The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration 9781138795396, 9781138795402, 9781315717722

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The Muse

Psychoanalysts have long been fascinated with creative artists, but have paid far less attention to the men and women who motivate, stimulate, and captivate them. The Muse counters this trend with nine original contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts, art historians, and literary scholars— one for each of the nine muses of classical mythology—that explore the muses of disparate artists, from Nicholas Poussin to Alison Bechdel. The Muse breaks new ground, pushing the traditional conceptualization of the muse by considering the roles of spouse, friend, rival, patron, and therapist—even a late psychoanalytic theorist—in facilitating creativity. Moreover, they do so not only by providing inspiration, but also by offering the artist needed material and emotional support, tolerating competitive aggression, promoting reflection and insight, and eliciting awe, anxiety, and gratitude. Integrating art history and literary criticism with a wide spectrum of contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives, The Muse is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in the relationships that enhance and support creative work. Fully interdisciplinary, it is also accessible to readers in the fields of art, art history, literature, memoir, and film. The Muse sheds new light on that most mysterious dyad, the artist and muse—and thus on the creative process itself. Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D., is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, and Faculty at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She is the author of Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House, and coeditor, with Léon Wurmser, of the Routledge title Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity (2015). She practices psychoanalysis in Manhattan.

PSYCHOANALYTIC INQUIRY BOOK SERIES SERIES EDITOR: JOSEPH D. LICHTENBERG

Like its counterpart, Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, the Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series presents a diversity of subjects within a diversity of approaches to those subjects. Under the editorship of Joseph Lichtenberg, in collaboration with Melvin Bornstein and the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, the volumes in this series strike a balance between research, theory, and clinical application. We are honored to have published the works of various innovators in psychoanalysis, such as Frank Lachmann, James Fosshage, Robert Stolorow, Donna Orange, Louis Sander, Léon Wurmser, James Grotstein, Joseph Jones, Doris Brothers, Fredric Busch, and Joseph Lichtenberg, among others. The series includes books and monographs on mainline psychoanalytic topics, such as sexuality, narcissism, trauma, homosexuality, jealousy, envy, and varied aspects of analytic process and technique. In our efforts to broaden the field of analytic interest, the series has incorporated and embraced innovative discoveries in infant research, self-psychology, intersubjectivity, motivational systems, affects as process, responses to cancer, borderline states, contextualism, postmodernism, attachment research and theory, medication, and mentalization. As further investigations in psychoanalysis come to fruition, we seek to present them in readable, easily comprehensible writing. After 25 years, the core vision of this series remains the investigation, analysis, and discussion of developments on the cutting edge of the psychoanalytic field, inspired by a boundless spirit of inquiry. A full list of titles in this series is available at: https://www.routledge. com/series/LEAPIBS. Recently published titles: Vol. 53 Attachment Across Clinical and Cultural Perspectives: A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach Sonia Gojman-de-Millan, Christian Herreman & L. Alan Sroufe (eds.)

Vol. 52 The Muse: Psychoanalytic explorations of creative inspiration Adele Tutter (ed.)

The Muse

Psychoanalytic explorations of creative inspiration

Edited by Adele Tutter

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Adele Tutter; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-79539-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-79540-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-71772-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

To my husband, John Hudak, and our children, Kaspar and Ursula Hudak—my sustenance and inspiration.

“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.” —Sir Philip Sidney

Contents

Illustrations and Credits Contributors Author’s Preface Acknowledgements

Introduction: Mnemosyne, Mother of the Muse Adele Tutter 1

A Memory on your Palette: Poussin’s Eternal Feminine Adele Tutter

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Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, as painted by her Husband, Paul Susan Sidlauskas

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Van Gogh’s Arlesian Muses Bradley Collins

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Spilling It Out: Dalí’s Signature Claire Nouvet

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“Herb and Dorothy” Vogel: The Art Collector as Muse J. David Miller

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Rebecca in the House: Musings on Identification Nancy Olson

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The Muse as Rescuer and Inspiration: Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein Joseph D. Lichtenberg

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An Unlikely Muse: Anne Sexton and Martin Orne Dawn M. Skorczewski

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Alison Bechdel’s Mystic Muse: A Psychoanalytic Allegory Vera J. Camden

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Index

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Illustrations and Credits

0.1 Raphael Raffaello Santi, Parnassus. Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Raphael_-_The_Parnassus.jpg 0.2 Details, Parnassus. Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Raphael_-_The_Parnassus.jpg 0.3 Marco Liberi, Jupiter and Mnemosyne. Image: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marco_ Liberi_-_Jupiter_and_Mnemosyne_-_WGA12975.jpg 1.1 Poussin, Self-Portrait. Image: Web Gallery of Art, www. wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/4/ 1.2 Poussin, The Continence of Scipio. Image: WikiPaintings, www.wikipaintings.org/en/nicolas-poussin/the-continenceof-scipio-1640 1.3 Poussin, Moses Saved from the Water. Image: © National Gallery, London, used with permission 1.4 Poussin, St Peter and St John Curing the Lame Man. Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Saint_Pierre_et_saint_Jean_gu%C3%A9rissant_ le_boiteux_-_Poussin_-_Metropolitan.jpg/ 1.5 Poussin, Apollo and Daphne. Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin__Apollo_and_Daphne_-_WGA18345.jpg 1.6 Drawing of terracotta bust of Anna Marie Dughet by François Duquesnoy. Image: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Collection, Yale University 1.7 Poussin, Esther Before Ahasuerus. Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Esther_ devant_Assu%C3%A9rus_-_Poussin_-_Hermitage.jpg

