity; Jane identified herself as a craftswoman, part of an artistic community. She was not professional, but she was able to produce artistic work; all her friends were artistic women. She carried family values into the family business and expressed a resistance to the alienated labour William Morris associated with industrial production and commodity culture. This mechanism of identity formation –and especially of gendered identity formation—through arts and crafts is present in the 19th century literature in significant ways. In Jane Eyre (1847), for example, Charlotte Brontë makes a statement for the value of feminine education and accomplishments: Jane is excited by the idea of learning to sew and do

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fancywork at school; formal education at Lowood not only produces in Jane a cultured young woman, able to earn a living in an antagonistic and intimidating world and participate in discussions with a learned gentleman like Mr Rochester – Lowood is also presided over by Miss Temple, depicted as a paradigm of female culture and achievement. Jane’s art forms the key to her recognition by St John; in Villette, Lucy Snowe uses embroidery as a private language while making the gift of a watch chain for M. Paul. Lucy, an orphaned and impoverished genteel young woman, is the first person narrator and protagonist of Villette. As a teacher in Brussels, Lucy makes two friends, erotic and beautiful Ginevra Fanshawe who, like Lucy, is of limited financial means, and pretty, angelic, wealthy and aristocratic Paulina Home. Lucy also divides her affections between two men: good-looking but cold and narrow-minded Dr John, and Paul Emanuel, ugly-looking but emotional and warm-hearted. The intended recipient of the gift in this scene assumes that it is made for his considered rival, Graham “Dr John” Bretton; for Lucy, however, the making of the chain is a way to signify the transfer of her affections from one man to the other. While M. Paul succumbs to jealousy, Lucy sews calmly, definining herself as a rational and composed woman as opposed to the irascible, impulsive and emotional male. Estella in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) is shown to knit in the scene where she announces her engagement to Bentley Drummle to Pip, while she is seen to be sewing Miss Havisham’s tatterred wedding dress, after Miss Havisham tore it in a paroxysm of despair over fear that Estella does not love her. Rather than read these scenes as haphazard or as showing Estella’s alienation and inability to control her fate (though the needle is in her hands, her destiny is not), I prefer to read them as steps in the path which will lead Estella to the sort of selfífulfillment she achieves in the end. Knitting and sewing appear in moments where the two relationships that have marked and formed Estella’s life appear to be cemented and complete. The knitting scene contains Pip’s declaration of unending love for her, while the sewing scene shows the importance of Estella’s relationship to Miss Havisham; though not a healthy relationship, it has made Estella who she is. In fact, Estella is the only person allowed to mend the skeletal wedding dress; both she and Miss Havisham are given a kind of redemption in the end. Generally, identity for women in the Victorian era was largely (if not wholly) formed through relationship; women were “relative beings,” with marriage forming the central axis of a woman’s life. An excellent summary of a woman’s defined place in the Victorian era is given by Marilyn Yalom in A History of the Wife. The material well-being of the

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woman depended on the financial situation of the husband. Through “a burgeoning advice literature” women were told how they should fulfill “their domestic responsibilities.” Women had to obey and satisfy their husbands, keep their children physically and morally sound and maintain the household. There were permissible activities such as attending church and philanthropy, while the duties of men and women were defined by the doctrine of separate spheres (the domestic life of unpaid work, silence and passivity for the women and the public life of paid work and activity for the men). Other well-known and well-accepted ideas defined the woman as the angel in the house, “the spiritual guide of the family,” conditioned by nature for the purposes of wifehood and maternity. Society elevated the woman morally; nevertheless, her power was of the “powerless” sort. “[W]ives were never to forget their dependence on the men … Women simply did not exist in their own right.” Further, the attribution to woman of an angelic identity meant that her nature was by definition asexual: the healthy woman was supposed to be incapable of sexual desire and sexual pleasure. Women succumbed to their husbands so that they could produce offspring.36 Women who did not marry were called odd, surplus, or redundant.37 Victorian society and culture being dominated by a “male, middleclass ideology of gender,”38 the ideal woman was considered to be the fragile, leisurely woman of the middle-class, while working-class women suffered a “very different plight.” Because of their involvement in the public and male spheres of “the nation’s factories and industries” they were often seen as unfeminine (by reason of their physical strength and presumed good health and robustness) and sexually available.39 Thus, female identity in the 19th century was constructed to a great extent by a masculine culture; the face of woman was fashioned by the male.40 Lucy Snowe in Villette is isolated, because she does not fit within the ways (male-dominated) culture defined female middle-class identity: she is orphaned, poor, plain; she is single and needs to work. Lucy is excluded “from [the society’s] official narratives of happiness and success.”41 Society has the power to render Lucy “invisible and mute,” and Lucy is aware of this.42 Lucy challenges what Sally Shuttleworth calls “the alternative models for womanhood created by men”43; and in particular by male visual art, namely the paintings of the sexual Cleopatra and the obedient daughter-wife-mother and widow in the La vie d’ une femme, while the society’s “perfect woman” is Paulina Mary Home, still a mental infant at nineteen.44 As has already been argued, beauty was an important component in 19th century female identity, while an appropriate measure of concern with

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female beauty was presumed to be a constitutive part of female identity. As has also been mentioned, “appropriate” meant within the limits of feminine modesty and within the single aim of pleasing the (perspective) husband and never the self. The female self was, in large part, supposed to be constituted by negation–negation of independence, of agency, sexuality, potentiality and intellectual power and achievement; negation of physicality, bodily experience and the body. Women were disíembodied, as Krugovoy Silver has also convincingly explained. Women had to be ethereal and slim in order to connote sexual purity, regulation of appettite and self-control. Hunger, appetite and body fat were unnatural in women.45 To conform to the ideal, women were urged to downplay every aspect of their physicality, including (but not limited to) their sexuality. Meal times in particular, were seen as opportunities for women to demonstrate their incorporeality through the small appetite and correspondingly slender 46 body.

Beauty could be, therefore, a limiting form of discourse on the one hand for 19th century women. Beauty can easily be seen as another of the limiting dicsourses framing the Victorian woman’s identity. Current scholarship, on the other hand, indicates that the discourse of female beauty also operated as a mode of establishing or allowing female agency (see Marcus and Beetham earlier) and it is the argument of this chapter that female beauty in 19th century Britain is a discourse positioning female identity as the result of relationship between women and is a liberating as well as limiting discourse. Mary Haweis’s idea that it is neither a “sin” nor “folly” for a woman to want to look lovely also led her to ask, “[a]fter all, what is vanity? If it means only a certain innocent wish to look one’s best, is it not another name for self-respect–and without it, what would woman be worth?”47 Haweis sets herself up against conduct book advice, but is also able to see woman as a reasoning subject, a rational creature who is entitled to an amount of self-admiration. A beautiful woman is, in Sarah Stickney Ellis’s discourse, a being with very little ability for self-definition: she will be inevitably led astray because of the admiration of others. In Haweis’s discourse, by contrast, a beautiful woman is able to define herself through her own reason–staring at the mirror is an aid and not an obstacle to attainment of character. As a result, beauty can provide us with a new and empowering language with which to read female identity and experience. Correspondingly, various aspects of beauty, including the language of beauty, the visualization of beauty and beauty accoutrements are being

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studied today for their contribution to the way(s) women actively constructed an identity for themselves. For Galia Ofek, representations of women’s hair in Victorian culture point out “a suppressed voice, which tells the story of a marginalized, fragmented or isolated female identity.”48 For Ariel Beaujot, fashion accessories were employed by Victorian women “in the fabrication of Victorian femininity;” women constructed their identity through gestures and movements, creating a certain perception of themselves.49 The consumption of commodities by women has been read by Krista Lysack as a form of “antidiscipline,” in which subjects fashion the world around them rather than regulate themselves according to it. Consuming for pleasure extended the sphere of middleclass women’s activity. Woman becomes a desiring subject and contests traditional gender norms and the traditional understanding of the self as distinct from objects.50 Lucy in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, even performs “a version of identity theft by producing Lady Audley through a world of commodities […].”51 This chapter builds upon these ideas, as well as on central scenes from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, to argue that the notion of beauty is empowering not only because it can grant women possibilities of selfpresentation, self-construction and agency, but also in the ways it posits women in relation to other women, especially beautiful, spectacular women. Female beauty is a way of writing about, and explaining, the imbricating channels towards creating an identity. In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Lucy Snowe’s struggle to maintain an independent identity and her struggle for self-definition have been welldocumented and thoroughly examined. There are no few instances in the book where Lucy, firstíperson narrator throughout the narrative, chooses to shift the focus from herself to other people–Paulina, Ginevra, Mme Beck—she even begins the narrative with a story from Paulina’s childhood. Kate Millett has argued that Lucy “is no one, because she lacks any trait that might render her visible: beauty, money, conformity.”52 At the same time, Millett points out that Lucy manages a prison break and expresses her “revolutionary sensibility.”53 In general, critics are divided as to whether Lucy’s struggle for self-definition is successful or not. Lucy lacks a blueprint for her journey to selfhood, says Brenda Silver. Her culture rejects her strengths and Lucy acquires a sense of herself as an outsider.54 For Heather Glen, Lucy does not control the cluttered world which surrounds her; she is powerless, less a presence than an absence. Further, in “Villette, the eye does not organize but simply receives impressions; this is a world which baffles, bewilders, dazzles, strikes.”55

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At the same time, there is a line of criticism which sees Lucy’s narrative as a more successful attempt to achieve authority, confidence and meaning. For Sandra M. Gilbert and Suzan Gubar, in the course of the novel, Lucy speaks in her own voice;56 likewise, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz observes that both author and narrator develop a sense of female power in part through the art of narration.57 Lucy’s narrative challenges male constructions of the social and psychological world.58 Brontë suggests an alternative vision to “the normative psychological vision implicit in male definitions of the ‘Real’.” Lucy appropriates to herself conventional theories “of a female predisposition to neurosis and monomania”59 and “calls into question the doctrine of control.”60 Similarly, female beauty and fashion also work to provide alternative methods of analyzing and explaining social experience. Critics have spoken about how Lucy’s near cross-dressing at the school-play is the articulation of a self bent on delineating its own forms and boundaries. If the ghostly nun Lucy encounters is an expression of her fears and oppression, the cross-dressing at the schoolplay indicates self-respect; Lucy refuses to dress completely as a man for the role and thereby deny her femaleness. The play is an important step towards finding a voice.61 The theatre allows Lucy to go beyond herself and confers her “clarity of vision and purpose.” Lucy is strengthened by the performance,62 she enjoys herself immensely and takes pride in herself.63 She is even allowed the “delicious pleasure” as a man-woman of making love to Ginevra.64 Charles Burkhart calls the school play the “high point of the school-girl crush between Lucy and Ginevra.”65 Fashion in Villette, Sara T. Bernstein maintains, is “a productive means of narrating the self and the body;” art and fashion shape Brontë’s vision of the 19th century world. Fashion bends and liberates66 and Lucy uses it to “seek recognition while evading categorization.” Her sphere is composed “of pure liminality; neither light nor dark, but the shade in between.”67 Brontë “uses fashion – as a presence, an absence and a ghost space between these categories—to shape her heroine’s views on gender, acquisition and loss”. Lucy uses this space to gain power.68 The thesis in this chapter enters a long line of criticism of art and beauty in the 19th century in order to consider a relatively unexplored dimension: female beauty’s capacity to create a language in which to conceptualize identity, and beauty’s capacity to stipulate identity as a relation between women based on empowerment and not repression. This is nowhere more obvious than in the looking-glass scene between Lucy and Ginevra. The scene comes right after the school play and, indeed, Ginevra approaches Lucy passionately, as she would a lover:

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“‘Lucy Snowe! Lucy Snowe!’ she cried in a somewhat sobbing voice, half hysterical … ‘How do I look, how do I look tonight?’ She demanded”69 (p. 214). The scene is ordinarily read as negative for Ginevra–Ginevra, selfish as she is, insists on her own personal beauty, emphasizes Lucy’s plainness, thus reinforcing in this scene Lucy’s self-doubts. According to Millett, [b]orn to a situation where she is subject to life-and-death judgments based on artifical standards of beauty, Lucy is subject to a compulsive mirror obsession, whereby each time she looks in the glass she denies her existence – she does not appear in the mirror. One of the most interesting cases of inferiority feelings in literature, Lucy despises her exterior self, and can build an inner being only through self-hatred.70

Is not the scene with Ginevra in front of the looking glass an excellent example of Millett’s idea? Lucy does not see herself in front of the mirror, she only sees Ginevra. The scene is insistent on Lucy’s lack of beauty. Ginevra explicitly sets out Lucy’s disadvantageous position in terms of physical appearance. The purpose of the scene seems plain enough. However, this reading ignores the complexity of the looking glass scene, and its relationship to what comes before and after in the narrative. Further, it ignores Lucy’s own ambivalent stance towards Ginevra, the way Lucy herself might have provoked Ginevra’s stinging words. “[You look] as usual, … preposterously vain.” Lucy tells Ginevra, while Ginevra protests: “Caustic creature! You never have a kind word for me.” (p. 314) Thus, the initial exchange between women means that Ginevra’s own caustic words are not entirely unprovoked. The scene before the looking glass comes right after the schoolíplay, where Lucy and Ginevra have played lovers. Moreover, it must be noted that Ginevra’s demeaning words give Lucy a chance to assert herself. Lucy does not make herself seem inferior in this scene, but speaks up, saying that she would not give “a bad sixpence” to be Ginevra, despite the beauty. “You are but a poor creature.” (p. 215) This is a scene where the girls exchange insults: it is not only Ginevra the beautiful insulting Lucy the plain. Beauty and plainness talk to each other; beauty dominates in front of the looking glass, perhaps unsurprisingly so. The looking glass here begins as an instrument of division: “Will you go with me now and let us two stand before it?” Ginevra asks (p.214) Lucy humours her and Ginevra goes on to draw the difference between their respective positions. (p. 215) But then, Lucy appears to be more conciliatory, the looking glass having built the possibility of communication rather than frissure. Despite their earlier exchange of insults, Lucy and Ginevra appear to be in accord when they

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begin to talk about young men. They leave the room together to go spy on the men, Ginevra commending Lucy: “there’s a dear creature!” (p. 216) In front of the looking glass Lucy and Ginevra reíenact the love/hate pattern which exists between them. Beauty here is, interestingly, their common denominator: not only is it their basic point of comparison, but also remarkably inclusive, for it brings unity after division. The looking glass begins as a signifier of fracture and ends as a conduit for identification. The looking glass scene is significant for the formation of identity, because it shows how identity formation is ambiguous, inclusive, and dual. Ginevra and Lucy exist beyond patriarchal definitions and codes; otherwise, they would not have been able to re-establish friendship at the end of the scene. Lucy’s relationship to Ginevra participates in a discourse which creates identity as multiple and constituted through an attribute such as beauty, shown here to offer women an opportunity for exchange (of stories, of common interests, even of insults.) What kind of mirror is the looking glass in the pensionnent’s dressing room? A mirror of truth, a distorting mirror, illusory, magical, what? I believe that it is all of those things. The polarities mirrored in it are “unstable” and “ambiguous,” failing to define the individual self in terms of difference from others;71 while also deconstructing the binaries of the self and other.72 In classic Greek literature, mythology and thought, the mirror was a locus where the self and other, the same and different, meet and intertwine. In many texts, the other rather than the self predominates, the mirror being an instrument for reversal.73 Though the looking glass in Villette distorts the reality (showing one woman rather than two), the image in the mirror has the magic ability to tell the truth. Beauty unites two very different women; their identity here merges and becomes a subject of exchange. This exchange can be negative (the insults) but also positive: in the end, the two young women leave together to go spy on the men. The ending of the looking glass scene is not fructured but playful; rather than showing Lucy’s inferiority complex or Ginevra’s supposed spitefulness, the mirror formulates female identity as a matter of fusion and fruitful exchange. That identity can be multiple, constituted via discursive and extra linguistic social performances contingent in relationship with others within specific contexts has been discussed before.74 Here we examine how beauty, both as a concept and as a physical attribute, can be used not only as a context, but also as a common denominator for women, and as a form of femaleícentred discourse; a discourse that can be appropriated and reformulated women. Beauty is a way of talking about women, which grants a pivotal role to the female characters and their situations in life, constructing a new perspective on

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these lives and situations. The young women in this scene transcend patriarchal definitions and categories. Beauty is able to dissolve categories; by doing so, it does not annihilate the sense of self but conversely restores it. Lucy’s relationship with Ginevra does follow an overall pattern of rejection and acceptance; in fact, Lucy (and Ginevra for that matter) is at her most passionate when she acts as Ginevra’s lover in the school-play: “…between us we half-changed the nature of the role, gilding it from top to toe. Between the acts M. Paul told us he knew not what possessed us … I knew not what possessed me either […].” (p. 210) Some critics have pointed out that in the end Ginevra fades from the narrative, yet this is patently inaccurate, as I will proceed to demonstrate. I will first discuss a scene where Lucy rejects Ginevra and then consider Ginevra’s role and presence in the narrative as a whole. The scene in question takes place at Hotel Crecy, and shows Lucy make an unfavourable comparison between Ginevra and Paulina, elevating the latter to a demiígoddess and patriarchy’s ideal woman while also demonstrating that young women like Ginevra belong to the margins of patriarchy and are rejected by patriarchal principles, precepts and norms. In this scene, Lucy fully aligns herself with the forces of patriarchy and the patriarchal viewpoint, which applaud female fragility and obedience and condemn female sexuality and spirit. The presence of Ginevra at the fête has been orchestrated by Lucy and Paulina, so that Paulina can make sure that Ginevra no longer comes first in Graham’s heart. (p. 391) During the fête, Paulina triumphs: dressed all in white, surrounded by her riches, demure and appropriately feminine, she impresses and enchants a group of academicians. The most learned of those sages is the first who manages to “draw” timid (only supposedly, Paulina can be quite a dissembler when she chooses) Paulina “into discourse.” (p. 398) Indeed, patriarchy has drawn Paulina in its discourse. Graham – the representative of Victorian hegemonic masculinity in the novel, is placed in this scene in the position of judge for the character and nature of the two girls. Ginevra has little money, wears crimson (an unusual colour to wear during the period, see C. Willett Cunnington’s yearly catalogue of conventional colours,75) plays with gaiety at the piano, makes mistakes while speaking French and is irreverent when faced with male authority. She is, therefore, to be judged severely by normative masculinity: “Ginevra and Paulina were now opposite to him [i.e. Graham]: he could gaze his fill. He surveyed both forms – studied both faces” (p. 400). The scene is almost tragic in its offhandedness, in the ease with which female spectacular beauty is rejected at the expense of feminine propriety and frigidity. Ginevra is even

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ridiculed because her piano performance is lesser than M. Joseph Emanuel’s: Lucy does not realize that she is comparing (and ridiculing) the performance of a schoolgirl to that of a master musician. She proceeds to discuss with Graham how inferior Ginevra is to Paulina. The function of fashion in the crimson dress scene at Hotel Crecy is plain enough: the white dress worn by Paulina symbolizes purity and appropriate femininity, while Ginevra’s crimson gown symbolizes the girl’s deviant presence and sexuality. Lucy here aligns herself with patriarchy and presents Ginevra in a very negative manner. The function of beauty as discourse here, however, outlines the centrality of this straightforward and rather crude scene to the formation of female identity in the narrative. Beauty as discourse serves to showcase the hierarchy between women (hierarchy in terms of how society sees them and how they see each other) and the ways they negotiate their relationships to femininity and to each other. Lucy here reveals the extent of her desire to conform, the extent to which she has internalized ideas of how women must assume only specific forms of behaviour; those who do so are to be lauded and rewarded, while those who do not ought to be ridiculed and condemned. Furthermore, beauty as discourse reveals the multiple faces of beauty in a narrative and what they may have to tell us about the experience of being a woman in a specific time and place. Alongside Paulina’s fairy-like, conforming beauty, there is Ginevra’s spectacular female presence and exuberant energy. There is a choice to be made; Lucy appropriately chooses fragile femininity while female energy and sexuality are checkmated. Had the scene at Hotel Crecy been the end of the narrative, this would have been the novel’s final word on how female identity ought to be formed: women ought to look at both normative femininity and female energy and choose the former.76 Sandra Lee Bartky has explained how Michel Foucault’s theory of Panopticon surveillance acquires a particular significance when applied to women: … self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become she is importantly a body designed to please […].”77

Apart from physical appearance, female acceptability also involves specific behaviour – movements, gestures, posture.78 The crimson dress scene is one excellent illustration of Bartky’s theory, an instance where anti-normative femininity (Ginevra) is ridiculed and dismissed because she does not conform to disciplinary practices and Panopticon surveillance.

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There is even the policing, disciplinary, societal stare in the forms of Graham, the academics, M. de Basompierre and Lucy herself; and the praise and approval for Paulina, the woman who has the correct appearance (fragile and whitely-clad) and displays the correct form of behaviour (timid, reverent towards, and dependent on, the men). A focus on spectacular female beauty in this scene shows how woman becomes an object in patriarchy and heteronormativity; how all elements of sexuality, energy and irreverence in a woman need to be exorcized if she is going to become acceptable in patriarchy’s magic circles; in fact, the crimson dress scene is a perfect paradigm of this process. In terms of the novel as a whole, however, beauty participates in a wider problematic. This is because the novel does not follow the pattern that would appear as natural after this scene, i.e. Lucy and Paulina affirming a lifelong friendship with Ginevra failing, both as a character, and as a friend to Lucy. Yet this is precisely what does not happen; what happens is quite the reverse. Though some critics have considered that Ginevra fades from the narrative in the end,79 this is actually what happens to Paulina. Twentieth and twenty-first century critics are still finding it difficult to overcome the prejudice against sexual, corpulent and outspoken girls and continue to write in favour of silent, angelic femininity. Though Paulina performs one of the cruelest actions in the book against Lucy’s emotional happiness and stability (making Lucy read Garham’s love letters to her, Paulina, even after Paulina realizes that Lucy has feelings for Graham too, p.521) her cruelty and whimsicality have gone unnoticed – at worse, Paulina is considered infantilized. Richard A. Kaye even attributes to Ginevra what is Paulina’s snobbish pride in a French heritage. For Kaye, Ginevra “flamboyantly continues to declare her Gallic lineage,”80 yet this is to be found nowhere in the novel. The character who flaunts her Gallic lineage is Paulina. In her own words: “We are Home and De Basompierre, Caledonian and Gallic.” (p. 364) It is Ginevra who resents the Homes’s obsession with their French title: “The man [i.e. Mr. Home] is English enough, goodness knows; and had an English name till three or four years ago.” (p. 351) Kaye is somewhat nearer the mark, however, when he reads Lucy and Ginevra as “mirror images of each other,” with Ginevra standing “for what can and cannot be evoked, what may be introduced into the text but must be left unresolved.”81 However, in the end the friendship between Lucy and Ginevra still exists; Ginevra does not have “a large share of suffering … in reserve for her future,” (p. 575) but manages to sustain her marriage though personal effort and devotion to a weak husband. (p. 575-76) Ginevra’s correspondence with Lucy is long and, as far as we know,

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uninterrupted; there is no mention of a similar correspondence with Paulina. Villette is, in Lucy’s own description, a “heretic narrative.” (p. 235) Female spectacular beauty is one method to introduce into the narrative questions about female identity, agency and sexuality which cannot be addressed by the more conventional, realistic, narrative. Ginevra’s beauty, and her unsevered bond with Lucy depict the formation of female identity not only as a process involving relationships with other women but also as in part a process that exists beyond dominant, heteronormative narrative formations and associations. Relationships with other women can be homoerotic–there is more than enough evidence of lesbianism between Lucy and Ginevraíbut also based on friendship, a common life (life at the boarding school) or even antithesis. Though often Lucy and Ginevra seem antithetical, they never lose their basic bond. Like the great looking glass at the boarding school, female identity is a matter of relationship with other women. While the relationships to men are easily defined–daughter, sister, wife, mother, widowíthose to other women are not. Friend, antagonist, an other self, all of these together? Female beauty in Villette is a locus of identity; beauty is a discourse of identity in that it enables the novel to construct an alternative method of analysis, an alternative way of seeing the roles and images women have to negotiate in order to form a sense of self. By introducing a sense of the unknowable, the unsayable, female beauty demonstrates that female identity cannot be absolutely or even satisfactorily defined by dominant narratives, explanations and social semiotics. What does the looking glass at the boarding school show? Do the girls see only a reflection of Ginevra in it? Lucy is not clear on this point but, if so, this does not necessarily mean that Lucy detests her own image, or that only the beautiful woman is worthy to be seen. Conversely, it is equally possible that Lucy appropriates Ginevra’s beauty and image; this explanation would tie with the outcome of the scene: Lucy and Ginevra do not depart the room alienated, but united. Beauty creates a link, not a fracture; beauty is a meeting point for women; beauty is a space in the narrative where female identity emerges as an alternative reading, an alternative notion and relation. Female beauty in Villette participates in an ongoing cultural dialogue in the Victorian era, a dialogue between the roles of woman as subject versus object, an actor and agent versus a relative, passive being. Female beauty straddles and upsets all those categories and binary oppositions. Female beauty makes opposition a method, not of division, but of inquiry. In Villette, female beauty is both defined and deployed as discourse, in

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that it functions to compare, contrast and reformulate versions of reality, of self, of relationship and of experience.

Bibliography Allen, Virginia M. “One Strangling Golden Hair: Rossetti’s Lady Lilith”. Art Bulletin 66, no. 2 (June 1984): 286-294. Armstrong, Nancy. “Gender and the Victorian Novel.” In The Cambirdge Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by Deirdre David, 97-124. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bartky, Sandra. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990. Beaujot, Ariel. Victorian Fashion Accessories. London: Berg, 2012. Bercaw, Nancy Dunlap. “Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings: Fancywork and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture, 1840-1880.” Winterhur Portfolio 26, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 231-247. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. Bernstein, Sara T. “’In This Same Gown of Shadow’: Functions of Fashion in Villette.” In The Brontës in the World of the Arts, edited by Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells, 149-167. The Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914. New York: Routledge, 1996. Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Edited by Mark Lilly. London: Penguin Books, 1979. Burkhart, Charles. “The Nuns of Villette.” The Victorian Newsletter 44 (fall 1973): 8-13. Cunnington, C. Willett. English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1990. Ellis, Sarah Stickney. The daughters of England: their position in society, character and responsibilities. New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1843. Frontisi-Ducroux, Francoise, and Jean Pierre Vernant. Dans l’ oeil du miroir. Translated by Vaso Mentzou. Athens: Olkos, 2001. Garson, Marjorie. Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. Yale Nota Bene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

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Gitter, Elizabeth G. “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination”. PMLA 99, no. 5 (October 1984): 936-954. Glen, Heather. “Shirley and Villette”. In The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, edited by Heather Glen, 122-147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Goggin, Maureen Daly. “Fabricating Identity: Janie Terrero’s 1912 Embroidered English Suffrage Signature Handkerchief.” In Women and Things 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies, edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, 17-42. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. Haweis, Mary. The Art of Beauty. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1878. Hawksley, Lucinda. Lizzie Siddall: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel. London: Carlton Publishing Group, 1998. Jackson, Anne W. “’It Might Gift Me with a World of Delight’: Charlotte Brontë and the Pleasures of Acting.” In The Brontës in the World of the Arts, edited by Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells, 125-147. The Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. Kaye, Richard A. The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. Kortsch, Christine Bayles. Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction: Literacy, Textiles and Activism. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009. Ledbetter, Kathryn. Victorian Needlework. Victorian Life and Times. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012. Lysack, Krista. Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Marsh, Jan. Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story 1839í1938. London: Pandora Press, 1986. —. Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. London: Quartet Books, 1988. Millett, Kate. “Sexual Politics in Villette”. In Villette New Casebooks, edited by Pauline Nestor, 32-41. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992. Milton, Catherine A. “A Heterogeneous Thing: Transvestism and Hybridity in Jane Eyre.” In Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature, edited by Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy Carlson, 189-208. Youngstown: Cambria Press, 2007.

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Newman, Beth. Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation and Victorian Femininity. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Ofek, Galia. Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. Parkins, Wendy. “Jane Morris and Company: Tactile Aesthetics and Other Family Values.” Plenary, BAVS Conference 2012, Sheffield, UK, August 30 -1 September, 2012. Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. “’Faithful Narrator’ or ‘Partial Eulogist’: First Person Narrator in Brontë’s Villette.” In Villette New Casebooks, edited by Pauline Nestor, 68-82. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Feminism, femininity and the histories of art. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge, 2003. Purchase, Sean. Key Concepts in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Key Concepts. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth Century Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Shuttleworth, Sally. “‘The Surveillance of a Sleepless Eye’: The Constitution of Neurosis in Villette”. In Villette New Casebooks, edited by Pauline Nestor, 141-162. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992. Silver, Anna Krugovoy. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Silver, Brenda. “The Reflecting Reader in Villette.” In Villette New Casebooks, edited by Pauline Nestor, 83-106. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992. Steele, Valerie. Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. —. The Corset: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Summers, Leigh. Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Wife. New York: Perennial, 2002. Yonge, Charlotte Mary. Womankind. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1878.

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Notes 1

Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 6. 2 Summers, Bound to Please, 21. 3 Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 35. 4 Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 100101. 5 Beth Newman, Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 7, 21. 6 Newman, Subjects on Display, 21. 7 Charlotte Mary Yonge, Womankind, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1878), 108-109. 8 Sarah Stickney Ellis, The daughters of England: their position in society, character and responsibilities (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1843), 96-97. 9 Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9. 10 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 119. 11 Marcus, Between Women, 117. 12 Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 78. 13 Beetham, Domesticity and Desire, 79. 14 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), 56-57. 15 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 57. 16 See Sean Purchase, Key Concepts in Victorian Literature, Palgrave Key Concepts (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 110. 17 Purchase, Key Concepts, 169. 18 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, femininity and the histories of art, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2003) 159. 19 Pollock, Vision and Difference, 205, 208. 20 Virginia M. Allen, “One Strangling Golden Hair: Rossetti’s Lady Lilith,” Art Bullettin 66, no. 2 (June 1984): 291. 21 Allen, “Rossetti’s Lady Lilith,” 293. 22 Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (London: Quartet Books, 1998), 44. 23 Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddall: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (London: Carlton Publishing Group, 1998), 43. 24 Hawksley, Lizzie Siddall, 174. 25 Jan Marsh, Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story 1839-1938 (London: Pandora Press, 1986), 117. 26 Kathryn Ledbetter, Victorian Needlework, Victorian Life and Times (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 1.

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Christine Bayles Kortsch, Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction: Literacy, Textiles and Activism (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009), 5. 28 Bayles Kortsch, Dress Culture, 13. 29 Talia Schaffer, Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth Century Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20. 30 Schaffer, Novel Craft, 35-36. 31 Nancy Dunlap Bercaw, “Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings: Fancywork and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture, 1840-1880,” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 233. 32 Bercaw, “Solid Objects,” 240-43. 33 Elizabeth G. Gitter, “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination,” PMLA 99, no. 5 (October1984): 938. 34 Gitter, “Women’s Hair,” 936. 35 Wendy Parkins, “Jane Morris and Company: Tactile Aesthetics and Other Family Values” (plenary, BAVS conference 2012, Sheffield, UK, August 31, 2012). 36 Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife (New York: Perennial, 2002), 180-182. 37 Yalom, A History of the Wife, 277. 38 Purchase, Key Concepts, 74. 39 Purchase, Key Concepts, 74. 40 Kate Millett, “Sexual Politics in Villette,” in Villette New Casebooks, ed. Pauline Nestor, (Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992), 36. 41 Heather Glen, “Shirley and Villette,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, ed. Heather Glen, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 146. 42 Brenda Silver, “The Reflecting Reader in Villette,” in Villette New Casebooks, ed. Pauline Nestor, (Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992), 95. 43 Sally Shuttleworth, “‘The Surveillance of a Sleepless Eye’: The Constitution of Neurosis in Villette,” in Villette New Casebooks, ed. Pauline Nestor, (Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992), 154. 44 Millett, “Sexual Politics,” 35. 45 Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature, 10. 46 Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature, 9. 47 Mary Haweis, The Art of Beauty (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1878), 258. 48 Galia Ofek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), 30-31. 49 Ariel Beaujot, Victorian Fashion Accessories (London: Berg, 2012), 32-34. 50 Krista Lysack, Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 8-11. 51 Lysack, Come Buy, 47. 52 Millett, “Sexual Politics,” 32. 53 Ibid., 41. 54 Silver, “The Reflecting Reader,” 87-91. 55 Glen, “Shirley and Villette,” 143.

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Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed., Yale Nota Bene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 50. 57 Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, “’Faithful Narrator’ or ‘Partial Eulogist’: First Person Narrator in Brontë’s Villette,” in Villette New Casebooks, ed. Pauline Nestor, (Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992), 69. 58 Shuttleworth, “The Constitution of Neurosis,” 153. 59 Ibid., 159. 60 Ibid., 152. 61 Silver, “The Reflecting Reader,” 93. 62 Anne W. Jackson, “It ‘Might Gift Me with a World of Delight’: Charlotte Brontë and the Pleasures of Acting,” in The Brontës in the World of the Arts, ed. Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells, The Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), 133. 63 Jackson, “Charlotte Brontë,” 126. 64 Ibid., 136. 65 Charles Burkhart, “The Nuns of Villette,” The Victorian Newsletter 44 (fall 1973): 10. 66 Sara T. Bernstein, “‘In This Same Gown of Shadow’: Functions of Fashion in Villette,” in The Brontës in the World of the Arts, ed. Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells, The Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), 153. 67 Bernstein, “Functions of Fashion,” 163. 68 Ibid., 167. 69 The quotations and page numbers from Villette refer to the following edition: Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Mark Lilly (London: Penguin Books, 1979). 70 Millett, “Sexual Politics,” 39. 71 Marjorie Garson, Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 272, 273. 72 Catherine A. Milton, discussing the scene in Jane Eyre where Jane sees Bertha in the mirror wearing Jane’s wedding veil, “A Heterogeneous Thing: Transvestism and Hybridity in Jane Eyre,” in Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature, eds. Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy Carlson (Youngstow: Cambria Press, 2007), 201. 73 Francoise Frontisi-Ducroux and Jean Pierre Vernant, Dans l’ oeil du miroir, trans. Vaso Mentzou (Athens: Olkos, 2001), 142-43. 74 See Maureen Daly Goggin, “Fabricating Identity: Janie Terrero’s 1912 Embroidered English Suffrage Signature Handkerchief,” in Women and Things 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies, eds. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), 19. 75 In C. Willett Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1990). 76 For a summary of how Victorian novels depict the division between femininity and femaleness, see Nancy Armstrong, “Gender in the Victorian Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001).

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Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 80. 78 Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 68-69. 79 For example, Richard A. Kaye, The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002) 57, 63. 80 Kaye, The Flirt’s Tragedy, 53. He repeats the assertion later, on p. 64. 81 Ibid., 81.