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1.8 Poussin, Apollo and the Muses on Mt. Parnassus. Image: WikiPaintings, www.wikipaintings.org/en/nicolas-poussin/ apollo-and-the-muses 1.9 Details, Self-Portrait (Figure 1.1) 1.10 Picasso, Working Artist Observed by a Nude Model. © 1927, Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image: Jean-Gilles Berizzi, © RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY, used with permission. Catalogue entry, “Le buste de la femme de N. Poussin.” Image: © Museum of Fine Arts Boston, www.mfa.org/collections/object/446712. Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego. Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_ Poussin_052.jpg 1.11 Detail, Self-Portrait (Figure 1.1); Picasso, Seated Woman (Marie-Thérèse). © 1937, Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image: Jean-Gilles Berizzi, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, used with permission 2.1 Cézanne, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife. E.G. Bührle Collection, Zurich. Image: courtesy of the the E.G. Bührle Collection 2.2 Cézanne, Woman with Green Hat (Madame Cézanne). Image: © The Barnes Foundation, reproduced with permission, all rights reserved. Rubens, Portrait of Suzanne Fourment (or The Straw Hat), National Gallery, London. Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_Chapeau_ de_Paille_by_Peter_Paul_Rubens.jpg 2.3 Cézanne, Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair, The Art Institute of Chicago, Wilson L. Mead Fund, 1948.54. Image: © The Art Institute of Chicago. Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress, Museu de Arte, São Paulo, Brazil. Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/c/ce/Cezanne_-_Madame_Cezanne_in_Rot.jpg. Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair, Beyeler Collection, Basel. Image: Google Art Project, http://upload.wikimedia. org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_-_ Madame_C%C3%A9zanne_In_A_Yellow_Armchair_-_ Google_Art_Project.jpg. Madame Cézanne (Hortense Fiquet, 1850–1922) in a Red Dress, The Metropolitan Museum of

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Art, The Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson Jr. Purchase Fund (62.45). Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://upload. wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Paul_C%C3% A9zanne%2C_1888–90%2C_Madame_C%C3%A9zanne_ %28Hortense_Fiquet%2C_1850%E2%80%931922%29_ in_a_Red_Dress%2C_oil_on_canvas%2C_116.5_x_89.5_ cm%2C_The_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art%2C_New_ York.jpg Cézanne, Madame Cézanne in Blue, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/thumb/2/2b/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_-_Madame_ C%C3%A9zanne_in_Blue_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/ 832px-Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_-_Madame_C%C3%A9zanne_ in_Blue_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg. Madame Cézanne, Detroit Institute of Arts. Image: Ellen Meiselman, http://the designspace.net, used with kind permission. Portrait of Madame Cézanne, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image: © RMSGrand-Palais/Hérve Lewandowski/Art Resource, NY Degas, Bust Portrait of a Woman, private collection; Woman with Umbrella (Berthe Jeantaud), National Gallery of Canada. Image: © National Gallery of Canada Cézanne, Madame Cézanne, Museum Berggruen, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Image: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin/Jens Ziehe/ Art Resource, NY Cézanne, Seated Woman (Madame Cézanne), private collection. Image: courtesy Sothebys, http://www.sothebys. com/content/dam/stb/lots/L14/L14002/1205L14002_ 78K78.jpg Gauguin, Madame Ginoux, 1888, white and colored chalks and charcoal, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, memorial gift from Dr. T. Edward and Tullah Hanley, Bradford, Pennsylvania. Image, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco Van Gogh, The L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) (first version), 1888. Image: Scala/Art Resource, NY; L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) (second version), 1888–1889, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn,

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1951. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY Gauguin, The Night Café, 1888. Image: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource Van Gogh, Augustine Roulin, 1888, Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz” Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland. Image: Oskar Reinhart; Gauguin, Madame Roulin, 1888, St. Louis Art Museum, funds given by Mrs. Mark C. Steinberg. Image: St. Louis Art Museum Gauguin, Blue Trees, 1888. Image: http://uploads7.wikiart. org/images/paul-gauguin/blue-trees-1888.jpg Van Gogh, La Berceuse (The Lullaby)), 1889, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of John T. Spaulding. Image: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885. Image: Google Art Project. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ 2/22/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_The_potato_eaters_-_Google_ Art_Project_%285776925%29.jpg Van Gogh, L’Arlésienne (after Gauguin), 1890. Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Arl%C3%A9sienne_ %28painting%29#mediaviewer/File:LArlesienne_Madame_ Ginoux4.jpg. Van Gogh, sketch of L’Arlésienne (after Gauguin), 1890 in a letter to Willemein van Gogh (with two letter sketches), 1890, Vincent van Gogh Foundation b722V/1962. Image: Van Gogh Museum Dalí, Madonna of Port Lligat. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society. Image: courtesy of the Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, used with permission Dalí, Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society, used with permission. Image: www.wikipaintings.org/en/salvador-dali/portrait-of-galawith-two-lamb-chops-balanced-on-her-shoulder. Photograph of Salvador and Gala Dalí Artists Rights Society. Image: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society, used with permission

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5.1 Herb and Dorothy Vogel, c.1970, from University of Oregon, at http://jsma.uoregon.edu/events/museums-filmherb-and-dorothy-50x50 125 6.1 Still video image from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca 141 7.1 Still video image of Saul Bellow. Adapted from www.youtube. com/watch?v=hls050A0We0. Image of Allan Bloom. Adapted from http://blogues.journaldemontreal.com/bock-cote/politique/ petite-reflexion-sur-nos-leaders-politiques-et-la-philosophie/ 170 8.1 Anne Sexton in her library on May 1, 1967. © Bettmann/ Corbis 182 8.2 Portrait of Martin Orne, M.D., by John Boyd Martin, 1996, used with permission 183 9.1 Are You My Mother?, p. 3. All illustrations in this chapter are from Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, © 2012, 2007 Alison Bechdel, respectively, and reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved 217 9.2 AYMM, p. 40 219 9.3 AYMM, p. 258 220 9.4 AYMM, p. 57 222 9.5 AYMM, p. 191 224 9.6 AYMM, p. 155 225 9.7 AYMM, pp. 36–37 226 9.8 AYMM, pp. 32–33 230 9.9 AYMM, p. 31 232 9.10 From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, p. 72 236 9.11 AYMM, p. 141 243 9.12 AYMM, p. 218 247 9.13 AYMM, pp. 288–289 250 All urls were accessed August 13, 2014. Every effort has been made to identify the copyright holders of the images in this volume. If any have been overlooked, please contact the publisher to rectify the omission.

Contributors

Vera J. Camden, Ph.D. is Professor of English, Kent State University, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University, Clinical Professor, Faculty, School of Social Work, Rutgers University, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center. She is editor of Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, Compromise Formations: Current Directions in Psychoanalytic Criticism and author of numerous articles in both literary and psychoanalytic publications. She is in private practice in Cleveland. Bradley Collins, Ph.D. is Associate Teaching Professor of Art History, Parsons, The New School for Design. He is author of many publications on art and psychoanalysis including articles in Art Journal, Art in America, and Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and the monographs Leonardo, Psychoanalysis, and Art History and Van Gogh and Gauguin: Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams. Joeseph D. Lichtenberg, M.D. is Supervising Analyst, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, and Founder and Director Emeritus, Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (Washington, D.C.). He is Editor-in Chief of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and the Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series and the author of many articles and monographs, most recently Sensuality and Sexuality across the Divide of Shame. He is in private practice in Bethesda. J. David Miller, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, George Washington University Medical School, and Supervising and Training Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. His writing on psychoanalysis and the arts, has focused on Matisse and Morandi. He is in private practice in Washington, D.C.

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Claire Nouvet, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of French, Emory University. Specializing in medieval French literature, psychoanalysis and critical theory, she is author of Abélard et Héloïse: la passion de la maîtrise and Enfances Narcisse, editor of Literature and the Ethical Question, and coeditor of Minima Memoria, In the Wake of Jean François Lyotard. Nancy Olson, M. Phil., M.D. is Faculty, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University, where she is Coordinator of the University Muriel Gardiner Program for Psychoanalysis and the Humanities. Writing about subjects as varied as Marion Milner, Gaston Bachelard, and Cubism, her scholarship mines the interface between clinical psychoanalysis and visual art. She maintains a private practice in New Haven. Susan Sidlauskas, Ph.D., Professor of Art History at Rutgers University and a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, has written on portraiture in the work of Degas, Ingres, Manet, Sargent, Cindy Sherman, Walter Sickert, and Vuillard. She is the author of Body, Place and Self in NineteenthCentury Painting and Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense, which was awarded the Dedalus Foundation Robert Motherwell Book Prize. Dawn M. Skorczewski is Professor of English and Director of University Writing, Brandeis University. She is the author of An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton and Teaching One Moment at a Time: Disruption and Repair in the Classroom. A former Fulbright Scholar in Amsterdam, her work has earned the CORST Prize of the American Psychoanlaytic Association and the Gondor Award for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Education. Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D. is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College; Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University; and Faculty, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She is author of Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House and coeditor, with Léon Wurmser, of Grief and Its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, and Creativity. Her writing has earned the CORST and Menninger Prizes of the American Psychoanalytic Association, among others. She is in private practice in Manhattan.