CHAPTER THREE LOLITA IS SET FREE: QUESTIONING AND RE-INVENTING CONSTRUCTIONS OF ADOLESCENT AND PRE- ADOLESCENT FEMALE BEAUTY IN PHOEBE GLOECKNER’S GRAPHIC MEMOIRS OLGA MICHAEL

Introduction: The Cultural Inscription of Female “To-be-looked-at-ness” and Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoirs as Interventions What Laura Mulvey termed women’s “to-be-looked-at-ness,” and that women have been created and recreated for centuries in Western culture as passive erotic spectacles under the voyeuristic gaze of the male subject, have been more than established preconceptions in film, visual studies and art history. Mulvey argued in 1989 that “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed… while Man is the bearer of the look.”1John Berger too, explained in Ways of Seeing that Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.2

The need for women and girls to pay attention to their outside appearance and the maintenance of beauty ideals has been imposed upon them for centuries and has recently started to become strongly associated with sexual availability.3 Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs, A Child’s Life and Other Stories and The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures, negotiate the status of the girl protagonist as a spectacle and introduce

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subversive forms of adolescent and pre-adolescent female beauty that set her free from the restrictions of the male gaze. Even though Minnie’s outside appearance becomes a factor that causes her continuous sexualization by adult men and her premature familiarization with her status as a sexual spectacle, some of her visual depictions will be shown to demonstrate a feminist take on adolescent and pre-adolescent beauty that ignores the male spectator all together.4 The two graphic memoirs incorporate, as I will explain, a series of discourses that construct and promote the association of female beauty, and specifically that of the adolescent and pre-adolescent girl, with sexual awareness and availability. Such notions, as it will be pointed out, lead to girls’ self-perception as sexual beings whose aim is to provide voyeuristic pleasure to male spectators. Particularly, with regards to Minnie, Gloeckner’s autobiographical alter-ego, the two graphic memoirs describe how her sexual development takes place in a domestic environment where she is constantly interpellated as a sexual being from her early childhood to her adolescence. As her biological father is absent from the family structure, the gap that emerges is substituted by her mother’s various boyfriends, who sexualize and sexually abuse her. Her mother, although physically present, is mentally absent and unable to protect her daughter since she is often depicted being drunk or under the influence of drugs.5 In this problematic familial context, and guided by external influences as well, the girl protagonist comes to perceive herself primarily as a sexual object available for the pleasure of adult men. Her pre-adolescent and adolescent beauty and its association with sexual availability becomes therefore a factor that prepares the ground for to her quasi-incestuous interaction with two father-figures and her sexual suffering within the domestic sphere. Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs focus on Minnie’s interaction with the aforementioned father-figures, Pascal and Monroe. The former influences Minnie’s sexual development during her childhood.6 The latter has a oneyear sexual affair with her when she is fifteen years old. The suffering caused by the affair is recreated in A Child’s Life and described in more detail in The Diary, a book compiled by Minnie’s diary entries interrupted by visual illustrations, portraits and comic strips.7 This chapter will examine which discourses that associate adolescent and pre-adolescent female beauty with sexual availability are embedded in Gloeckner’s texts either implicitly or explicitly, and how they are undone to construct the protagonist beyond suffering and objectification. It will begin by discussing the tradition of comics, both mainstream and underground, and it will proceed to analyze literary and artistic

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representations of the Lolita figure, consumer materials, and the male adults in the protagonist’s family domain, who see and treat the girl as a sexual being. It will demonstrate how the girl protagonist grows up enmeshed in these influences and how adolescent female beauty is ultimately re-imagined and recreated in the context of the two graphic narratives to construct Minnie as a new version of the Lolita figure that is no longer colonized by the male gaze. Ultimately, this chapter will show how Minnie as a new version of Gabrielle d’ Estrées unsettles and mocks preconceived ideas about female beauty and ignores the male spectator, thus introducing a feminist take on the female spectacle.8

The Female Body in American Mainstream Superhero and Underground Comics: Claiming a Space in the Male-Dominated Tradition In his discussion on the male-dominated comics tradition, Andrew J. Deman observes that, For the greater part of the 20th century, comics turned a blind eye toward the progressive gains of the feminist movement, and instead created an intrinsically masculine space that treats women as sexual commodities whose primary purpose is to provide visual pleasure to the male reader.9

Remarking on the “highly sexual visual representations of women,” in superhero comics, and specifically, in relation to the Wonder Woman, Deman notes that she “privileges aesthetic over function” as her strapless bathing suit costume is far from sensible [and her] high-heeled, knee-high boots tap into a common sexual fetish and also create a more sexually appealing visual representation in the comics form by allowing the illustrator to draw [her] with an arched back and extended leg.10

The discomfort the particular outfit might cause is, as Deman points out, of secondary importance in relation to “the need to portray a visualized sex object.”11 In addition to her minimal, sexually provoking outfit and her high-heeled boots, the Wonder Woman is also beautiful. She has long legs and slender arms, ideal curves, big blue eyes, long eyelashes, black, arched eyebrows, long flowing hair and full lips painted with red lipstick. By looking at the Wonder Woman’s depictions therefore, one realizes that she is primarily introduced as a sexually desirable visual object.12

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However, in The Great Women Superheroes Trina Robbins provides a positive reading of the Wonder Woman and other women superheroes as inspiring for women readers.13 Nevertheless, the fact that the vast majority of them are constructed according to bodily dimensions and representations of femininity that provide voyeuristic pleasure to the male eye remains relatively unnoticed. As Deman notes, High-heeled, knee-high boots are extremely common in the costumes of superheroines since Wonder Woman, as are skin-tight leather cat-suits, skin-exposing outwear… and long flowing hair, worn down…. In all cases, the representation endorses the object status of the female character and the primacy of visual pleasure within the medium.14

Richard Reynolds too, explains that superhero comics were influenced by, and reproduced women’s representation in pinups and pornographic films of the 1940s.15 Building on Reynolds’ observation, Deman notes that “by loading the image with echoes of other images with clearly defined cultural practices, superhero comics further demonstrate their commitment to visual pleasure.”16 In post-World-War II America therefore, mainstream superhero comics became a cultural vehicle that constructed the woman as sexualized and objectified. The objectification and sexualization of women in the verbal/visual medium became more brutal in American underground counter-cultural productions during the 1960s and seventies. Underground comics emerged as a reaction against the “comics code” that came into being in the mid1950s, after Fredric Wertham’s polemic against mainstream comics, which he considered a negative influence for American youth.17 Amy Kyste Nyberg defines the code as “a set of regulatory guidelines primarily concerned with sex, violence, and language drawn up by publishers and enforced by the ‘code authority.’”18 The code imposed restrictions on the free expression of comics artists, against which underground creators like Robert Crumb reacted with their visual depictions of women’s sexual violation.19 Indeed, Naomi Wolf explains in The Beauty Myth, that underground comics like Robert Crumb’s Zap series depict a masculinist backlash against women and girls as they construct images of “child abuse and rape.”20 Thus, the female body in American comics, both mainstream and underground, emerged for and through male gaze and fantasy, introducing in this way the medium as one of the cultural ideological tools that reproduced and contributed to the formation of the beautiful woman and girl as sexualized spectacles. Despite the medium’s misogynist tradition, Gloeckner chooses to compose Minnie’s life stories through the comics form. The association of

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her work to the history of the medium is explicitly stated from the very beginning of her first graphic memoir. That the girl functions as a sexual spectacle under the gaze of the adult man, as Hillary Chute explains, is inscribed in the structure of A Child’s Life by Robert Crumb’s introduction to it.21 Gloeckner’s protagonist is initially introduced through Crumb’s perspective in his introduction to the book and the accompanying visual illustration of the girl protagonist, which demonstrate how she is seen and recreated by the male eye: The truth is [as Crumb explains,] that I’m just like all the other despicable males that appear in these comic stories. I, too, lusted after the young, budding artist-cartoonist from the moment I first met her, when she was 16 or 17 years old. I, too, desired to subject the beautiful, intense young girl to 22 all sorts of degrading and perverse sexual acts.

In A Child’s Life, Minnie’s youthful beauty seems to function precisely as a source of sexual suffering. This is demonstrated not only by Crumb’s introductory comments, but also by the other narratives included in the book, which describe various incidences of sexual abuse and rape. For example, “Minnie’s 3rd Love, or: Nightmare on Polk Street,” includes disturbing visual representations of Minnie using drugs, passing out, and being raped while unconscious. Similarly, it proceeds to show her being forced to unwanted abusive sexual acts throughout which she is crying and pleading for an adult man’s love.23 Hence, what is presented as Crumb’s sexual fantasy in the introduction becomes disturbingly real in the following narratives. Apart from Crumb’s verbal text that provides an insight into his sexual fantasies with regards to the adolescent female spectacle, his visual depiction of Gloeckner/Minnie (Figure 3-1), shows how the female body is filtered through and created by the male artist’s imagination. Elizabeth El Refaie points out that Robert Crumb’s ideal female sexual objects, as depicted in his comics, are “women with grotesquely large buttocks” and thighs, who engage in “various forms of what can only be described as more or less consensual sexual assault.”24 While the artist’s depiction of Gloeckner/Minnie is not obscene, by investing the girl’s body with large thighs and buttocks it demarcates how the medium of comics becomes a tool that modifies the female body in a way that brings it closer to the artist/spectator’s ideal sexual object. Hence, the initial pages of A Child’s Life force the reader to begin the task of interpreting the graphic memoir based on the presupposition that Minnie is eroticized by the adult male gaze.

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Fig. 3-1: “Phoebe,” p. 4, from A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by Frog Books/North Atlantic Books, copyright © 1998, 2000 by Phoebe Gloeckner. Reprinted by permission of publisher.

However, the visual images that follow and depict the sexually available and alluring adolescent female body which is raped and violated, are introduced in Gloeckner’s work from the perspective of the female victim/artist. Thus, they succeed in destabilizing the creation of male voyeuristic pleasure in the reader’s interaction with the graphic memoir, and mark a shift in the tradition of underground and mainstream comics with regards to the sexualisation of the female spectacle. Deman notes that

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Gloeckner’s “work challenges the cultural practice of sexual representation in comics by severely complicating any potential visual pleasure that her visual renderings might elicit within the reader” because it forces him/her to “experience the collateral damage that accompanies sexual objectification.”25 In A Child’s Life, female beauty and its association with sexual availability are presented in a way that brings forth the damage that is done to the sexualized girl, rather than the pleasure evoked in the male spectator, and which introduces the possibility for the medium of comics to function as a feminist counter-discourse against its male-dominated tradition. Simultaneously, the complication of patriarchal impositions of beauty ideals in Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs expands to other discourses as well with references to media other than comics, which introduce ideal adolescent beauty as sexual availability.

Beyond the Comics Tradition: How the Family, Literature and Consumerism Become Influential in the Protagonist’s Self-Perception as a Sexual Being under the Male Gaze In her discussion of Gloeckner’s autobiographical oeuvre, Peggy Orenstein has pointed out that “we talk a lot about the damage done to girls by unrealistic standards of beauty but not about the vulnerability that comes when [they] actually meet them.”26 Explaining how the girl protagonist associates her worth as a person with how sexually desirable she is, Gloeckner notes that “Minnie had been bombarded with adults who had no boundaries and were overtly sexual with children,” further noting that “you get used to that, and after a certain point you think of yourself and value yourself solely as a sexual being.”27 Indeed, Pascal, one of the men with whom Minnie’s mother had a relationship is shown to repeatedly sexualize the young protagonist as well as other girls. 28 In one incident, when he is with Minnie in a car, he describes a fourteen-year-old girl he sees in the street as follows: Look at the tall one! She can’t be more than 13 or 14! God! She could have just walked out of a David Hamilton photograph! Her breasts probably just sprouted yesterday… and she’s hardly used to them… Look at her long slender legs, her high forehead and classically waspy features.29

Pascal’s comments construct the adolescent girl as a sexual being and guide Minnie to start perceiving herself as such too. His paedophilic gaze becomes a strong influence in the domestic sphere that leads to the phenomenon described above by Gloeckner. Apart from Pascal, the panel depicted below (Fig. 3-2), demonstrates additional discourses that introduce

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the view that the beautiful girl is a sexual being in the service of adult male heterosexuality. It illustrates how Minnie becomes familiar with the sexualisation of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls on two different levels: Firstly, through canonical literary representations of the Lolita figure, and secondly, through consumer materials and particularly, dolls. Minnie is approximately at the age of eight years old when the incident takes place and she is shown sitting on the floor in her room reading Nabokov’s Lolita, the tale of the adult male narrator’s sexual fascination with young girls and his erotic attachment to his step-daughter.30 Nabokov’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, is an English literature professor who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, and marries her widowed mother Charlotte to be close to her. After his wife dies, he travels around America with Dolores, whom he calls Lolita, and they start a sexual relationship.31 In Nabokov’s text Lolita emerges as a figment of the narrator’s imagination that is embodied in different girls throughout his lifetime, as a prototype, to which some of the girls he encounters resemble.32 Humbert describes the nymphets or Lolitas as follows: Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac)…. The little deadly demon… stands unrecognized by [other children] and unconscious herself of her fantastic [sexual] power.33

What is mostly sexually alluring about the Lolita according to Humbert is the beauty of her youthful female body.34 The narrator also explains that “it was [Dolores] who seduced” him and she was already sexually active before sleeping with him at the age of twelve.35 In addition to Nabokov’s book, next to the protagonist, we see lying half-open on her bag, the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, who married his “barely pubescent” cousin Virginia Clemm, and in whose work pedophilia is one of the central aspects.36 Nabokov’s narrator too, refers to Poe’s relationship with his fourteen year-old cousin in an effort to normalize his erotic fascination with adolescent and pre-adolescent girls.37 With the incorporation of Poe and Nabokov’s works, and the literary construction of the adolescent and pre-adolescent girl as sexually available for adult men, the panel moves beyond the tradition of mainstream and underground comics, and the familial context, to the depiction of the sexualized, erotic girl in canonical literature. By reading these texts at the age of eight, Minnie is further instructed to treat herself as a sexual being.

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Fig. 3-2: “An Object Lesson in Bitter Fruit,” p. 47, from A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by Frog Books/North Atlantic Books, copyright © 1998, 2000 by Phoebe Gloeckner. Reprinted by permission of publisher.

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Apart from the reading material, Minnie’s transition from an innocent sexually unaware childhood to sexual awareness is demonstrated through the incorporation of dolls in the panel. On the right side, we observe a dismembered doll with a broken leg, detached from her body, and also pierced by an arc. The doll has a rope around her neck; one that functions to prevent her from falling on the ground, and which could also be interpreted as a means of suffocation. The brutal mutilation the doll seems to have suffered, could be seen as a symbolism of a rather violent end to Minnie’s sexually unaware girlhood. It is after all a doll with a girly figure, without the bodily features of Barbie that are believed by many girls to render the female body desirable. Next to the broken doll we see a cat excreting, hence suggesting a further devaluation of the childhood which is disassociated from sexual awareness. In contrast, next to Minnie we see another doll lying on the floor. This is, however, a naked Barbie-like doll, tall and skinny, with long black hair, and dark eyelashes, big firm breasts, long slim legs and slender arms, similar to the bodily features of the Wonder Woman as previously described, thus pointing to the contemporary beauty ideal in Western culture. By situating the particular doll closer to Minnie and without clothes on, Gloeckner’s depiction demonstrates the protagonist’s exploration of the sexual Barbie-like female body that transmits unrealistic beauty ideals to girls which do not fit their age. The oxymoronic depiction of sexual availability during childhood is also inscribed by the way Minnie is drawn. The depiction above (Fig. 3-2) shows her as a sexually alluring Lolita. Her eyebrows are slightly lifted while she is reading, her nose is small and elegant, her big eyes are half-closed, she has long black eyelashes and she is wearing a very short skirt. While being a child of eight years old, the influences embedded in the particular panel and the way Gloeckner draws her protagonist bring her forth as a child who simultaneously looks sexually appealing, hence embodying Nabokov’s Lolita. A Child’s Life therefore, introduces the excessive availability of discourses that construct the girl as a sexual being, demonstrating Naomi Wolf’s observation that images of sexualized female bodies are everywhere in contemporary culture.38 Commenting upon the current sexualisation of girls in the West, Gili Durham describes the Lolita phenomenon and notes that “the first myth of the Lolita effect is the translation of girls’ sexuality into visual metaphors of sex work.”39 The Lolita prototype is primarily a visual being. By stylizing their bodies in ways that visually present and therefore offer their sexual availability, girls enter, according to Durham, a process that resembles the politics of sex work, thus further reproducing their status as

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sexual objects/spectacles. Additionally, the critic suggests that girls’ attention on bodily appearance opposed to the cultivation of their mentality as has the same end-result.40 Moreover, she notes that twelveyear-old girls believe that the perfect girl should look like Barbie and points to the intensification of the particular belief through the emergence and distribution of push up bras for pre-teens and fake nails for toddlers among other consumer materials.41 Debra Merskin too, describes consumer goods targeted towards girls that include, for example, hair care products, leggings, even thong underwear for girls of ages between seven and fourteen, goods which cultivate the idea that they should appear as sexually desirable from childhood.42 After discussing a number of fashion advertisements, Merskin concludes that the message from advertisers and mass media to girls (as eventual women) is they should always be sexually available…and they will be gazed on as sexual objects.43

This phenomenon leads to girls’ obsessive preoccupation with outside appearance and their abstinence from aiming at the construction of a selfimage that would function for their own benefit and beyond their status as sexual objects. Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs demonstrate precisely an example of the aforementioned process. However, Minnie’s focus on being sexually desirable eventually becomes problematic and leads to sexual suffering, thus also showing the negative aspects that come along with the cultural sexualisation of the adolescent and the pre-adolescent girl. Concluding her discussion of Lolita representations in the media, Merksin points out that they lead to Soft-porn portrayals [that] encourage the sexual exploitation of girls [,to] sexual portrayals [that] contribute to [their] fetishization … [and to] passive eroticized images [that] foster an overall climate that does not value girls’ and women’s voices or contributions in society.44

These outcomes are shown in Gloeckner’s first graphic memoir, which demonstrates Minnie’s premature familiarization with her status as a sexual spectacle that eventually leads to a self-destructive exploration of her own sexuality.

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Breaking the Shackles: Parodic, Grotesque and Masqueraded Beauties In a culture that promotes the position of women and girls as first and foremost visual spectacles under the male gaze in such a suffocating way, would there be a potential that allows feminist artists to undo the given situation? Discussing the role of culture in the construction and preservation of gender identities and stereotypes, Janet Wolff has pointed out that: Art, literature, and film do not simply represent given gender identities, or reproduce already existing ideologies of femininity. Rather they participate in the very construction of those identities. Second (and consequently), culture is a crucial arena for the contestation of social arrangements of gender. Cultural politics, then… is a vital enterprise, located at the heart of the complex order which (re)produces sexual divisions in society.45

In her discussion of women’s position in Western patriarchal culture, Wolff introduces the term “feminine sentences” as “an exploration of the constraints and restrictions experienced by women” therein.46 The critic further proceeds to note that “feminine sentences are those formulations and expressions, in a variety of cultural forms and media, of women’s own voice,” their intervention in culture and the articulation of their own experience.47 This is precisely the context in which Gloeckner’s work can be situated. It is composed in the medium of comics that is strongly associated with the construction of the woman as a sexual object and it incorporates different discourses that impose particular beauty ideals which restrict the girl protagonist into her role as a sexual spectacle. The step-father’s paedophilic comments, Poe and Nabokov’s samples of high literature with their alluring Lolitas as well as the Barbie doll, are influences that demonstrate how prevalent the image of the sexualized underage girl is in Western culture and how easily it can lead girls to perceive themselves as mere erotic spectacles. Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs however, do not remain restricted in incorporating these influences. On the contrary, they proceed to reevaluate them and to ultimately undo them as the following discussion will show, by introducing a new version of adolescent female beauty that is set free from the restrictions of the male gaze. Gloeckner and Minnie’s portraits (Fig. 3-3 and Fig. 3-4) are two instances that offer a feminist take on adolescent female beauty through the use of parody, the grotesque and the carnivalesque mask.

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Both illustrations show the protagonist nude. Such depictions entail a potential risk in the effort to make a feminist statement with regards to the erotic female body. Wolff explains that the representation of the nude female body is problematic for feminism because of “its pre-existing meanings, as sex object, as object of the male gaze,” which can “reappropriate the body, despite the intentions of the woman herself.”48 However, Gloeckner’s illustrations manage to unsettle possible expectations on behalf of readers/spectators about nude female beauty and refuse to allow the objectification of the girl’s body due to the disturbing elements of illness in the first case and masquerade in the second, which are associated with the grotesque and the carnivalesque, respectively. The subversiveness of grotesque bodies is identified in Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the Medieval carnival as a process through which hierarchies and order are destabilized. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque body can be a diseased body, one whose boundaries are open to the world, its genitals exposed and its characteristics exaggerated and caricatured to mock hierarchies and perform a critique against ideal, classical bodily representations by showing what is supposed to be concealed.49 Philip Thomson too, observes that due to its “fundamental element of disharmony” the grotesque provokes “delight in novelty and amusement at a divergence from the normal [that] turns to fear (and anger) when... norms are seriously threatened or attacked.”50 The grotesque thus, becomes [an] aggressive weapon, [whose] shock effect… may … be used to bewilder and disorient, to jolt [the reader] out of accustomed ways of perceiving the world and confront him with a radically different, disturbing perspective.51

Mary Russo and Janet Wolff introduce the grotesque and the carnivalesque as means through which subversive female embodiments can take place, ones that destabilize preconceived ways of seeing and cultural constructions of the sexually desirable and the beautiful female body. Wolff notes the repression of aspects of bodily existence like sexuality, illness and birth in classical bodily representations and points out that if the repressed aspects of the body explode “into visibility,” a possibility for “political revolution and moral transgression” is created. 52 She further suggests that, Any body politics… must speak about the body, stressing its materiality and its social and discursive construction, at the same time as disrupting existing regimes of representation.53

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The critic assigns this task primarily to feminist artists and cultural workers, who Can engage in the challenging and exhilarating task of simultaneously affirming those identities, questioning their origins and ideological functions, and working towards a non-patriarchal expression of gender and the body.54

Mary Russo too, explains how the exposure of non-ideal naked female bodies is considered threatening and dangerous.55 She observes that when openly exposing old and large female bodies, women are believed to have done “something wrong.”56 Moreover, she notes that the experience of being a woman is different than the one represented in Western maledominated art and literature.57 She discusses the significance of the grotesque and the carnivalesque in the creation of female experience in art and notes that the “masks and voices of carnival resist, exaggerate and destabilize the distinctions and boundaries that mark and maintain high culture and organized society.”58 In addition, she notes that the carnival is Set apart from the merely oppositional and the reactive; carnival and carnivalesque suggest a redeployment or a counterproduction of culture, knowledge, and pleasure. In its multivalent oppositional play, carnival refuses to surrender the critical and cultural tools of the dominant class, and in this sense, carnival can be seen above all as a site of insurgency, and not merely withdrawal.59

If feminist art uses the grotesque and the canrivalesque as tools that denaturalize the position of the female spectacle within patriarchal discourses, then Gloeckner’s illustrations (Fig. 3-3 and Fig. 3-4) demonstrate two instances where Lolita’s adolescent beauty is revised to construct a female experience that is absent from canonical male art and literature, as well as from the male-dominated comics world. The first self-portrait (Fig. 3-3) follows Robert Crumb’s introduction in a Child’s Life and depicts young Phoebe suffering from pemphigus vulgraris, an autoimmune illness that affects the surface of the skin and creates blisters and wounds making it appear as decomposing, thus opening its boundaries to the external world and introducing a grotesque version of the protagonist’s beauty. Gloeckner, a professional medical illustrator, brings forth the diseased body to metaphorically represent the experience of sexual abuse and to pathologize the autobiographical avatar’s suffering. In her reading of the particular portrait, Hillary Chute argues that the depiction of Phoebe as suffering from pemphigus vulgaris reflects the girl’s shattered subjectivity

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Fig. 3-3: From A Child’s Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by Frog Books/North Atlantic Books, copyright © 1998, 2000 by Phoebe Gloeckner. Reprinted by permission of publisher.

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and her shame for her non-normative experiences.60 What is also noteworthy about this illustration however, is that by turning her head away while naked, Phoebe reproduces the convention that the female spectacle should turn her head away from the spectator due to her chastity and inferiority.61 Hence, the female body in the particular self-portrait is introduced in a position that would have the potential to establish the authority of the male artist/eye over it, while also depicting an adolescent beauty that could conform to Western ideals without the sickness that deforms the skin. Consequently, it could also evoke the spectator’s voyeuristic pleasure due to its sexual seductiveness. Indeed, as the narrator informs us in her forward to A Child’s Life, she never had pemphigus vulgaris.62 In contrast, what this illustration performs by inscribing the protagonist’s sexual suffering as an illness of the skin is a feminist take on the association of adolescent and pre-adolescent female beauty with sexual availability. As explained, the discourses evoked in Gloeckner’s first graphic memoir introduce sexual availability as inextricably linked to contemporary notions of female beauty and the girl’s status as a spectacle. Phoebe’s portrait with pemphigus vulgaris visually embodies the pain that comes along with the protagonist’s search for validation through sexual contact by metaphorically marking it on the surface of her body as a sickness. The sexualisation of the adolescent and pre-adolescent girl is introduced in this example from a different perspective. Readers/spectators no longer have access only to the male narrator/artist/author’s view. The female spectacle here speaks for herself. Emerging from the position attributed to the female body within Western patriarchal high artistic circles, Phoebe’s self-portrait undoes beauty ideals established therein. Her closed eyes are possibly demarcating pain and suffering. Additionally, her breasts are covered by her arm and the close-up depiction of her skin, while from her waist-down, the drawing itself starts decomposing, thus refusing to show the most obscene and erotic parts of her naked body. Lastly, her illness, which deforms her skin, evokes Bakhtin’s definition of the grotesque and introduces a disturbing spectacle. Phoebe’s pain, inscribed on her body, functions as a way to resist her objectification in a system where the spectator is always-already male and sexualizes the girl, and where the girl is stormed by images which reproduce the view that she should appear as a sexually alluring being.

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Revising the Tradition and Laughing at Spectators’ Expectations: Minnie as Gabrielle d’ Estrées Apart from Phoebe’s painful depiction with pemphigus vulgaris in A Child’s Life, Minnie’s representation in The Diary (Fig. 3-4) introduces another aspect of the carnivalesque and the grotesque body, one that evokes laughter as it also introduces a masqueraded female beauty. Minnie’s portrait is a parodic revision of the Renaissance painting Gabrielle d 'Estrées and her Sister, the Duchess of Villars, created by an anonymous artist from the school of Fontainebleau circa 1594 and currently exhibited in the Louvre museum in Paris.63 The painting shows two sisters, Gabrielle on the right side and the duchess of Villars on the left, in an intimate scene taking place in their bath. The two women are depicted from their waists-up; they are both nude and their bodies face spectators in the same way that Minnie’s body does in Gloeckner’s revised version of the artwork. Simultaneously, they also boldly return their gaze and the duchess encircles and pinches Gabrielle’s nipple. The painting therefore reproduces the status of women as sexual spectacles via their nudity, their gaze that aims at male spectators and the homoerotic act depicted mise-en-scène. Gabrielle’s body is reconfigured in Minnie’s visual embodiment to introduce her beyond suffering and victimization, to a position of survival that is no longer harmed by the male gaze. The protagonist’s parodic portrayal as a new version of Gabrielle d’ Estrées will be shown to demonstrate the peak of her rejection of the male spectator, while also creating links to the tradition of the adolescent female spectacle that stretches back to the Renaissance. Like the grotesque and the carnivalesque, parody too has the potential to revise cultural inscriptions of gender representations and thus it can be used towards feminist ends. Simon Dentith notes that it Is one of the principal forms in which a belated culture manages its relationship to its cultural predecessors…. [A] more polemical relation to the cultural past often expresses itself in the practice of ‘writing back’: the canonic texts of the past are scrutinized, challenged, and parodied in the name of the subject positions (of class, race or gender) which they are seen to exclude.64

Judith Butler too, points to the subversive potential of parodic bodily performances as means that deconstruct heteronormative gender inscriptions. As she explains, Parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Although the gender

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meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization.65

Fig. 3-4: From The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures by Phoebe Gloeckner, published by Frog Books/North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2002 by Phoebe Gloeckner. Reprinted by permission of publisher.

What Butler describes as a denaturalization of essentialist gender identities and stereotypes through parodic proliferations, can be put in productive use in feminist art, so as to critically engage with maledominated traditions and to undo the pre-given roles of the female gender therein. Gloeckner’s reconfiguration of the Renaissance painting introduces a present feminist polemical take on the artwork as a cultural predecessor with regards to the female spectacle. While situating her work in the same lineage therefore, Gloeckner’s artistic vision simultaneously unsettles any associations of the female spectacle with the male gaze, thus denaturalizing the role of the erotic female body as inscribed in Western art. In addition, by evoking Gabrielle as a historical figure, Minnie’s depiction also alludes to a similar narrative as the one unfolded in The

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Diary and in Nabokov’s tale, which concerns the sexualisation of the young woman by a considerably older man and a patriarch. Like Minnie and Dolores, Gabrielle d’ Estrées can be characterized as another Lolita figure since she was also sexually involved with a man who can be considered a father-figure, precisely because Henri IV was the king of France during their affair.66 Gabrielle was born in 1573 and moved to Henri’s court when she was fifteen years old.67 Rose- Marie and Rainer Hagen describe Gabrielle’s beauty as reaching the Renaissance ideal and they point out that she had various affairs from the time she first arrived at the court.68 Her sexual affair with the king caused a crisis in his relationship both with the church and with the populace. However, being seduced by her beauty, the French monarch decided to divorce his wife to marry Gabrielle, as Katherine Crawford explains.69 The historical events around the royal affair demonstrate therefore the repetition of the motif of the young woman’s sexualisation by and sexual involvement with an older man and the idea that young female beauty is associated with sexual availability. Nevertheless, it is also useful to explain how the aforementioned relations are implicated in the painting itself and how the female body is treated therein so as to identify the changes that take place in Gloeckner’s new version. The painting contains, as Crawford notes, a “message... intended for the king, as a viewer of the image, if not the owner of it.”70 Both Gabrielle and her sister are nude to please the French monarch as the artwork was commissioned to be exhibited within the court. Rebecca Zorach observes that despite its homoerotic dimension, it aims at satisfying male voyeuristic pleasure.71 Henri is not present in the image but the ring that Gabrielle holds with her right hand implicates him as it was a present he offered her to seal their engagement.72 The painting therefore reproduces the sexual dynamics that existed within Gabrielle and Henri’s relationship and the girl is visually embodied to sexually please the patriarch. In Gloeckner’s version Minnie is alone, possibly in her bathroom, standing naked in front of a mirror, with a towel around her head and Noxzema cream on her face, pinching her own nipple and looking at herself. The ring held by d' Estrées, indicating her potential marriage with King Henri, decorates Minnie’s neck, excluding the implications for a union with a male figure of authority. Attention and desire focus on the self as demonstrated by her auto-erotic touch on her breast. By touching her nipple, Minnie explores the sensuality of her body and appreciates its beauty for her own sexual pleasure. Her gaze in the mirror and the praising of her masqueraded reflection ignores the male spectator and demonstrates

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a narcissism that refuses to provide voyeuristic pleasure. The mirroring that takes place invites readers either to identify with her in narcissistically appreciating the sensuality of her body while masqueraded or to reject it. However, failing to appreciate it in the way that she does, is to remain restricted within patriarchal discourses that refuse to accept anything but the male-dominated versions of ideal female beauty. Minnie’s narcissism can be understood as a feminist tool, if we see it through Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective, which demonstrates how a girl’s autoerotic engagement with her body deconstructs the male spectator’s power over her. According to Freud, narcissism is The attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated – who looks at it..., strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities.73

Narcissism therefore, concerns the transference of sexual desire from an external object to the self and it is a condition mostly affecting women. Freud explains that women demonstrate higher levels of narcissism, especially during adolescence and if “they grow up with good looks,” thus becoming charming and fascinating for men, while also causing “the lover’s dissatisfaction.”74 For Freud, a woman who looks at herself erotically automatically abandons the gendered role of the passive female spectacle. In her act of auto-eroticism she is invested with phallic sexual agency, thus becoming desirable but also threatening for men. In Minnie’s representation (Fig. 3-4), phallic agency is symbolized by the towel on her head, a parodic version of a crown and simultaneously, a phallic symbol. If she owns the phallus, as metaphorically embodied through the towel, and turns her desire for an external love-object to herself, then the particular illustration demonstrates her move beyond the need for sexual affirmation by adult men, and specifically from her abusive step-father Monroe, to self-awareness and self-love. Thus, while influenced and constructed through various discourses that promote the notion of the girl and the woman as sexual spectacles, Minnie’s narcissism embraces the particular position, albeit for her own voyeuristic pleasure and introduces her beyond sexual suffering. Apart from her gaze in the mirror, another element that excludes her potential sexualisation through the male eye is her masqueraded beauty. If the grotesque has the power to offer a new shocking possibility with regards to how we perceive the world, as Bakhtin and Thomson have suggested, and if this possibility can be associated with subversive feminist acts of bodily representations, then Gloeckner’s new version of

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the Gabrielle d’ Estrées painting demonstrates it. Being drawn with Noxzema cream on her face, Minnie seems to be wearing a mask, associated with the carnival, which causes laughter as well as the disturbance of societal hierarchies. 75 In Medieval carnival, laughter is caused through clownish masquerades that mock hierarchical figures like the king.76 According to Bakhtin, the mask Is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity…, [it] is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries [and] to mockery.77

Additionally, Timothy Hyman points out that the mask has the potential to conceal and to free “the individual from class and even from gender.” 78 Being invested with the potential to be subversive therefore, Minnie’s masks, the Noxzema cream and the towel on her head, show precisely the rejection of the conventional standards with regards to female beauty by introducing a new Gabrielle d’ Estrées and to a different extent, a new Lolita figure. In addition, by being invested with phallic power, Minnie’s embodiment also deconstructs the passivity ascribed to the female spectacle in traditional Freudian psychoanalysis which perceives the woman and the girl as always already passive and castrated due to their lack of the phallus. Minnie here is active; she has the phallus and returns the gaze, both at herself and at the reader/spectator.

Conclusion: Female Beauty as Feminist Spectacle From the Barbie doll to the Wonder Woman and to Crumb’s women, from the Renaissance and Gabrielle d’ Estrées to Edgar Allan Poe’s paedophilia and to Nabokov’s mid-twentieth-century Lolita, the female spectacle has been shaped by male gaze, sexuality and desire. The Lolita figure so far existed and was created by and through male fascination with adolescent and pre-adolescent beauty. In Gloeckner’s new version the spectacle is set free. The sexualisation of the underage female body as well as sexual violence against female beauty are recreated from the perspective of the girl, thus pointing to the suffering that comes along with women and girls’ objectification. In addition, by showing what happens in the process of beautifying the self, and not the final result that appears in advertisements, paintings and literary constructions of the adolescent female body, Minnie’s representation as Gabrielle d’ Estrées intervenes in Lolita’s history to cause a laughter that destabilizes ideals of adolescent beauty and construct the protagonist as a survivor beyond her status as an abused, suffering and passive victim.

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Laurence Goldstein observes that “the female body has been colonized in the nudes of high art and the sex-symbols of popular culture,” and this has introduced the effort to “locate and describe alternative images” as one of the most significant tasks of the feminist movement.79 In addition, she explains that the creation of alternative images can take place through “contemporary artists’ use of humour or anger to signify resistance to voyeurism, turning the erotic into a challenging joke.”80 While preserving the erotic in Minnie’s representation as Gabrielle d’ Estrées, Gloeckner’s artistic vision succeeds in freeing the adolescent female body from the constraints of the male gaze, sexuality and desire. The two parodic depictions of Minnie show how Lolita’s beauty is revised and recreated towards feminist ends and how it emerges as a new discourse that excludes the male eye/I while auto-erotically involving the female self. In her discussion on women’s feminist art in the 1970s, Lisa Tickner asks “what parallels or alternatives to the virgins… whores… and Lolitas with which we are familiar” would exist, and which the feminine corresponding processes would be “to the masculine preoccupation with the pubescent girl that runs from Lewis Carroll to Balthus, Bellmer and Ovenden,” if women were the makers of art.81 Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs provide answers to Tickner’s questions and demonstrate how feminist art allows space for subversive female beauty to be created. While incorporating various discourses that create and re-create the (adolescent) female body as a sexually available being and the problems that come with girls’ early preoccupation with their status as sexual beings, Minnie’s grotesque parodic embodiments allow the creation of a feminist counterdiscourse on female beauty. As Tickner explains, We cannot pull out of thin air a new and utopian art – or a new and utopian sexuality: both must be arrived at through struggle with the situation in which we find ourselves. Art does not just make ideology explicit but can be used, at a particular historical juncture, to rework it.82

Beyond narrating Minnie’s sexual development and the sexual abuse she has suffered, through her childhood and adolescence, Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs incorporate and question cultural constructions of adolescent female beauty as sexual availability. While preserving Minnie’s eroticism, her last depiction (Fig. 3-4) rejects the male spectator and gives voice to the mute seductive girl. Most importantly, the girl’s eroticism is preserved in these illustrations for the expression of a distinctly female experience and for the pleasure of female readers/spectators, who through their interaction with the narrative, are introduced to a new potential of the

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female body/spectacle. While Minnie’s diary entries introduce her love for and subordination to the father figure who is also her abuser and the suffering that comes along with it, her carnivalesque and grotesque visual embodiments transport her both beyond abuse and beyond her conventional status in Western art.83 This is precisely where the significance of Gloeckner’s revision of elements from Western culture and of female beauty lies: As it makes a feminist statement about the objectified status of the girl and the woman, it also constructs the victim of sexual abuse as a powerful self-sufficient survivor. Gloeckner’s texts function on three levels in accordance with Tickner’s argument in relation to feminist art: Firstly, being composed in a medium strongly associated with the sexualisation and objectification of the female body and narrating the perspective of the abused female girl, they introduce comics as a tool that allows the expression of a purely female experience. Secondly, they construct an archive of artistic and literary representations of the adolescent erotic girl, which they proceed to modify towards feminist ends. Thirdly, they incorporate elements that point to the consumerist construction of girly beauty as sexual availability. While drawing all these traditions and influences together however, Gloeckner’s texts remarkably succeed in lifting the protagonist beyond the restrictions they impose. Moving from the painful experience of sexual abuse to selfawareness and self-love, Minnie as a new version of Gabrielle d’ Estrées mocks potential expectations on behalf of the spectators, while simultaneously pulling them further into the history of the female spectacle in art, which is ultimately revised towards feminist ends.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, London: M.I.T. Press, 1968. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London, New York: Routledge, 1990, 2008. Chute, L Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Coviello, Peter. “Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity and the Logic of Slavery.” English Literary History 70, no. 3 (2003): 875-901. Crawford, B. Katherine. “Politics of Promiscuity: Masculinity and Heroic Representation at the Court of Henry IV.” French Historical Studies 26, no. 2, (Spring 2003): 225-252.

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Crumb, Robert. “Introduction” In A Child’s Life and Other Stories, by Phoebe Gloeckner, 5. Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 1998, 2000. —. The Complete Crumb, Vol. 1-17, edited by Robert Boyd. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2009. Deman, J. Andrew. “The Intervening ‘I’: Phoebe Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoir and the Destruction of Visual Pleasure.” In Visual Memoirs After the 1970s: Studies on Gender, Sexuality, and Visibility in the Post-Civil War Rights Age, edited by Mihaela Precup, 155-166. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Editura Universită‫܊‬ii din Bucure‫܈‬ti, 2010. Dentith, Simon. Parody, The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2000. Durham, M. Gili. The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Do About It. London: Duckworth Overlook, 2009. Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. London, Routledge, 1992. El Refaie, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Estren, J. Mark. A History of Underground Comics. Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing, 1993. Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914).” In Freud’s ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’ edited by Joseph Sandler, Peter Fonagy and Ethel Spector Person, 1-32. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Gloeckner, Phoebe. A Child’s Life and Other Stories. Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2000. —. The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures. Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2002. Goldstein, Laurence, ed. In The Female Body: Figures, Styles, Speculations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Greenberg Robert and George Perez. Wonder Woman: Amazon, Hero, Icon. New York: Universe Publishing, 2010. Hagen, Rose Marie and Rainer Hagen. What Great Paintings Say. Vol.2, translated by Karen Williams and Michael Husle. Köln, London: Taschen, 2003. Henley, M. Nancy. Body Politics: Power, Sex and Nonverbal Communication. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall, 1977. Hoesterey, Ingeborg. Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Hyman, Timothy. Carnivalesque. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2000. Love, Ronald. Blood and Religion: The Conscience of Henri IV, 15531593. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2001.