Author’s Preface

I came to the topic of the muse in reverse. Artists and writers have served as my psychoanalytic “muse,” their insights into human nature predating the more recent contributions of psychoanalysts. My study of Nicholas Poussin took an unexpected turn when I encountered his muse, encrypted on a fragment of his Louvre Self-Portrait—a seemingly peripheral element of the composition, and yet its conceptual fulcrum. Thus it was Poussin who led me to ask exactly how, and why, can a person that seems so separate from the artist’s practice be in fact so central to that practice? It has been a joy to share this question with colleagues, and a privilege to collect their answers in this volume. As an editor, this project engaged me more deeply than anticipated. Some of the contributors to this volume reported that, in what seemed like a parallel process, I functioned as something of a “muse” as I edited their essays. If true, then I have gained even more, for the elegant and creative approaches my colleagues have brought to bear on the topic have challenged me to think about my own work in new and different ways. For their inspiration, and for their warm collegiality, I am deeply thankful.

Acknowledgements

The editor thanks Dr. Joseph D. Lichtenberg, editor of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series, for his terrific initiative and championship of interdisciplinary psychoanalytic scholarship. I thank Kate Hawes, Senior Publisher and Editor at Routledge, for stewarding this publication and for overseeing the Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series with her sure hand, and her assistants, Susannah Frearson and Charles Bath, for their tireless help. I thank each of the authors for the talent, enthusiasm, and expertise so evident in their contributions to this volume. James Levinsohn provided invaluable assistance. I am grateful to my colleagues and friends, in particular Daria Colombo and Wendy Katz, for their support and encouragement. I thank my husband, John Hudak, and my children, Kaspar and Ursula Hudak, for their steady patience and love. And I thank David Carrier, Poussin scholar extraordinaire, who welcomed this outsider into the field of art history with generosity and wisdom. The Salvador Dalí extracts in Chapter 4 from Dalí, S. (1942 [1993]), The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (trans. H. M. Chevalier) (New York: Dover) are reprinted by kind permission of Dover Publications, Inc. Extracts in Chapter 7 taken from Ravelstein by Saul Bellow, copyright © 2000 by Saul Bellow are used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC (USA), and Penguin Books Ltd. (UK). The excerpts from the poems of Anne Sexton featured in Chapter 8 are reproduced with the permission of Houghton Mifflin, Inc. and Linda Gray Sexton. © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr.

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Introduction Mnemosyne, Mother of the Muse Adele Tutter

I call upon queen Mnemosyne, Zeus’ consort, Who gave birth to the holy, sacred and clear-voiced Muses . . . O blessed goddess, for the initiates, stir the memory of sacred rite, And ward off oblivion from them. —ORPHIC HYMN 771

In 1511, Raphael was commissioned to decorate several rooms in the Vatican Palace. One of the frescoes he painted in the Stanze di Raffaello is Parnassus (Figure 0.1), in which a panoply of poets and scholars gathers

Figure 0.1 Raphael Raffaello Santi, Parnassus, 1511, Stanza della segnatura, Vatican Palace Image: Wikimedia Commons

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to pay tribute to Apollo, god of the arts. Seated in the center, Apollo plays his lute, accompanied by the nine Muses—his students, and the privileged mythical source of creative inspiration: Calliope, muse of epic poetry; Clio, history; Erato, lyric poetry; Euterpe, music; Melpomene, tragedy; Polyhymnia, sacred poetry and oratory; Thalia, comedy; Terpischore, dance; and Urania, astronomy. The recipients of their gifts also appear in Parnassus; ahead of his time, Raphael pointedly identifies the poet Sappho by name, distinguishing her from the female muses lest the viewer “condemn women to being always the Muse and never the Maker” (Figure 0.2a; Parker, 1998, p. 767). During the Renaissance the theme of the nine muses enjoyed so much popularity that guides were published to allow the learned viewer to recognize each one by their traditional attributes: Clio by her book, Polyhymnia by her white dress and scepter, Terpischore by her harp, and so on. Personifying the Renaissance principle of which Raphael was the undisputed master—the mirroring beautification of reality by visual art— the serene Polyhymnia gazes at Melpomene’s tragic mask, countering its distorted face and lined brow (Figure 0.2b). As for Melpomene, she holds her mask at her sex, which could be interpreted in all sorts of ways. Among them might be the reminder that like the mortal scholars and poets they inspire, the divine Muses were also borne of a mother. And it is surely fitting that, in classical myth, that mother is Mnemosyne—the goddess of memory. Mnemosyne is not portrayed in Raphael’s Parnassus, but the stream that flows below Apollo’s feet references the waters that bear her name, and confer the ability to remember to all who drink from it (Figure 0.2c). In the underworld, their counterpart is the river Lethe, from which the departed drink to forget their past lives. The myth of Mnemosyne and her daughters allegorizes the mental process prerequisite for the creation of our valued cultural products, all of which, it might be said, constitute a form of remembering—and sometimes, at the same time, a form of forgetting. Mnemosyne was one of the four Titans, a product of the union of heaven and earth, and revered by the ancient Greeks as the guardian of the oral tradition. The myth of Mnemosyne and the nine children she conceived in nine nights of love with Jupiter is a Hellenic expansion of a much older matriarchal myth, which featured no gods, but three goddesses—in one telling, Melete (“meditation” or “practice”), Mneme (“memory”), and Aoede

Introduction: Mother of the Muse

Figure 0.2 Details, Parnassus: a, upper left: Sappho; b, upper right: Polyhymnia and Melpomene’s mask; c, lower left: the river Mnemosyne; and d, lower right: Homer Image: Wikimedia Commons

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(“song”)—who may have themselves tripled from an original “primal mother-goddess” (see Modell, 1993, p. 134). Underlining the relationship between the mind, thought, and the conscious awareness of time, the Greek “mneme” is derived from the proto-Indo-European root, men (“mind”). And song, of course, is a mnemonic device that facilitated the commiting of epic poetry to memory in the great oral tradition, which predated written language by thousands of years. In Parnassus, a prominent place is granted to the blind poet Homer, who famously begins his two heroic epics with the command: Sing to me, O muse (Figure 0.2d). Along with Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare, in the manner of the great poets he thus summons divine inspiration, while at the same time invokes the oral tradition. His command—and the iconic notion of the artist and his muse—is a poetic elaboration of Laplanche’s (1997) assertion that all “[c]ultural activity is an opening out on to the other, an address to the other” (p. 664). Indeed, Notopoulos (1938) notes that, for Plato, the singular importance of memory for creativity is rooted in the dialectical qualities of spoken dialogue in the oral tradition. “It is the creative use of memory, which is movement of thought, rather than a fixed formalized retention of it in the written word, that Plato advocates,” he writes; “the written word, however, like the image may be a steppingstone to the original, but the memory of the philosopher must in its creative apprehension be similar to dialectic” (p. 482). In other words, creativity is borne not in a vacuum, but from a dialogic operation on memory, a sensate, reciprocal, interpersonal interaction—in other words, in the crucible of object relations, in dialectical relationship to “the original.” Creativity, it seems, is cut from the same cloth as identity. Of no little irony, the personification of memory and mother of the Muses was all but forgotten by Renaissance painters, who vastly preferred to portray her talented and comely offspring. Not so their Baroque successor, Marco Liberi (Figure 0.3). In his portayal of Mnemosyne, he imagines Jupiter as an eagle, one of his characteristic metamorphic forms. Wings spread, he approaches Mnemosyne, her legs splayed in reference to Titian’s Venus and Adonis. But while in that canvas Venus entreats her lover Adonis not to leave her, Mnemosyne welcomes her lover’s advances—a more forward expression of desire, which despite her show of modesty is as great as Venus’. Head demurely turned, she smiles as she opens her thighs to Jupiter, whose talons grip her leg in an avian takeoff on the “slung-leg” motif, visual shorthand for sexual intercourse (Steinberg,

Introduction: Mother of the Muse

Figure 0.3 Marco Liberi, Jupiter and Mnemosyne, c.1660–1680, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest Image: Wikimedia Commons

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1968). Infused with her lover’s bestial potency, the striations of Mnemosyne’s robe flow seamlessly into staves, illusionistically turning into the sheet music she literally “births” as she straddles the celestial globe (Figure 0.3, detail). This marvelous evocation of the music of the spheres at the same time symbolizes the conception and birth of the nine Muses—which, in Liberi’s eyes, embody the transformation of Eros into art. Given how much attention has been paid to the genesis of creativity, surprisingly little has been trained on the object relationships credited with inspiring creative works of art. In 2006, an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, “Psychoanalysis and the Muse,” took on the role of the arts and other vocations as “muse” to the clinical psychoanalyst. In his contribution, David Shaddock framed the traditional understanding of the muse within a self psychological formulation: She is always female: a nurturing and wise mother, but also an eroticized, if unattainable, lover, who offers the creative act as a sublimated resolution of oedipal desires. The muse is also maternal in the sense of the analogy between creativity and procreativity . . . For [certain] artists the creative process involves the subjugation and chaste service to the idealized oedipal mother . . . Only she can perform the life-and-art-giving selfobject functions. (Shaddock, 2006, p. 427) In The Private Self, Arnold Modell (1993) expands on the selfobject prototype of the muse, offering that while the muse may “contribute to the coherence of the self,” that self may also be consumed or “surrendered to an idealized muse” (p. 138). Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s seminal work on the use of the object, Modell opens the door to darker aspects of the muse relationship—for example, the muse’s survival of aggression, thereby demonstrating otherness, and eliciting attendant envy and hatred, as Herbert Rosenfeld (1971) explains. Especially if the muse is destructive or consuming, the muse may be rejected “to reestablish externality and individuality” (p. 139), a notion familiarized by Picasso and his serial repudiation of his muses (see Barolsky, 2010). From a different perspective, Rozsika Parker (1998) emphasizes the muse’s functioning to neutralize the real and perceived destruction intrinsic to creativity: “the fear, guilt and anxiety associated with aggressive creativity [is] mediated by the muse, which is compared to the internal good object” (p. 767).