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Merskin, Debra. “Reviving Lolita? A Media Literacy Examination of Sexual Portrayals of Girls in Fashion Advertising.” American Behavioural Scientist 48, no.1 (2004): 119-129. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. London: Corgi, 1955, 1978. Nyberg Kyste, Amy. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Orenstein, Peggy. “A Graphic Life.” The New York Times, August, 5th, 2001. Acessed September 15, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/magazine/a-graphiclife.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. Robbins, Trina. The Great Women Superheroes, edited by Christopher N.C. Couch. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1996. Russo, Mary. “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Theory, edited by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, 318-336. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Tickner, Lisa. “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists since 1970.” In Looking on: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts, edited by Rosemary Betterton, 235-253. London, New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Thomson, Philip. The Grotesque. London: Methuen & Co, 1972. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. London: Vintage, 1990. Wolff, Janet. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Wollstonecraft, Mary. “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” In Feminist Papers. Edited by Alice Rossi, 40-87. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. Zorach, Rebecca. “Desiring Things.” Art History 24, no.2 (April 2001): 195-212.

Notes 1

Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 1920. 2 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972), 47.

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As early as in the eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft has noted that “taught from their infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” See, Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir ed. Alice Rossi (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 55-57. For contemporary impositions of beauty ideals see Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (London: Vintage, 1990), 9-20 and Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 127. Here, Wolff explains that “women learn as girls to monitor their appearance and to conform to what is presented in the culture as some ideal of femininity.” In relation to the association of girly beauty with sexual availability see Gili M. Durham, The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Do About It (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2009) and Debra Merskin, “Reviving Lolita? A Media Literacy Examination of Sexual Portrayals of Girls in Fashion Advertising, American Behavioural Scientist 48, no.1 (2004): 119-129. 4 See, Phoebe Gloeckner, A Child’s Life and Other Stories (Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2000), Phoebe Gloeckner, The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2002). 5 See for example Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 22-26. 6 For instance, in “Hommage à Duchamp” Pascal is depicted at a scene of masturbation while he is looking at Minnie and her sister. Minnie is eight years old during the particular incident and her sister is younger. The particular scene demonstrates how the two girls are implicated in the father-figure’s sexual pleasure via his gaze onto them. Simultaneously, it shows how the adult father-figure is introduced for the protagonist and her sister as a sexual being, thus investing family relations with overt and explicit overtones. See Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 27-32. 7 For more examples of the protagonist’s sexualisation by the father figures see Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 53, 67, 73 and Gloeckner, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 4-6. 8 Minnie and Gabrielle d’ Estrées form a lineage of adolescent girls, imagined and created in Western visual arts from the Renaissance to contemporary women artists’ works. The Renaissance painting Gabrielle d'Estrees and her Sister, the Duchess of Villars depicts a girl whose affair with King Henri caused scandals in the French court and who remained known in history for adhering to the beauty ideals of her time and for seducing the French patriarch. Minnie’s beauty and sexual affair with the adult man and father-figure familiarize readers with a feminist, de-romanticized version of the same masterplot by introducing the protagonist’s perspective and the woman artist’s take on the events. The girl and her beauty in this case are no longer created to serve the voyeuristic pleasure of the adult man. 9 Andrew J. Deman, “The Intervening ‘I’: Phoebe Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoir and the Destruction of Visual Pleasure,” in Visual Memoirs After the 1970s: Studies on Gender, Sexuality, and Visibility in the Post-Civil War Rights Age, ed. Mihaela Precup (Bucure‫܈‬ti: Editura Universită‫܊‬ii din Bucure‫܈‬ti, 2010), 155.

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Ibid., 156. Ibid. 12 For a history of the Wonder Woman and her various visual representations see, Robert Greenberg and George Perez, Wonder Woman: Amazon, Hero, Icon (New York: Universe Publishing, 2010). 13 See Trina Robbins, The Great Women Superheroes, ed. N. C. Christopher Couch (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1996). 14 Deman, “The Intervening ‘I’: Phoebe Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoir and the Destruction of Visual Pleasure,” 156-157. 15 Richard Reynolds, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 34. 16 Deman, “The Intervening ‘I’: Phoebe Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoir and the Destruction of Visual Pleasure,” 157. 17 Mark J. Estren, A History of Underground Comics (Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing, 1993), 20. 18 Amy Kyste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), vii. 19 See for example Robert Crumb, The Complete Crumb, Vol. 1-17, ed. Robert Boyd (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2009). 20 Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 137. 21 Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 230. 22 Robert Crumb, “Introduction,” in A Child’s Life and Other Stories, by Phoebe Gloeckner (Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2000), 5. 23 See Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 70-81. 24 Elizabeth el Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 80. 25 Deman, “The Intervening ‘I’ in Phoebe Gloeckner’s Comics Memoir and the Destruction of Visual Pleasure,” 159. 26 Peggy Orenstein, “A Graphic Life,” The New York Times, August, 5th, 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/magazine/a-graphiclife.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm 27 Phoebe Gloeckner, “A Graphic Life,” The New York Times, by Peggy Orenstein. 28 See Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 51-53. 29 Ibid., 35. 30 Regarding Minnie’s age see Phoebe Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 10. About the Lolita figure see Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Corgi, 1955, 1978). 31 Ibid., 74-103. 32 Ibid., 16, 24, 44. Here Nabokov’s narrator describes different Lolitas, with whom he was sexually associated. 33 Ibid., 18, 19. 34 Ibid., 74. 35 Ibid., 139, 143. 36 See Peter Coviello, “Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity and the Logic of Slavery,” English Literary History 70, no. 3 (2003): 895-896. 37 Nabokov, Lolita, 146. 11

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Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 135. Durham, The Lolita Effect, 85. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 95. 42 Merskin, “Reviving Lolita? A Media Literacy Examination of Sexual Portrayals of Girls in Fashion Advertising,” 119. 43 Ibid., 120. 44 Ibid., 119, 126. 45 Wolff, Feminine Sentences, 1. 46 Ibid.,10. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 121. 49 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, London: M.I.T. Press, 1968), 303-367. 50 Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen & Co, 1972), 21, 24. 51 Ibid., 58. 52 Wolff, Feminine Sentences, 125. 53 Ibid., 138. 54 Ibid. 55 Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Theory, eds. Katie Conboy et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 318. 56 Ibid., 319. 57 Ibid., 320. 58 Ibid., 325. 59 Ibid. 60 Chute, Graphic Women, 62. 61 In relation to women’s aversion of the gaze in contrast to male spectacles, see Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 194. See also Nancy M. Henley, Body Politics: Power, Sex and Nonverbal Communication (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall, 1977), 163. 62 Gloeckner, A Child’s Life, 7. 63 Anonymous, School of Fontainebleau, Gabrielle d 'Estrées and her Sister, the Duchess of Villars, c.1594. Oil on wood panel. Paris: Louvre. For photographic reproductions of the painting view the online Louvre museum collection at http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/gabrielle-destrees-and-one-her-sisters 64 Simon Dentith, Parody, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2000), 29. For a definition of parody and its subversive potential in visual and literary arts see also, Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 13-14. Hoesterey defines parody as “a work of literature or another art that imitates an existent piece which is wellknown to its readers, viewers, or listeners with satirical, critical, or polemical intention,” while noting that “characteristic features of the work are retained but are imitated with contrastive intention.” 65 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, New York: Routledge, 1990, 2008), 188. 39

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With regards to King Henri’s age see Ronald Love, Blood and Religion: The Conscience of Henri IV, 1553-1593 (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2001), 18. 67 Rose Marie Hagen and Rainer Hagen, What Great Paintings Say, Vol.2, trans. Karen Williams and Michael Husle (Köln, London: Taschen, 2003), 204. 68 Ibid. 69 See Katherine B. Crawford, “Politics of Promiscuity: Masculinity and Heroic Representation at the Court of Henry IV,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 2, (Spring 2003): 225-252. 70 Ibid., 234. 71 Rebecca Zorach, “Desiring Things,” Art History 24, no.2 (April 2001): 199. 72 Hagen and Hagen, What Great Paintings Say, 206. 73 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914),” in Freud’s ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’ eds. Joseph Sandler et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 3. 74 Ibid., 18, 19. 75 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 11. 76 Ibid., 200. 77 Ibid., 40. 78 Timothy Hyman, Carnivalesque (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2000), 16. In his reference to contemporary uses of the grotesque, Hyman refers to Robert Crumb’s comics, with their exaggerated depictions of genitals and obsessive engagement with sexual intercourse, thus introducing Crumb’s art as a contemporary example in the history of the grotesque and the carnival. I would also add Gloeckner’s grotesque depictions of genitals and bodies, which beyond the representation of the protagonist’s sexuality also intervene in the history of Western art and literature to perform a feminist revision of the female spectacle and the Lolita figure. 79 Laurence Goldstein ed., The Female Body: Figures, Styles, Speculations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), x. 80 Ibid. 81 Lisa Tickner, “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since 1970,” in Looking on: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts, ed. Rosemary Betterton (London, New York: Pandora Press, 1987), 238 82 Ibid., 248-49. 83 See for example Minnie’s diary entry with an account of her love for Monroe and her vulnerability in Gloeckner, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 78-80.

CHAPTER FOUR ORLAN’S GRUESOME THEATRE: RELIGION, TECHNOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF SELF-MUTILATION AND VIOLENCE AS GESTUS PANAYIOTA CHRYSOCHOU

“I make images which almost make us blind. My work stands between the folly of seeing and the impossibility of seeing.” “Like Medusa, Orlan knows that certain images compel most people to close their eyes, the eyes becoming ‘blackholes into which the image is absorbed willingly or by force. These images plunge in and strike directly where it hurts…’” —Orlan quoted in Knafo, “Castration and Medusa,” 1451

As one watches Orlan’s Carnal Art documentary (2001), in which Orlan playfully recites excerpts from literary and psychoanalytic texts in front of a camera while a group of certified surgeons jab her with needles in order to perform “reconstructive” cosmetic surgery on her face by slashing across her skin, “slic[ing] open her lips, and, most gruesomely of all, sever[ing] her ear from the rest of her face with [a] scalpel,” one is likely to experience an unsettling feeling of malaise, at the very least, or a sense of physical and/or emotional shock.2 For the French multimedia performance artist, who repeatedly splays and parades herself on the operation table – what (in a gruesome pun) she refers to as an “operating theatre” – this drastic refashioning or cut under the surgeon’s knife allows her to come closer to a coincidence or consonance of body and language, outer perception and inner essence or identity. The surgeries are thus (en)acted in order to achieve a greater unity between possession (the “what I have”) and being (“what I am”), “in order to become fully being, in order to become Being ‘such as it is.’”3 To quote Orlan from her Carnal Art documentary directed by Stéphan Oriach,

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skin itself “is superfluous since possession and being do not coincide […] I never have the skin of what I really am.”4 In order to suture the inherent gap or dichotomy between actual reality and lived, perceptual experience, being and having (or feeling and having), Orlan repeatedly tears or opens out her own body, placing it on public display for the other or spectator and subsequently imploding any notion of an aesthetically beautiful or natural body. The body is or becomes fictional and socially constructed. It is mere skin, and skin can be restructured and reshaped in accordance with our own will: “In the future, bodies will become increasingly insignificant – nothing more than a ‘costume,’ a ‘vehicle,’ something to be changed in our search ‘to become who we are.’”5 In this sense, viewing the body as a physical vehicle for living precludes viewing it as a sacred and religious temple invested with the Holy Spirit. Rather than viewing the body as self-contained and impermeable, this way of viewing the body opens out its discursive potential and reclaims it from the hermetic sealing-off of discursiveness which the religious model of the body implies. It also resituates agency onto the individual who “inhabits” his or her own body, and who can thus fashion and refashion it at will by divesting it of its transcendental status – the body as transcendental sign of the Name-of-the-Father (a concept developed by Jacques Lacan to describe and designate the role of the father in the symbolic order, that is, the cultural world) – and rooting it concretely in the material and linguistic realms of representation. At the same time, Orlan’s refashioning of her own body plays on, and even cuts across, stereotypical and discursive notions of female beauty in order to undermine them in the search for concrete and determinate identity. Since beauty is inscribed and manifested upon the female body, imploding this body as a natural entity or category necessarily entails, for Orlan, the implosion and undermining of stereotypical notions of feminine beauty. From a discursive and aesthetic point of view, this way of situating the body as a kind of vehicle with an idealized end-point or telos is interesting, if only because it speaks to a constant human desire to attain some form of mastery over bodily identity. In the late nineteenth century the French philosopher Henri Bergson firmly grounds the body as the site and locus of action; the body is a lived body that moves freely in the world and has the capacity “to be a vehicle of human choice” even though it may not always be granted human agency.6 The very term “vehicle” obviously connotes movement. The body, as a vehicle, can be used and reused at will in Orlan’s experimentation with various identities. It is in constant flux, what Renata Salecl designates as “a changeable work of art” over which she has seeming control.7 Yet

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before turning to the aesthetic implications of Orlan’s performance, or even before examining in more depth the social implications of Orlan’s “body art” per se, I would like to linger a little on her assertion that she experiences no physical (or emotional) pain during her surgical operations, that her body is ultimately divorced from any materialist base or subjectivity. In her attempts to objectify the body – from the very moment, in fact, that she discards or renounces any notion of physical or psychical pain – Orlan transforms or reduces it into a semiotic function or abstract sign. Her project can be viewed as being based on a binary between semiotics and phenomenology where substance – the very experience of existing in a body – gives way to semiotics and where the vital and living body becomes for Orlan a mere conceptual or abstract image that is open to representation. Such a reading is reminiscent of that undertaken by Jean Baudrillard in his highly evocative analysis of J. G. Ballard’s compelling sci-fi novel Crash, whose main protagonist Vaughan constantly (en)acts and re-enacts car crashes and simulates the postures of wounded bodies as they are captured by his camera. Like Orlan, Vaughan, although a fictional character, documents his performances. And, whilst Orlan uses the surgical object as a technological intervention into her own body, the protagonist in Crash uses the metallic-body of the car to effect his own body’s dissolution into an abstract surface or concept, which is further mediatized by the photographic image – a medium of technology to which I shall shortly return. For the moment it is interesting to note that in Baudrillard’s postmodern reading of Vaughan’s bloody histrionics, “the entire body becomes a sign which offers itself in the exchange of body language.”8 There is nowhere any sense of the body’s organicity in this symbolic exchange of body language, that is, the exchange of signs which occurs between the body of the car or, in Orlan’s case, the surgical instrument (if one takes the conceptual leap and is willing to make the transposition) and the body of the subject, not even when the body is impacted on, and thus transformed, by the automobile or surgical object. As Baudrillard makes clear: It is all identical: all shocks, all collisions, all impacts, all the metallurgy of accidents is inscribed in a semiurgy of the body – not in anatomy or physiology, but in a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, and wounds which are like new sexual organs opened in thebody.9

Divorced from any anatomico-physiological setting, the body is “reduced to the symbolic exchange of signifiers.”10 At the same time, in its

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process of “becoming,” it also engenders the creation of a new “semiurgy” or abstract system of signs. And, as the wound is part of the body, it too is subsumed into this system, becoming what Baudrillard calls a “symbolic” wound, one which is deinvested of libidinal cathexis and functions merely as abstract or disembodied sign. As such, it is disseminated along the semiotic system like a signature, infinitely reproducible and infinitely prone to simulation. And, as Jacques Derrida aptly points out in Margins of Philosophy, signatures function only in so far as they are repeatable or “iterable,” and thus able to be repeated in several different contexts: “In order to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production.”11 Hence signatures, like wounds, can be endlessly counterfeited, imitated and simulated. For Derrida experience in general is always already marked (paradoxically) by both iterability and erasure, repetition and loss, and whilst it is clearly beyond the scope of this work to fully engage in a Derridean philosophy of difference and deconstruction, suffice it to say that his notion of a signature – or, what I would like to call a wound-assignature – may shed some light on Orlan’s cosmetic surgeries as staged performances. In one of Orlan’s exhibitions in particular, a progressive series of forty photographic images of her facial surgical wounds are displayed for public view. These seriated photographic images show the capacity for the wound to be reproduced and simulated ad infinitum through the mediatization of the camera and the openness of Orlan’s body towards the other and the other’s field of vision, her attempts to make her wounds a sharable event–a collective spectacle, in short, rather than a private ideal.12 Orlan’s body is thus opened out, it “offers itself to [representation], opens upon… an imminent spectator, is a charged field.”13 It is a charged field, in other words, to the extent that it opens itself to representation and the other’s gaze, implicating itself in a dialectical movement where violence functions as a kind of social gestus and feeds into an attempt to destabilize constructed identities. Orlan is constantly “trad[ing] among shifting, constructed identities, layered on a body that has experienced all of these constructions.” Her performance arguably functions as “a noncoincidence of body and language, a Brechtian, postmodern dissociation of presence and discourse.”14 Yet, before attempting to reclaim Orlan’s performances by foregrounding them in a kind of historico-materialist discourse or gestic feminist criticism (assuming, of course, that this is even possible or desirable), I would like to pause once more over Orlan’s

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complete negation of pain and her complete disavowal of the subjective body. In effect, Orlan’s belief in the complete obsolescence of the human body allows her to assume (even if phantasmatically) the position of a “posthuman self where a multiplicity of selves are constantly shifting and in motion.”15 I say phantasmatically because there is no way to avoid humanism – and paradoxically so – when positing the posthuman condition. It is all very well, pace Derrida, to say that the “post” in humanism is always already returning, that this movement is in effect always taking place, but it is also the case that there is no clear way out of this very impasse. “There is no pure outside to which ‘we’ can leap. To oppose humanism by claiming to have left it behind is to overlook the very way that opposition is articulated.”16 What this means is that despite Orlan’s protests to the contrary, she needs the body in her performances, and the body feels pain. For while Baudrillard sees wounds as primarily “symbolic” and semiotic, as disembodied artefacts or signs which circulate in a semiotics without any meaning, it is my contention that Orlan’s gaping wounds, the open orifices she exposes in her photographic images, delineate a very precise economy of pain frozen and petrified in time. Indeed, the fact that the wounds themselves may be read as abstract signs does not preclude them from also being or becoming embodied, “real” events. They may possess an ambivalent status, in their attribution as at once psychical and social, virtual and real, a matter of both representation and perception at the same time, yet it is not easy, perhaps even impossible, to relegate the body to some pre-subjective or even pre-objective state of being. (I am reminded here of a kind of Husserlian something, the something of consciousness, the consciousness of, which we cannot extricate ourselves from.) As I mentioned previously, the body feels, even lives, pain. It is not so easy to abstract it from its materiality and root it in some conceptual or even pre-ontological discourse of semiotics. Indeed, the very question of semiotics, of language itself, presupposes the existence of the body, even if only as referential, material sign. As Jacques Lacan notes in Écrits, “language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is.”17After Orlan’s “cosmetic” operations, she is left with the reality of the wounds on her face, which serve as very real and unforgettable markers of the mediation between her own body and the surgical instrument, i.e. the needle, the scalpel, the surgeon’s knife. They form “an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains and discharges.”18 They are both part of a conceptual system of signs but also concrete markers of pain which shatter the body’s sense of unity. And, as Vivian Sobchack points out in her

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criticism of Baudrillard’s reading of Crash, a criticism which can be applied with the same cogent force to Orlan’s surgical practices, “there’s nothing like a little pain to bring us (back) to our senses, nothing like a real (not imagined) mark or wound or artificial orifice to counter Baudrillard’s postmodern romanticism.”19 The body is as much a subject as it is an object; it is all too easy to forget our lived and imagined sense “of the human body not merely as a material object among others, but as a material subject that bleeds and suffers and hurts for others because it can bleed and suffer and hurt for oneself” (Sobchack).20 While Sobchack’s argument may read like a romanticized version of a nostalgic desire to recoup once more the body’s subjectivity, which (one may argue) has always already been disseminated and fragmented via artifice and technological practices, it is significant that she brings the notion of the material body to the fore once more. For Orlan cannot escape the body. The locus or site of action is precisely her body, on which she inscribes her own discursive text.21 The photographic images are like a testament to the vulnerability of the flesh, in which the wounds map out a very precise representation of physical and psychical pain. It is paradoxical indeed that this should take place, especially considering Orlan’s complete disavowal and rejection of this very pain on which her work is premised. Unlike many other female performance artists, who tend to magnify their pain and oppression under patriarchal discourse, she attempts to downplay it in her Theatre of Cruelty, even reduce it entirely.22 As Elaine Scarry remarks, this type of logic is untenable precisely because physical pain, even when it is inscribed in an elsewhere, transferred onto another object (such as a photographic image, for example), will still retain or carry “some of the attributes of pain with it.”23 Although Scarry is referring specifically to contexts involving war and torture in her astute analysis, where one individual attempts to obliterate the sense of an other’s pain, the fact remains that physical pain is real. As a phenomenon it occurs “not several miles below our feet or many miles above our heads but within the bodies of the persons who inhabit the world through which we each day make our way.” Furthermore, it is “a sign of pain’s triumph” when it effects what Scarry calls an aversiveness by “invok[ing] analogies to remote cosmologies (and there is a long tradition of such analogies.)” 24 What Orlan does is to invoke the sense that each surgical operation functions as a kind of remote cosmology divorced from material pain. She views her operations as attempts to achieve reincarnation in this life, with all the religious and mystic undertones that this implies. The image of the wound itself obviously resonates with religious undertones. Wounds exude

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a mysterious, mystic quality. Yet this mysticism is not specifically grounded in Christian doctrine. The wounds themselves have been begotten from the perverse union of the body with technology. As such, they are part of a new semio-gnosis, of which Orlan is the “messiah”. Wounds are simply signs which circulate in this new semio-gnosis. There is no question of transcendence, that is, the wounds on the body are not transcendental signifiers; they are more like ambivalent signs in a constant play of signification, a neither/nor system. The irony here is that Orlan’s “fantasy of rebirth,” her “Christlike attempt to transcend the body and mortality” point to her very own sense of embodiment.25 After all, even Christ was half-man. When she notes that this visual fantasy “of my body being opened endlessly”resonates with religious imagery, I cannot help but be reminded of Caravaggio’s painting The Incredulity of St Thomas.26 In it, Thomas is directly inserting his finger into Christ’s wound, an open orifice out of which no blood is seen to flow (Fig. 1).27 As Peggy Phelan notes of this painting, its paradox is to be found precisely in the fact that Christ’s bloodless body bears the very real marks of embodiment at the same time that it presents us with a disembodied subject: The paradox of Caravaggio’s painting lies precisely here: in the narrative “proof” of Christ’s embodiment Caravaggio paints the radical disembodiment of human love and subjectivity. Recording the narrative “proof” of Christ as (eternally) living body, Caravaggio’s painting gives us a wounded, bloodless body. An arrested frozen image, Caravaggio’s Christ makes vivid the terror of embodiment.28

This “terror of embodiment” is the same terror I read in Orlan’s fixed photographic images, which denounce their sense of embodiment at the very same time as they reinscribe it. The flat surface of the photograph does not erase its Barthesian punctum, its capacity not only to designate a body which was embodied at the time the photograph was taken, but also to imminently direct the spectator’s attention to their own painful embodiment as they look at Orlan’s images. Some of her self-portaits, in fact, are composed using her own skin and blood, a visceral reminder once more of her message that the body is in pieces. As spectators we bear witness to Orlan’s fragmented body. While it has been claimed that this fragmentation can be empowering to the extent that it textualizes and reterritorializes the female body – hence reclaiming it as a site of empowerment – I would argue that Orlan’s project interrogates conceptions of embodied subjectivities and identities in order to bring up specific concerns – feminist or otherwise – regarding spectatorship, the

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gaze and voyeurism, as well as stereotypical definitions of female beauty, rather than being a feminist manifesto of triumph. As Parveen Adams points out, there is an implicit horror in viewing Orlan’s detachable face, “the horror at seeing this, at not knowing where all this seeing will end.”29

Fig. 4-1. The Incredulity of St. Thomas – Caravaggio, c. 1601-2, in the Picture Gallery in Sanssouci park, Potsdam, Berlin. Copyright by Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg/ photographer: Hans Bach. Reproduced with permission by the copyright holder.

It is almost as if the real horror for the viewer lies in the possibility that Orlan’s identity will cease to become recognizable or that she will even disappear. The lifting of her face confronts spectators with the prospect that identity is pliable, even erasable. The face becomes a mask or mere covering, yet a covering which we still cannot detach entirely in order to look underneath. Since Orlan’s face can be seen in close-up during her surgical operations it is significant that Adams should draw attention to it. As Georg Simmel points out, the face has an “aesthetic significance” and achieves “in mirroring the soul” through a kind of symmetrical unity and inner mimesis.30 “Hence any failure of the mimetic power of the face effects a violent ‘despiritualization,’ which takes the form of images of the shattered body.” Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari

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refer to an overcoded face-system “that ‘draws the entire body’ into the ‘abstract machine of faciality.’”31 Although this frame of reference serves to unroot the face and body from concrete materiality and locate them in a mechanized abstraction, it serves to bring up the importance of the face as an overloaded system of signs which decode and even overcode the body. I would argue that it is this explicit overcoding which becomes traumatic when it exceeds its interpretative frame, leading to what Seltzer calls the failure of the mimetic power. Even though Barbara Rose claims that Orlan’s use of mediated technology creates “a sophisticated feedback system, a vicious circle of echoing and self-generating images” which spawn “a progeny of hybrid media reproductions” there is always the possibility that this system will break down with the weight of its sensory and imagistic overload.32 What is more, to see “cuts in the face violates our sense of separation between the visceral and the human.”33 Although Rose claims that Orlan creates a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt or A-effect by alienating her audience through the “sensory overload of her imagery” and its visceral effects, I would argue that there is a dimension to Orlan’s work which elides the aesthetic because it cannot escape the corporeality of the body. Even if her goal is to alienate her spectators, it is arguable if she ever manages to achieve it – a point to which I shall return. Whatever the case may be, seeing the body literally and performatively in pieces is more traumatic than it is empowering. Sarah Wilson feelingly describes the pain involved whilst watching Orlan’s surgical performances, noting that as “spectators we witness her virtual martyrology, we know that her operations in flesh and spirit are both real and metonymic – an emblem for so much pain.”34 Wilson also claims that Orlan refuses giving her spectators a cathartic experience: “We are witnesses at a tragedy which we are forced to experience empathetically (transexually for the male viewer), as an aggression on ourselves. Catharsis – even as challenged in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty – is rigorously denied.”35 Carey Lovelace, on the other hand, asserts that there is a “metaphysical healing potential” in Orlan’s performances.36 To begin with, there is what Lovelace calls an “inflammatory (in-yourface) quality” to her work. Orlan wishes to evoke powerful emotions in her spectators: “I seek to make a visual work,” she said, “for which one has a strong bodily response, rather like one reacts physically listening to music.”37 Obviously Orlan’s claim here directly refutes Rose’s supposition of an alienating, Brechtian aestheticism.

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At the same time, since catharsis is an embodied and social process in which the “shuddering body” of the subject is marred by “rational vision” and subject to “an unhealthy division of self and social being – a division which only catharsis itself can heal and regulate,” Orlan’s desire to make her performances social and embodied events lead, ironically, to what Diamond calls “the shudder of catharsis,” which, as we have already seen, is not ultra-individualistic but socially contingent, dependent on the other for its embodiment.38 Since “catharsis marks and remarks a sentient convergence of body and meaning,” Orlan’s material body becomes a social and visible embodiment involving herself and her spectators.39 This embodiment is achieved first through the assignation of ontological status and consistency – as well as hermeneutic visibility – to her body, and then through a marking and remarking of this body as a social body which sees its own performance at the same time as it seen by others. In other words, it is impossible to escape embodiment. In order to make the body socially visible – a social construction – some sense of its materiality needs to be recouped. This is important if we are to open out the body’s potentialities and avoid situating it in an either/or discursive or biologically determined model. As Vernon Rosario astutely points out, discursive or constructivist analyses of the body may open “a broader terrain for understanding the body and sex as sociological and historical phenomena molded, perhaps even determined, by relations of power.”40 However, although such analyses may offer a mode of resistance for women, they “might [also] instead foreclose the possibility of resistance because of the weight of socialization and cultural convention, or, in Butler’s formulation, the compulsory reiteration of gender and sexual norms.”41 Thus it would be dangerous to claim that Orlan is fashioning and refashioning her body at will and simply reconstructing her gender without returning to the material and sentient body, not so much in order to claim there is a biological or deterministic inevitability which Orlan cannot escape as to posit that any social (re)marking of the body must necessarily start at and with the body – a stumbling block which Orlan cannot magically do away with. Even psychoanalysis itself, which analyses the mind and psyche and attempts to stop at the body, cannot get rid of the body, which phenomenologically appears to haunt its theoretical borders in the same way as the maternal body returns to haunt Freud “like a fata morgana.”42 There is a finitude to the body which makes it resistant to what Rose calls “hybrid” reproductions. Through these operations Orlan herself becomes “vulnerable to disfigurement, even death.”43 Even she realizes

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that her project will have to end sometime and that her body has limits. In a piece on corporal punishment in The Independent Judith Palmer quotes Orlan as saying: “I’d have to have an operation a month if I took up all the requests from galleries around the world” (par. 2).44 After she has created the “perfect” mythological face out of “the images of the ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘Diana’, and Boticelli’s ‘Venus’” her project will be complete, her face becoming an encrypted, overloaded and “living palimpsest where historical representations of female beauty are stored.”45 (Incidentally, her choice of body parts from different models is reminiscent of the artwork of the Greek painter Zeuxis who chose to paint the most beautiful features from five different women because he was unsatisfied with using only one female model.) In addition, the relics of her flesh and blood which she sells in vials to finance some of her final operations cannot be reproduced ad infinitum – unless she cuts herself to death – and attest to the body’s corporeal limits. At the same time, these bodily relics are like excess byproducts which she can expunge at will. These bloody waste-products or “bits of her dislodged flesh” (Lovelace 15) are like abject excretions which threaten her very identity.46 By refining Mary Douglas’s notion of defilement in Purity and Danger, Kristeva advances her theory of abjection. The subject’s very identity “is tied to the identity of the borders of the body which are threatened by bodily secretions” such as blood, milk and urine. It is only by “abjecting” or “ejecting” these secretions that identity is constituted.47 Thus her oeuvre is marked, ironically, by the abjection of herself as performer/artist/self in order to delineate more clearly the borders of her own identity and the dividing line “between the inside and the outside, between the clean and proper self and the abject other.”48 Orlan becomes her own work of abjection. The only difference is that she herself orchestrates and regulates what is to be abjected at a specific moment in time, creating the comforting illusion of personal choice while the surgeons “abjectify” her with their surgical implements. It is perhaps worthy to note in this context that Orlan has read aloud Kristeva’s texts during her surgical performances. So while it is indeed the case that Orlan challenges “our rigid perceptions of beauty,” the cost she has to pay for this does not justify an unreserved feminist celebration of her work.49 At the same time, the very fact that she dares to challenge, on one level, these very perceptions is an important aspect of her work that should not be overlooked. As we have already seen, Orlan becomes both abjectified and objectified through her work. The commodification of her flesh is reminiscent of the practices of the artist Piero Manzoni in the 1960s,

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whoused his own blood, breath, and excrement in his artwork and then sold it in order to make a statement about the waste engendered in the consumerist art world. This commodification may seem as a subversive and grotesque parody of capitalist and consumerist culture in which the female body becomes the object of male desire since Orlan is offering and marketing her body in irregular bits and pieces, as though it were some kind of a baroque figure which will bodily fall apart at any moment, rather than as a commodified whole to be screened over and appropriated by the male gaze. However, if a feminist reclaiming of the body entails its literal defragmentation, one wonders where exactly the triumphalist outcome of Orlan’s practices is to be located. At the same time, one also wonders how her alleged claims of negating rather than reclaiming the body can serve explicitly feminist ends. Indeed, if Orlan implodes any notion of a natural and living body, her experience is (re)created ex nihilo, leaving us to wonder wherein lies the truth of her experience since it is neither to be located in materialist nor spiritual frames of reference. For Orlan explicitly rejects Christian doctrine as well, although her work has strong ties to a Catholic visual tradition. She uses the passion of Christ as a tragedy and subverts it by positing herself as a martyr whose alleged sacrifice remains to a certain extent unredeemed. By attempting to make the flesh word rather than vice versa, Orlan subverts theological dogma at the same time as she denounces the religious belief in the body’s sacred and inviolate wholeness. It is interesting that Orlan should do this by making use of artistic representations of Greco-Roman mythological figures such as Diana, who was equated with the virgin goddess of the hunt Artemis, and Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. These female figures are seen as idealized stereotypes of feminine beauty in Western culture and statuesque representations of them aim at maintaining a sense of the body’s sculpted wholeness. In opposition to Orlan’s project, which tests the body’s boundaries and its porosity, these figures attest to the body’s hermetic self-containment. Orlan plays with this idea and posits it as a perilous fantasy. Through recourse to cosmetic surgery and the manipulation of computer graphics, she “has created a picture of herself that is a composite of various features taken from Renaissance and post Renaissance representations of feminine beauty.”50 By using the images of Diana, the Mona Lisa and Sandro Botticelli’s Venus she has technologically (re)created a merging template of feminine representations of beauty. We have already seen that for Deleuze and Guattari the face is an over-loaded and over-coded system. In a sense, Orlan “challeng[es] our rigid

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perceptions of beauty” through her constant and palimpsestual facial overcoding.51 At the same time, she also challenges the idea of the body’s hermetic and inviolate wholeness by deconstructing the bodily contours of aesthetic and statuesque representations of feminine beauty. If for Renaissance and post Renaissance artists and sculptors the body was seen to be a hermetically sealed and self-contained bubble of aesthetic female beauty, with its own distinct and perfectly flawless contours, for Orlan this bubble is nothing but a deceptive illusion which is liable to burst at any given moment. As Maren Möhring points out, Greek sculpture focuses on bodily contours and “aims at a body sealed off from the environment, selfcontained and self-possessed.”52 At the same time, Greek statues represent the female nude as chaste and immaculate, an idea which Orlan toys with in a dangerous way since by sculpting her own naked and sexualized body in public she risks entering into the zone of pornography rather than the aesthetic realm. Her performative work can be aligned with many of Carolee Schneemann’s confrontational performances in the 1960s, such as Eye/Body (1963), which aimed to subvert the traditional relationship between the pleasure-seeking gaze of the male viewer and the submissive masochism of the female subject who passively offers her body for spectatorial consumption. In her efforts to reclaim and control her body, Schneeman was often accused at the time of narcistically exposing it and this compromised and often stunted the radical and political efficacy of her project. In terms of its mode of reception, inasmuch as it feeds into feminist concerns with the gaze and voyeuristic practices, responses have been divided and there has often been a tendency to downplay and even elide the aesthetic dimension of Orlan’s work in order to accentuate the traumatic implications of viewing, and in Orlan’s case physically experiencing, the real event of a body as it is surgically cut and maimed. At the same time, the voyeuristic aspect of Orlan’s performances draws on modes of theatre like freak shows and the Grand Guignol [sic], a genre focusing on horror shows and whose eponymous theatre originated in Paris, with brief flourishing bouts in London as well over the years. It was noted for “its gruesome depictions of gore, madness and perversion” and for its focus on ocularcentrism and sadomasochistic practices. “Eyes were gouged out, stabbed and swallowed, while blind characters played a prominent role in the performances.”53 Not only did the playwrights of this genre focus on the eye’s vulnerability as a bodily organ but also on its susceptibility to deception and illusion by skilfully presenting events which never really took place.