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Today, “sing to me” is more often heard not in poetic recitation, but in a child’s request of a parent. Didier Anzieu (1979) posits that the original form of l’enveloppe sonore, the “audio-phonic skin” (p. 23), is mother’s containing voice, which receives and contains a child’s violent projections. In contrast to the classical role of messenger of divine inspiration, some of the muses described in this volume offer the maternal nurturance emblemized by mother’s voice. But, as the reader will find, others depart from this idyllic recapitulation of mother and child, as well as from the more traditional positions of artist and lover. Indeed, like any other, this special sort of object-relation is not limited to erotic or filial paradigms; rather, each artist–muse relationship reflects the unique dynamics, limitations, and needs of the individual dyad. By examining a variety of specimen examples through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, we gain a better grasp of the breadth and depth of the heterogeneity of this important partnering. To this end, this volume offers a fortuitous number of essays—nine original contributions—authored by psychoanalysts, art historians, and literary scholars, which between them concern painting, cinema, poetry, fiction, and graphic narrative. These essays utilize a rich variety of theoretical perspectives: applications of the British independent, object relations, intersubjective, and relational schools are all in evidence. Their historical order parallels the ever-expanding conceptual breadth of the muse, from the traditional female muse to the male artist to the relationships that inspire creative women; from the familiar lover to the diverse positions of friend, rival, patron, therapist, predecessor—even a posthumous psychoanalytic theorist. The nine specimen examples of the muse explored in this volume also display a wide range of functions, hardly limited to “inspiration”; rather, the muse facilitates artistic production via the provision of material support and emotional nurturance, the disinhibition of competitive aggression, the promotion of reflective interaction and insight, and the elicitation of awe, anxiety, and gratitude. Collectively, they illuminate the protean nature of the mysterious relationship between artist and muse. At the core of the more traditional conception of the muse lies the immortalizing power of the “eternal feminine.” In Chapter 1, this writer explores Nicolas Poussin’s underappreciated relationship with the woman who nursed him to back to health from syphilis, Anna Marie Dughet, who became his wife. He repaid her life-giving gift by enshrining her on canvas in a multiplicity of parts, from Madonna to Magdalene, servant to queen.

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And in his Louvre Self-Portrait, Poussin visualizes the internalization, within his own multiplicity of parts, of the woman through whom he divined the world. Another wife whose role as muse was historically denied is Cézanne’s wife, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne. Susan Sidlauskas corrects this extraordinary elision in Chapter 2, in which she demonstrates that Fiquet Cézanne was in fact one of Cézanne’s primary and enduring preoccupations. Sidlauskas argues that Madame Cézanne’s function as a muse consisted of simply existing as an other with whom her notoriously difficult husband could engage in a particularly prolonged and intense manner as he painted her, allowed him to explore in great depth the intersubjective, mirroring realm she terms the “interworld.” In Chapter 3, Bradley Collins takes the role of the muse beyond the feminine, and into the realm of memory. Meticulously dissecting the complex relationship between Vincent van Gogh and his great male muse, his friend and rival Paul Gauguin, Collins introduces into the mix Van Gogh’s less celebrated muses, the common men and women of Arles that the two artists painted side by side. Van Gogh’s quotidien “Arlesian muses” are intensely cathected vessels of memories of childhood; loving and contentious attitudes toward Gauguin; feelings of abandonment and rivalry; and; regressive wishes for dependent fusion. Nor is the maternal muse a necessarily ideal or benign one. In Chapter 4, Claire Nouvet examines the fraught relationship between Salvador Dalí and his lifelong companion and sworn inspiration, Gala, to whom he explicitly credited his work—so much so, he signed his paintings with both their names: “Gala–Dalí.” Nouvet posits that while Dalí outwardly represents Gala as the embodiment of the maternal care upon which his art relies, his muse reactivates an unconscious and annihilating maternal desire, the “Dalí” persona its product. In contrast, in Chapter 5, J. David Miller casts the art collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel as muses to the artists they nurtured. An improbable but entirely plausible modern-day incarnation of Jupiter and Mnemosyne, they provided nurturance and support to major artists, as yet unknown when they became their patrons. In creating a world-class collection, they also recreated themselves, from a couple of modest means to major patrons of the National Gallery of Art. Nancy Olson further expands the conceptual reach of the muse in Chapter 6, in which she construes the unforgettable namesake of Daphne

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du Maurier’s novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rebecca, as post-humous muse to the narrator who succeeded Rebecca as the second Mrs. de Winter. Her innovative use of readers’ reviews posted on the Internet allows Olson to also identify Rebecca as an enduring and pluripotent cultural muse. Extending Parker’s formulation that the muse mediates the aggression prerequisite for creativity, Olson suggests that the muse may also function to promote it, subduing the “inhibiting angel.” Joseph Lichtenberg mines the rich interface of muse and memoir in Saul Bellow’s semi-autobiographical novel Ravelstein in Chapter 7. Bellow’s wife provides the literally life-saving emotional and physical support that the narrator/author needs as he struggles to overcome his inhibitions and write the memoir of his late friend Ravelstein, modeled on Bellow’s real-life friend Allan Bloom. Lichtenberg elaborates Miller’s suggestion that the psychoanalyst can in some respects likewise act as muse to the analysand: in contradistinction to historical mandates of neutrality, the analyst can function as mentor, savior, and inspiration for personal growth. This notion is quite literally realized in the final two chapters. In Chapter 8, Dawn Skorczewski discusses Anne Sexton’s relationship with her psychiatrist, Martin Orne, who encouraged his patient to write poetry and became the focus and fulcrum of much of it. Skorczewski shows how, by nurturing her good internal objects, and by allowing her a space in which she could excel without fear of envy, criticism, or retaliation, Sexton’s “unlikely muse” allowed her to become not only a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, but also, in her own words, “a whole human being.” Strongly resonant with the story of Sexton and Orne, in Chapter 9 Vera Camden turns to the work of Alison Bechdel, for whom the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott served as a “mystic muse” during the writing of the graphic memoir Are You My Mother? Camden formulates this book as an allegorical journey in which the author searches for her “True Self.” Bringing the volume to a fitting conclusion, she closes the circle around the self-reflective exploration of memoir, the creative, reparative work of analysis, and the numinous work of memory, The mythical figure of Mnemosyne and her daughters may have faded from contemporary consciousness, but memory and its vicissitudes have not: on the contrary, it is the beating heart of the psychoanalytic project, and at the very core of critical inquiry today. Nourished by our vital connections, memory is the link between our culture and its canonical