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At the same time, and apart from the use of such sleights of hand, they also “exploited contemporary anxieties about contagious and inherited diseases, foreigners and the impact of technological and medical advances.”54 Not only does Orlan tap into such anxieties others may possess but she also explicitly celebrates these advances in technological progress as a welcome stepping-stone towards her road to selftransformation. It is extremely telling that all of Orlan’s performances are mediated by technological devices such as the camera. The eye of the camera is like a wandering and roving eye which probes underneath Orlan’s skin to reveal its interiority, an interiority of flesh and blood that is “objectified, thingified, imaged.”55 In his analysis of Benjamin’s Illuminations and the subject of photography, Eduardo Cadava stresses the moribund link between photography and death. The photograph is really its own “grave for the living dead” because it inherently bespeaks of “a history of ghosts and shadows – and it does so because it is this history.” The photographic image itself is a monument or testament to the living corpse, what Barthes refers to as “the living image of a dead thing.”56 Not surprisingly, a primary signifier of the abject for Kristeva is the actual corpse which invokes horror as it blurs the boundaries between self and other. Ironically, Orlan’s photographic images during her live performances are constant reminders or relics that bear witness to the very real possibility of her death rather than transformation as she is “captured” by the camera. Her constant attempts to expose her interiority through the use of technological devices are bound to fail at the outset. For as Derrida reminds us in The Gift of Death: “No manifestation can consist in rendering the interior exterior or show what is hidden.”57 In a sense, although Orlan attempts to imitate Greco-Roman art, which could be seen perhaps “as a mimetic form of self-formation,” her radical reformulation of the body by reconfiguring its porosity is obviously closer to more modern machinic models of the body than anything else.58 The modern body is vulnerable, exposed and permeable. At the same time, it is connected to technological devices, becoming a “prosthesis” of the machine. The body becomes, or rather it is a machine, or in Artaud’s terms “an over-heated factory.”59 Orlan exhibits a constant and obsessive fascination with removing the skin or outer covering of the body in order to look inside and thus make the outside mirror, or rather become, the inside. She claims that the lack of pain in her performances is central to her work because the trauma of witnessing a human body torn and ripped apart shifts self-reflection onto the viewer. In an interview with Robert Einright in 1998 for the magazine

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Border Crossings, she emphasizes the transgressive power of this inner/outer divide and of pain generally: So, this last operation is on the theme of pain, and actually the absence of pain. I intend to have myself cut completely open and to show the inside of my body. I would be lying smiling, absolutely conscious and just showing the inside of my body without any pain. And when you open up like that to the world, you are creating a wound which has also sexual and erotic connotations. This would be another stage, the stage of self-mirroring and the mirror brought up to the world. Then, after everybody will have looked into my body, I will simply have it closed back.60

Orlan’s performances are, to use Judith Halberstam’s words, like “an elaborate skin show” where the skin “no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster.”61 Although Halberstam is referring explicitly to the Gothic tradition, where the skin becomes the ultimate, divisive boundary, there is certainly a grotesque element or dimension to Orlan’s work which makes many of her viewers recoil in horror in the same way as they would when watching splatter or skin being torn asunder and relentlessly flayed in horror movies. There is, in Orlan’s work, what Baudrillard has defined in “The Ecstasy of Communication” as the obscenity of “transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication.”62 As Lovelace has pointed out, when artists and critics congregated in Soho in the Sandra Gering Gallery in 1993 to watch Orlan’s seventh operation on a large TV screen, the actual gallery “emptie[d] of a third of its audience” before the performance had drawn to an end.63 Davis cites one of Orlan’s lectures given in Amsterdam in 1995, where she projected images on screen of herself during “reconstructive” cosmetic surgeries. “The audience watched as the surgeon inserted needles into her face, sliced open her lips, and, most gruesomely of all, severed her ear from the rest of her face with his scalpel.”64 As Davis remarks, the complete indifference with which Orlan presented these images of her own body art naturally produced a shock in the audience. It takes a “strong” stomach, after all, to watch these various gruesome acts of bodily mutilation.65 Yet this is, on the whole, Orlan’s intention to begin with: the audience must be shocked if her art is to be at all effective. For “art has to be transgressive, disruptive and unpleasant in order to have a social function.”66 However, what exactly is the political and “social function” of Orlan’s body art, and how effective is this art in the materialisation of that very social function which it claims to perform? Additionally, since beauty is another manifestation of the material presence of the body, is it possible to

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toy with representations of female and aesthetic beauty and then to simply discard the body once Orlan has created a resulting template for her surgical and cosmetic operations? In order to answer these questions, one must return to the body once more and the way it is perceived. For Orlan, modern technological advances in cosmetic surgery, eugenics and virtual reality have now shattered any notion of a natural body as being nothing more than a precarious fantasy. However, as many critics have claimed, Orlan makes her body the site of action and through surgery transforms it “into language.”67 This is similar to Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s formulation in “Bodily Bonds” that women can find their voice only after they refashion their flesh and reclaim it from patriarchal discourse. From a feminist perspective, the parallelism with Orlan’s body art is not wide of the mark since her art has often been seen as an attempt at reclamation – the reclamation, that is, of the female body. It is an art which not only “examines the social pressures which are exercised upon women through their bodies,” but also attempts to subvert, or at least relieve, those pressures.68 One way in which Orlan does this is by subversively inverting the patriarchal reading of the “feminine ideal.” As Davis points out, her face “deviates radically from the masculinist ideal of feminine perfection”69 and Germaine Greer highlights that she is “a feminist ikon.”70 Yet how successful is Orlan’s body art? And how does Orlan reclaim the female body by negating its ontological materiality? Finally, is it really possible to destroy the concept of a natural body or even stereotypical representations of beauty which are inscribed and manifested upon the body? Although Orlan would answer the latter question in the affirmative, I am highly sceptical of her complete disavowal of physical, if not psychological, pain involved in her extreme surgical practices. The body is full of nerve endings that are receptive to pain, many of them located on the skin. To claim, therefore, to be a disembodied subject, incapable of feeling pain and playfully reciting literary texts in front of a camera “while her face is being jabbed with needles or cut” is clearly not feasible.71It is also interesting that Orlan should use “classical” models of feminine beauty as depicted by male artists in her work. If her project aims to challenge our fixed and preconceived notions of aesthetic and female beauty, then perhaps she could have used “uglier” models to begin with for her cosmetic surgeries, or even taken up images created by female artists. Clearly the idea of what qualifies as beautiful or not is relative and moot, and there may bemuch truth in the proverbial axiom that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For our intents and purposes, suffice it to say that

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even stereotypical images and representations of female beauty are not rigidly idealized by all bystanders. Paradoxically, Orlan attempts to challenge fixed conceptions of beauty by using the very same representations of female beauty which are already highly venerated and standardized by the Western canon of art. She starts from the basic premise or assumption that these images – of Diana, of the Mona Lisa and of Venus – are the stereotypical representations of female beauty par excellence. Thus, she already subscribes from the outset to the idea that these are the perfect models of beauty whose features need to be deconstructed and defragmented in order for stereotypical notions of beauty to be challenged and in order for her project to have social and political validity. Yet who is to say that these figures of beauty must necessarily serve as the feminine ideal in the first place? Setting aside the fact that to even posit a “feminine ideal” is problematic, a cursory glance at Renaissance and post Renaissance artwork will reveal that the artists, art historians and critics, as well as those who commissioned various paintings and set the standards on what was deemed aesthetically beautiful, were predominantly men. In my view, there is something almost tautologically unsettling in Orlan’s basic assumption of canonical beauty which serves to blunt the political efficacy and radicalism of her project. In short, her work cannot directly serve feminist or even socio-political ends because to effectively challenge and subvert the epistemic and imperialist hegemony of the artistic canon surely requires a rival strategy or system which will counter its juridical power. If a new rival system cannot be instated to counteract the hegemonic canon and its social structures of power, then, at the very least, certain feminine stereotypes of beauty need to be challenged from “within” the social system rather than (re)appropriated for explicitly personal ends. By inscribing these images onto her body, albeit in new and fantastical configurations (in one operation she modifies her chin so it looks like Botticelli’s Venus, in another she tries to imitate the mouth of François Boucher’s Europa) in order to create a consonance between her appearance and identity, Orlan is simply reinstating the hegemonic hold of male-centred conceptions of female beauty as a stable point of reference rather than articulating the convergence of multiple aesthetic discourses and practices at the site of “beauty” in order to contest it and problematize it as a category. At the same time as she attempts to re-negotiate the borders of the female body by subverting monolithic definitions of sensuality, the erotic and female identity formation (an attempt which is partially successful), she also manages to negate the very process of her liberatory subversion

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by reinstating an objectified female body in its place which is (re)inscribed by patriarchal and stereotypical codes of representation. In addition, it is not a very pleasant sight either for most people to witness Orlan’s lecture, as evidenced by the audience’s responses in Amsterdam. It is not an easy task to surpass the sheer “gruesomeness” of Orlan’s body art and critically engage with the issues it raises about beauty and the female body, identity and personal agency. Like other selfmutilative practices which are commonly seen as perverse, Orlan’s body art can very easily be viewed in a negative light by certain spectators. As Halberstam points out in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, it is easy to read the body that changes as being a sign of monstrosity. Many try to turn away from it because in it and through it “we may read the difference between an other and a self, a pervert and a normal person, a foreigner and a native.”72 Armando Favazza grapples with similar issues in his highly comprehensiveBodies Under Siege: Self-mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry, which explores the ambivalence or even dread felt by individuals when they are faced with self-mutilators – who are in many cases female – and their practices, which often seem inane and senseless. He attempts to arrive at a more critical understanding of the complex and multifaceted dimensions of self-mutilation as a practice, both on an intrapersonal and societal level. As Favazza notes, “we normally live within our skins. All that is enclosed by my skin is me; everything else is not me. The skin is a border between the outer world and the inner world, the environment and the personal self.”73 A tendency for self-mutilative practices may occur once this border or boundary between inner and outer worlds starts to break down, the subject no longer being able “to perceive where the body ends and the outside world begins.”74 This condition, pathological in nature, is commonly termed “depersonalisation disorder” since it is marked by the subject’s own loss of any sense of personhood, a feeling that the body is unreal and “that time and the environment have mysteriously changed.”75 As it is the body that forms the locus or centre onto which selfmutilative practices are enacted and inscribed an exploration into the various perceptions that self-mutilators have of their own bodies can be highly enlightening in our understanding of mutilation practices. One form of mutilation, that of self-cutting, is an often highly effective attempt on the part of the subject to reinstate himself or herself back into subjective personhood. Once the cut stimulates pain and the letting of blood, cutters “are able to verify that they are alive,” that they have a skin border and that their body has limits.76

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“Feeling alive” and rejuvenated after the cutting is a sensation which most, if not all, cutters tend to experience. John Kafka documents the story of a young woman who had the intense and “‘exquisite border experience of sharply becoming alive’ at the moment of cutting herself. She described the flow of blood as being like a voluptuous bath whose pleasant warmth spread over her body, moulding its contour and sculpting its form.”77 In stark contrast to suicidal attempts, however, such ritualized bloodletting is seen as regenerative, not “an exit into death” but “a re-entrance into [life and] into a state of normality.”78 It makes the body feel real and tangible. This blood-bath ritual is extremely telling. As the blood flows down the body, the body’s borders or “contours” so to speak are clearly defined and delimited. This mysterious gratification which this process entails can be linked with more than just specific masochistic tendencies on the part of the subject: the warm embrace of blood in this instance is sexually, even fetishistically, gratifying. This linkage between sexual gratification and cutting has also been reported as existing in many other cases, in which skin cutting is seen as “represent[ing] the creation of multiple little female genitalia on the skin,” which the subject can then fondle at will and touch unrestrainedly.79 The stimulation of pain here induces a pleasurable sensation which almost seems to match that attained during masturbatory activity, the letting of blood metaphorically parallel to what occurs during orgasm: a rush of blood to the vagina and clitoris occurs at this critical moment. Viewed from a different standpoint also, the “little female genitalia” or cuts, as they bleed, can also be seen as self-induced and orchestrated outlets for menses,80 but a menses that is “vicarious,”predictable and regulated.81 As a result, such bloodletting, for cutters, takes on therapeutic properties, which is fairly reminiscent of bloodletting therapy in eighteenth-century England as practised by prominent surgeons such as Joseph Lister. This allowed “unclean” blood to be discharged, thus “provid[ing] an opening through which the tension and badness in their bodies [could] rapidly escape.”82 This provides instant relief, a feeling of euphoria, and allows the cutter to release, in private, feelings of rage and frustration directed against the self or the outside world, in the guise of its various medical, political and socio-cultural institutions. Although perhaps not as effective as practices enacted on a broad social scale, such as public demonstrations or picketing, the very act of self-cutting “is some sort of action” which is both therapeutic and “preferable” to complete passive resistance.83 On another level, self-mutilation of this kind can be therapeutic precisely because of the scar which it leaves, or inscribes, on the body.

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The relief of watching one’s own blood flow gives way to the relief of watching oneself heal, the scar symbolically evidencing the body’s healing capacity, and also “mark[ing] a hurtful occasion” or event.84 The cut or wound possesses regenerative power. Similarly, in other more permanent forms of body modification, such as piercing, the “mark” of the cut also becomes “a very strengthening and powerful experience.”85 After the cut you “bleed and then end up with something beautiful… and then it heals and you have it and you’re proud of it – that can be very empowering. It can be a reclaiming for a lot of people.”86 This experiential sense of “reclaiming” one’s own body by modifying it according to one’s own specification and then watching it heal is often envisioned as a truly liberating event. In a case study quoted by Germaine Greer, stripper Jane Shag Stamp remarks of her piercing and tattooing practices: I get off on the initial pain… And I come home high and treat myself to taking it easy… Some folk seem to think by stripping I’m offering up my body to all these men, well I like to think tattooing/piercing helps me to feel like it is my own.87

While this is quite clearly an assertion of the “liberatory” function of such practices as body piercing, it is also an equivocal response since it not only allows us to wonder whether it would be a truly liberatory event if it were not a response to the actual “trauma” of stripping, but also because it illustrates the inherent dichotomy between actual reality and lived, perceptual experience, feeling and having. For it is, after all, very different to “feel” that the body is one’s own than it is for it to “be” one’s own and thus be able to reclaim complete autonomous control over it. What Shag Stamp has overlooked, although it comes out implicitly in her discourse, is the diminishing of her personal agency in the process itself. It is probably the professional body piercer or tattooer who had the control whilst refashioning and modifying her body, in the same way as it is the surgeon who is holding the surgical appliances during Orlan’s performances. Thus it is all very well to assert that through cosmetic surgery, the literal “cut” inscribed onto her body, she can reclaim control and that under the cut of the surgeon’s knife, she “designs her body, orchestrates the operations and makes the final decision about when to stop and when to go on.”88 Indeed, it is all very well as long as we forget that a single cut by the surgeon in the wrong place can cause permanent disfigurement if not death.

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Obviously we do not live in an enclosed vacuum. Orlan’s performative acts cannot be seen exclusively in ultra-individualistic terms. They necessarily draw the other into the visual and discursive domain. Hence, although “the surgeons themselves remain subject to the final gaze of Orlan’s camera” and hence “cannot escape her watchful eye,” it is also inevitably the case that they are scripting her body and subjecting it to their own reified gaze.89 At the same time as her performances are mediated by the technology of the gaze, they also bear witness to the other within the visual and perceptual field. In short, the lens of the camera objectifies Orlan and she becomes a body which can also be seen and voyeuristically fetishized by both the surgeons and the spectators. As spectators, we too are appropriating her body within our scopic field. Of course we can make a conscious choice to avert our gaze and fix or concentrate it elsewhere, especially when visuality becomes excessive or, in Baudrillard’s terms, too obscene. For Orlan repeatedly strikes our eyes with images which “plunge in and strike directly where it hurts.”90 Danielle Knafo compares her to Medusa: Like Medusa, Orlan is both fascinating and dreadful. We wish to gaze at her as she engages in body mutating and life-threatening practices, yet we are aghast at the slicing of her flesh, frozen by the literal confrontation with bloody castration, mortality, and the uncanny encounter between reality and fantasy.91

Body rituals are uncannily repetitive even as they tend to blur the boundaries “between reality and fiction.” As Freud points out in “The Uncanny” (1919), the uncanny is really “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind.”92 Clearly bodily sacrifice is not a modern concept. Even though Orlan attempts to induce shock therapy with her own radical body modification practices, she was not the first to engage in offensive sexual acts or blood sacrifices. Amongst Orlan’s predecessors were Gina Pane, who “was known for the tiny cuts she made in her body in events that had ritualistic, religious overtones,” Rudolph Schwartzkogler who focused on the body in his violent and ritualistic practices by maiming himself, as well as Chris Burden whose art work “included crawling over broken glass, sticking electrical wires in his chest, and having himself crucified on a Volkswagon.”93 What is more, although Knafo associates Orlan to the all-powerful Medusa, she forgets about the spectators who stand in for Perseus and can detach themselves from her transfixed and petrified stare simply by averting it or even “cutting” Orlan off from their visual terrain. Although

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Orlan claims that she wishes for her spectators to close their eyes, refusing to look could also effectively be construed as a way of disengaging from the social and critical function Orlan claims to perform in her work. If the personal in extremis is to become political, then at the very least Orlan’s surgical practices should be viewed as a social and embodied involvement – at least, that is, if her project is to succeed. In other words, the audience must be made to look if her work is to have any potent political force or social currency. Influenced by Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty, Orlan forms part of a large tradition of body artists in the 1960s who sought to merge audience and performance and effect social and political change. In The Theatre and Its Double Artaud “propose[d] a theatre where violent physical images pulverise, mesmerise the audience’s sensibilities, caught in the drama as if in a vortex of higher forces.”94 In short, “every facet of the spectator’s sensibility” was to be attacked by recourse to “a revolving show” that would “extend its visual and oral outbursts over the whole mass of spectators.”95 Sacrifice, the Dionysian festival and bodily mutilation were all ways of achieving these outbursts. Orlan was also influenced by Bataille’s work on eroticism and the sacred, which removes any sense of the erotic and evokes the horror of death. As he notes in Theory of Religion: “Man feels a kind of impotent horror in the sense of the sacred.”96 According to Bataille, taboos imposed by culture and religion shelter us from this horror – taboos which Orlan herself transgresses. In a sense, there is a very real horror in witnessing Orlan’s transgression of the sacred through her artwork. She disrupts social and monolithic constructions of sexuality, identity and religion. In many of her pieces she mocks Renaissance art which depicted the Virgin and other holy women and attempts to subvert the Catholic division of femininity into the stereotypes of angelic saint or whore. Whereas the “White Virgin” is holy and chaste, Orlan praises the “Black Virgin” who, like Adam’s first wife Lilith in the Old Testament, is autonomous and in Jewish folklore more generally represents the female demon-goddess. In Black Virgin Wielding White Cross and Black Cross No. 24 (1983), Orlan plays with the opposition between white and black (Fig. 2).97 Dressed in a black leatherette gown she wields two crosses in her hands, an upturned white one and a black one which faces downwards in order to symbolize its inversion of deeply ingrained Christian tradition. At the same time, she exposes one of her breasts, which is reminiscent of the way in which many artists and painters used to represent the Madonna, with her nurturant breast, as she suckled the baby Jesus. The breast attacks spectators’ sensibility as well as their visual field. With its Medusa-like

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quality, it is the quintessential example of the castrating breast which petrifies action. At the same time, there is an almost defiant rejection of anything maternal since the breast here is not seen as a symbol of nourishment. In her corporeal performance, Orlan dismisses the sanctity of the breast, or rather, the sanctity with which it is steeped in religious tradition. It is glaringly surrounded by black latex rather than the virgin-like tresses of the Madonna’s robe. As a signifier of the abject, this breast becomes a visibly erotic one, charged with sensual energy. At the same time, it is a performing breast as well, “rendered obscene” by “its appearance outside the usual domestic frame.”98

Fig. 4-2. Orlan, Black Virgin Wielding White Cross and Black Cross No. 24, 1983, Cibachrome on aluminum, 160 x 120 cm. Photograph by Jean-Paul Lefret. Published in ORLAN 1964-2001, 59. Copyright Orlan. Reproduced with kind permission by Orlan.

It is not difficult to see that such works as Black Virgin Wielding White Cross and Black Cross No. 24 have the potential to shock many of its viewers. Some of this shock derives from Orlan’s subversion of religious dogma and iconography. It is also induced by her capacity to physically enter her work and confront her viewers directly with the provocative gaze of the Black Virgin. In the same way as she does with her surgical and

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self-mutilative performances, Orlan uses some of her other pieces as a way of identifying herself with holy figures. Due to their transgressive nature, her artistic performances can very easily slip (and unfortunately so) into being labelled as deranged and delusional practices before they are even critically deconstructed and analysed for their potential social and aesthetic value. As Favazza notes, this is often the case with self-mutilation and other practices which we have difficulty in understanding. And, as we have already seen, self-mutilation does bear religious or mystic undertones, with many self-mutilators identifying themselves with or even as a Christlike figure. Indeed, what is concerning is not so much the resonance of self-mutilation to religious doctrine, but the uncanny blurring of the boundaries between life and death, pleasure and unpleasure, which this practice seems to entail.99 The boundaries are very thin. Without clearly demarcating the boundaries between mutilation as grace or perversion, a source of pleasure or unpleasure, Favazza suggests that “it is easy to forget that dripping blood may accompany birth as well as death.”100 The fact that people still gather round to watch Orlan is certainly evidence of what Mark Seltzer defines in Serial Killers as our “wound culture: the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound.”101 We are as fascinated as we are repelled by it all. We may be able to turn away in due time, but the cut has already been made.

Bibliography Adams, Parveen. “Operation Orlan.” In Orlan: This Is My Body, This Is My Software, edited by D. McCorquodale. London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996. Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Victor Corti. London & New York: Calder Publications, 1993. Ashby, Imogen. “The Mutant Woman: The Use and Abuse of the Female Body in Performance Art.” Contemporary Theatre Review2000, 10, no.3 (Malaysia, OPA: 2000): 39-51. Badmington, Neil. “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism.” In Posthumanism, edited by Neil Badmington, 1-10. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2000. Ballard, J.G. Crash. London: Vintage, 1995. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 2000.

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Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” In The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 126134. Translated by John Johnston. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. —. “Two Essays: ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’ and ‘Ballard’s Crash.’” Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 3 (1991). Accessed July 11, 2011. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992. Cadava, Eduardo. “Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History.” Commemorating Walter Benjamin. Spec. issue of Diacritics 22, no. 3/4 (1992): 84-114. Carnal Art. Directed by Stéphan Oriach, 2001. Myriapodus Films, 2003. Documentary. Davis, Kathy. “‘My Body Is My Art’: Cosmetic Surgery as Feminist Utopia?” In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 454-465. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” In Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, 309-330. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. —. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Diamond, Elin. “The Shudder of Catharsis in Twentieth-Century Performance.” In Performativity and Performance, edited by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 152-172. New York & London: Routledge, 1995. Dolan, Jill. “In Defence of the Discourse: Materialist Feminism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism… and Theory.” In A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance, edited by Carol Martin, 94-107. London & New York: Routledge: 1996. —. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1988. Einright, Robert. Interview with Orlan. “Beauty and the I of the Beholder: A Conversation with Orlan.” Border Crossings 17, no. 2 (1998): 44-7. Favazza, Armando. Bodies Under Siege: Self-mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry. 2nd ed. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

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Freshwater, Helen. “Shadow Play: The Censorship of the Stage in Twentieth Century Britain.” PhD Diss., University of Edinburgh, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Essentials of Psychoanalysis: The Definitive Collection of Freud’s Writing, 218-68. Translated by James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1991. —. “The ‘Uncanny.’” In Art and Literature, edited by Albert Dickson, 336-376. Translated by James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1990. PFL XIV. Giles, Fiona. “The Tears of Lacteros: Integrating the Meanings of the Human Breast.” In Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, edited by Ivan Crozier and Christopher Forth, 123-141. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005. Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. UK: Doubleday, 1999. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Harris, Geraldine. Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity. Manchester: MUP, 1999. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Knafo, Danielle. “Castration and Medusa: Orlan’s Art on the Cutting Edge.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 10, no. 3 (2009): 142-158. Lacan, Jacques. Dzcrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London & New York: Routledge, 2003. Lovelace, Carey. “Orlan: Offensive Acts.” Performing Arts Journal 17, no.1 (January 1995): 13-25. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Möhring, Maren. “Working Out the Body’s Boundaries: Physiological, Aesthetic, and Psychic Dimensions of the Skin in German Nudism, 1890-1930.” In Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, edited by Christopher Forth and Ivan Crozier, 229-246. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005. Oliver, Kelly. “The Crisis of Meaning.” In The Kristeva Critical Reader, edited by John Lechte and Mary Zournazi, 36-54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Palmer, Judith. “Corporal Punishment: How Much More Body-as-LivingCanvas Performance Can We Take? Who's Using Whom?” The Independent. 26th April 1996. Accessed February 5, 2012. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/corporalpunishment-1306808.html

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Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. Rosario, Vernon. “Phallic Performance: Phalloplasty and the Techniques of Sex.” In Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, edited by Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier, 177-190. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Rose, Barbara. “Orlan: Is it Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act.” Art in America 81, no.2 (February 1993): 83-125. Salecl, Renata. “Cut in the Body: From Clitoridectomy to Body Art.” In The Other Within. Vol. 1, edited by Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, 157-173. Thessalonica: Athanassios A. Altintzis, 2001. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition.” In The New American Studies: Essays from Representations, edited by Philip Fisher, 228-259. California: University of California Press, 1991. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York & London: Routledge, 1998. Sobchack, Vivian. “Baudrillard’s Obscenity.” Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 3 (1991). Accessed July 11, 2011. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/forum55.htm Sprengnether, Madelon. The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990. Wilson, Sarah. “L’ histoire d’ O, Sacred and Profane.” In Orlan: This Is My Body, This Is My Software, edited by D. McCorquodale, 8-17. London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996.

Notes 1

Danielle Knafo, “Castration and Medusa: Orlan’s Art on the Cutting Edge,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 10, no. 3 (2009): 145. 2 Kathy Davis, “‘My Body Is My Art’: Cosmetic Surgery as Feminist Utopia?” in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, eds. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 454. Davis provides a comprehensive overview of Orlan’s body art, citing one of her lectures given in Amsterdam in 1995 where she projected images on screen of herself and her surgical wounds to an assembled audience. Although it is unclear where this lecture took place exactly, it seems likely that it was at Triple X Festival. 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 66. 4 Carnal Art. Documentary, dir. by Stéphan Oriach, Myriapodus Films, 2001. 5 Davis, “My Body Is My Art,” 458.

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Quoted in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 193. 7 Renata Salecl, “Cut in the Body: From Clitoridectomy to Body Art,” in The Other Within, ed. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, vol. 1 (Thessalonica: Athanassios A. Altintzis, 2001), 169. 8 Jean Baudrillard, “Two Essays: ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’ and ‘Ballard’s Crash,’” Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 3 (1991), accessed July 11, 2011, http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm 9 Ibid., emphasis mine. 10 Geraldine Harris, Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity (Manchester: MUP, 1999), 74. 11 Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 328. 12 I use the term “mediation” of the photographic image here rather deliberately. While for Baudrillard, for example, “the photo is no more a medium than is the technology or the body – all are simultaneous in this universe where the anticipation of an event coincides with its reproduction, and even with its ‘real’ occurrence” (Two Essays), I read the photographic image as a medium which does not lack “depth” of affectivity simply because it is reproducible, but has the ability, through its mediation with the body, to “wound” or puncture it. As Roland Barthes points out in Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), there are certain photographs which have a punctum, a Latin word which “refers to the notion of punctuation” and serves to designate the mark or wound made by this sharp “element which rises from the scene [of the photograph], shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (26). Cf. Walter Benjamin in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), where the camera is seen as “penetrating” into the unconscious, and drawing forth an “unconscious optics” which would otherwise have remained invisible to the naked eye: “Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man” (230). It is, in fact, precisely Orlan’s aim to “punctuate” the other’s consciousness, to effect a wounding or shock in the other, by her explicitly graphic visual images. 13 While I am acutely aware of some of the limitations and critiques of phemonelogy as a perceptual and philosophical system, such as its presupposition according to Jill Dolan in The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1988) “that there is a universal way of looking, that any perceivable object has a stable, universal essence that can be read the same way by any individual” (46-7), I am borrowing some of its concepts here because its positing of the individual as the centre of the cosmic universe seems to me to be especially relevant to Orlan’s work and the perceptual field it engenders. It is by no means to imply that there is a universal way of reading Orlan’s practices, only to suggest that her work firmly and squarely puts her at the centre of her own universe – and, it should be added, encompasses the spectator in that universe also. 14 Taken from Jill Dolan, “In Defence of the Discourse: Materialist Feminism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism… and Theory,” in A Sourcebook of Feminist

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Theatre and Performance, ed. Carol Martin (London & New York: Routledge: 1996), 104. 15 Imogen Ashby, “The Mutant Woman: The Use and Abuse of the Female Body in Performance Art,” Contemporary Theatre Review 2000, 10, no. 3 (Malaysia, OPA: 2000): 48. 16 Neil Badmington, “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism,” in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2000), 9. 17 Jacques Lacan, Dzcrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London & New York: Routledge, 2003), 95. 18 J. G. Ballard, Crash (London: Vintage, 1995), 39 (emphasis mine). 19 Vivian Sobchack, “Baudrillard’s Obscenity,” Science Fiction Studies 18, no.3 (November 1991). 20 Ibid. 21 I use the term “inscription” deliberately here because of the not uncommon metaphorical status ascribed to the ontological body as text, as a site onto which multiple discourses and ideologies are re(inscribed) and re(interpreted). Karen Sanchez-Eppler, for example, in “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” in The New American Studies: Essays from Representations, ed. Philip Fisher (California, University of California Press, 1991) reads the body as a text. Although her essay is primarily an exploration of the critical intersection of feminist and abolitionist practices in nineteenth-century slavocratic America, her focus on the human body of women and (female) slaves is particularly enlightening. She understands the body as “attain[ing] the status of a text,” as being the site onto which the inscription of patriarchal readings takes place. For the woman to “reclaim” her body she must “invert patriarchal readings,” and finds her voice by subversively refashioning the way her flesh is “read” against her. “For women the ability to speak was [and is] predicated upon the reinterpretation of [her] flesh,” which leads to her subsequent reinscription into subjective personhood (230). I find Eppler’s formulation particularly intriguing, particularly in relation to Orlan’s radical and shocking body play. 22 Cf. Imogen Ashby, “The Mutant Woman,” 45: “Interestingly, Orlan has been keen to underplay the pain involved in what she does and this is in stark contrast with other body artists who have used the pain inflicted to represent the oppression, or otherwise, that they experience.” Instead of using the politics of pain as a powerful force against which to re-inscribe herself in patriarchal discourse, it is almost as if Orlan seeks to sidestep it or eliminate it from her field of vision by a radical subversion of its norms. 23 Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 173. 24 Ibid., 4. 25 Knafo, “Castration and Medusa,” 150. 26 Ibid. 27 Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, c. 1601-2, Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam, Berlin. 28 Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London & New York: Routledge, 1997), 42.

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Parveen Adams, “Operation Orlan.” In Orlan: This Is My Body, This Is My Software, ed. D. McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996), 58. 30 Quoted in Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York & London: Routledge, 1998), 243. 31 Ibid. 32 Barbara Rose, “Orlan: Is it Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act,” Art in America 81, no.2 (Feb 1993), 83-125. 33 Carey Lovelace, “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” Performing Arts Journal 17, no.1 (January 1995), 18. 34 Sarah Wilson, “L’ histoire d’ O, Sacred and Profane,” in Orlan: This Is My Body, This Is My Software, ed. D. McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996), 9. 35 Ibid., 16. 36 Lovelace, “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” 25. 37 Ibid., 18. 38 Elin Diamond, “The Shudder of Catharsis in Twentieth-Century Performance,” in Performativity and Performance, eds. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), 154. 39 Ibid. 40 Vernon Rosario, “Phallic Performance: Phalloplasty and the Techniques of Sex,” in Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, eds. Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier.Lanham, (MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 179. 41 Ibid. 42 Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 5. 43 Lovelace, “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” 14. 44 Judith Palmer, “Corporal Punishment: How Much More Body-as-Living-Canvas Performance Can We Take? Who's Using Whom?” The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/corporal-punishment1306808.html, accessed April 26, 1996. 45 Ashby, “The Mutant Woman,” 44. 46 Lovelace, “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” 15. 47 Kelly Oliver, “The Crisis of Meaning,” The Kristeva Critical Reader, eds. John Lechte and Mary Zournazi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 47. 48 Ibid. 49 Ashby, “The Mutant Woman,” 44. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Maren Möhring, “Working Out the Body’s Boundaries: Physiological, Aesthetic, and Psychic Dimensions of the Skin in German Nudism, 1890-1930,” in Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, eds. Christopher Forth and Ivan Crozier (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 238. 53 Helen Freshwater, “Shadow Play: The Censorship of the Stage in Twentieth Century Britain” (PhD Diss., University of Edinburgh, 2002), 254. 54 Ibid.

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Eduardo Cadava, “Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History,” Commemorating Walter Benjamin. Spec. issue of Diacritics 22, no. 3/4 (1992): 90. 56 Ibid. 57 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 63. 58 Möhring, “Working Out the Body’s Boundaries,” 238. 59 Quoted in Seltzer, Serial Killers, 242. 60 Orlan, interviewed by Robert Einright, “Beauty and the I of the Beholder: A Conversation with Orlan,” Border Crossings 17, no. 2 (1998), 45. 61 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 7. 62 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, trans. John Johnston (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 130. 63 Lovelace, “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” 13. 64 Davis, “My Body Is My Art,” 454. 65 Although there is a modern trend which seeks to rephrase self-mutilation by calling it self-harm, I feel that the latter term serves to deflect from the emotional resonance with which the former term is heavily loaded by effectually glossing it over. The term mutilation drives home with the full extent and force the recognition that there is a grotesque dimension to Orlan’s practices, even though she herself has refuted such a claim. 66 Davis, “My Body Is My Art,” 458. 67 Salecl, “Cut in the Body,” 169. 68 Davis, “My Body Is My Art,” 458. 69 Ibid. 70 Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman (UK: Doubleday, 1999), 33. 71 Davis, “My Body Is My Art,” 457. 72 Halberstam, Skin Shows, 8. 73 Armando Favazza, Bodies Under Siege: Self-mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 148. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 274. 76 Ibid., 148. 77 Ibid., 161, emphasis mine. 78 Ibid., 271. 79 Ibid., 163. 80 It is quite interesting to note in this respect that most self-cutters have been identified by Favazza et al as being primarily female. A study by Richard Rosenthal has also found that “more than 60 percent of the self-cutting by women took place at the time of their menses” (quoted in Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, 269). 81 Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, 165. 82 Ibid., 272. 83 Ibid., 273.

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Ibid., 280. Ibid., 284. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 99, italics mine. 88 Davis, “My Body Is My Art,” 459. 89 Ashby, “The Mutant Woman,” 45. 90 Knafo, “Castration and Medusa,” 145. 91 Ibid., 144, emphasis mine. 92 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1990), PFL XIV, 363-4. 93 Lovelace, “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” 15. 94 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London & New York: Calder Publications, 1993), 63. 95 Ibid., 66. 96 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 36. 97 Orlan, Black Virgin Wielding White Cross and Black Cross No. 24, 1983, Cibachrome on aluminum, 160 x 120 cm. Photograph by Jean-Paul Lefret. Published in Orlan 1964-2001 (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2002), 59. 98 Fiona Giles, “The Tears of Lacteros: Integrating the Meanings of the Human Breast,” Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, eds. Ivan Crozier and Christopher Forth (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 136. 99 For Freud’s interesting account of the ways in which the boundaries between pleasure and unpleasure tend to blur and become murky, see his seminal essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (120), in The Essentials of Psychoanalysis: The Definitive Collection of Freud’s Writing, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 218-68. 100 Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, 322. 101 Seltzer, Serial Killers, 1. 85

PART II HELLENIC BEAUTY IDEALS, CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND AESTHETIC REPRESENTATIONS

CHAPTER FIVE THE LYCEUM OF GREEK WOMEN AND THE IDEALIZATION OF FEMALE GREEK BEAUTY MARIA KYRIAKIDOU

The Lyceum of Greek Women was founded in late 1910 by Kallirroi Parren and a group of women comprising her closest associates. Parren, was born in Crete in 1859 as Kallirroi Siganou. In 1878, she graduated from the Arsakeion, an educational institution for the training of female teachers, and worked for ten years as a teacher in Adrianople and elsewhere. She was also employed as a journalist and wrote novels. Fluent in many languages, Parren travelled outside Greece and was considered one of the few women intellectuals at the end of nineteenth-century Greece. After her marriage to the journalist Ioannis Parren from Constantinople, she visited her husband’s native city, where she was frustrated by the status of women and decided to devote her life to female emancipation. Before the establishment of the Lyceum of Greek Women, and from 1887 to 1907 a group of women under the leadership of Kallirroi Parren published the Ladies’ Journal (Efimeris ton Kyrion), the first weekly Greek feminist journal.1 According to the Lyceum’s statutes, which were officially recognised by the Greek state on 19 February 1911,2 its objectives included the creation of a coalition among women in the “Letters, Arts and Sciences.”3 The publication of the Lyceum’s official bulletin, the Deltion, was an effort to provide a platform for the group’s aims as well to act as its mouthpiece. The Lyceum’s members aspired to work for the “progress of their gender” and for the maintenance and revitalization of Greek traditions (dances, songs and costumes); in short, to raise awareness both for gender equality and for the furtherance of Greek folklore.4 This twofold aim represented the culmination of Parren’s lifetime struggle. The founding of the Lyceum combined her feminist concerns with her folklorist interests, the latter been inextricably linked to Greek nationalist

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objectives of that time. In fact, Parren’s two goals were inextricably linked throughout her lifetime and she was convinced that the progress of the feminist cause would contribute to the revitalisation of the Greek nation and vice versa. Accordingly, she believed that a nationally minded and knowledgeable about the Greek culture woman would eventually contribute to the creation of a healthy, prosperous and vigorous nation. From the very first year of its existence until the end of the interwar period (which for Greece is habitually set in 1936 and the establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship) the Lyceum organised recurrently various festivities in order to instigate a revival of Greek traditions and customs. A whole division, the Department of Festival Organisation, was charged with preparing the annual (even if this was not always the case)5 festival of the Lyceum at the Panathenian stadium in Athens which was the one that hosted the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 (a symbolic link with the classical past). The Greek historian Eleni Fournaraki with a significant work6 focused on the quest for “greekness” in women’s bodies and the construction of national symbols and identities through such festivals. My present chapter is set to investigate the beauty ideals that were established and promoted via these festivals and especially via the dancing performances during them and the contextualization of such beauty standards within the contemporary Greek and international intellectual and aesthetic framework. The starting point of Parren’s desire for the organisation of such festivals dates back to the very first modern Olympics in Athens, when she suggested that a re-enactment of the ancient Panathenian procession performed by highly respectable Athenian maidens would be an appropriate link between the sporting events and “genuine Hellenic beauty.” Even though her plans did not materialize in 1896, Parren found the opportunity to introduce similar festive events in 1911. In May 1911, the first public festival called Blooming Festival (Anthesteria) was organised by the Lyceum in the Zappeion Hall.7 The first festival in the Panathenian Stadium was held in 1914 and was followed by another one in 1915; for the next decade the realization of these festivals was halted due to extenuating political circumstances, such as the political exile of Parren for her pro-monarchist liaisons by the liberal Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, as well as Greece’s entanglement in the First World War and the Asia Minor disaster (1922) after a Greco-Turkish war which resulted to a major national calamity for Greece and to the influx of a great number of refugees in the country. Between 1925 and 1938, the Lyceum conducted over a dozen public events in the Stadium:

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Chapter Five … five consecutive annual festivals between 1925 and 1929, and the festival of 1933. Other festivities were held in response to invitations from third parties to the Lyceum to (co)-organize or simply to take part in [national] celebrations, usually anniversary events.8