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texts, and between this world and the next. In the great oral tradition of the ancient poets, enduring works of art form a river of memory from which we drink—to remember, to reflect, and to spur the endeavors that enrich our fleeting lives. In the best of circumstances, this collection of essays will itself function as a muse, a catalyst to inspire others to continue to interrogate the underpinnings of creativity: Mnemosyne’s daughters, who keep memory alive.

Notes 1

The Orphic Hymns, p. 60.

References Anzieu, D. (1979). The sound image of the self. Int. R. Psycho-Anal., 6, 23–36. Barolsky, P. (2010). A Brief History of Art from God to Picasso. College Park, PA: Penn State Press. Laplanche, J. (1997). The theory of seduction and the problem of the other. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 78, 653–666. Modell, A. H. (1993). The Private Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Notopoulos, J. A. (1938). Mnemosyne in oral literature. T. P. Am. Philol. Assoc., 69, 465–493. Parker, R. (1998). “Killing the angel in the house”: Creativity, femininity and aggression. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 79, 757–774. Rosenfeld, H. (1971). A clinical approach to the psychoanalytic theory of the life and death instincts: An investigation into the aggressive aspects of narcissism. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 52, 169–178. Shaddock, D. (2006). My terrible muse: Cohesion and fragmentation in the creative self. Psychoanal. Inq., 26, 421–441. Steinberg, L. (1968). Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The missing leg. Art Bull., 50, 343–353. The Orphic Hymns. Athanassakis, A. N., & Wolkow, B. M. (trans.) Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (2013).

Chapter 1

A Memory on your Palette Poussin’s Eternal Feminine Adele Tutter

Gaze aloft—the saving eyes See you all —GOETHE, FAUST II1

A Mysterious Profile In the 1650 self-portrait commissioned by his Parisian friend and patron, Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Nicolas Poussin poses himself in front of several

Figure 1.1 Left: Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 1650, Musée de Louvre. Right: detail Image: Web Gallery of Art

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stacked canvases; they reveal only a small portion of one painted surface, which shows a brilliantly lit profile bust of a woman (Figure 1.1). The remainder of this depicted canvas is masked by a superimposed painting to the right, a piece of furniture below, and the physical limit of the self-portrait to the left, a framing that also admits a cryptic pair of disembodied arms that reaches to embrace the evidently delighted woman. Complementing her golden hair, her burnished diadem is further and most unusually distinguished by what appears to be a seeing eye. No such embedded figurative imagery exists in the earlier Berlin SelfPortrait, commissioned by another patron, Jean Pointel; indeed, with this exception, “pictures within pictures, familiar in seicento painting, do not appear in Poussin’s art” (Carrier, 1993, p. 16).2 Yet the cover of Anthony Blunt’s authoritative book on Poussin, an image of the self-portrait, cropped to exclude it altogether, reflects the marginal importance granted to what he reduced to an “ornament” (Blunt, 1967, p. 218). Following Blunt—who himself relied on Poussin’s early biographer, Bellori—art historians traditionally interpret the atypical embedded painting within a painting as representing an “allegorical group of painting and friendship,” as befitting a gift-depiction of the painter and his craft (p. 218). While other formulations pay a bit more attention to the embedded painting, they largely support the popular view of Poussin as a cerebral, rational painter, disinterested in presenting, in a public work, the private or the personal—a view the artist did little to discredit, but rather encouraged with his classicism and intellectual rigor.3 Indeed, “if the goal of classical artists is to be impersonal, then Poussin has succeeded all too well” (Carrier, 1993, p. 105). In contrast to prevailing conceptualizations, I have shown that Poussin does in fact represent his wife, Anna Marie Dughet, in his art (Tutter, 2011). Here, I extend these findings and argue that Anna Marie and the multiple critical roles she played in Poussin’s life—in sickness and in health—are commemorated in his art, if camouflaged within allegorical and peripheral guise. Representing an array of female characters that comprise the breadth and depth of womankind, Anna Marie was Poussin’s muse: in his eye, the embodiment of the eternal feminine. In particular, the analysis of the Louvre self-portrait opens a window onto an entirely different view of painter and the painting, which I will argue is in effect a portrait of the painter and the woman he considered his muse—an integral part of the self that the artist chose to portray.