The format of the festivals was based on a steady core of repeated features structured around archaic performances and modern folk dances. A great number of young women (at times accompanied by men), all dressed in traditional costumes and ancient-like attires appeared in the open-air stadium in the presence of a class- and gender- mixed audience. They were enthusiastically received by the authorities in presence and the Athenian public9 and were viewed as an additional proof of the assumed “uninterrupted” bonds between Ancient and Modern Greece passing through the traditions of the Byzantine era and the folk cultural elements during the Ottoman rule. The Byzantine link was added to the celebrations primarily through the practice of tableaux vivants (static scenes) from 1914 onwards and the structure of the festivals was to a large extent crystallized through the years.10 The number of the performers, primarily women, varied through time amounting to hundreds in the 1920s while major emphasis was placed not only on their gender but also on their social class origins; various newspaper columnists mentioned that the girls were members of the upper class11 and “daughters of our best families,”12 just like the vast majority of the Lyceum members that were reported as women of the upper class according “to social conventions”13 who undertook the task to spread the knowledge of the ancient Greek “spirit and art... from the hut of the poor to the palace of the rich.”14 In short, elite women who wished to enrich Greek society by reawakening its cultural heritage. These educated women who had strong links to the political elite of that time period were taking the lead in the effort to establish a much desired link between the past and the present through the study and teaching of Greek dances both ancient and contemporary; their care and attention allegedly turned even the “humble” folk dances into masterpieces “of the fine arts, based on the eternal source of meter and rhythm.” Dance is reported as an art form of paramount importance and the name of Terpsihore, the Muse of dance, is evoked as sovereign among other Muses.15 The Lyceum ladies were quoted as “people with lofty intellect” and “civilized bodies of Athenian virgins... statue-like bodies”, which had turned the spectators speechless before the “classical beauty called Greek dance.”16 Such dance was thought most suitable for the physical type of a Greek and it was reported that ...these beautiful bodies, which could not possibly be admired much when dancing foreign balls, gained our appreciation with the artistic forms that

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only the rhythmic and plastic movements of the Greek dances could offer.17

The performances during the festivals comprised a rather awkward amalgam of various historical eras always related to glorious features of Greek history from prehistoric (Minoan) to medieval (Byzantine) period and emulated the processions of ancient Greece coupled with folk dances from the contemporary countryside. Such a mixture reflects the desire of Lyceum members and of the contemporary spectators to attest an undisputable link between these eras, the continuity of Greek culture18 and evidently, Greek racial purity and pre-eminence. Prominent politicians and members of the government, intellectuals, wealthy middle and upper-class businessmen, the royal family and “the whole Athens”, as the press reported, were among the thousands of spectators during these performances.19 A major common thread among these (often unrelated) eras was, the central to these festivals, female figure, one that was often quoted as “eternal Greek beauty”, an essentialist concept around which the festivals had developed. What follows is an assortment of instances from a number of festivals through the years which clearly illustrates the worldview and the objectives of its organisers. The idealised fifth-century figures of Karyatides from the Acropolis and those of the powerful Amazon fighters together with the female hunter Olympian goddess Artemis were invoked in order to prompt an icon of the “eternal”, feminine Greek beauty. A graceful appearance was expected to be the chief feminine trait during the festivals. The ancient female characters were rather “tamed” and adjusted to the contemporary docile, feminine ideals of the early twentieth century to conform to social expectations for women. In one instance, a representation of Psyche was looking for her soul mate while little girls dressed in white, sprinkled her with white and pink flowers. The Homeric princess Nafsika was presented together with her “virgin” maids of honour while women dressed as byzantine princesses were watching from seats modelled as byzantine towers. Young girls represented the four seasons of the year and personified different provinces of contemporary Greece (some of which had just recently been added to the country after the Balkan wars) and performed traditional folk dances. As quoted: ...the whole of Greece, Old and New, will be represented at the Stadium with the Greek dances, the Greek songs and the multifarious and very rich Greek and local dresses. The provinces, the islands, Epirus and Macedonia, the Dodecanese will be presented with unique loftiness.20

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All those areas were considered sine qua non integral elements of the Greek territory and cultural heritage. The reports on virgins, even more, “graceful virgins” with “indescribable beauty” are abundant. The concluding remarks of a female reporter in her eloquent account regarding the 1927 festival are revealing: “We can all see that the contemporary Greek woman is a genuine descendent of her ancient sisters, those who had been highly praised by so many poets and writers.”21 Dances, songs, costumes but mostly the women, who wore them, all these beauties combined appeared in the Panathenian Stadium, their youth and beauty flourishing... The Stadium that day held a feast of glory... which showcased the race, concentrated in all the beauty and harmony that were preserved from high antiquity to our days.22

The likeness of contemporary to ancient beauty was sought in regard to an ostensibly eternal (classical) female beauty ideal, virginity, bodily grace, decency, nobility and propriety. Virginity is often praised as an indication of inner beauty: “The whole procession was filled with virginity, modesty, it was very beautiful.”23 Furthermore, valour and vitality are equally regarded as indispensable to the Greek nation and an essentialized eternal “Greek psyche”. The beauty standard under discussion here does not relate to beauty in any erotic sense of the word but is rather full of nationalist symbolism and meaning. Women’s public performances and the sight of women’s bodies in public – in contrast to the usual domestic space – which could be viewed as rather alarming in those times, are vested in a positive meaning as these performances are associated with historical, political and national aspects that were meaningful within the contemporary ideological framework. The projection of the aesthetic ideal of classical beauty turns these women to icons of respectability.24 Local newspapers extolled these appearances which are sanctioned precisely for involving purportedly immaculate, virgin images literally on display. The standards of their beauty are not crude or improper images of dancing women and the erotic element has been eradicated; instead, haughtiness and dignity of the nation find their proper expression through the theatricality of the performance and the physical charms of the festival performers. These were reported as the very qualities that would increase the likelihood of marriage for the “fresh virgins” with the “beautiful and plastic, virgin bodies”: “If I discover tomorrow that two thirds of these ladies were not instantly engaged to get married, then the young men who attended the spectacle are amongst the most stupid humans on earth.”25 Gracefulness, beauty standardized as

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uniquely Greek, dignity and virginity are among the qualities which, according to the reporter, should inspire the potential grooms among the audience. Another important facet of such aesthetic ideal is the tie between harmony and health. As for the first element, beauty was recognized as a by-product of harmony in a romanticized ancient Greek sense and it is not an accident that quite often the reporters would refer to the statue-like beauty of the performers and the plasticity of their bodies. Fifth-century statues as eternal standards of beauty were recalled from the collective memory as the girls re-enacted their performances in a solemn and poised way.26 Descriptions of the Lyceum performers’ beauty invoked images of classical Greek art, already in the first of these events: I will refer to two of the girls… who represented the grace and the beauty…. The first, Mrs. Kefentzaki from Crete… is the personification of ancient Greek beauty. One has the feeling that her head was removed from an Attic relief or fell of the body of a Tanagra statue. Her profile is a miracle of regularity and, as she was dressed in an ancient tunic, the viewer, had often the sense that she was a virgin coming right off an ancient vase. To her austere… face, started a smile where all the graces applied… Her body, rather slender… is elegant and tense with an incredible plasticity.27

This aesthetic ideal which was attributed both to nature and to the Greek heritage of the girl was coupled by another beauty type that was described in the same article: The other lady, Mrs. Ilectra Papageorgakopoulou … is the type of the island beauty despite her Peloponnesian origins. On a most elegant body, gracefully rounded, this twenty-year old girl bears a strange, magical head… Even though her profile is not as regular as that of the first girl, her eyes are capable of melting hard metals while her facial colour and smile betray a well controlled flaming nature… They were both a pleasure to the eyes and the senses. And there … at the foot of the Acropolis, under the Attic sky idealized as it was by all this beauty, all turned to be a scene of ancient life.28

The above extracts suggest that the Greek beauty ideal was not one but as diverse and varied as Greek nature, landscape, territory and history was. A common ground to all of these variations though was classical (mostly Attic) art, primarily vase painting and sculpture. The epitome was:

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Chapter Five … a graceful lady in a light blue antique dress, which shows her fair neckline and crystal-like hands… a figure representing all the features of the Greek woman that are preserved through the art of sculpture and depicted in the verses of poets.29

The body of the performers was under scrutiny and dancers were often asked to re-enact body postures depicted in ancient Greek pottery.30 Greeks were not alone in their appreciation of such an aesthetic value. Neoclassical romanticism was a major trend in western thought and the …interest in Greece and its ancient past was developed by Western intelligentsia of the Enlightenment with the revival of classical learning… Soon Greece became the signifier of mythical values already a representation in itself … the Greek nation was re-created in terms of the European view of world history and arranged into a repertoire of items, themes and sites.31

The representatives of the dominant Western culture had generated an interpretation of its contemporary Greece that was based on ruins frozen in time. The travellers’ accounts of the nineteenth century as well as the early twentieth century Nelly’s photographs of nude and semi-nude dancers on the Parthenon are indicative examples of Western nostalgia for lost authenticity but also of a search for legitimate cultural European superiority.32 The westernized members of the Greek bourgeoisie were also in search for authenticity as it was suggested by Parren herself in an editorial of The Ladies’ Journal (Efimeris ton Kyrion): For three years now we are seeking the secrets of our ancient dances everywhere, wherever they could be possibly saved in the purest and most noble form and grace. In the green fields of the flowery meadows, on the ridges of the hills, in the blue islands and the ever-white mountains, the primeval dwellings of the ancient strong and beautiful gods.33

An additional highlight of these festivals was the presentation of the laboring woman, the woman of the countryside, who’s reported “agility of movements and gracefulness of body” were considered a living proof that women’s work outside the household can turn them into beautiful and well built humans. The traditional garments and the associated headscarf (“tsemberi”) were extolled: …the headscarf, worn by a beautiful young female head has the advantage to present many more variations than the hat…. We can see it on the oldest findings of plastic art, always worn with excellent grace. In the Greek reliefs, the representations on Greek vases… the grace of the scarf, its enchanting simplicity is uncomparable… Throughout Greece, the tsemberi,

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is worn in different ways, it is tied differently… The farming women of Greece had not sacrificed the un-described beauty of the scarf for the hat… The Lyceum performances proved how… admirably plastic is the scarf on the heads of the Greek women.34

The headscarf as an additional link between the ancient and modern rural Greece, was seen as the ideal frame through which Greek beauty was highlighted, with significant evocations to classical arts, primarily sculpture and vase painting. The plasticity of the female bodies was central to the references of the contemporary reporters. The Lyceum dancers were equaled to the beauty standard of the Parthenon Karyatides which corresponded to the golden century classical female beauty ideal.35 Elsewhere there were references to “upstanding bodies with the desirable, virgin shape that captivates and appears much more beautiful with the ancient attires.” 36 Health was also viewed as a prerequisite for beauty closely linked to youthfulness which was another essential characteristic of the performers. The link between beauty and health is a cross-cultural view that still endures today. Already in the interwar period, beauty was inextricably related to the preservation of good health and prescriptive literature of this time made clear references to the connections between these two aspects of a “good life”.37 In a similar vein, in interwar Britain, the connection of health and beauty was viewed as a duty for all women, as a certain path to their happiness as wives and mothers and vital in view of “the valuable national possession, the future race.”38 As a press commentator mentioned after one of these festivals, he was not just impressed by the ladies’ dancing capabilities (albeit memorable) but by a certainty that struck him as he watched them twist their bodies in the Stadium: the certainty that the young ladies of this social rank share a beauty that... does not resemble either the French, or the British or German, but it has its own unique type and can be safely called neo-hellenic... The fact that about 500 girls, from all over Greece and not just from Athens, gathered in one place and represented not just the Athenian but the neo-hellenic beauty as a whole.... Germans, British, French and Italian spectators marvelled at your beauty and they sang it in different languages. But above all, we, your compatriots... wish that your children inherit your own, Greek beauty, but also Greek psyche and Greek upbringing, which is up to you to inspire.39

The paragraph above introduces a variety of issues with a special focus on the belief in different, racially defined, beauty attributes and the suggestions to women’s patriotic duties. The task of women to raise good patriots is seen as a major parameter of women’s obligation to contribute

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to their country’s wellbeing. As another spectator reported: The “creme de la crème” of the female population of Athens in terms of education, grace, beauty and elegance was gathered yesterday in the scene of the Stadium to declare its faith and devotion to the national ideals. This was not just a dance parade. It was an imposing march of an army, the army of future mothers of the Nation.40

The epitome of men’s contribution to their country, army service, found its equivalent in the duty of women to raise nation-loving children. Such an analogy was put forth quite often by early feminists like Parren in the service of her gender equality goals based on women’s reproductive abilities. In her quest for women’s political participation, a path she had pursued with particular ardour throughout her life, she was entrapped into essentialized and messianic beliefs and doctrines regarding women’s “natural” inclinations and set destinies regarding childbearing and motherhood. This sort of women’s contribution to their country, albeit very political, is not reported as such but rather as natural, as an act that pertains to nature than to society and thus, it is deemed appropriate for women and their reproductive duties in the service of a nation that was in search of its “true” national and racial self: This is how a nation finds itself again, through the guidance of its poets who, from the depths of the national psyche know how to re-surface … the ideals of the races, and renew the race with the everlasting tradition... The whole nation today… turns with love to the true fountains of its life, its language, its art, its aesthetics, its emotional treasure.41

Nations are presented as physical beings, natural bodies and their aesthetic value ranks high among its most important features. The Lyceum girls from every corner of the Hellenic territory are perceived as parts of this organic beautiful whole that is breathing in these young female bodies. The Lyceum women provide insights into the nationalist discourse projected by the proponents of a haughty Greek nation. Parren herself had fully endorsed the nationalist slogans of the time, such as that “Greece is the ‘chosen’ nation… which draws its superiority from its ancient heritage.”42 Nationalist rhetoric has often used cultural capital, invented traditions and ancestral purity and the “concurrent discovering of a high culture with links to local traditions. This is what has been described as a nation’s ‘self-worship’, with songs and dances from some traditional culture” in what Dimitris Damaskos terms as “home grown ancestor worship.”43

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After a catastrophic Greek-Turkish war of 1897, Parren had projected a plan for gender equality through which women’s “national activities” legitimized their presence in the public sphere. Patriotic actions were prioritized for women as their active engagement in those would help reformulate the hitherto social conventions, hoping to attain a “new contract” that would remove further restrictions imposed upon women’s public action.44 In these decorous spectacles which functioned as high-brow entertainment, featured the physical charms of upper class women, who were simultaneously used as national icons. The aesthetic image of these women is showcased as an authentic representation of “greekness” and they are viewed as bearers of the Greek culture. As Parren herself suggested, the festivals display the unique phenomenon of a culture, advanced from the time of its very emergence, which through its development amidst centuries of barbarian and other rule, lost nothing of the nobility of the race, the beauty and harmony of line and colour.45

Such reference is not coincidental. Parren’s outlook was set within an ideological framework that had prevailed both in Greece and abroad. In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, theoretical exhortations on the so-called “Greek aesthetic” found a most fervent supporter in a nationalist poet, Pericles Yannopoulos, who essentialized aesthetic qualities that he deemed authentically Greek through two studies titled: The “Greek line” and “The Greek colour”. In his attempt to formulate a study of the perennial “greekness” and in order to encapsulate what he termed as the essence and the character of the Greek race, in the aesthetic version of the terms, he studied what he called “Hellenic nature” which included the landscape, the countryside as well as young men and women living there. Yannopoulos claimed that he had discovered essence that was manifest both in Classical and Byzantine art and could form the basis for the creation of a novel Greek aesthetic ideal that he deemed suitable for the Greeks.46 He encouraged his contemporaries to observe nature: It is like you see a living, warm body of a beautiful woman; observe modern art and it’s like you see a very beautiful lady dressed in white but cold, ice cold, dead... This way you feel all the wildness of the contemporary European aesthetics.47

In his view, the Greek nature, the Greek land,

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Chapter Five a land most beautiful and divine, a land which is perfect Aphrodite, the Mother Greek land... had given birth to a Greek animal, the Greek, US. And since our land is the most charitable land on earth this animal happened to be the HUMAN BEING.48

His extremist views on the unique beauty and humanity of Greeks were often overlooked (with noticeable exceptions) leading Yannopoulos to a spectacular suicide but his appraisal of the Greek nature and its aesthetic value was quite influential and could be traced in prominent works of art throughout the twentieth century. An utterly Greek aesthetic ideal was put into practice by the painter Nikolaos Gyzis who was highly praised by his contemporaries, a proof to the fact that the discussion on “greekness” was quite spread and developed among at least the educated, high income, strata of the early twentieth century Greek society. In the same vein, idealistic, symbolic female figures are common among the paintings of Gyzis.49 Other Greek intellectuals and scholars ascribed to similar ideals that were expressed not only through literary and artistic works of art but also through other sort of public performances such as the Delphic festivals organised by the poet Angelos Sikelianos and his American wife, Eva Palmer-Sikelianou. The couple started to plan the festivals in 192450, and in 1925, Palmer-Sikelianou began to select the female members of the tragedy chorus they created among the Lyceum girls. From the spring of 1926, until early 1927, she taught the Lyceum girls the music and specific movements for the theatrical performances.51 The first festival in 1927 was followed by a second in 1930 and these celebrations were an attempt to demonstrate an “organic” relation between classical antiquity, Byzantium and Modern Greek folk lineage. The Delphic performances were a major happening and received ample coverage in the daily press: The cream of Athenian society had been involved in these events and the spectators in the audience (when not foreigners, scholars and journalists) were members of the capital’s “high society”… [The performances] entailed a dialogue between Neo-Romanticism, the requirements of “greekness” and authentic folk art.52

References to the aesthetics of the female body and its historical roots were not absent from these events, either. In the occasion of the presence at the second festival in 1930 of the Greek beauty queen Aliki Diplarakou (who had also won the title of Miss Europe) in a traditional costume, the Athenian press was quick to theorize on Greek lineage and female beauty with titles like: “Eternal Greek beauty. Delphi, Miss Greece 1930 and the revival of antiquity.”53

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The program of the Delphic festivals included ancient-themed events, such as athletic games, tragedy and dance performances, re-enactments of ancient rituals, byzantine music concerts, Greek folk dances and exhibits of hand crafts from all over Greece. Throughout their duration, the festival organizers underlined the preeminence of Greek historical continuity via a tripartite historical scheme: Antiquity, Byzantium and Modern Greece54 just like in the Lyceum festivities. All over the world, modern dance performances drew heavily on the Delphic festivities. The Sikelianos couple had both family but also ideological and artistic ties to the American dancer Isadora Duncan as the sister of Angelos, Penelope, was married to the brother of Isadora;55 the latter …extended the reach of both modern dance and her style of feminism as she danced through Europe, claiming that she wanted to use her dancing body to re-conceptualize women’s place in western culture… Opposing the longstanding notion that women on stage were invariably eroticized figures, she opened the possibility for the female dancing body to provide a medium for carrying other meanings and aspirations.56

Hellenism and the figures of ancient Greek iconography were key to her choreography as they served as sources of inspiration while she argued that ancient Greek art invite viewers to look into the nude body in a “noble” and not lustful way. Nature and its aesthetic value were equally at the core of her performances.57 Isadora Duncan saw in the ideal form of dance the harmony in the “natural language” of the body that becomes the movement of the body. She defined “natural” as beautiful, a beauty projecting perfect harmony, symmetry, strength and health,58 very similarly to the standards sought in the festivals under discussion. Duncan performed and lived in Europe, including Greece in 1903,59 before and after the First World War, before and during the time of the Lyceum festivities. Her influence was heavy upon the upper middle class milieu that constituted the festivals organizing committee and to those women, like Parren, who wished to create a public space for women’s social activities and emancipation. The beauty standard projected through the Lyceum festivals wasn’t just physical or external but to a great extent internal, a reflection of the inner “natural” self. The beauty of the Greek girls especially of those coming from the countryside was considered natural both because these women lived by nature and because they were members of the Greek race and parts of its landscape. In addition to the country girls, the educated urban, upper class ladies who had the privilege of education and culture contributed their “fine

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touch” in order to place the link between contemporary dances and ancient performances in bold relief and this contribution justified their input to their country’s wellbeing and the national causes. The dominant ideology of the time was the so called Great Idea (Megali Idea). According to the Greek politician Kolettis who had first expressed a seemingly “classic exposition” of the Great Idea, it was based on the notion of the “civilising mission” of the Greeks in the Balkan Peninsula. This idea envisaged the liberation of unredeemed Greeks and was dear to the majority of the Greek population, men as well as women. Such idealisation was used in order to provide an alibi for the desired expansion of the Greek state, northward and southward to the islands.60 Bearing in mind the close affiliation of nationalist projects in Greece with the Great Idea, it is hardly surprising that the Lyceum activities were fully endorsed by members of the political elite and the Athenian public, while the contemporary press praised its contribution to the implementation of the Great Idea through the preservation of Greek tradition and the promotion of nationalist values.61 This effort was clearly recognized and in many press reports, one can find hymns to the Lyceum ladies and their activities: Women are activated, the Greek woman entered the national scene and from the passive doll position she used to hold so far in society, the Athenian lady at least, wishes to contribute her equal share in the struggle for national existence and be proud of it.62

It is an historical commonplace that at key moments of formation and unrest, nationalist discourses involve symbolic and image representations of a personified female nation due to the desire for national reproduction.63 Nature is gendered as female and is vested with women’s reproductive realities.Women were thought to be the guardians of tradition and the loci of national purity. Women’s bodies are appropriated by the nationalist discourse and practice and culturally idealised beauty is associated with the nation’s pride and self-assuredness for the future. In a revealing article about the nationalisation of female beauty in the Habsburg Empire, Alexander Maxwell presents cases on how “female beauty was a symbol of collective national worth and a source of collective national pride.”64 In a pseudoscientific sense, taxonomies of female beauty were created and even though it could be recognized that women from all races can be beautiful, it was suggested that the distinct character of their beauty depends on their nationality.65 Given such instances of aesthetic racial classification and the proliferation of ideas regarding classical beauty throughout the western world at the turn of

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the twentieth century, it is evident that the women of the Lyceum undertook the task to link Greek female beauty to historical aesthetic paradigms. Finally, the festival itself was used as a proof that contemporary young Greek women can be free-spirited as hundreds of them proceeded with courage in a full stadium during these public spectacles.66 Such a free spirit was sought after also in the political arena and the female activist field. The founder of the Lyceum and the inspirational source of the festivals, Kallirroi Parren, made clear that these graceful women who proudly displayed their beauty deserve every right to equal political participation and enfranchisement. Parren had expressed her admiration for the European states which had granted women the vote.67 She maintained that the proposed revision of the third article of the Constitution68 would offer women the opportunity to enjoy the same rights with every “adult, sane and honourable individual..., thus removing them from the ranks of minors, idiots and criminals.”69 She tried to substantiate her equal rights stance on the contribution of Greek women to their country not only in the present era but also throughout Greek history: “Prominent women in the past have contributed to the progress of Greek civilisation in a way similar to that of men, spreading the light of culture all over the world.”70 Equally obvious was her effort to include into this theoretical construct the “other” women, those who did not belong to the ranks of the upper, wealthy and educated urban segments of society: “They are not only the city women, the developed but also those living on the mountains, those living in poor huts that sang the songs of freedom to their sons and raised them with feelings of sacrifice for their country.”71 In her romantic vision of self-denial and sacrifice for the honour of the country, Parren urged politicians to grant women the right to vote at least in local elections, for they could successfully deal with public health issues and charity activities, that is with work “clearly and exclusively belonging to housewives and mothers, work in which women had shown unmistakable experience, dexterity and supremacy.”72 Parren and her spiritual offspring, the Lyceum of Greek Women, focused its attention on political emancipation as early as November 1918, when, following the suggestion of Parren, it established a legislative division which after 1922 was called the “political emancipation division.”73 Other members of the Lyceum of Greek Women shared the opinion of Parren on women’s enfranchisement. They stressed their belief that women should be educated and “ready to assist those men who are incapable of contributing to the well being of their family.”74 Education was central to these ladies’ self-identification as it was often used as a token of intellect. A major part of such education, the knowledge of

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classical art was used as an indication of value and worth for these women. Parren’s views reveal that the messianic perceptions dominating her early feminist declarations had not drastically changed in the interwar period. She was unquestionably expressing a trend of thought shared by men and women alike. The feminist Lyceum members and Parren were inspired by their international counterparts. During the avant-garde art movement at the beginning of the twentieth century many feminists turned to classicism as a viable form of aesthetic politics. For these activists, classicism functioned as a critique and alternative to the oppositional logic of the avant-garde and modernity at large. Classical art spoke to the creative tensions between the private and the public, the fallen and the pure, worldly praxis and the work of art. Specifically, though, feminists adopted and adapted the principles of classical ritual. For them, ritual explicitly united action and symbol, the body and its representation, and thus became an important tool with which to reconfigure the terms of culturally inscribed power. It… served as a... constant construction and reconstruction of those categories that govern the social.75

If this was a trend among western feminists of the turn of the century, for the feminists of the Lyceum the ideal of classicism had an additional role as the representation of a social, national and aesthetic integrity. Those Greek feminists who had espoused classicism and the aesthetics of ritual practices, just like their western counterparts, longed to experience the transformative nature of rites, which by no means entailed a radical obliteration of the established gendered system of power. The performances in those nation-celebrating festivals were fully justified as public events. In a critically formative period for the Greek state (with the Balkan wars changing its borders) as well as for the formation of an early European-like bourgeois class, the classical aesthetic could demarcate the romantic character of nationalism, provide the sense of continuity and belonging necessary for the citizens of the newly integrated Greek state and at the same time put the women of the group in a subjectivization process that would provide them with a novel identity and re-shape their place in society. Their urge to make women visible in a firm, significant, public way through these performances can also mean the recognition of the value of an integrated community rather than mere individuality and the perception of the nation as the collective amalgamation of diverse desires.76 All rituals are inflamed by passion but the passion evident in those festivities aspires to fill with passion the souls of the Greeks as members of a wider collective unfolding between the past and the present. In this union, the

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role of women is indispensable as future mothers and nurturers of the youth but also as agents of the aesthetic idea that ostensibly represents the collective: beauty and harmony. As suggested by Harrison, the performers of a ritual do not simply “embody” an idea, they also create it in the process. From the performance springs the personification.77 Just like those rituals which acquire meaning and social power collectively, the projected ideal of beauty here is also collectively established. It is a beauty standard that emerges as self-evident to the spectators. All the reports describe the aesthetic value of the event and the beauty of the ladies in similar terms and metaphors. This reveals the collective formulation and acceptance of the beauty ideal of “greekness” through the projection of elementary forces that seem to return anew. This beauty ideal is perceived as powerful and vigorous, full with intensity and radiating with energy coming from inside the body as well as from its form and shape. Such beauty is not centred on a bluntly sensual basis but it is remote and disciplined. The symbolic distance revamps the female performers as aesthetic icons and images but also places them at the core of public life. The publication of the Ladies’ Journal, the foundation of the Lyceum and the organisation of the festivals all take place within a process of identity definition, re-definition and empowerment that does not involve only individual subjects but a wide array of social relations and structures. Within this array the identity of the Lyceum and what its membership meant was in a fluid state for the first years; nevertheless, two constant areas of identification were women’s progress and the perpetuation of national ideals and traditions.78 At the end of the interwar period, the Lyceum began to face financial difficulties.79 As a result of the destructive war of 1922 and the decline of the Great Idea, the festival gradually lost its popularity and the Lyceum a considerable source of income. Throughout its long existence, its interests were differentiated according to national and international political circumstances. Therefore, some departments were weakened or strengthened accordingly. In any case, it seems that, towards the beginning of the 1930s the Lyceum’s concerns for female political emancipation were overridden by its activities for the preservation of Greek folk culture. Such an emphasis, together with its politically conservative make-up,80 allowed the Lyceum to continue its operation during the ultranationalist, authoritative Metaxas dictatorial regime. In conclusion, the Lyceum of Greek Women had, in addition to its feminist objectives, the task of serving national interests “in favour of women, the family, the race and the nation.”81 In that respect, the performances were

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deemed as “...coming from the inner depths of the race, [being] the harmonious exhibit of the most beautiful and graceful of all exercises, the one that is best combined with the bodily and psychic health.”82 It appears as there was no noticeable tension between Parren’s emancipatory project and her ideals about female bodily culture (including conformity and purity). As Fournaraki suggested, after 1897, Parren developed a broadly speaking “regenerative” female mission in the public space, led by women of the middle- and upper- social strata: it fell to their lot to reactivate the nation and to shape the coming generations with the “vital power” of “Hellenism”, which, in Parren’s view, had references to the ancient Greek past and ideal. This “regenerative” mission had motherhood in its core.83 Since motherhood was demarcated as a “collective duty and service towards the nation-state... a claim to citizenship was justified on behalf of women, presupposing full possession of civil and social rights.”84 The liberating project was underway but conformity to the nationalist goals of a maternal role was reckoned as a requirement. The re-enactment of the ancient rituals most of which had a symbolic, transformative power in antiquity, illustrates the Lyceum women’s desire to acquire new, public roles in Greek society through their own historical heritage. The performers under study stepped with one foot into the past and with the other into the present. The heritage of classical beauty is considered to provide these girls with a most valuable wealth for the future. The Greek culture is thought to be durable but also capable of renovation. Past traditions enter the present and permeate it with refreshed vigour and beauty.85 According to Dimitris Tziovas, a number of approaches to the Greek past include a romantic one which predisposes the past in organic continuity with living present suggesting that relics of the past can be traced in modern cultural phenomena as well an aesthetic modernist approach which accepts the presence of the past in the present not merely in a historical analogy but rather as an aesthetic continuity. This last stance is associated with the search for an archetype, an abstract quality that constitutes a source of rejuvenation through time.86 The adoption of such a quest for an archetypical “greekness” in an aesthetic sense characterises the modernist perspective of Parren and other Lyceum women. It was thought to be the role of these women, who constitute not only a social but also a cultural elite, to bridge the gap between the past and the present, to prove that the seed of ancient culture was not dead and in the early twentieth century Greece it found fertile ground in the bodies of these young ladies to flourish and be born anew.

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Selection for Mei Lanfang’s Performances in Japan (1919), the United States (1930) and the Soviet Union (1935).” European Journal of East Asian Studies 6, no. 1 (2007): 75-102. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina. “The Making of a Modern Female Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Interwar Britain.” Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 299–317.

Anonymous sources “Ǿ ȝİȖȐȜȘ EȠȡIJȒ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ İȚȢ IJȠ ȈIJȐįȚȠȞ” [“ȉhe Great Festival of the Lyceum in the Stadium.”] Efimeris ton Kyrion 28, no. 1051 (1914): 2568. “ȀĮIJĮıIJĮIJȚțȩȞ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ” [“The Statute of the Lyceum of Greek Women.”] Efimeris ton Kyrion, 25, no. 1002 (1911): 1556-8. “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ Įʌȩ IJĮȢ ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȐȢ ǼijȘȝİȡȓįĮȢ įȚĮ IJȠȣȢ ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪȢ ȋȠȡȠȪȢ” [“Reports from the Greek Press on the Greek Dances.”] Efimeris ton Kyrion 25, no. 1004-5 (1911): 1587-1612. Additionally, I have used for this chapter a number of anonymous (and a few signed) contemporary, early twentieth century, press reports (from newspapers such as Esperini, Efimeris tou Koromila, Empros, Kairoi, Chronos, Astrapi, Patris, Estia, Script, Nea Imera, Vradyni) quoted in the Efimeris ton Kyrion and other, secondary sources. They are listed in the Notes section below with title and/or date information, when available.

Notes 1

Eleni Varika, Ǿ EȟȑȖİȡıȘ IJȦȞ KȣȡȚȫȞ. Ǿ īȑȞİıȘ ȝȚĮȢ ĭİȝȚȞȚıIJȚțȒȢ ȈȣȞİȓįȘıȘȢ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ, 1833-1907 [The Ladies’ Revolt. The Birth of a Feminist Consciousness in Greece, 1822-1907] (Athens: Historical Archive of the Commercial Bank of Greece, 1987), 201-10; Sasa Moschou-Sakorrafou, IıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȠȣ ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪ ĭİȝȚȞȚıIJȚțȠȪ ȀȚȞȒȝĮIJȠȢ [History of the Greek Feminist Movement] (Athens: Private publication, 1990), 94-5; Koula Xiradaki, To ĭİȝȚȞȚıIJȚțȩ ȀȓȞȘȝĮ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ. ȆȡȦIJȠʌȩȡİȢ EȜȜȘȞȓįİȢ (1830-1936) [The Feminist Movement in Greece. Pioneer Greek Women (1830-1936)] (Athens: Glaros, 1988), 56-7. 2 Eleni Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚȠ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ, 1911-1991 [The Lyceum of Greek Women, 1911-1991] (Athens: Lykeio ton Ellinidon, 1993), 24-5. 3 “ȀĮIJĮıIJĮIJȚțȩȞ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ” [“The Statute of the Lyceum of Greek Women”] Efimeris ton Kyrion, 25, no. 1002 (1911): 1556. 4 Ibid, 1556-8. 5 More than a dozen such events during the interwar period were planned and prepared either single-handedly by the Lyceum members or at the request of third parties, at times associated with Parren’s pro-monarchist, conservative political

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affiliations (Eleni Fournaraki, “Bodies that Differ: Mid- and Upper-Class Women and the Quest for ‘Greekness’ in Female Bodily Culture (1896–1940),” The International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 12 (2010): 2071, 2077-2078). 6 Fournaraki, “Bodies that Differ”. 7 Fournaraki, “Bodies that Differ,” 2065-6. 8 Ibid, 2076. 9 Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚo, lists a number of contemporary press reports on the first annual festival of the Lyceum in September 1911. 10 Fournaraki, “Bodies that Differ,” 2073-2074. 11 Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚo, 32-38. 12 Kallirroi Parren, ȁȠȖȠįȠıȓĮ IJȦȞ ǻȡĮıIJȘȡȚȠIJȒIJȦȞ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ, 1911 [Report on the Activities of the Lyceum of Greek Women, 1911] (Athens 1912), quoted in Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚo, 51. 13 N. Spandonis, “ȅȚ İȜȜȘȞȚțȠȓ ȤȠȡȠȓ” [“Greek dances”], from the daily Ǽsperini, quoted in Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚo, 52. 14 “To ȁȪțİȚȠȞ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ. Ǿ ȆȡȩȠįȠȢ IJȠȣ ĭİȝȚȞȚıȝȠȪ” [“The Lyceum of Greek Women. The Progress of Feminism,”] from the Efimeris tou Koromila, quoted in Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚo, 48. 15 “OȚ EȜȜȘȞȚțȠȓ XȠȡȠȓ” [“The Greek Dances,”] originally published in the newspaper Kairoi, quoted in “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ Įʌȩ IJĮȢ ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȐȢ ǼijȘȝİȡȓįĮȢ įȚĮ IJȠȣȢ ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪȢ ȋȠȡȠȪȢ” [“Reports from the Greek Press on the Greek Dances,”] Efimeris ton Kyrion 25, no. 1004-5 (1911): 1588. 16 Spyros Melas, “ǹȞșİıIJȒȡȚĮ” [“Blooming Festival,”] from Chronos newspaper, quoted in “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ,” 1588. 17 Reported in an anonymous, untitled piece from the newspaper Kairoi, quoted in “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ,” 1612. 18 From the early 1830s onwards, the development of Greek national identity was heavily influenced by the need to answer Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer’s theory. He had claimed that the inhabitants of contemporary Greece had no links with the ancient Greeks and that they were descendants of Slavs. Many scholars, both Greeks and foreigners, attempted to challenge Fallmerayer and prove the continuity between different periods of Greek history (Eleni Varikas, “Gender and National Identity in Fin de Siécle Greece,” Gender and History 5, no. 2 (1993): 270). For a detailed discussion of Fallmerayer’s study and its effect on contemporary Greek thought, see GiorgosVeloudis, O Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer țĮȚ Ș īȑȞİıȘ IJȠȣ ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪ ǿıIJȠȡȚıȝȠȪ [Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer and the Birth of Greek Historicism] (Athens: Mnimon, 1982). 19 “ǹʌȩ IJȘȞ EȠȡIJȒ IJȠȣ ȈIJĮįȓȠȣ” [“At the Festival in the Stadium,”] from Kairoi, quoted in Efimeris ton Kyrion 28, no. 1053 (1914): 2594-7. 20 “Ǿ ȝİȖȐȜȘ EȠȡIJȒ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ İȚȢ IJȠ ȈIJȐįȚȠȞ” [“ȉhe Great Festival of the Lyceum in the Stadium,”] Efimeris ton Kyrion 28, no. 1051 (1914): 2568. 21 Eleni I. Siphnaiou, “Ǿ ǼȠȡIJȒ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ ıIJȠ ȈIJȐįȚȠ” [“The Festival of the Lyceum of Greek Women at the Stadium,”] Ellinis 7, no. 5 (1927): 108-109. 22 Kallirroi Parren, “ȅ ȋȠȡȩȢ İȚȢ IJȠ ȈIJȐįȚȠȞ” [“The Dance at the Stadium,”] Efimeris ton Kyrion 28, no. 1053 (1914): 2586.

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“ȉĮ ǹȞșİıIJȒȡȚĮ İȚȢ IJȠ ǽȐʌʌİȚȠȞ” [“The Blooming Festival in the Zappeion,”] from the newspaper Empros, as quoted in “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ,” 1610. 24 For women’s public performances in the Caribbean, see Belinda Edmondson, “Public Spectacles: Caribbean Women and the Politics of Public Performance,” Small Axe 13 (2003): 2-3. 25 N. Spandonis, “ǼșȞȚțȒȢ ǼʌȚȕȠȜȒȢ” [“About National Might,”] from the newspaper Astrapi, quoted in “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ,” 1591. 26 Athina Gaitanou-Gianniou, “ȂȚĮ īȚȠȡIJȒ ıIJȠ ȈIJȐįȚȠ” [“A Festival in the Stadium,”] Ellinis 5, no. 5 (1925): 101-3. 27 N. Spandonis, “ǹʌȩ IJĮ ǹȞșİıIJȒȡȚĮ” [“At the Blooming Festival,”] from Astrapi, quoted in “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ,” 1598. 28 Ibid. 29 “ǼȟĮijȞȚțȩȢ dzȤȠȢ ĭȜȠȖȑȡĮȢ İȚȢ IJȘȞ ȍȡĮȓĮȞ ȀȠıȝȚțȒȞ ȈȣȖțȑȞIJȡȦıȚȞ” [“A Sudden Sound of a Flute in the Nice, Popular Gathering,”] originally published in the newspaper Patris, quoted in “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ,” 1605. 30 Antonis Glytzouris, “‘Resurrecting’ Ancient Bodies: The Tragic Chorus in Prometheus Bound and Suppliant Women at the Delphic Festivals in 1927 and 1930,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 12 (2010): 209597. 31 Nikos Panayotopoulos, “On Greek Photography: Eurocentrism, Cultural Colonialism and the Construction of Mythic Classical Greece,” Third Text 23, no. 2 (2009): 184. 32 Ibid, 184-5. 33 Parren, “ȅ ȋȠȡȩȢ,” 2585. 34 Athinaios, “TȠ ȉıİȝʌȑȡȚ” [“The Headscarf,”] Empros, May 27, 1925, 1. 35 “H ȆĮȡȑȜĮıȚȢ IJȦȞ ȀĮȞȘijȩȡȦȞ” [“The Ȃarch of the Basket-Carriers,”] from Patris, quoted in Efimeris ton Kyrion 28, no. 1053 (1914): 2598-9. 36 “ȊʌȑȡȠȤȠȢ ǹȞĮʌĮȡȐıIJĮıȚȢ” [“A Wonderful Representation,”] from the newspaper Script, quoted in Efimeris ton Kyrion 28, no. 1053 (1914): 2594. 37 Maria Kyriakidou, “The ‘Power of Beauty’: Promoting Gender Stereotypes in Interwar Greece,” Women in Society 3 (2012): 28-38. 38 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “The Making of a Modern Female Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Interwar Britain,” Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 304. 39 “ȅȞİȚȡȫįȘȢ İȠȡIJȒ” [“ǹ marvelous festival,”] from the daily Nea Imera, quoted in Efimeris ton Kyrion 28, no. 1052 (1914): 2575. 40 “Ǿ ȤșİıȚȞȒ IJİȜİIJȒ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ İȚȢ IJȠ ȈIJȐįȚȠȞ” [“Yesterday’s festival by the Lyceum of Greek Women in the Stadium,”] Empros, May 25, 1925: 1. 41 Pavlos Nirvanas, “ȉȚȝȒ İȚȢ IJĮȢ īȣȞĮȓțĮȢ” [“Honour to Women,”] from the newspaper Estia, quoted in Efimeris ton Kyrion 28, no. 1052 (1914): 2575. 42 Efi Avdela and Angelika Psarra, “Engendering ‘Greekness’: Women’s Emancipation and Irredentist Politics in Nineteenth-Century Greece,” Mediterranean Historical Review 20, no. 1 (2005): 73. 43 Dimitris Damaskos, “The Uses of Antiquity in Photographs by Nelly: Imported Modernism and Home-Grown Ancestor Worship in Interwar Greece,” in A

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Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece, ed. Dimitris Damaskos and Dimitris Plantzos (Athens: Benaki Museum, 3rd Supplement, 2008), 331-2. 44 Avdela and Psarra, “Engendering ‘Greekness’,” 74-75. 45 Kallirroi Parren, ȁȠȖȠįȠıȓĮ IJȦȞ ǻȡĮıIJȘȡȚȠIJȒIJȦȞ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ, 1925 [Report on the Activities of the Lyceum of Greek Women, 1925] (Athens 1926), quoted in Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚo, 160. 46 Antonis Danos, “The Culmination of Aesthetic and Artistic Discourse in Nineteenth-century Greece: Periklis Yannopoulos and Nikolaos Gyzis,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20, no. 1 (2002): 75-112. 47 Pericles Yannopoulos, DZʌĮȞIJĮ [The complete works,] 6th ed. (Athens: Nea Thesis, 1993), 49. 48 Ibid, 155 (emphasis in the original). 49 Danos, “Aesthetic and Artistic Discourse”. 50 Pantelis Michelakis, “The Establishment of Official Theater Festivals, Total Works of Art, and the Revival of Greek Tragedy on the Modern Stage,” Cultural Critique 74 (2010): 149-163. 51 Glytzouris, “‘Resurrecting’ Ancient Bodies,” 2095. 52 Ibid, 2106. 53 Anonymous, untitled report in the daily Vradyni, May 4, 1930, quoted in Glytzouris, “‘Resurrecting’ Ancient Bodies,” 2117. 54 Eleftheria Ioannidou, “Toward a National Heterotopia: Ancient Theaters and the Cultural Politics of Performing Ancient Drama in Modern Greece,” Comparative Drama 44-45, no. 4-1(2011): 385-403. 55 Lambrini Kouzeli, “ǹʌȠȝȞȘȝȠȞİȪȝĮIJĮ. ǼȪĮ ȈȚțİȜȚĮȞȠȪ. ǼȡȦIJİȪIJȘțİ īȣȞĮȓțİȢ, ȆĮȞIJȡİȪIJȘțİ IJȠȞ ȆȠȚȘIJȒ” [“Memoirs. Eva Sikelianou. Fell in Love with Women, Got Married to the Poet,”] To Vima, October 17, 2010, accessed August 1, 2012 http://www.tovima.gr/books-ideas/article/?aid=361260 56 Patricia Vertinsky, “Isadora Goes to Europe as the ‘Muse of Modernism’: Modern Dance, Gender, and the Active Female Body,” Journal of Sport History 37, no. 1 (2010): 21. 57 Ibid, 22-34. 58 Melissa Ragona, “Ecstasy, Primitivism, Modernity: Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman,” American Studies 35, no. 1 (1994): 48, 53. 59 Ibid, 51. 60 Theodore George Tatsios, The Megali Idea and the Greek-Turkish War of 1897: The Impact of the Cretan Problem on Greek Irredentism, 1866-1897, (Boulder: East European Monographs; Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1984), 416; Konstantinos Tsoukalas, EȟȐȡIJȘıȘ țĮȚ ǹȞĮʌĮȡĮȖȦȖȒ. ȅ ȀȠȚȞȦȞȚțȩȢ ȇȩȜȠȢ IJȦȞ ǼțʌĮȚįİȣIJȚțȫȞ ȂȘȤĮȞȚıȝȫȞ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ (1830-1922) [Dependence and Reproduction. The Social Role of Educational Mechanisms in Greece (18301922)] (Athens: Themelio, 1987), 26-8. 61 It was actually maintained that the Lyceum “directed the public’s attention to a... nationalist attitude” (Kallirroi Parren, ȁȠȖȠįȠıȓĮ IJȦȞ ǻȡĮıIJȘȡȚȠIJȒIJȦȞ IJȠȣ ȁȣțİȓȠȣ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ, 1916 [Report on the ǹctivities of the Lyceum of Greek Women, 1916,] (Athens 1917), quoted in Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚo, 78).

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Anonymous, untitled report in the daily Esperini, quoted in “ȋȡȠȞȠȖȡĮijȒȝĮIJĮ,” 1589. 63 Barbara Einhorn, “Insiders and Outsiders: Within and Ǻeyond the Gendered Nation,” in Handbook of Gender and Women's Studies, ed. by Kathy Davis et al. (London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2006), 196-214, accessed 7 April 2010, doi: 10.4135/9781848608023.n12. 64 Alexander Maxwell, “Nationalizing Sexuality: Sexual Stereotypes in the Habsburg Empire,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 3 (2005): 273. 65 Ibid, 277-8. 66 Gaitanou-Gianniou, “MȚĮ īȚȠȡIJȒ,” 101-103. 67 For Parren’s indirect claims to female suffrage, see Varika, Ǿ ǼȟȑȖİȡıȘ IJȦȞ ȀȣȡȚȫȞ, 259. 68 Article three of the Constitution of June 1911 determined that “all Greeks… have the same rights according to law”; see Government Gazette, June 1, 1911: 125, 533. 69 Kallirroi Parren in her introductory speech in Athens for the opening of the First National Women’s Congress in April 1921, quoted in Efi Avdela and Angelika Psarra, O ĭİȝȚȞȚıȝȩȢ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ IJȠȣ ȂİıȠʌȠȜȑȝȠȣ. ȂȚĮ ǹȞșȠȜȠȖȓĮ [Feminism in Interwar Greece. An Anthology] (Athens: Gnosi Publications, 1985), 438. 70 Ibid, 434. 71 Ibid, 440. 72 Ibid, 438. 73 This division had fallen into disuse by 1926. In the 1920s and 1930s novel Greek feminist groups emerged under the influence of international movements, some of which espoused radical ideology. Within this context, Parren apparently feared that many women could eventually emerge as politically radical and vote for antimonarchist parties. 74 Maria M. Dekaristou, “ȋİȚȡĮijȑIJȘıȚȢ” [“Emancipation,”] Eva Nikitria 2, no. 10-12 (1922): 10-2. 75 Edward P. Comentale, “Thesmophoria: Suffragettes, Sympathetic Magic, and H.D.’s Ritual Poetics,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 472-3. 76 For similar perceptions among the British feminists of that period, see Comentale, “Thesmophoria,” 480. 77 Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1913), 71. 78 Evdokia Giannati, Efimeris ton Kyrion (1887- 1917): Aspects and Negotiations of the Female Identity (M.A. Thesis, Aristotle University, 2010), accessed March 3, 2013 http://invenio.lib.auth.gr/record/125496/files/GRI-2011-6104.pdf? version=1. 79 Mpompou-Protopapa, To ȁȪțİȚo, 170. 80 In the 1920s and 1930s new feminist groups emerged under the influence of international movements, some of which espoused radical ideology. Within this context, the Lyceum’s conservative positions were denounced by radical groups as well as their individual counterparts. 81 Kallirroi Parren, “To ȁȪțİȚȠȞ IJȦȞ ǼȜȜȘȞȓįȦȞ” [“The Lyceum of Greek Women,”] Efimeris ton Kyrion 25, no. 1002 (1911): 1548.

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Parren, “ȅ ȋȠȡȩȢ,” 2586. Fournaraki, “Bodies that Differ,” 2056-7. 84 Ibid, 2057. 85 For an analogous case in interwar East Asia, see Catherine Yeh, “Refined Beauty, New Woman, Dynamic Heroine or Fighter for the Nation? Perceptions of China in the Programme Selection for Mei Lanfang’s Performances in Japan (1919), the United States (1930) and the Soviet Union (1935),” European Journal of East Asian Studies 6, no. 1 (2007): 75-102. 86 Dimitris Tziovas, “ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȩIJȘIJĮ țĮȚ īİȞȚȐ IJȠȣ ’30” [“Greekness and the ’30s Generation,”] Cogito 6 (2007): 7. 83

CHAPTER SIX APHRODITE’S HEIRS: BEAUTY AND WOMEN’S SUFFERING IN CYPRIOT PUBLIC SCULPTURE VICKY KARAISKOU AND ADRIENNE CHRISTIANSEN

Introduction Since ancient times Cyprus has connected its name with Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, vindicating the place of her birth. However, in the current Cypriot milieu, Cypriot women have ceased being Aphrodite’s heirs and instead seem to have become the daughters of Penelope and Antigone. Sculptors creating commemorative art have defined women’s existence, in both the (Greek) Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), as embodying the national traumas fabricated through the state’s intense political upheavals since the 1950s.1 Artistic representations repeatedly depict women fulfilling their roles through the act of mourning and wailing for their missing or dead husbands, sons, fathers and brothers. The perception of women’s beauty in Cyprus, thus, gradually acquired a moral dimension and resulted in being intimately connected to their suffering and endurance. Roland Barthes notes that the persistence of behaviour reveals its intentions.2 Drawing on the memorial sites in the Republic of Cyprus and in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, this chapter addresses several recurrent themes of female representations in public commemorative sculpture. The persistence of these themes suggests important relationships between women and national identities in the Cypriot imaginary. We argue that, for Greek Cypriot women, the exposure to suffering and the persistent “wound worn on the body politic” are inextricably tied to the morals of Orthodox Christian Church.3 The emergence of a new

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interpretation of beauty, although radically different from the ancient kálos in aesthetic terms, is regarded within Greek culture to be its natural evolution on a moral level. In reality, the issue of beauty as pure aesthetics is of no interest at all in Greek Cypriot memorials depicting women, and results only as a secondary, inevitable parameter of the new iconological types applied. In contrast, Turkish Cypriot women’s exposure to suffering and the persistence of this theme in commemorative art are inextricably linked to nation-building ideologies and the TRNC’s desire to justify its existence as a state. The chapter’s overarching claims are predicated on four subarguments: first that women’s bodies constitute “bodies of national resistance,”4 being the result of a disciplinary process through which they are moulded to fit the identity of “good ethnic subject[s]”5; secondly that within each ethnic group’s cultural milieu, the perception of women’s beauty came as a secondary consequence of a typology built and arrayed with national imperatives and the family’s key role in the nationalist ideology; thirdly that memorials, testifying to past wounds on the ‘national self’ legitimize the injury in present time, and thereby repeatedly characterize real women as suffering wives, daughters, sisters and, mainly, as mothers of the nation’s male defenders. On the other hand, the idealized female representations are limited to the personification of abstract concepts. Women’s depicted suffering serves to call the new nation into existence in the case of monuments in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and to reproduce the nation in the case of the monuments of the (Greek) Republic of Cyprus. The chapter first describes the ways that inter-communal conflicts, the resultant 1974 war, and the consequent division of the island cemented different cultural notions on both sides of the island. We continue by illuminating aspects of the cultural milieu that shaped women’s identities– and their aesthetic depictions–indicating how religious doctrines, patriarchal social structures, and nationalist ideologies served as pivotal components. The chapter follows with a description and analysis of the memorial sites in Cyprus that depict women and sustains that historical, cultural and political determinants have transformed Cyprus from the mythical birthplace of women’s beauty into the home of women’s suffering and despair.

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From Enosis/Taksim to the Constitutional Conflict and the 1974 Partition The contemporary seeds for Cyprus as a deeply divided society were planted in the 19th century and were reinforced by Greece’s irredentist policy during the same years, as well as the romantic goal of the Megali Idea (Great Idea).6 The identification of Cyprus with ellinikótita (greekness)–which includes the Greek-Orthodox ideals–culminated in the 1955-1959 National Organization of Cypriot Fighters’ (Ethniki Organosi Kiprion Agoniston or EOKA) guerrilla war against British authority. EOKA’s ultimate aim was to fulfil the Greek Cypriots’ goal of Enosis (formal union) with Greece. Concurrently, Turkey and Turkish Cypriots advocated a policy of partition known as Taksim. By 1960, Greek Cypriots successfully wrested control from Great Britain and won the country’s independence but did not fulfil their Enosis aim. Britain, Greece, and Turkey signed a “Treaty of Guarantee” insuring the independence of the new state and its territorial integrity. In so doing, the newly independent Republic of Cyprus and the three other countries agreed to relinquish their pursuits of either Enosis or Taksim policies. Many of the commemorative sculptures in southern Cyprus analyzed in this chapter concern battles and events that took place during the EOKA guerrilla war years. Between 1963 and 1967 new violence broke out following a constitutional crisis. Cyprus’ President, Archbishop Makarios, suggested thirteen revisions that would limit the political power of Turkish Cypriots who constituted only about 18% of the country’s population. Separate municipalities began to develop in Cyprus’ five main cities in response to the crisis.7 Intense inter-ethnic violence broke out, resulting in 420 dead Turkish Cypriots and more than 219 dead Greek Cypriots. Approximately 25,000 Turkish Cypriots withdrew into four defended enclaves during this time and many of them–out of fear–lived in tents, barns and caves.8 The commemorative art we consider from northern Cyprus reflects this time of uncertainty and violence. In 1967, a Greek military junta in Athens came to power and revitalized Greek Cypriots’ interest in Enosis. However, Archbishop Makarios, who had been the political leader of EOKA’s 1955-1959 struggles and an earlier advocate of Enosis with Greece was reluctant to commingle with the Greek dictatorship and he gradually abandoned Enosis as a goal of his administration. His policy change prompted the Greek Cypriot nationalists’–organized in the EOKA B group–coup against him on July 15, 1974, realised with the support of the Greek generals. Five days later, on claims of fulfilling their role as a guarantor power and

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protecting the Turkish Cypriot population from what they feared was potential genocide, 40,000 Turkish soldiers and paratroopers invaded Cyprus in a military campaign that the Turkish Armed Forces labelled “Operation Attila” as a codename and which Turkey later referred to as the “Cyprus Peace Operation.” Atrocities took place in both sides and led nearly one third of the total Cypriot population to flee their homes and become internally displaced:9 approximately 162,000 Greek Cypriots fled their homes in northern Cyprus and, vice versa, an estimated 50,000 Turkish Cypriots fled to or were forcibly moved to the north over the next twelve months. By the time a ceasefire was called on August 16, 1974, more than 6,000 Greek Cypriots and approximately 1,500 Turkish Cypriots had died; the Turkish Army occupied 36% of Cyprus’ territory and the island was partitioned into two ethnically homogenous zones.10 Both sides had large numbers of missing soldiers and citizens, an issue that would come to dominate the political scene in southern Cyprus for the next four decades. The November 1983 self-declaration of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus prompted the United Nations Security Council to pass Resolution 541, which described the TRNC’s declaration of independence as legally invalid. The Security Council went on to urge other member states to recognize only the Republic of Cyprus as valid authority on the island, which led to an international economic embargo against the TRNC. Turkey’s attempts to change the population ratio and political dynamics on the island by sending tens of thousands of Turkish mainlanders to Cyprus since the 1974 partition have led to bitterness on the part of Greek Cypriots.11 The depth of the political, social and cultural division in the island was verified in 2004 when Turkish Cypriots voted in favour of the Annan Peace Plan that would have reunited the island politically, while Greek Cypriots, already part of the EU, voted against it.

Reproducing cultural patterns The perpetuation of tradition, which is summarized in the reproduction of the past culture, constitutes a predominant characteristic in Cypriot society and a reference point for its political rhetoric. Greek Orthodox Cypriots, being the island’s majority population, shaped the dominant culture and perceived their heritage as the only legitimate national culture. This belief turned instrumental in setting the fundamental presuppositions of their national self-image.12 Cultural patterns for the Turkish Cypriot population, on the other hand, reflected changing (and sometimes conflicting) Turkish norms. For

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example, traditional social and familial relations that prevailed throughout the Ottoman Empire mostly continued through the contemporary era, but newer norms, dating to 1923 with the birth of the modern Turkish state, also began to arise. Ultimately, the Turkish Cypriots did adopt the sweeping modern social and political reforms prompted by Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, first president of the Republic of Turkey.13 Initially, though, the Muslim Cypriot community debated the progressive reforms advocated by Kemalists, especially secularism and reforms to family law and use of alcohol.14 Owing to the laïcité-style secularism that is a foundation of Kemalism, Turkish Cypriots to this day tend to have somewhat distant relationship to Islam. Other Kemalist themes have come to Cyprus through explicit foreign policy decisions by the Turkish government.15 Whether attributed to Ottoman or Kemalist influences, Turkish Cypriot culture is patriarchal and highly nationalistic. National identities based on the continuity of what is experienced as the symbolic value of national culture are strongly linked to ideas of purity and normalization of the “correct” way to be a member of the nation.16 Concomitantly, they constitute a habitus closely linked to morals and defined by positive values and meticulously selective procedures of remembrance; and they fabricate mutual dependencies that stress sameness and discourage deviation.

Suffering is Divine The Church played a crucial role in boosting nationalist tendencies in the case of the Greek Orthodox Republic of Cyprus.17 The element of selfrenunciation that the Christian faith advocates as fundamental in achieving personal spiritual fulfillment had direct and paramount impact on the perception of the body and on the concept of death. Suffering of flesh and soul was promoted as the indispensible credential for salvation and the only appropriate behaviour to be worthy of Christ’s Passion and His utmost sacrifice. Concurrently, Christians’ focus on the soul and contempt for the earthly body proved to be impressively compatible with Plato’s theories on the immortality of the soul and the withdrawal from bodily living.18 These ideas became inextricably associated with the heroic archetypes that propagate sacrificial death. As a consequence, the disciplined body that renounces all pleasures turned into a controlled and canonized vehicle of the Divine. Equating national identity with the Orthodox identity, or vice versa, came as the natural evolution of the role the Orthodox Church played in preserving tradition–that is, Greek language and creed–in both Cypriot and

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Greek history. The rebirth or the salvation of the nation replicated the religious cycles of the Passion of Christ and His resurrection. Rosenberg notes that since the drama of salvation in the Christian tradition legitimized individual personal dramas, man has claimed his right “to transcend himself morally.”19 In the 2nd-3rd centuries A.D., Tertullian in his Ad martyras (To the martyrs) referring to Christians and arguing about martyrdom fear noted: [T]he honour and glory to gain will be even greater if their bodies succumb to the pain while they will not moan of pain. If […] guns, the fire of torment and the cross do not frighten us […] I can assure you that martyrdom is nothing compared to the splendour of God’s glory and the heavenly reward.20

Following this line of argument, sacrificial death became a main virtue and the subject of glorification. Sacrificial death also became ‘innocent’, aligned as it was with the nationalist need to exclude culpability or any sense of misdeed from the actions of its ethnic members. On the other hand, in the Greek cultural milieu sacrificial heroic death is closely associated with sanctity. Since the 12th century the iconic archetype of the Greek hero Digenis Akritas (the guard of the borders) has been associated in popular memory with saints such as St. George or St. Dimitrios creating a canonized version as the “young warrior saint.”21 The impact of Digenis Akritas’ myth on the Cypriot society is evident both by the frequent mentioning of Cyprus as Akritikí Megalónisos (The Big Island on the Border)–which identifies the Greek Cypriot nation to the heroic pattern altogether–and by the nickname of the iconic figure of EOKA 1955-59 struggle, General Georgios Grivas, as Grivas Digenis. Consequently, the death of Greek Cypriot men during the inter-ethnic and inter-communal fights since the 1950s was perceived as sacred death. That notion acquired potent social and cultural value and had a direct effect on women in their identities as mothers, wives, daughters and sisters: Their body became the carrier of their “emotional attitudes”22 and was “normalized”–in the ways it was handled/used, appeared and disposed– under its disciplinary power.23 Hence, the obligation to mourn constitutes a heavily moral nationalist order as it acknowledges men’s action of sacrifice and their status as sacrosanct heroes, in line with the Orthodox tradition.

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Beautiful suffering bodies Any discourse on the body brings into the picture the concept of beauty. Over time in Western culture, the ancient tendency to value the human body and prioritize “care of the self” shifted to a preoccupation with the “purity” of the body.24 Especially in the Greek cultural milieu this transformation occurred as a result of the identification of ancient Greek thought with Christian doctrines, in line with the fundamental principle of Greek and Greek Cypriot nationalism and the ‘continuity’ of greekness in time. The perishable nature of all material things included the body, which ceased to be the mirror of the divine perfection and, in any event, the transient reality diminished in importance compared to the transcendent eternity.25 By associating the body with original sin, the senses were condemned as a source of danger for the soul. According to Saint Augustine, terrestrial beauty (sensual, physical traits) was imputed as the most perilous of the temptations.26 In St. Thomas Aquinas’ writings it took a decisive transcendental nature by acquainting--centuries later--the preexisting platonic contention that spiritual things were degraded when taking corporeal shape. As Sir Kenneth Clark puts it “[w]hile the Greek nude began with the heroic body proudly displaying itself on the palestra, the Christian nude began with the huddled body cowering in consciousness of sin.”27 Plato’s and Plotinus’ theories defining goodness, beauty, wisdom and truth as primarily attributes of the divine experienced an uncomfortable collision with Christianity which considered the beautiful, but usually naked, pagan idols as the abode of devils and thus perilous to morals.28 That cultural reversal directly affected the interpretation of beauty in Christian Church and was indicatively described in the lines of Saint Augustine during the 4th and 5th centuries: “In order to support your faith Christ was deformed while remaining eternally handsome […]. This is His power: His deformation makes you beautiful. Had He not consented to be deformed, you would have never regained your lost divine nature. Let’s go down this road and we will reach insight; when we arrive there, we will see our likeness with God”29

Hence, the aforementioned formulations rendered the body a malleable instrument while the eradication of the image of bodily beauty turned suffering into a “sort of ideograph.”30 That ideograph, in the case of Cypriot memorials, was formulated by the stylized types women’s identities created.

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Victimhood, martyrdom and trauma According to LaCapra “‘[v]ictim’ is not a psychological category. It is, in variable ways, a social, political, and ethical category.”31 In Cyprus’ case, the Greek Cypriot southern part of the island exemplifies what LaCapra defines as a structural rather than an historic trauma.32 Greek Cypriots stoke their sense of individual and ethnic victimhood and thereby incorporate their woundedness into the ethnic body and vice versa. Building structural upon historical trauma legitimizes both collective and personal memory while politicizing the symbolic value of death. The consensus ideology of the prolonged wound in southern Cyprus’ habitus is perceived as commensurate with the long suffering of Christian saints. It also alludes to the hostile ‘other’–the Turkish Cypriot inhabitants of the northern part of the island–whilst institutionalizes it as proof of their true victimhood.33 Since dead and missing persons are symbols of loss–on both individual and national levels–in the now, and symbols for national recovery in the future, they haunt present time by documenting the experience of injustice against the national body. The “wound culture”34 that arises from the experience of absence, loss, and from the “belated temporality of trauma”35 abets empathy and repetition, resulting in the mystification of historical events and consequently leading to nationalistic mythologies. The nationalist mythology and the prevailing ideological framework it generates also tend to promulgate sameness. The latter coordinates virtually heterogeneous groups and individuals behind a common set of demands36 and moulds social memory as an indispensible part of national identity, thereby providing the illusion that the past is revived in present time.37 The following analysis on the commemorative art of Cyprus–both in Greek Cypriot south and Turkish Cypriot north–demonstrates the direct effect of the aforementioned political, cultural and religious components of both traditions on the perceptions and, hence, depictions of women.

Mapping women’s identities in commemorative sculpture States exercise in multiple ways their roles as “powerful identifiers”38 because of the symbolic recourses they possess,39 and memorials constitute a very effective weapon in their effort to cement collective identities due to their visual elements. The almost six hundred memorials that exist in the southern Greek Cypriot Republic of Cyprus, apart from their role in the politics of remembrance, also constitute a powerful means of promoting and

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reflecting collective male and female identities.The vast majority of the commemorative sculptures are busts, statues and architectural complexes consecrated to individual Greek Cypriot men killed during the political inter-communal conflicts between the 1950s and the 1970s, and secondarily to Greeks who fought with them supporting the pursuit of union with Greece. The memorials are spread in an area of approximately five thousand seven hundred fifty square kilometres, or an average of almost one monument per ten square kilometres. In contrast, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, memorial sites tend to valorise group experiences such army units or communal activities such as nation building. Individual busts and statues in the TRNC are almost entirely devoted to memorializing three politicians: Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, TRNC President Rauf Denktaú, or the first vice-president of the Republic of Cyprus, Dr. FazÕl Küçük. Female presence is located in only a striking minority among the monuments. In sharp contrast to the individual valorisation articulated in memorials dedicated to men, monuments depicting women replicate their most traditional roles and mirror male identities, perpetuating a vicious cycle. Rather than commemorating actual women who lived and acted, sculptors (mostly male ones) attribute to them almost entirely inclusive identities. In the vast majority of southern Cypriot commemorative public art they depict symbolic female figures like Liberty, or mothers and wives who mourn and wail over dead male bodies. These women assume their roles through the importance of the dead, glorifying them or demonstrating perseverance in waiting for the return of “missing” male family members or their remains. Women, in their role as farmers, hold a distinct secondary position and share part of the visual connotations with the mourning mothers; that is, they bear aesthetic affinities with them. In both cases they constitute the end result of the disciplined bodies cast in self-renunciation and in the national cult. Even though they do not share the Greek Cypriot Orthodox culture, in the northern part of the island women are likewise depicted as mourning over dead male bodies, both in terms of their personal loss and in sync with nationalist ideologies of remembrance. Furthermore, they suffer privation and misery at the hands of Greek Cypriots. Unlike their Greek Cypriot counterparts, though, Turkish Cypriot women’s suffering is shown as playing a pivotal role in the history and development of the TRNC state. According to Eley “[v]aluing the family as the source of the nation’s continuity in time, nationalist ideologies have seen men as future martyrs and women as mothers.”40 Especially for Greek Cypriots, women became the symbols of absence and the embodiment of what LaCapra calls

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structural and historical trauma. They exist as performing bodies of victimhood asserting the national tragedy and preserving memory. The “closed home syndrome” Paul Sant Cassia refers to regarding the wives and mothers of the dead and missing in southern Cyprus,41 can be described as the ultimate proof of the powerful patriarchal social structures and how the concept of nation can be enacted as a natural extension of the family and kinship relations.42 Traditionally in Greek and Greek Cypriot culture, home is considered to be women’s only natural space. It is the centre of all family celebrations where the local community witnesses the virtues and worthiness of its female inhabitants judging by the way the home is kept and handled. The aforementioned syndrome symbolically reflects the only identity regarded as socially acceptable for women in mourning: in the same way they are expected to consume themselves in grieving and strictly refrain from social life, their home is expected to be “closed.” Women must abstain from any activity permitted to people who enjoy life. Whilst the conceptual framework of the heroic archetype excludes men from bereavement, loss is regarded as a wound to male pride–national pride included–generating responses of patriotism, bravery and duty. As Cynthia Enloe notes “nationalism has typically sprung from masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation and masculinised hope.”43 The female equivalent of honour, on the other hand, is implemented by mastering the distinct behaviours of obedience, family life and sexual innocence among which, according to Anthias, submission is the key concept.44 Their existence as the “correct” daughters, sisters, wives and mothers constitute a fundamental source of male pride. Bourdieu45 and Calhoun46 identify the words pride and honour, but there is a fine distinction between them in Mediterranean culture. Although both pride and honour are “symbolic capitals”47 and create social identity, pride applies mostly to men and is extroverted in the sense that it depends also on the actions of others and on external conditions. In contrast, the concept of honour applies mainly to women, is rather introverted and fabricated by the actions of its carrier. That very crucial distinction perpetuates women in the pattern of sinful Eve, who carries the sole responsibility for upsetting the social order. Men preserve their role as innocent victims of women’s disobedience and consequent moral failure. Men guard and control women’s purity because the female body risks social rejection, exclusion and staining the family’s honour.48 Since female deviances are regarded as threats to the survival of the community, “the heroic female” was moulded in the symbol of an asexual, idealized figure portrayed as mother of the heroes and of the

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nation.49 Through ensuring the purity of the “ethnic blood line,”50 women dignify their social role and become objects worthy of veneration. In his book Bodies of Evidence, Sant Cassia extensively analyses the national value of women dressed in black in southern Cyprus who perform vigils, protest, and who march all while holding photographs of their missing men. He compares them to contemporary Antigones consumed by the need to locate and bury their beloved ones, the “bodies of evidence” that symbolize the country’s tragedy. In turn, women’s bodies constitute “bodies of evidence,” too, through the way they present themselves socially.51 Clothes become their identifier or the intermediary between the privacy of the body and public space. In the same way that clothes of the dead and the missing are kept as “linking objects” according to Volkan, women’s clothes testify to their devotion to the highest sacred national symbols.52 In a traditional society like Cyprus, clothes are “important bearers of social status”53 and a signal that a woman participates in shared values, hence securing social coherence. Apparently, contemporary depictions of Cypriot women share with their ancient ancestors of the Aphrodite era the heavy, long cloths that wrap the body and confine it in its domestic space. However, the confined/closed female bodies in contemporary Cyprus are the result of different social ferments, and illustrate an eloquent analogy to the aforementioned “closed home syndrome.” Clothes also play an important social marking role for women in the TRNC. Kemalist reforms adopted in the 1920s were not limited to political matters, but also extended to religious administration and religious garb.54 President Atatürk encouraged Turkish men to stop wearing the fez and women to stop wearing the veil because these signified religious affiliations that were at odds with his secularist ideology. Today in Cyprus, one can distinguish between Turkish Cypriots and more recent Anatolian emigrants (“settlers”) because female emigrants tend to wear the head scarf typical of devout Islamic women.55 In contrast, almost all of the women depicted in the TRNC memorials wear modern, secular clothing consistent with Kemalist values. Atatürk’s reforms also aimed to improve women’s lives. However, those educational reforms meant “only to improve their contribution to the Republican patriarchy as better wives and mothers.”56 Thus, Kemalist ideologies shaped expectations of Turkish Cypriot women’s behaviors in ways roughly similar to how the Orthodox Church shaped expectations of Greek Cypriot women.

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Petrified women in Cyprus Living women Among the inclusive and symbolic female identities only a few monuments are dedicated to individual women who actually lived, either in Cyprus or in Turkey and in Greece. All of them comply with the prerequisite values that characterize the “good ethnic subject” or a good citizen. Efrosini Proestou’s memorial in Nicosia highlights her selfrenouncement in order to hide and save from death a group of twelve Greek Cypriot soldiers at Lapithos village. Nitsa Hatziyeorgiou’ bust commemorates her contribution to the national development, as does Ourania Kokkinou’s bust, situated in a high school yard in Nicosia, being also the first Cypriot female theologian. Athiná Dianellou’s and Eugenia Theodotou’s busts, situated at Nicosia’s Dianellio High School grounds, memorialize their social charity work. A sculpted relief is also dedicated to Sophia Vempo, the Greek singer who identified her voice with patriotic songs during the Second World War in Greece. Only one living woman has been commemorated in the memorial art in northern Cyprus. A bust of Zübeyde HanÕm, mother of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is located in a park in Kyrenia. Like many of the depictions of women in southern Cyprus’ commemorative art, her head is covered in a scarf, associating her with peasantry rather than religious piety. Unlike the women who are memorialized in southern Cyprus’ sculptures, Zübeyde HanÕm never lived in Cyprus and none of her accomplishments are noted at the memorial site except for her role as Atatürk’s mother.

Goddesses and sublime creatures The idealized allegoric female depictions referring to abstract concepts such as Liberty take after the aesthetic patterns of Greek antiquity in southern Cyprus, while in the northern Turkish Cypriot part they acquire a more feminine, contemporary hue. The reproduction of classic beauty in the Greek Cypriot environment is not the end result of a genuine artistic quest and interest, but reflects the intentional reference to the ancestral cultural roots in order to secure the nation’s ideological framework. The personification of the abstract concept of liberty in contemporary Greek Cypriot monuments corresponds to the tradition of personifying victory in Greek antiquity. Possibly this is the reason why there are many more such monuments in southern Cyprus than in the northern section, where only one statue outside Kyrenia depicts a woman leading the way to the future.

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On the other hand, in the Republic of Cyprus, Liberty often takes the form of the ancient goddess Athena intensifying the links between the ancient myths and the contemporary ethnic ones. In both parts of the island the intentionally vague identity of these representations permits their meaning to be malleable and hence compatible with national needs. Only two goddess statues in southern Cyprus are indifferent to Cyprus’ political or nationalist ideologies: an Artemis at Larnaca and an Athena in the Paliouriotissa area of Nicosia in her capacity as the goddess of wisdom. Athena, in her role as the symbol of war, demarcates two memorials that do advance nationalist ideas: one bust for the fighters of Kili village (Paphos district), and a statue for the EOKA 1955-59 dead in the Ayios Pavlos quarter (Nicosia) (Fig. 6-1). These two Athenas are exact copies of each other, made by the same artist. Strong necks support the goddesses’ heads. Their facial traits appear more masculine than feminine, despite their long hair and the female hidden curves emerging beneath the heavy long chiton of the second. Slight identity ambiguities and shifts can be further detected at the Ayios Pavlos memorial. In spite of using the most well-known hallmark of the goddess Athena–her helmet–the statue is explicitly identified as Liberty, while the bust at Kili village has no title and therefore her meaning is open to interpretation. The placement of the laurel wreath on the helmet in both cases is not a familiar aesthetic formulation or symbolism for Athena, but eloquently reflects the intentions of the sculpture’s commissioners. The placement of Athena’s statue at an Ayios Pavlos churchyard and the inscription on the low pedestal under her feet are in array with the pivotal concepts of Greek Cypriot nationalism and declare the devotion of the fighters to motherland (“Using our soul as a shield we safeguard the Greek soil, faithful to the oath for the motherland.”) Among the monuments that put forward idealized allegoric female patterns, the most sonorous one is the Liberty complex situated at the homonym square in the old city of Nicosia, across the headquarters of the Archbishopric and only metres away from the Green Line of partition (Fig. 6-2). The Liberty complex is composed on consecutive levels of platforms and forms a triangular synthesis where the main volume of the narration evolves at the base, around the mausoleum. Liberty’s figure is depicted according to the distinct classic aesthetics, in its fluidity of volumes and refinement of gestures. She stands still and imperious on a high pedestal on top of the construction. She holds part of her pleated himation around her left forearm, while pointing towards the sky with her right arm, thus constituting a sharp antithesis with the narrative realistic figures at the base. Liberty’s chiton and himation, along with her

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headdress, evoke direct connotations with the Greek primordial cultural traditions, whilst the ordinary clothing and features of the peasants below her bridge the past with the ephemeral present. The white marble of the construction underlines further the concepts of spiritual purity and eternity, as do the contrasts between Liberty’s expressionless, idealistic face and the faces of ordinary Cypriots which are sealed with traces of malaise. The viewer cannot escape noting the close proximity between the political Liberty monument–which illustrates the country’s hopes and aspirations–and the campus of the Greek Orthodox Archbishopric, one block away. The Orthodox Cypriot Church played a prominent role in Cypriot history especially during the years 1960 through 1977 when the roles of Archbishop and President of the Republic of Cyprus were held by the same person, Makarios III. A second personification of Liberty at a memorial dedicated to EOKA 1955-59 fighters at Larnaca (Fig. 6-3) replicates all the iconic features of the archaic kores and is the only one among the memorials of this category to be sculpted in marble. The absolute symmetry of the whole architectural construction contradicts the low relief on the dedicatory plaque of the pedestal. The succinct narration and the rather clumsy postures of the two depicted fighters contrast with Liberty’s features and attire: the stiffness and the rigid frontality of the kori; her verticality underlined by the stylized drapery of the long chiton; and her imposing presence on the high pedestal. Despite the predominant role she holds in the whole complex, her isolated presence in the middle of the square turns her into an ideogram that briefly asserts the ideological frame of greekness and draws attention to the figures of the two fighters. Two memorials for the dead and missing, one at Avgorou village (Ammochostos district) (Fig. 6-4) and a second at Larnaca dedicated to the Lisi dead and missing (Fig. 6-5), render the female figures more familiar compared to the aforementioned “Liberties” through the subtle differentiations of their clothes. Although they entirely lack any indication of who their identity might be, the statues confer the sense of a mundane existence. Their bodily postures and their gestures, especially the Lisioton statue at Larnaca, reveal their determined, aggressive intentions much more effectively than do the seriousness of their faces. On the other hand, the lack of any body embellishment cancels the mundane dimension of these young women. Their physical plainness validates them as transcendental symbols and protects them from the male viewers’ desire. Furthermore, the verticality and the vigilance of their bodies, the decisive positioning of their head, and the gaze of their eyes fixed beyond real time and space creates a diligent analogy with their original ancestors.

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Another memorial complex at Limassol city includes a woman in a highly androgynous manner (Fig. 6-6). The almost asexual faces of the two Athena monuments previously commented (Fig. 6-1) reoccur in this dead partisans’ memorial. The androgynous female figure, which holds a dead fighter, is crowned with a laurel wreath, the typical heroic symbol. The only element that indicates her femininity–apart of the renowned pieta pattern she replicates–is the archaic, long chiton and her headdress. Her muscular arms, strong hands, angular face, strong chin and cheekbones, and her voluminous body bear strong references to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Sibyls. A differing depiction of loss and mourning is represented in the memorial for the dead and missing in the Derynia village (Ammochostos district) (Fig. 6-7) during the 1974 Turkish invasion. Unique in its aesthetics complex, it utilizes a poetic manner that evokes memories of iconic classic masterpieces. The two female sculptures, the seated and standing one between the two parts of the backdrop, make visual allusions to the Hegeso tombstone’s figures and to the calm grandeur of the Parthenon pediment and frieze depictions. Despite their concrete presence framed in the void between the two pieces of the backdrop, the quick sketching of their bodies, the missing head of the one–in memory of the mutilated ancient statues–and the brief description of the second head direct the viewer’s attention to the body representing Derynia’s dead, which emerges through the volume of the backdrop. The viewer’s eye almost ignores the female figure that seems to float in an intangible existence and focuses instead on the young man who stretches his perfectly moulded limbs, thereby displaying the grace and harmony of his body. The lovely Liberty figure, 5 kilometres west of Kyrenia in the TRNC, stands alone among all the statues and memorial sites analysed in this chapter (Fig. 6-8). A modern woman, she memorializes no historic event and watches over no heroic, dying fighter. No dedicatory plaque adorns the site and so her message is malleable and open to interpretation although she holds symbols of liberty and peace; a flame in her right hand and a dove in her left. Unlike the heavily robed and shrouded figures in southern Cypriot commemorations, this Liberty’s sheer, flowing, and clinging dress highlights her slim body and full breasts. She looks upward and her face belies no suffering, perseverance or aggressiveness. Of all the memorial sites discussed here, this beautiful and sexual Liberty could easily be Aphrodite’s heir.

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Sorrowful mothers and persevering mothers of the nation The predominant role of women as mothers and their duty to offer their sons to the nation constitutes the most widespread of all the identities acquainted in the commemorative sculpture of both southern and northern Cyprus. Nevertheless, among the almost six hundred memorials in southern Cyprus, only twelve have mourning mothers as part of the total visual synthesis. Instead, the memorials focus on the heroic dead. In the north, three memorials show women mourning their dead martyrs. One monument in the southern part of Cyprus makes explicit references to women’s sacrificial actions for the motherland, the Aradippou village (Larnaca district) memorial (Fig. 6-9), dedicated to the Cypriot mother. In this case, the broken chains in the hands of the central figure convey a loud visual statement reinforcing her double identity as mother of the nation and of its fighters. The sublime and hence inaccessible prototype of the Mother of Christ, who obeyed her destiny to give birth to a son destined to sacrifice himself in order to save humanity, culminates the ties among family, the nation and the Christian doctrines of perseverance. At the same time the monument secures women’s conformity to the moral order and to the sacred security of family life, identifying in one compact frame women’s ethnic, social and private identities. Women’s capacity to endure combined with their mourning results in a conventional depiction, evident in memorials such as the aforementioned Cypriot mother of Aradippou village, and the memorial for the Mother of the dead and missing at Vrissoules village (Ammochostos district). These Cypriot mothers, eyewitnesses of the national tragedy, have abandoned the classical, detached dispositions we describe above and assumed more naturalistic poses. Women’s ancient attire has also been discarded in favour of the familiar, long, and thick villagers’ dresses, accompanied by the apron and the headscarf as further social indicators of her activities. Strangely, the statue of Kallipateira at Perivolia village (Larnaca district), although not part of the typical Cypriot mother’s commemoration pattern, shares identical physical traits with all of the figures of the Aradippou and Vrissoules memorials.57 The female figures of the aforementioned three memorials bear resemblances in gestures, postures, facial traits, expressions and attire with all the commemorated Cypriot mothers. All together, they constitute new, stylized and symbolic iconological types and, in this way, suffering constitutes an additional symbolic abbreviation of loss and absence. Despite the realistic traits of Cypriot mothers’ appearance that would imply a level of differentiation among them, all their facial features lack individuality. What links all the mother monuments is the imprint of

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sorrow on their wrinkled faces. What differentiates them is the level of that sorrow and the expressed emotions that in no way outshines the woman’s individual elements over her public identity. Passivity and silent endurance are the most common ways of rendering public the private pain of the loss. Even though the “wound culture” has seemingly turned into a national duty in southern Cyprus, exaggerated, loud, and desperate expressions of grief are extremely rare. The mother at the House of the Missing, at Pyrga village, (Larnaca district) (Fig. 6-10) constitutes the most indicative and unique case: She screams in pain and horror while crawling on the ground under the feet of the dead soldier (ostensibly her son) who hangs from a pole in the middle of the patio. Her impressively intense grief deforms her face and the diagonal positioning of the woman’s body echoes her despair on the surrounding walls. The apparent contradiction between the extent of loss, its symbolic promotion and the usually reserved form of mourning in southern Cyprus can be explained only within the existing ideological pattern of the heroic sacrifice. Given the sanctity of such a loss and the spiritual experience embodied in long-suffering and sacrifice, the violence and injustice the innocent male victim has endured are his credentials for becoming a hero. Within this framework, a violent revolt on part of the living and especially the mother–given her symbolic and actual social role–would mean abolishing or questioning the heroic archetype and would insult the very concept of the Passion and the endurance that Christ himself symbolizes. Much more acceptable are the respectable expressions of grief like that of the Nikitari mother (Nicosia district), offering with resignation the heroic wreath to the dead. Or the cubistic, massive, seated mother from Palehori Orinis village (Nicosia district) (Fig. 6-11), reminiscent of iconic Egyptian sculptures. The Palehori Orinis mother sculpture underlines her disconnection from the fact, almost her determination to act out her role as sacrificial mother. The inscription under her feet sounds like the voice of her son uttering the words: “Mother you breast fed me with fire turning my heart into a shining star.” A more realistic and persuasive expression of pain is depictedat the memorials of Tsadas (Paphos district) and Pyrga village (Larnaca district) (Fig. 6-12). In both cases, sorrow is apparent on the elder mothers’ faces and bodies that are abandoned in sobbing. These figures indeed provide to the viewer an instant glimpse of their private tragedy. The epitome of the Cypriot mother’s identity, though, is found at the memorial for the dead and missing at Latsia (Nicosia) (Fig. 6-13). The memorial brings together the distillate of the national symbols constructing a concise visual narration of the Greek Cypriot identity. A

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hexagonal marble pedestal mounted on a low base and delimited by an equal number of Doric-like columns carries four massive Cypriot women who share the weight of an extra size bronze torch on their backs. The women, all in typical peasant dresses, struggle under the weight of the torch, striving to balance it and safeguard its vivid flame. The six metopes between the Doric-like columns are decorated with low reliefs capturing iconic images of the Cypriot tragedy: wire fences; dead bodies; symbols of martyrdom; the idealized female figure of victory or motherland embracing the souls of her fighters; wailing women in front of a church; and soldiers at the peak of battle. Apart from the apparent physical weight the gigantic torch implies, its symbolic weight serves as an allegory of heroism and of the sacrifices required in order to ensure the historical continuity and the safety of the homeland. That sacrifice is mirrored on the bodies and faces of these women, and inextricably testifies to their role in the ethno-nationalistic rhetoric. Memorials in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus also pay homage to the suffering, peril, and sacrifices women have experienced. However, in contrast to the memorial sites in Greek Cyprus, memorials in the TRNC tend to use women’s suffering as a key component to narratives about the birth of the new “state.”58 Not surprisingly, the events leading to the development of the TRNC comprise a common theme in Turkish Cypriot memorials. After all, their successful 1974 military intervention has been repeatedly decried as an “illegal invasion” by Greek Cypriots and was condemned in multiple United Nations and Security Council resolutions. Moreover, the TRNC’s self-declaration of independence in 1983 was also deemed illegal by international governing bodies. To this day, 30 years after its self-declaration, the TRNC is still officially recognized by no country outside of Turkey. TRNC memorials, thus, tend to depict women’s sacrifices and suffering as the proximate cause of, or justification for, the 1974 military action and the 1983 self-declaration of statehood. The four-sided monument in the primary Nicosia roundabout tells the story of the TRNC utilizing iconic images. One scene depicts a mother, pieta-like, mourning her dead son who lies in her lap. Her husband stands stoically in the background. In a second scene on a different side of the memorial, Turkish soldiers stand and kneel in action. One surveys the terrain while another plants the Turkish flag in the soil. A third scene on a different side depicts significant male actors in the TRNC’s political life: Dr. FazÕl Küçük, the first elected Vice-President of the Republic of Cyprus and Rauf Denktaú, the founding president of the TRNC. A fourth side of the memorial shows a modern man and woman standing back to back,

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equal, each holding the flame of liberty and looking toward the future with confidence (Fig. 6-14). Together, these four scenes tell a truncated, but unmistakably clear story of the TRNC’s past and future: The Turkish people on the island suffered and died due to Greek Cypriots; the Turkish military intervened; the political leaders in Northern Cyprus led the suffering people to a newly created and safe political state; and the people now look to the future with hope and liberty. The same narrative theme of the TRNC’s founding and future is repeated in the bas relief story told on the inside wall of the memorial dedicated to the Peace and Freedom Operation five kilometers outside of Kyrenia (Figs. 6-15 and 6-16) and in the memorial park at the Bo÷az Martyr’s Cemetery outside of Nicosia (Figs. 6-17 and 6-18). That national narrative is also told, although in not so linear a fashion, at the LimasolGirné Martyrs’ memorial in the large roundabout in Kyrenia (Fig. 6-19). From a distance, the Peace and Freedom Operation monument appears as a set of ten colossal gun turrets. Next to these turrets, a curving wall (Fig. 6-16) literally tells the story of the 1974 military operation in which Turkey sent 40,000 troops to the island in response to the coup against Archbishop and President Makarios III. The first panel depicts Turkish Cypriot suffering at the hands of Greek Cypriots starting in the early 1950s. Fires burn, wagons are turned upside down, children’s books and bodies are strewn over the ground, and women and children cry in agony. The next panel shows the 1960s violence in which Turkish Cypriots were enclaved. This, too, is depicted as a time of chaos and women’s suffering. The third panel treats 1974 and the resulting political changes for Turkish Cypriots. Jet fighters fly in formation, Turkish soldiers come ashore, and women and children point the way for the soldiers who have come to save them. Although in this panel fires continue to burn, the human figures literally are re-righted. In the next two panels depicting life after 1974, men and women march together, joyfully, arm in arm. Children dance and wave. Doves fly overhead. The final panel depicts the iconic Turkish star and crescent. Similarly, visitors to the Bo÷az Martyrs’ Cemetery outside of Nicosia also learn about women’s suffering and its role in TRNC history. A concrete trail above the cemetery passes by several symbolic statues such as a polished black obelisk, an alphabetical list of names of the dead martyrs buried in the cemetery, statues of a gigantic soldier brandishing a machine gun, menacing lions at the gates, and a statue of children offering flowers to Turkish soldiers. Finally, a 5-panel bas relief bronze narrative tells the modern history of the Turkish people on the island. Comparable to the images utilized at the Peace and Freedom Operation monument, the

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first panel at the Martyrs’ Cemetery shows the bodies of dead men, women and children following inter-ethnic violence that occurred in the 1960s. The second panel depicts women and children, in peril, running for their lives (Fig. 6-17), while the second half of the panel shows them living in tents and huddled around fires in oil drums, trying to stay warm. The third panel depicts women and men living in caves. They are slumped over and burdened by the cold, hunger, and poverty and this suffering led to guerrilla-style military resistance by the Turkish Cypriot organization, TMT. The fourth and fifth panels recreate Turkish Cypriots’ salvation— coming in the form of heroic military intervention on the part of the Turkish Army in 1974. Visitors see vibrant bas relief scenes of paratroopers landing on Cyprus, soldiers coming ashore in amphibian assault vehicles, and many details of battle scenes. The conclusion of this narrative materializes in the form of a ten-foot high statue of a Turkish soldier with a raised gun and a modern Turkish Cypriot woman each holding on to a flag of the TRNC between them (Fig. 6-18). Her right hand is held high as she grips the flag. In her left hand, she clutches to her chest a large book with the title “TRNC TARIHI” or “TRNC HISTORY.” She wears a modern, short skirt and blazer and has a serious, almost severe look on her face. Once again, this extraordinary set of bas relief panels characterizes women’s pain and suffering as the proximate cause for military intervention by the Turkish Army. That military campaign led to Turkish Cypriots’ freedom and security, instantiated as the new TRNC state, of which women are equal partners. The Martyrs’ memorial site in the Kyrenia roundabout (Fig. 6-19) constitutes the fourth and final example of how sculptors depict Turkish Cypriot women’s suffering as connected to the successful development of the TRNC state. The site has three main components: A pieta-like scene where a woman behind bars mourns her dead son who lies in her lap, a scene of a modern woman who protectively grips her young son while her husband attempts to pull apart bars that seem to imprison them; and a penultimate central scene on a raised marble pedestal where a modern woman and her ostensible husband hold hands while each raising aloft an olive branch in their free hands. All three scenes are “framed” by a tall concrete structure reminiscent of sports heraldry. Although this memorial site does not have a linear story line like the other TRNC monuments, nor does it depict the role of Turkish soldiers, it contains the same modern female figures, similar scenes of suffering and peril, and familiar scenes of success, happiness, and hope for the future. Remarkably, where Turkish Cypriot women in the middle of the “story” are routinely shown as mourning their dead men or as the huddled,

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downtrodden victims of Greek Cypriot brutality, by the end of the narrative, women have been transformed into tall, fashionably-dressed, happy, and equal partners to men in the new TRNC state. They are, in short, depicted as playing a central role in birthing the new Turkish Cyprus and thereby bringing a kind of closure to the political milieu, a closure unknown to Greek Cypriot women who continue to suffer the “ethnic wound.” The “ethnic wound” or the revival of the “injury to the National Self” as Papadakis puts it is a prevalent motif among Greek Cypriot women, especially women in black who hold photographs of their beloved missing and dead.59Although iconic features in contemporary Greek Cypriot history and in documentary material, these women are reflected only twice in commemorative sculpture–at the memorial for the dead and missing villagers of Morfou at the Astromeritis’ village barricade in the Nicosia district (Fig. 6-20) and in the church-like cement tent at Dasaki Ahnas (Ammohostos district) (Figs. 6-21 to 6-23). At Astromeritis, young girls hold the photographs and not older women, who by default are mothers of missing and dead. In the second memorial, the fragmented young female figures at the entrance of the Dasaki Ahna church (Fig. 6-22) appear as dead souls although they are the ones holding photographs of the missing. Their barely-material existence contradicts sharply with the realistic depictions of the rest of the women who exude anguish, exhaustion and despair inside the church (Fig. 6-23). This particular construction constitutes the only monument in southern Cyprus that shifts attention away from heroic glorification of men and towards women’s privacy, there by commenting on their way of experiencing motherhood, uncertainty and peril. Only three memorial compositions in southern Cyprus are dedicated per se to motherhood. Two of them depict mothers surrounded by many children. Although the children are the sole protagonists of the sculptural compositions, the inscription on the pedestal of one clarifies the essence of the respect being paid. The choice of words and the tone utilized make the inscription especially interesting and eloquent: On the cylindrical pedestal of the Larnaca city commemorative complex (Fig. 6-24) we read “To you mother of many children who sacrifice yourself. You offer your body and soul to society bringing up good citizens to be.” In the second memorial site commemorating motherhood, where no text is added, the title itself (Mother of many children) along with the repetition of familiar visual elements in the composition, adequately fills the conceptual void. The monolithic treatment of motherhood exclusively as symbolic value in conjunction with national ideals is more than apparent in the case of the

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memorial entitled “The Mother” which was explicitly dedicated by Nikos Siakolas to the memory of his mother, Eleni (Fig. 6-25). This memorial overturns all visual connotations applied to Cypriot mothers. Because of its individual character it is the only public depiction of a mother as a charming young woman joyfully playing with her children, exposing her body in a carefree manner, and ignoring altogether the conformism of the implicit or explicit heroic commemorations.

The mother-farmer The identity of mother-farmer constitutes the natural extension of the mother-wife identity and the scarce cases of those memorials intend to communicate her contribution to the family needs. Her extended duties inside and outside the domestic space were indispensable parts of her existence within the traditional family structure and her competence in keeping and handling the household was regarded as a major virtue. Her role as “lady of the countryside,” according to the Peristerona inscription (Fig. 6-26), focuses again on hardship and sacrifice, outweighing any personal aspirations. The identification of the status of the mother, the wife and the farmer is visually affirmed through her clothes, and her physical traits in general are consistent to the requirements of her inclusive social identity. Therefore, beauty as aesthetic quest, again, is not an issue of interest itself: it preserves the strictly moral dimension and results only as a secondary outcome of the applied iconological types. Three memorials, two busts and a full body sculpture explicitly commemorate and honour women’s contribution as co-workers along with men in the fields. The two busts–one at Kouklia village (Paphos district) and the second at Peristerona village (Nicosia district)–feature a young and a middle aged woman, respectively, while the Paralimni village (Ammochostos district) (Fig. 6-27) statue–being part of the Paralimni dead and missing memorial–depicts a rather elegant statue of mother-worker. A statement on a low pedestal of that memorial underscores women’s civic, sacrificial duty even as it attempts to acknowledge and valorise women’s excellence as farmers: She is “a busy bee, a field worker, a life pillar and mother of the Cypriot heroes.”

Fighting spirit The distinct segregation between masculine and feminine identities becomes explicitly tangible in the case of the two memorials in Greek Cyprus honouring women’s contribution to national struggles. Aggeliki

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Sotiriou’ bust in Pano Kyvides village (Limassol district) is the only female Cypriot fighter explicitly named. She was known by the male nickname “Filimon” and died during the EOKA 1955-59 struggles. The second memorial, situated at Agros village (Limassol district) (Fig. 6-28), it explicitly honours all women fighters of the Pitsilia area by paying a “reverent commemoration and praise” to them as indicated on the inscription. Nevertheless, by contrast with her stated role, the sculptured depiction does not include any of the expected–or necessary under the circumstances–male attitudes of aggressiveness or militaristic spirit. On the contrary, the woman depicted in the sculpture is illustrated in favour of the female stereotype, as a mild, rather agreeable creature, saluting with her right hand while holding a brick in her left hand, which rests bended on her belly. This monument acknowledges that some women participated in the EOKA guerrilla war as military fighters. However, social and cultural norms in Cyprus have such power that, even in a rare memorial that acknowledges women’s aggressiveness, their visual depictions continue to be conventional. Symbolic cultural values prove so rigid that they cannot be challenged with any visual recognition of a shifting identity, because it would risk deconstructing dominant codes. Comparing this statue with the aggressive female figure of the Lisioton memorial at Larnaca (Fig 6-5) makes evident how women’s behaviours and bodies must be confined to specific, demarcated areas and disciplined by normalizing conditions. According to all accounts, the apparent aggressiveness of the Lisioton memorial figure was permitted by virtue of her allegoric identity. As an allegorical figure, she could not compare with–and consequently shake–any pre-established social norms in the actual contemporary Cypriot society. Women’s strictly designated social position in Greek culture only allows them an opportunity to share celebrations with male co-fighters. Owing to her role as the mother of the nation, responsible for nourishing its fighters, she stands by his side at the monuments for the working class heroes and the SEK (Confederation of Cypriot Workers) premises in Nicosia (Fig. 6-29), enjoying visually an equal share of the national victories. Notably though, this spontaneous, overflowing sentiment is illustrated only in depictions of younger women and decreases inversely with age: At the militant students’ memorial in Limassol and the SEK complex in Nicosia, the intense diagonal lines of the woman’s body and the stretching of her limbs evoke the enthusiasm expected of youth. In contrast, the working class woman depicted in Nicosia keeps a restrained bodily disposition, almost stylized and gloomy, where her uplifted left hand contradicts the heavy volumes of her rigid bodily posture.

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Conclusions The monuments described in this chapter, like all monuments, are framed in order to support a particular, partial view of history. They actually constitute two different interpretations of the very same history, and are the evidence of nationalistic selective memory processes. Being commemorative pieces, they serve the dual purpose of reflecting the notions of their cultural milieu through the wishes of their commissioners– the state or local agencies, governmental or not–and intensifying them. The issue of beauty as aesthetics is not part of these monuments. Their explicit purpose is the promotion of society’s ideological commitments. The aesthetic style applied is inextricably linked to the iconological components used and altogether they indicate the “correct” way to be a member of the nation, serving the principles and the values that form “good ethnic subjects.” Female stereotypes, both in Greek Cypriot and in Turkish Cypriot public commemorative sculpture, are reproduced with the sole pursuit to support the male identities, especially those associated with heroism. In other words, the semantic content shaped the form of their representations. The moral hue that overshadowed women identities in southern Cyprus has been the end result of the patriarchal social structures and the Christian doctrines. The female heroic pattern that derived from the compatibility between the sacrificial death and suffering of the latter, and the heroic archetypes was adjusted to the patriarchal dominant codes. Thereby it became an additional instrument to the building of the potent national identities and the nationalist ideology. Social conventions were safeguarded in the Turkish Cypriot environment, too. Nevertheless, Turkish Cypriot women’s exposure to suffering and persistence is inextricably linked to nation-building ideologies. Northern Cyprus vindicates the future by acknowledging and attributing to its female agents a, comparatively speaking, more active role as a result of the social and political reforms prompted by Kemal Atatürk. Thus, contrary to Greek Cypriots, between the traditional Muslim Ottoman tradition and secularism it was the latter that won the lead. The TRNC monuments analysed here make clear that women’s suffering was proximately related to Turkey’s decision to intervene in Cyprus with military force. Turkey’s actions, thus, are depicted as heroic, masculine, and sacrificial, even though military action came fully eight years after the suffering–depicted on the monuments–concluded. It is no coincidence that the handling of ancient Greek aesthetic patterns in the Republic of Cyprus reproduces classic beauty only in the

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symbolic figure of Liberty. Although Greek Cypriots vindicate the future by firmly claiming the ancestral past, the Orthodox Christian fear of senses and terrestrial beauty, and its preoccupation with the “purity” of the body met its exact equivalent in the nationalistic need of ensuring the purity of the “ethnic blood line.” The idealized allegorical figure of Liberty–along with goddess Athena and the unidentified personifications of abstract concepts–whilst obviously cementing the link with the ancestral past thereof reinforcing national and cultural identities, cannot be identified with the real, everyday women who experience the “belated temporality of trauma” or what LaCapra calls “structural trauma.” To them is reserved the role of mourning and wailing mother and wife that generates intense feelings, either because of an already existing experience, or because of the fear of an upcoming calamity. The sole case of the idealized but unidentified female representation at Kyrenia (TRNC) could be justified by the lack of that background, and possibly by the results of Atatürk’s reforms. A common element among the majority of female depictions in Cyprus is the hieratical, quiet and upright positioning of their bodies, where none of the details draw attention to their womanhood. The statues’ frontality and solemnity prompts the viewer to adopt a similar attitude and respectively turn–especially the Cypriot mothers–into sacrosanct figures. Through this process, the depicted suffering reinforces norms about how women are supposed to look and act. The sole exception in this category, Nikos Siakolas’ memorial dedicated to his mother Eleni, proves that very power of the prevailing female stereotypes. The snapshot impression it evokes was allowed for the reason that it is not making part of the nationalistic propaganda iconology. The elimination of this parameter permitted the individual facial traits, the emergence of personal emotions, and the fluid, relaxed movement of the body. Among all female representations in commemorative public sculpture in Cyprus this is the only case of a woman with an individual identity who vindicates the right to be herself, indifferent to society’s gaze.

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Notes 1

The TRNC is self-declared. No country recognizes it as a state except for Turkey. Roland Barthes, ȂȣșȠȜȠȖȓİȢ. ȂȐșȘȝĮ [Mythologies. Lesson] (Athens: Rappa, 1979), 215. 3 Rebecca Bryant, “Partitions of Memory: Wounds and Witnessing in Cyprus,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 2 (April 2012): 349, doi:10.1017/S0010417512000060. 4 Miranda Christou, “A Double Imagination: Memory and Education in Cyprus,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 24, no. 2 (October 2006): 295, doi:10.1353/mgs.2006.0019. 5 Floya Anthias, “Rethinking Social Divisions: Some Notes Towards a Theoretical Framework,” Sociological Review 46, no. 3 (August 1998): 519, doi: 10.1111/1467-954X.00129. 6 Adamantia Pollis, “The Social Construction of Ethnicity and Nationality: The Case of Cyprus,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 2, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 77, doi:10.1080/13537119608428459. 7 Diana Weston Markides, Cyprus 1957-1963: From Colonial Conflict to Constitutional Crisis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 8 Richard Patrick, Political Geography and the Cyprus Conflict (Ontario: Department of Geography Publications Series No 4, University of Waterloo, 1976), 46, 119. 9 This is true except for approximately 500 aging and enclaved Greek Cypriots living in the Karpas region. 10 In March of 2003, TRNC President Rauf Denktaú unexpectedly opened the Green Line that partitioned the island and Cypriots, Turkish and Greek alike, were allowed to visit their legal homes and properties for the first time since 1974. 11 Mete Hatay, “Is the Turkish Cypriot Population Shrinking? An Overview of the Ethno-Demography of Cyprus in the Light of the Preliminary Results of the 2006 2

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Turkish-Cypriot Census,” PRIO Report (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 2007), 54. 12 Pierre Bourdieu, Loic J. D. Wacquant, and Samar Farage, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (March 1994): 8, doi:10.2307/202032. 13 Kemalism can be summarized in six overarching principles, sometimes called the “six arrows”: Republicanism, Populism, Secularism, Reformism, Nationalism, and Statism. Atatürk outlined his philosophy and reforms in an extraordinary sixday speech given in 1927. See Atatürk, 2008. 14 Ilia Xypolia, “Cypriot Muslims among Ottomans, Turks and Two World Wars,” Bo÷aziçi Journal 25, no. 2 (2011): 109-120. 15 Umut Uzer, Identity and Turkish Foreign Policy: The Kemalist Influence in Cyprus and the Caucasus (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). 16 Craig Calhoun, “Nationalism and Ethnicity,” Annual Review of Sociology 19, no. 1 (August 1993): 231. 17 Nadav Morag, “Cyprus and the Clash of Greek and Turkish Nationalisms,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 10, no. 4, (2004): 604, doi:10.1080/13537110490900368. 18 Joan Wynn Reeves, Body and Mind in Western Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 88. 19 Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (London: Thames and Hudson 1962), 164. 20 Umberto Eco, ǿıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȘȢ ǹıȤȒȝȚĮȢ [History of Ugliness], trans. D. Dotsi and A. Chrisostomidis (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2007), 58. 21 Eliso Elizbarashvili, “The Formation of a Hero in Digenes Akrites.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 50, no. 3 (2010): 454. 22 Rudolf De Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Ruth Wodak, “The Discursive Construction of National Identities,” Discourse & Society 10, no. 2 (April 1999): 153, doi:10.1177/0957926599010002002. 23 Kevin Olson, “Habitus and Body Language: Towards a Critical Theory of Symbolic Power,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 21, no. 2 (March 1995): 43-44, doi: 10.1177/019145379502100202. 24 Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” Political Theory 12, no. 2 (May 1984): 180, doi:10.2307/191359. 25 Kenneth Clark, The Nude (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 301. 26 Reeves, Body and Mind, 58. 27 Clark, The Nude, 303. 28 Reeves, Body and Mind, 199. See also Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3-4. 29 Umberto Eco, ǿıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȘȢ ǹıȤȒȝȚĮȢ [History of Ugliness], 50. 30 Clark, The Nude, 225. 31 Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 723, doi:10.2307/1344100. 32 Ibid., 722-725. 33 Bryant, “Partitions of Memory,” 340, 349. 34 LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 712.

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Ibid., 724-725. John Coakley, “Mobilizing the Past: Nationalist Images of History,”Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 10, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 541, doi:10.1080/13537110490900340. 37 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37. 38 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper. “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (February 2000): 16, doi:10.2307/3108478. 39 Ciaran Cronin, "Bourdieu and Foucault on Power and Modernity," Philosophy & Social Criticism 22, no. 6 (November 1996): 78, doi:10.1177/019145379602200603. See also Jennifer Todd, “Social Transformation, Collective Categories, and Identity Change.” Theory and Society 34, no. 4 (August 2005): 436, doi:10.1007/s11186-005-7963-z. 40 Calhoun, “Nationalism and Ethnicity,” 231. 41 Paul Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 106-108. 42 Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March 1998): 254, doi:10.1080/014198798330007. See also Maria Hadjipavlou, Women and Change In Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 36. 43 Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 243. 44 Cynthia Cockburn, The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus (London: Zed Books, 2004), 118. 45 Bourdieu, et al., “Rethinking the State,” 8-9. 46 Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” 13. 47 Bourdieu, et al., “Rethinking the State,” 8-9. 48 Floya Anthias, “Researching Society and Culture in Cyprus: Displacements, Hybridities, and Dialogical Frameworks” in Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History and an Island in Conflict, ed. Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Welz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 189. See also Hadjipavlou, Women and Change, 150; Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 255; and Olson, “Habitus and Body Language,” 31-32. 49 Hadjipavlou, Women and Change, 44. 50 Ibid., 39. See also Anthias, “Researching Society,” 189. 51 Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence, 111. 52 Ibid., 107. 53 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, 6th ed. (Cambridge, England: Polity, 2007), 14. 54 Perry Anderson, “Kemalism,” London Review of Books, September 11, 2008, accessed July 31, 2013, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/perry-anderson/kemalism 55 Sevgul Uludag, “So How about the ‘Settlers?’” Alithia. 23 March 2003, accessed August 8, 2013, http://www.hamamboculeri.org/ 56 Zehra Arat, "Kemalism and Turkish Women," Women & Politics 14, no. 4 (Fall 1994), 57. 36

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Daughter, sister, wife and mother of Olympic Games winners in ancient Greece, she dared to dress like a man and enter the Olympic stadium during the Olympic Games, ignoring the strict prohibition for women. Although she was caught, she avoided the death penalty because of her family reputation and mainly because her act was interpreted as prompted by motherly love and pride. 58 The strong similarity among the TRNC monuments reflects the role of the new government in commissioning the memorial sites and the government of Turkey in paying for them. They also share many visual and ideological elements because most of the monuments were designed by Professor Tankut Öktem, Turkey’s officially titled “State Artist.” Öktem is especially well known for his monumental sculptures of President Atatürk, both in Turkey and Cyprus, and for his sculptures memorializing the Turkish War of Independence. 59 Yiannis Papadakis, “Narrative, Memory and History Education in Divided Cyprus: A Comparison of Schoolbooks on the History of Cyprus,” History & Memory 20, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2008): 143, doi:10.2979/HIS.2008.20.2.128.

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Images The copyright of all the images of this chapter (Fig.1 through Fig. 29) is owned by the authors of the chapter, Vicky Karaiskou and Adrienne Christiansen.

Fig. 6-1. Athena statue. Ayios Pavlos quarter, Nicosia.

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Fig. 6-2. Liberty monument. Old city of Nicosia.

Fig.6-3. Liberty monument. Larnaca.

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Fig. 6-4. Memorial for the dead and missing. Avgorou village, Ammochostos district.

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Fig. 6-5. Memorial for the Lisi dead and missing. Larnaca.

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Fig. 6-6. Dead partisans’ memorial. Limassol (detail).

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Fig. 6-7. Memorial for the dead and missing. Derynia village, Ammochostos district.

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Fig. 6-8. Liberty. Near Kyrenia.

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Fig. 6-9. Cypriot mother. Aradippou village, Larnaca district.

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Fig. 6-10. Mother and the missing soldier, House of the Missing. Pyrga village, Larnaca district.

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Fig. 6-11. Cypriot mother and EOKA 1955-59 fighters’ memorial. Palehori Orinis village, Nicosia district.

Fig. 6-12. Mother of the missing. Pyrga village, Larnaca district.

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Fig. 6-13. Memorial for the dead and missing. Latsia, Nicosia.

Fig. 6-14. Lefkosha roundabout memorial.

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Fig. 6-15. Peace and Freedom Operation monument. Outside Kyrenia.

Fig. 6-16. Peace and Freedom Operation monument. Inside wall (detail of fig. 615). Outside Kyrenia.

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Fig. 6-17. Bo÷az Martyr’s Cemetery. Outside Nicosia.

Fig. 6-18. Bo÷az Martyr’s Cemetery. Outside Nicosia.

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Fig. 6-19. Limasol - Girné Martyrs’ memorial. Kyrenia roundabout.

Fig. 6-20. Memorial for the Morfou dead. Astromeritis village barricade, province of Nicosia.

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Fig. 6-21. The church-like cement tent memorial. Dasaki Ahnas, Ammohostos district.

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Fig. 6-22. The church-like cement tent memorial (detail from the front side). Dasaki Ahnas, Ammohostos district.

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Fig. 6-23. The church-like cement tent memorial (detail from the inside). Dasaki Ahnas, Ammohostos district.

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Fig. 6-24. Commemoration to the mothers of many children. Larnaca.

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Fig. 6-25. The Mother. Nicosia.

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Fig. 6-26. Monument to the Cypriot Farmer. Peristerona village, Nicosia district.

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Fig. 6-27. The Paralimni Mother. Part of the Dead and Missing memorial. Paralimni, Ammochostos district.

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Fig. 6-28. Monument to the Pitsilia Women Fighters. Pitsilia village, Limassol district.

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Fig. 6-29. The SEK monument. Nicosia.

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CHAPTER SEVEN FEMALE BEAUTY AND IDENTITY POLITICS: IN SEARCH OF A “FEMALE GAZE”? MARIA KYRIAKIDOU

Contemporary Western society demonstrates a growing importance for bodies and the term “somatic society” has been coined by Bryan Turner to map this significance. The ways bodies are represented from an aesthetic point of view are considered essential for the construction and reinforcement of gender identities. Such identities are not monolithic and have been the subject of academic investigation for decades.1 Associated with the study of corporeality is the discussion on whether “beauty matters.” The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the associated academic programmes around the world started to incorporate a woman’s viewpoint in various disciplines including the field of aesthetic appraisal. In most recent years, gender studies as an area of analysis, incorporates the intricate sets of gender relations and their varied parameters and interplay in any society questioning all aspects of human experience including the issues which were tantamount to philosophical inquiry in aesthetics and cultural criticism within the contemporary western socio-cultural context. The matter of beauty clearly poses a challenge for feminist theory in general and not just in the field of arts. The majority of feminist studies from the nineteenth century onwards “view current practices of feminine beautification as an oppressive element of a patriarchal society, while only a few among the most recent analyses discuss the potential evolutionary, and even empowering, aspects of embellishment.”2 As it turns out “new voices in feminist theory discuss the ‘possibility of a feminine aesthetic’ under certain conditions and the variation of gendered perspectives on beauty.”3 It is consequently maintained that feminine beautification could at times be seen as a pleasure for the female subject if is a freely chosen

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option, free from the “male gaze”, which pervades numerous facets of women’s lives.4 Although, as suggested by Irene Visser, there is no easily defined theory of the gaze, the gendered gaze theory can be better perceived through the feminist critique especially after the mid-1980s. Early discussions regarding a male gaze connected power with visibility and John Berger in a pivotal work (1975) maintained that the male gaze in Western culture manipulates and restricts women; it defines what is acceptable or not and denotes the importance of the internalization aspect of the whole process:5 Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.6

In addition to this view, Laura Mulvey’s work on film studies (1975) showed that both male and female spectators take pleasure in a particular arrangement of the gaze through which “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed.”7 Her insistence on psychoanalysis seemed to deaestheticize art while aesthetics philosophers examine whether aesthetic pleasure should be seen as just one variant of male sexual pleasure.8 Issues of aesthetics and gender proved to be critical to the assessment of artistic production.9 Much of the feminist analysis on the issue since the 1970s aimed at reclaiming women’s artistic creation and suggesting deconstructive (and in some cases destructive) views of the classic ways of art assessment.10 Contemporary art and cultural creation in general is based on the disruption with the modern standards both in terms of aesthetic modes and in terms of gender hierarchies. Art cannot be viewed as distinct and isolated from society and its various asymmetries (gender, class, race etc). Despite the fact that artists and viewers can often have a rather personal approach to the artistic product, they operate within specific cultural, social, political and historical contexts that in most cases are androcentric and patriarchal.11 In order to discuss aesthetic ideals it is necessary to first plunge into the vast intellectual tradition of the West on the notion of aesthetics that has been challenged by feminist concerns. Even though “this is not to say that any or all of these are, or must be, sexist; it does suggest, however, that we should consider the possibility.”12 It may now appear that feminism needs to “formulate alternative relational values” in the field of aesthetics that would be “anchored in the female gaze.”13 The proponents

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of a feminist aesthetics started to criticize past paradigms and suggested conceptual schemes with an interpretive vigour to dispute well established past discourses. Feminists have challenged traditional views in terms of embodiment, aesthetics and female agency. As Joanne Waugh maintained, a feminist reading of art works …holistically and pragmatically… ignore[s] the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting the new and possibly interesting questions… it suggests that we might want to stop doing things and do something else. But it does not argue for this suggestion on the basis of antecedent criteria common to the old and new language games. For just insofar as the new language really is new, there will be no such criteria.14

The feminist stance seeks to reverse the traditional subject/object relations within the established status quo. But as Elina Oinas puts it “…a counter-discourse is needed… the denial of the male gaze loses its effect if only silence follows.”15 To break this silence, the constructive part of a female gaze should not be, similarly to the male gaze, based on oppositional power relations and gender asymmetries but on the premises of deference, self-determination and gratification for the female subject. It is to the exploration of diverse and distinct gazes that we devoted this volume. In the different chapters of this book, a number of variations on the theme of female beauty in art are presented. Even though the beauty ideals come from diverse historical, cultural and artistic traditions and art forms there are still certain common denominators that unite the chapters. First and foremost is the ability to view beauty as a femaleícentred and (with the possible exception of the Cypriot sculpture which serves collective identities on the island) as a liberating discourse. The gaze of the Lyceum of Greek Women members is idiosyncratic and novel even within the limits and constraints of their historical, ideological and social context. The Villete heroines focus on a relational gaze while Orlan is renegotiating the borders of the female body through the bloodletting rituals of trauma and suffering. Gloeckner’s Minnie disregards the viewers and turns her gaze to self-examination for her own pleasure, a process that is liberatory, while the sculptures representing women in Cyprus are associative and strengthen the sense of community. In certain historical cases, we trace attempts to exploit and appropriate classical and standardized women’s beauty, seen for the first time through a female gaze, for the promotion of gender symmetries even though this path was, at times, associated with well established, conventional principles of the past, such as ethnocentrism. To explain such an instance,

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one has to acknowledge that any interpretive claim is learned in practice and is based on past paradigms. At the turn of the previous century, it would be a truly daunting task to validate and justify a radically innovative female gaze especially since the women who projected their own perspective in the field of the arts and sought a solid public presence, were, in most cases, members of the educated and cultured elite of their respective societies. On the other hand, “cultural and individual changes are more likely to occur when there are continuing radical doubts about current practices and their vocabulary, doubts that do not seem resolvable by arguments stated in this vocabulary.”16 Therefore, it was not before the novel social paradigms of the 1960s and in close link with postmodern philosophy, that radical doubts on the male gaze were surfaced and the female gaze went through the phase of its denial, via shock, trauma and the carnivalesque. Thus, a common theme among almost all the chapters of the book is references to classical, ancient or Renaissance standards of female beauty either as original models for women’s emancipation or as aesthetic standards to be contested by female artists in the postmodern era. The first trend is exemplified by the chapter on the Lyceum of Greek women in which the art of dance has a primary role in envisioning female beauty. Generally speaking, there was a relationship between European classicism and the appreciation of ancient aesthetic ideals which was emphasized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Lyceum of Greek Women, an organization that was established in Greece with a focus on gender equality objectives, had organized a series of festivals based on dance performances with a twofold aim. First, to promote the patriotic idea of historical, territorial and cultural continuity in the newly expanded Modern Greek state and, second, to bring women (mostly those upper middle class, educated women that constituted a major part of its membership) to the fore of public life hoping to prove the indispensability of women to the development of their country. The women of the Lyceum had internalized the predominant nationalist ideology of their time and the fact that the ancient beauty standard which European neoclassicists admired was primarily Greek (and secondarily Roman) intensified the efforts of the Lyceum ladies to associate it with its contemporary Greek women. The concept of continuity that was promoted through the Lyceum festivities and the link between classical ideals and Christian Byzantium appeared to be very persistent elements regarding the definition of greekness. The appliance of aesthetic ideals based on classicism turned the female performers of the festivals into models of decorum while their appearances

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were enthusiastically endorsed by the general public and the daily press which often referred to revered, virgin beauties that symbolized the dignity of the nation. Key constituent features of the female beauty projected through these performances were harmony, grace and symmetry in line with the celebration of sculpture, as the aforementioned aesthetic features were common in ancient Greek statues, and the Lyceum dancers were encouraged and taught to assume positions similar to those of the statues. One should note that even though this is part of “home grown ancestor worship” (page 108 in this book) it was not a uniquely Greek phenomenon as the comparison with western cases (such as that of Isadora Duncan) suggests. What is interesting, on the other hand, is that both in the case of Duncan and in that of the Lyceum members, the performances, albeit quite conformist and along traditional viewpoints shared both by men and women, also found a manner to fit into a modernist renewal and an emancipatory course of action. Through a subjectivisation process, the women performers at the festivals were re-defining their place in Greek society, strengthened the collectively perceived aesthetic values of the Greek nation and substantiated their claims for a positive contribution to their country and their potential new status which could range from the opening of educational fields and professional opportunities for women to the ultimate achievement of the right to vote. These early feminists though, seem entrapped into their own essentializing ideology since they did not base their liberating claims on the concept of politics but on that of nature and their presumed ideas regarding women’s “natural” inclinations and pre-dispositions towards motherhood (e.g. giving birth for the nation and raising their children with the love of their country). Equally “natural” appeared the aesthetic ideal for the nation since the latter was often compared to a physical body rather than a social construct. In the Cypriot case Vicky Karaiskou and Adrienne Christiansen study commemorative sculpture and claim that …the issue of beauty as aesthetics is not part of these monuments. Their explicit purpose is the promotion of society’s ideological commitments. The aesthetic style applied is inextricably linked to the iconological components used and altogether they indicate the “correct” way to be a member of the nation, serving the principles and the values that form “good ethnic subjects.” (page 149 in this book)

The intentions behind the monuments studied in the Greek Cypriot community are to justify the “mother identity” as an alternative heroic female pattern. In contrast to the Lyceum’s efforts (whose members

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focused on a “natural” aesthetic), the focus of the Cypriot case is on the “spiritual experience” with numerous references on Christian passion (for the Greek Cypriots), sacrifice, suffering and trauma. This “Christian passion” according to the authors of the chapter corresponds to what “Rosenberg [(1962, 164)] notes that since the drama of salvation in the Christian tradition legitimized individual personal dramas, man has claimed his right ‘to transcend himself morally’.” (page 131 in this book) Even though beauty is associated with trauma and suffering also in the cases of Orlan and Gloeckner, the difference is that in the instance of Cyprus the trauma is collective and national, away from the individual and personal trauma of the postmodern art which, to a great extent, is an exhilarating factor for the woman artist and the represented female characters. In Cyprus women’s bodies are seen as “bodies of national resistance” and the perception of women’s beauty came as a secondary consequence of a typology built in arrayed with national imperatives and the family’s key role in the nationalist ideology; […] memorials, testifying to past wounds on the “national self” legitimize the injury in present time, and thereby repeatedly characterize real women as suffering wives, daughters, sisters and, mainly, as mothers of the nation’s male defenders. (page 127 in this book)

Such role legitimizes women’s public presence but through the persistence of male-centered, patriarchal values and thus it cannot be considered emancipatory. The chapter provides insights into the processes through which patriarchal representations deprive the female figure of beauty in order to depict her in the well-defined roles of grieving mother/widow after a war or violent conflict. References to classical standards of female beauty transverse also the chapters of Part I and are indicative of the importance that such standards have for the western culture in various historical eras. Orlan’s project draws on examples of mythological faces such as Diana, Venus and Mona Lisa with a focus on their Renaissance representations. Orlan’s body becomes a palimpsest on which “historical representations of female beauty are stored.” (page 77 in this book) The choice of Venus and Diana (Artemis) is not accidental as they are seen as “idealized stereotypes of feminine beauty in Western culture and statuesque representations of them aim at maintaining a sense of the body’s sculpted wholeness” while the statues represent the female nude as chaste (page 78 in this book) in a similar line with the interwar Lyceum case. Panayiota Chrysochou argues that even though Orlan tends to imitate Greek and Roman artistic ideals, she is, in fact, close to more contemporary models of the body as she

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radically transforms her own. Religiosity is also present in her work (as in the case of Cyprus) since self-mutilation is associated with religious connotations but Orlan in practice subverts religious dogmas through her performances and work. The art of the Renaissance has a solid presence also in Gloeckner’s comics since her heroine Minnie explores her sexuality through the parody of a classic painting portraying an historical figure, Gabrielle d’ Estrées. Such a mockery of a classic work of art and the associated patriarchal cultural tradition that founded contemporary Western art is unsettling to the male gaze and reformulates the image of the female body in contemporary artistic tradition. Maria Ioannou’s chapter on the Villette includes some references to ancient Greek thought as well, as the author discusses the role of a mirror in classical literature and mythology as “a locus where the self and other, the same and different, meet and intertwine.” (page 26 in this book) The chapters of part I focus their scrutiny on art forms with suggestions for something new, wishing to deny past criteria, to ridicule and reverse the old modus operandi. Associated with this trend, a common theme among these chapters is gender identity formation or selftransformation through the conceptualization of female beauty. Olga Michael who studied two works of “graphic memoirs” in the tradition of comics, namely Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories and The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures, focuses on the role of the girl protagonist. Throughout her analysis, Michael uses the term “feminine sentences” introduced by the critic Janet Wolff as these “sentences” appear to be constituting elements of the aforementioned new language and demonstrates that Gloeckner’s illustrations exploit the grotesque and the carnivalesque in order to denaturalize the “position of the female spectacle within patriarchal discourses […] adolescent beauty is revised to construct a female experience that is absent from canonical male art and literature, as well as from the male-dominated comics world.” (page 51 in this book) Gloeckner’s Minnie who has suffered sexual abuse as a child is familiarized with adolescent girl sexualisation through literary texts of a male-oriented society like the Lolita figure and through consumer objects such as dolls including the Barbie-type ones. However, the female artist breaks the stereotypical male gaze and in at least two instances, presents subverting female images away from the male gaze. First, she depicts young Phoebe as suffering from pemphigus vulgaris, a skin disease that creates blisters and wounds, and brings to the fore a rather grotesque side of the protagonist’s beauty.

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Next, Minnie comprehends her sensuality and discovers her beauty for her own sexual pleasure. One of her portraits is a masqueraded mirror reflection of Gabrielle d’ Estrées, a late sixteenth century Renaissance painting character, and she ignores the male viewer while her showcased narcissism rejects any intentions of offering voyeuristic joy. Instead, it is viewed as an implicit feminist tool. Michael resorts to Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective to advocate that a “girl’s autoerotic engagement with her body deconstructs the male spectator’s power over her.” (page 57 in this book) As she continues, while preserving the erotic in Minnie’s representation as Gabrielle d’ Estrées, Gloeckner’s artistic vision succeeds in freeing the adolescent female body from the constraints of the male gaze, sexuality and desire. The two parodic depictions of Minnie show how Lolita’s beauty is revised and recreated towards feminist ends and how it emerges as a new discourse that excludes the male eye/I while auto-erotically involving the female self. (page 59 in this book)

On a similar note, Panayiota Chrysochou analyzes the work of Orlan, a French multimedia performance artist, who often puts herself on an operating table viewing the body as an operating vehicle for living. While cosmetic surgery is often associated with beautification processes that many women perform based on conventional and well established beauty stereotypes, the ways in which Orlan’s body is presented, is open up to representation and re-interpretation. As Chrysochou puts it, As spectators we bear witness to Orlan’s fragmented body. While it has been claimed that this fragmentation can be empowering to the extent that it textualizes and reterritorializes the female body – hence reclaiming it as a site of empowerment – I would argue that Orlan’s project interrogates conceptions of embodied subjectivities and identities in order to bring up specific concerns – feminist or otherwise – regarding spectatorship, the gaze and voyeurism, as well as stereotypical definitions of female beauty, rather than being a feminist manifesto of triumph. (pages 73-74 in this book)

Through the use of semiotic and psychoanalytical tools as well as Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the author of this chapter argues on the implausibility of body fragmentation practices to serve an explicit feminist goal such as reclaiming the body on behalf of a female gaze. It is rather viewed as negating and in that sense it bears similarities to Michael’s analysis of Gloeckner’s comics since the overturning of standardized beauty ideals is also associated with trauma, negation and the grotesque. Equally similar is the focus of both chapters on

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unconventional and eccentric types of performance shows that center on horror such as freak shows and the Grand Guignol genre (in the case of Orlan) or the carnivalesque (in the case of Gloeckner). The aforementioned reversal of what is reckoned as a normative model of aesthetics can be considered a path leading to self-transformation for the female artist. If one considers the view that art has to be disruptive and unpleasant in order to have a social function (Kathy Davis, quoted in page 81 in this book) then Orlan’s self-mutilation serves a purpose since it blurs the boundaries between the inside and the outside, the personal self and the outer world and the realization of such blurring by the performer can lead to a rejuvenated self-identification, in the sense that she is born anew every time such artistic rituals are performed. One should add here the empowering effects of the operating processes through which the artist shapes and designs her own body even via the surgeons who use their appliances according to her own instructions. And this is not an isolated act since it is publicly performed and spectators/viewers are engaged in the project although often in awe. In other examples from the plethora of her artistic output, she disrupts the virgin/whore division which ostensibly weights heavily on social and religious interpretations of femininity. Despite these practices, and even if Orlan challenges “monolithic definitions of sensuality, the erotic and female identity formation” (page 83 in this book) this is only in part, since she “is using the very same representations of female beauty which are already highly venerated and standardized by the Western canon of art.” (page 83 in this book) At the end of her surgeries, she reinstates an objectified (and highly traumatized) female body. In Maria Ioannou’s chapter it is attested that the Victorian era beauty ideal for a middle class woman was to be fragile and ethereal and adjusted to cultural norms and the acceptable paths while a working class woman was usually described more robust and healthy due to her presence in the public sphere and the factories. The sturdiness of the latter can fit in the notion of the sublime which already in the eighteenth century has been contrasted to the notion of the beautiful as been the other end of a gendered system of identification: beautiful for the feminine and sublime for the masculine. Such a polarized view of the two notions has been disputed by early feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft who elaborated on the concept of the female sublime.17 Ioannou also argues that female beauty ideals at that time in the fields of arts, crafts and particularly fashion were based on an interplay between passive objects and active subjects, as women indulged in the pleasure of looking at their counterparts and been looked at. This observation introduces a notion of

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female agency and women’s identity formation through the focus on female beauty as the study of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette reveals. A major aspect of such a process, Ioannou maintains, is based on relationships, as Victorian women were “relative beings.” Following the relevant literature, she argues that beauty can be a force which forms identity based on relationships between women and thus it can be “a liberating as well as limiting discourse” (page 22 in this book), in short that the notion of beauty is “empowering not only because it can grant women possibilities of self-presentation, self-construction and agency, but also in the ways it posits women in relation to other women.” (page 23 in this book) A mirror scene is analyzed as an indicator of how beauty is used as a common denominator for women; it dissipates patriarchal classifications and, by giving predominance to women’s action, it reformulates female identities. The different chapters of the book discussed here are distinct examples assembled throughout our search in aesthetic ideals in art regarding female beauty and the possibility of a distinct gaze in the way women perceive female beauty. There is a wide variety of instances that can attest to the fact that a female gaze, just like the male gaze, is not onedimensional and homogenous. Throughout the book, a female gaze is presented as an endeavour to destroy the old paradigms, a practice which is, to a great extent, empowering per se as it evidently puts women to the position of the subject and reveals women’s agency not only as artists but also as performers, art viewers and audience. Even though in certain cases, as Irene Visser suggests, a female and feminist gaze “may both be seen as part of the overall feminist reconstructive programme,” she distinguishes between a feminist gaze that is “committed to struggle” and “exposes the male gaze as a controlling force” and a female gaze that “does not operate from a concern with principles of control” but it is rather “creative, liberatory, associative, dialogic, based on the principles of respect and pleasure. These, then, are the aspects of the ‘otherness’ of the female gaze.”18 At the end, one realizes that since there are “multiple audiences and spectator positions, multiple ways in which different kinds of social groups are distanced, or entranced by the image”19 we cannot avoid references to a multiplicity of female gazes rather than to a uniform and standard female or even feminist gaze. The search for the latter could plausibly be the subject matter of a future research project.

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Bibliography Berger, J. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Brand, Peg Zeglin. “Beauty Matters.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 1 (1999): 1-10. Cahill, A. J. “Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification.” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 42-64. Guerrilla Girls. “Our Story.” Accessed August 2, 2013. http://www.guerrillagirls.com/press/ourstory.shtml. Kyriakidou, Maria. “The ‘Power of Beauty’: Promoting Gender Stereotypes in Interwar Greece.” Women in Society 3 (2012): 28-38. Leibowitz, Flo. “A Note on Feminist Theories of Representation: Questions Concerning the Autonomy of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 361-364. Mattick, Paul Jr. “Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in the Constitution of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 294-303. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18. Oinas, Elina. “The Sexy Woman and the Smart Girl: Embodied Gender Identity and Middle-class Adolescence.” NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 6, no. 2 (1998): 78-88. Patterson, Maurice and Elliott, Richard. “Negotiating Masculinities: Advertising and the Inversion of the Male Gaze.” Consumption Markets & Culture 5, no. 3 (2002): 231-249. Sassatelli, Roberta. “Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture.” Theory, Culture, Society 28 (2011): 123143. Singh, D. and Singh, D. “Shape and Significance of Feminine Beauty: An Evolutionary Perspective.” Sex Roles 64, no. 9-10 (2011): 723-31. Visser, Irene. “Reading Pleasure: Light in August and the Theory of the Gendered Gaze.” Journal of Gender Studies 6, no. 3 (1997): 277-287. Waugh, Joanne B. “Analytic Aesthetics and Feminist Aesthetics. Neither/Nor?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 317-326.

Notes 1

Maurice Patterson and Richard Elliott, “Negotiating Masculinities: Advertising and the Inversion of the Male Gaze,” Consumption Markets & Culture 5, no. 3 (2002): 232.

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D. Singh and D. Singh, “Shape and Significance of Feminine Beauty: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Sex Roles 64, no. 9-10 (2011): 723-31. 3 Maria Kyriakidou, “The ‘Power of Beauty’: Promoting Gender Stereotypes in InterWar Greece,” Women in Society 3 (2012): 29. 4 A. J. Cahill, “Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 42-4. 5 Irene Visser, “Reading Pleasure: Light in August and the Theory of the Gendered Gaze,” Journal of Gender Studies 6, no. 3 (1997): 278, 283. 6 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 47. 7 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 9. 8 Flo Leibowitz, “A Note on Feminist Theories of Representation: Questions Concerning the Autonomy of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 362-3. 9 Peg Zeglin Brand, “Beauty Matters,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 1 (1999): 1. 10 Visser, “Reading Pleasure,” 284. 11 Movements such as the Guerrilla Girls established in 1985 are self-defined as “feminist masked avengers... How do we expose sexism, racism and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture? With facts, humor and outrageous visuals. We reveal the understory, the subtext, the overlooked, and the downright unfair.” Found at their website “Our Story”, Guerrilla Girls, accessed August 2, 2013, http://www.guerrillagirls.com/press/ourstory.shtml. 12 Joanne B. Waugh, “Analytic Aesthetics and Feminist Aesthetics. Neither/Nor?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 318. 13 Visser, “Reading Pleasure,” 284. 14 Waugh, “Analytic Aesthetics,” 322. 15 Elina Oinas, “The Sexy Woman and the Smart Girl: Embodied Gender Identity and Middle-class Adolescence,” NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 6, no. 2 (1998): 86. 16 Waugh, “Analytic Aesthetics,” 321. 17 Paul Jr. Mattick, “Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in the Constitution of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 294, 299. 18 Visser, “Reading Pleasure,” 285. 19 Roberta Sassatelli, “Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture,” Theory, Culture, Society 28 (2011): 129.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashby, Imogen. “The Mutant Woman: The Use and Abuse of the Female Body in Performance Art.” Contemporary Theatre Review2000, 10, no.3 (Malaysia, OPA: 2000): 39-51. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 2000. Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” In The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 126134. Translated by John Johnston. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. Brand, Peg Zeglin. “Introduction: How Beauty Matters.” In Beauty Matters, edited by Peg Zeglin Brand, 1-23. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Brand, Peggy Zeglin, and Mary Deveraux. “Introduction: Feminism and Aesthetics.” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (fall/winter 2003): ix-xx. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London, New York: Routledge, 1990, 2008. Cahill, A. J. “Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification.” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 42-64. Davis, Kathy. “‘My Body Is My Art’: Cosmetic Surgery as Feminist Utopia?” In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 454-465. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1988. Durham, M. Gili. The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Do About It. London: Duckworth Overlook, 2009. Eaton, Marcia M. “Kantian and Contextual Beauty.” In Beauty Matters, edited by Peg Zeglin Brand, 27-36. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body. Fashion, Dress and Modern SocialTheory. 6th ed. Cambridge [England]: Polity, 2007.

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Felski, Rita. “Because it’s Beautiful: New Feminist Perspectives on Beauty.” Feminist Theory 7, no. 2 (2006): 273-282. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Essentials of Psychoanalysis: The Definitive Collection of Freud’s Writing, 218-68. Translated by James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Goldstein, Laurence, ed. In The Female Body: Figures, Styles, Speculations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Greenberg Robert and George Perez. Wonder Woman: Amazon, Hero, Icon. New York: Universe Publishing, 2010. Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. UK: Doubleday, 1999. Haweis, Mary. The Art of Beauty. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1878. Henley, M. Nancy. Body Politics: Power, Sex and Nonverbal Communication. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall, 1977. Hoesterey, Ingeborg. Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Jeffreys, Sheila. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Hove: Routledge, 2005. Leibowitz, Flo. “A Note on Feminist Theories of Representation: Questions Concerning the Autonomy of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 361-364. Mattick, Paul Jr. “Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in the Constitution of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 294-303. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Meyers, Diana Tietjens. Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women’s Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Newman, Beth. Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation and Victorian Femininity. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Feminism, femininity and the histories of art. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge, 2003. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997. Reeves, Joan Wynn. Body and Mind in Western Thought. London: Penguin Books, 1958. Scruton, Roger. Beauty. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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Selected Bibliography

Singh, D. and Singh, D. “Shape and Significance of Feminine Beauty: An Evolutionary Perspective.” Sex Roles 64, no. 9-10 (2011): 723-31. Tickner, Lisa. “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists since 1970.” In Looking on: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts, edited by Rosemary Betterton, 235-253. London, New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Vertinsky, Patricia. “Isadora Goes to Europe as the ‘Muse of Modernism’: Modern Dance, Gender, and the Active Female Body.” Journal of Sport History 37, no. 1 (2010): 19-39. Visser, Irene. “Reading Pleasure: Light in August and the Theory of the Gendered Gaze.” Journal of Gender Studies 6, no. 3 (1997): 277-287. Walter, Natasha. Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. London: Virago Press, 2010. Waugh, Joanne B. “Analytic Aesthetics and Feminist Aesthetics. Neither/Nor?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 317-326. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. London: Vintage, 1991. Wolff, Janet. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Wife. New York: Perennial, 2002.

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr. Adrienne Christiansen is a tenured associate professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota (USA) where she teaches political communication courses in the Political Science Department. She is also Director of the Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching. Professor Christiansen is interested in the rhetoric of campaigns and elections, the role of social media in creating social and political change, and in the rhetoric of war. She is at work on a book manuscript about how political monuments and other memorial sites prepare Cypriots for the permanent political division of the island. Panayiota Chrysochou (b. 1982) grew up in Limassol, Cyprus. She has a PhD in Psychoanalysis, Theatre and Gender Studies from the University of Edinburgh, which focuses specifically on visual and trauma theory and the gendered and socio-political body in certain plays and dramatic performances. Her research interests include psychoanalysis and trauma studies, performance theory, postcolonial theory, the Victorian Gothic, the Gothic generally as a mode and aesthetic, as well as texts ranging from the nineteenth to twenty-first century. She has published several articles in well-renowned journals such as The Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies. Her current research aims to re-examine the effects of technology and vision on the theatrical and gendered body through psychoanalytic and socio-cultural frameworks and how trauma functions as an inscribed narrative on bodies in general. She is currently working as a coordinator of Gender Studies at The University of Cyprus under the auspices of UNESCO. Maria Ioannou is a lecturer in literature and gender studies at the University of Cyprus. She has earned her PhD from the University of Exeter on Victorian literature and gender studies, and has published articles on femininity in Charles Dickens’s novels while also presenting papers on beauty in the Victorian era and gender studies today. Her research focuses on Victorianism, gender, and the cultural, historical and material forces and practices that shape personhood and literary production.

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Contributors

Vicky Karaiskou is Assistant Professor at the Open University of Cyprus, Programme “Studies in Hellenic Culture”. Her research focuses on the relationship between artworks and socio-cultural milieu. Human figure, its interactions with public space, and visual culture along with cultural and national identity issues constitute main focal points in her research. Since 2002 she has taught topics of Greek and Western art history, visual communication and culture at the Universities of Patra and Thessaly in Greece and at the Greek Open University. She has extensively published in Greek art magazines on contemporary Greek art. Her last book Uses and Abuses of Culture. Greece 1974-2010 is expected in November 2013 by University Studio Press publishing house (Thessaloniki, Greece). Maria Kyriakidou is an Associate Professor at the American College of Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied history and archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece where she received her BA degree. She got her Master’s in Anthropology from George Washington University in the USA and her Ph.D. in Modern Greek Studies from King’s College, University of London. Her doctoral thesis investigated the history of the Greek feminist movement. She participated in a number of international conferences and has published articles on gender and history in Greek and international scientific journals including an article on female beauty (Kyriakidou, Maria. “The ‘Power of Beauty’: Promoting Gender Stereotypes in Interwar Greece.” Women in Society 3 (2012): 28-38) as well as a book on women’s participation in municipal councils in Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests include gender studies, Greek history, politics and cultural studies. Olga Michael is a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester in English and American Studies. Her thesis is entitled “Pastiche and Family Strife in Contemporary American Women’s Graphic Memoirs: Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel.” Her research interests concern autobiographical performances via verbal/visual media, the association between trauma and the visual, domestic violence and the reparative function of literature and art. Olga has worked as a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Manchester, where she also gained her MA degree and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cyprus in English Language and Literature in 2008.

INDEX

A Child’s Life and Other Stories, 38, 43, 46, 52, 61, 63, 64, 186 abjection, 77, 187 adolescent beauty, 39, 44, 51, 53, 58, 186 aesthetic ideal, 104, 105, 109, 110, 184 aesthetics, 4, 108, 109, 110, 114, 127, 138, 140, 149, 180, 181, 184, 188 Akritikí Megalónisos, 131 Allen, 18, 31, 34 Ammochostos, 139, 140, 141, 147, 159, 162, 177 angel in the house, 17, 21 Annan Peace Plan, 129 Antigone, 126 Aphrodite, 8, 110, 126, 136, 140 Aradippou, 141, 164 Artaud, 75, 80, 88, 90, 98 Artemis, 9, 78, 103, 138, 185 Astromeritis, 146, 170 Atatürk, 130, 134, 136, 137, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156 Athena, 138, 140, 157 Athiná Dianellou, 137 Avgorou, 139, 159 Ayios Dometios, 157 Bakhtin, 50, 53, 57, 60, 65, 66 Ballard, 69, 90, 91, 94, 95 Barbie doll, 49, 58 Bartky, 1, 10, 11, 12, 28, 31, 37, 192 Baudrillard, 69, 70, 71, 72, 81, 87, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 192 Bean, 8, 10, 13 Beaujot, 6, 23, 31, 35 beauty accoutrements, 22

beauty ideals, 8, 38, 44, 47, 49, 53, 63, 101, 182, 187, 188 beauty matters, 3, 180 Beauty Myth, 1, 11, 41, 62, 63, 64, 65, 194 Beetham, 6, 17, 22, 31, 34 Berger, 18, 31, 34, 38, 60, 62, 181, 190, 191, 192 Bo÷az Martyr’s Cemetery, 144 Braddon, 5, 10, 12, 23 Brand, 3, 4, 10, 12, 190, 191, 192 Brontë, 6, 7, 16, 19, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 36 Buszeck, 4, 10, 12, 13 Butler, 54, 55, 60, 65, 76, 192 Cahun, 4 Caravaggio, 73, 74, 95 Carnal Art, 67, 91, 93 carnivalesque, 49, 50, 51, 54, 60, 183, 186, 188 CEDAW, 1 Chute, 42, 51, 60, 64, 65 classical beauty, 102, 104, 112, 116 classical ideals, 183 Colebrook, 4, 10, 12 comics code, 41 corset, 16 Crash, 69, 72, 90, 91, 94, 95 Crawford, 56, 60, 66 Crumb, 41, 42, 51, 58, 61, 64, 66 Cyprus, 2, 8, 9, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 185, 186 Cyprus Peace Operation, 129 Dasaki Ahnas, 146, 171, 172, 173 Davis, 81, 82, 91, 93, 97, 98, 117, 124, 188, 192

198 Deleuze, 74, 78 Delphic, 110, 111, 118, 122 Deltion, 100 Deman, 40, 41, 43, 61, 63, 64 Denktaú, 134, 143, 153 Dentith, 54, 61, 65 Derrida, 70, 71, 80, 91, 94, 97 Derynia, 140, 162 Deveraux, 4, 10, 12, 192 Diamond, 76, 91, 96 Dickens, 11, 12, 20, 195 Digenis Akritas, 131 Duncan, 111, 119, 123, 184 Durham, 10, 12, 13, 47, 61, 63, 65, 92, 97, 192 Eaton, 3, 10, 12, 192 Efimeris ton Kyrion, 100, 106, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125 Efrosini Proestou, 137 Eleni, 101, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 147, 150 Eliot, 6, 11, 12 ellinikótita, 128 Ellis, 17, 22, 31, 34 embroidery, 19, 20 Enosis, 128 EOKA, 128, 131, 138, 139, 148 Eugenia Theodotou, 137 fashion, 6, 7, 16, 17, 24, 28, 48, 68, 144, 188 fashion accessories, 23, 31, 35 fashion illustrations, 6, 16 Favazza, 84, 90, 91, 97, 98 Felber, 5, 10, 12 Felski, 4, 10, 12, 193 female agency, 19, 22, 182, 189 female beauty, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 16, 17, 22, 24, 29, 30, 39, 44, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 68, 74, 77, 79, 82, 83, 104, 107, 110, 112, 113, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 196 female body, 8, 18, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47, 50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 68, 73, 78, 82, 83, 84, 110, 135, 182, 186, 187, 188

Index female gaze, 9, 182, 183, 189 female narrative, 19 female spectacle, 40, 42, 43, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 66, 186 feminine sentences, 49, 186 feminist criticism, 70 festivals, 9, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 183, 184 Foucault, 2, 12, 28, 151, 153, 154, 155 Freud, 57, 61, 66, 76, 87, 92, 93, 96, 98, 187, 193 Gabrielle d’ Estrées, 40, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 186, 187 gaze, 5, 6, 8, 9, 17, 19, 27, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 63, 65, 70, 74, 78, 79, 87, 89, 139, 150, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187, 189 gender equality, 100, 108, 109, 182 gender identities, 49, 54, 55, 180 gender studies, 2, 180 Gilbert, 6, 10, 24, 31, 36 Ginevra, 6, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 Girlie, 6, 11, 13 Gitter, 19, 32, 35 Gloeckner, 8, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 182, 185, 186, 187 golden hair, 19 Goldstein, 59, 61, 66, 193 Great Expectations, 20 Great Idea, 112, 115, 128 Greek antiquity, 137 Greek beauty, 100, 103, 105, 107, 110 Greek culture, 101, 103, 109, 116, 127 Greek dances, 102, 103 Greek nation, 101, 104, 106, 108, 184 greekness, 101, 109, 110, 115, 116, 128, 132, 139, 183

Female Beauty in Art: History, Feminism, Women Artists Green Line, 138, 153 Grivas, 131 grotesque, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 66, 78, 81, 97, 186, 187 Guattari, 74, 78 Gubar, 6, 10, 24, 31, 36 Gyzis, 110, 117, 123 Halberstam, 81, 84, 92, 97 handicraft, 19 Hartney, 4, 10, 12 Haweis, 22, 32, 35, 193 Haze, 45 headscarf, 106, 107, 141 Hegeso, 140 Hyman, 58, 61, 66 ideology of gender, 21 ISSEI International Conference, 2 Jane Eyre, 19, 32, 36 Jeffreys, 1, 11, 193 Kallipateira, 141 Kemalism, 130, 150, 151, 154, 155 Kili, 138 Kouklia, 147 Kristeva, 77, 80, 92, 96, 187 Küçük, 134, 143 Kyrenia, 137, 140, 144, 145, 150, 163, 168, 170 Ladies’ Journal, 100, 106, 115 Lady Audley’s Secret, 10, 12, 23 Lapithos, 137 Larnaca, 138, 139, 141, 142, 146, 158, 160, 164, 165, 166, 174 Latsia, 142, 167 Liberty, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 150, 158, 163 Limasol-Girné Martyrs’ memorial, 144 Limassol, 140, 148, 161, 178 literary portraits, 5 Lolita, 38, 40, 45, 47, 48, 51, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 186, 187, 192 looking glass, 25, 26, 30 Lucy Snowe, 20, 21, 23, 25 Lyceum, 8, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113,

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114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 182, 183, 184, 185 Lyceum of Greek Women, 8, 100, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 182, 183 Makarios, 128, 139, 144 Marcus, 6, 11, 13, 17, 22, 32, 34 Marsh, 18, 19, 32, 34 Martyrs’ Cemetery, 144 Martyrs’ memorial, 145 masqueraded beauty, 57 Megali Idea, 112, 119, 123, 128 memorials, 127, 132, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 147, 185 Merskin, 48, 62, 63, 65 Meyers, 4, 11, 12, 193 middle-class, 17, 21, 23 Middlemarch, 6, 11, 12 Millais, 18 Minnie, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 182, 186, 187 Morfou, 146, 170 Mulvey, 38, 62, 181, 190, 191, 193 mutilation, 47, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 97, 186, 188 Nabokov, 45, 47, 49, 56, 62, 64 narcissism, 57, 61, 187 national identity, 121, 130, 133 Nicosia, 137, 138, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 157, 158, 166, 167, 169, 170, 175, 176, 179 Nikitari, 142 Nikos Siakolas, 147, 150 Nitsa Hatziyeorgiou, 137 Nyberg, 41, 62, 64 ocularcentrism, 79 Oinas, 182, 190, 191 Operation Attila, 129 Ophelia, 18 Orenstein, 1, 8, 11, 44, 62, 64 Orlan, 4, 8, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91,

200 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 182, 185, 187, 188 Ourania Kokkinou, 137 paedophilia, 58 Palehori Orinis, 142, 166 Palmer-Sikelianou, 110 Panathenian, 9, 101, 104 Paphos, 138, 142, 147 Paralimni, 147, 177 Parkins, 19, 33, 35 parody, 49, 54, 65, 78, 186 Parren, 8, 100, 101, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 Parthenon, 106, 107, 140 patriarchal society, 180 Peace and Freedom Operation monument, 144, 168 Penelope, 126 Peristerona, 147, 176 Perivolia, 141 Phelan, 73, 92, 95 Pitsilia, 148, 178 plasticity, 105, 107 Plato, 130, 132 Plotinus, 132 Poe, 45, 49, 58, 60, 64 Pollock, 18, 33, 34, 193 postmodern, 69, 70, 72, 183, 185 pre-adolescent beauty, 39 Pre-Raphaelite, 18, 32, 34 Psomiades, 2, 3, 11, 12, 193 Pyrga, 142, 165, 166 Republic of Cyprus, 126, 127, 128, 129, 134, 138 Reynolds, 41, 62, 64 Riot Grrrl, 7, 10, 11, 13 ritual, 85, 87, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 124, 182, 188 Robbins, 41, 62, 64 Rossetti, 18, 31, 34 Russo, 50, 51, 62, 65 Saint Augustine, 132 Scarry, 72, 93, 95 school of Fontainebleau, 54 Seltzer, 75, 90, 93, 96, 97, 98

Index sexual availability, 38, 39, 44, 47, 53, 56, 59, 60, 63 Siddall, 18, 32, 34 Sikelianos, 110, 111 Silver, 17, 22, 23, 33, 34, 35, 36 Sophia Vempo, 137 St. Thomas Aquinas, 132 Steele, 6, 16, 33, 34 sublime, 137, 141, 188 Taksim, 128 Taylor-Wood, 4 The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 38, 55, 61, 63, 66, 186 Theatre of Cruelty, 72, 75, 88 Third Wave Feminism, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13 Thomson, 50, 57, 62, 65 Tickner, 59, 60, 62, 66, 194 trauma, 80, 86, 90, 133, 135, 150, 182, 183, 185, 187 TRNC, 126, 127, 129, 134, 136, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 153, 156 Tsadas, 142 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, 126, 134 victimhood, 133, 135 Victorian culture, 23 Victorian era, 7, 16, 20, 30, 188, 195 Victorian femininity, 2, 23 Victorian women, 16, 23, 189 Villette, 6, 7, 12, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 189 Visser, 181, 189, 190, 191 Vrissoules, 141 Walter, 1, 7, 11, 12, 91, 94, 97, 194 Weems, 4 Wolf, 11, 41, 47, 62, 63, 64, 65, 194 Wolff, 49, 50, 62, 63, 65, 186, 194 women’s identity politics, 1 women’s magazines, 17 Wonder Woman, 40, 41, 47, 58, 61, 64, 193 wound, 70, 72, 73, 81, 86, 90, 94, 126, 133, 135, 142, 146

Female Beauty in Art: History, Feminism, Women Artists wound culture, 133 Yalom, 20, 33, 35, 194 Yannopoulos, 109, 110, 117, 119, 123

Yonge, 17, 33, 34 Zorach, 56, 62, 66 Zübeyde HanÕm, 137

201