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Works of art within works of art often serve a special function, distilling and clarifying the meanings of the greater effort of which they form a part. Just as Freud (1900 [1953]) observed for dreams within dreams, Grinstein (1956) and Balter (2006) show that works of art within works of art can point to an underlying meaning concealed or disavowed by the greater work—e.g. the play-within-a-play in Hamlet—the additional representational layer providing the distance necessary to overlook or otherwise minimize the embedded representations. Might this be the case for Poussin’s self-portrait? Returning to it, note that the profile of the lady and the arms that embrace her are but a fragment of a much larger composition; evidently, she is part of a much larger story. Examination of the painter’s oeuvre suggests that we have seen her before. At the age of 26, Poussin left his native France to settle in Rome. Fifteen years later, he left his happy home in 1640 to serve a fairly miserable twoyear period in Paris as premier peintre du roi to the court of Louis XIII. It was a mandate he dreaded and postponed for over a year, in no small part because it meant being away from his wife. Shortly before leaving, Poussin painted The Continence of Scipio (Figure 1.2). The story, a theme of his own choosing, is from Livy: to everyone’s surprise, Scipio Africanus, a celebrated Roman military commander on campaign in Spain, orders that a gift from his troops—a captive native, “a grown maiden of a beauty so extraordinary that, wherever she went, she drew the eyes of everyone”—be returned to her betrothed, the Celtiberian chieftain Allucius (Livy XXVI, 20:1). In Poussin’s rendering, a comely young woman behind Scipio honors this munificent display of integrity, reaching on tiptoe to crown him with a laurel wreath. This detail derives neither from Livy nor from previous depictions of the theme, but from a winged figure of Victory who crowns a seated general (Blunt, 1967). But Poussin’s maiden has no wings, and is very clearly a mortal being. Her classical profile follows that of the embedded painting: note in particular the long, chiseled nose, the small mouth with its shapely lips, the fullness of the softly modeled chin, the large, prominently outlined round eye, and the curly, reddish golden hair. While the soldiers in Scipio are dressed and armored with meticulous accuracy, the fortress in the background recalls the more modern Castel Sant’Angelo, a landmark not in Scipio’s Rome, but in Poussin’s, suggesting that the story of Scipio remained germane to the painter in his own place and time. One could hypothesize that Poussin found Scipio’s dilemma

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Figure 1.2 Upper: Poussin, The Continence of Scipio, 1640, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art. Lower: detail Image: WikiPaintings

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reminiscent of his own reluctant obligation to relinquish the comforts of home in order to fulfill the mandate of his king. In both cases, their sacrifice was advantageous: just as Poussin benefited from the compensation and the prestige of his royal appointment, Scipio’s munificence had the (likely intended) benefit of winning the Spanish over to the Roman side. The learned Poussin—who had received the benefit of a sound classical education in his native France—would surely have known that, after the grateful Allucius collected his fiancé, he returned to report, as if scripted, “to Scipio with fourteen hundred picked horsemen” (Livy XXVI, 20:14). Surely this new allegiance was unhindered by the “generous amount of gold” that Scipio awarded Allucius along with his returned fiancé—the ransom money that Scipio had accepted from his fiancé’s parents (Livy XXVI, 20:12). By crowning Scipio as victor, Poussin subtly alludes to his moral and military victories. On a less calculating level, one might also imagine that he responded to Scipio’s righteous renunciation—the kind of moral victory over desire also demanded of a man afflicted with syphilis. Poussin was one such man. Yet this and other aspects of his private life are not thought to have been intruding upon or even influencing his art. Fostered by a lack of biographical data, his rather exquisite privacy has been breached only by explorations of his relationships with patrons and fellow intellectuals and artists in Rome and in Paris. Much less has been written about his more personal life. While his letters paint the portrait of a savvy, often jealous painter preoccupied with the business of satisfying patrons and making a living, save for his fierce devotion to and concern for his wife, they reveal far less about his married life and his childlessness, concerns presumably impacted on by his long struggle with venereal disease—issues that few writers give more passing than a passing mention.4 Although 10 years separate the maiden in white in Scipio from the female figure in the 1650 self-portrait, the distinctive profile reappears one year later, in Poussin’s 1651 London Moses Saved from the Water (Figure 1.3). Put afloat in a basket on the Nile to escape the Pharaoh’s summary execution of infant boys, Moses is followed by his vigilant sister, Miriam, who engineers his “discovery” by the Pharaoh’s daughter and her ladiesin-waiting. In the painting, Miriam looks up at Pharaoh’s daughter as if to ask, “Shall I get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” (New International Version, Exodus 2:7). This will be, of course, their mother. Miriam, her curls loosened, and in simple white robes that recall

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Figure 1.3 Upper: Poussin, Moses Saved from the Water, 1651, National Gallery, London. Lower: detail Image: © National Gallery, London, used with permission

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the crown-bearer in Scipio, resembles the now-familiar profiled woman. And so does the lady-in-waiting that helps her to support Moses’s basket, and regards him with the same open-mouthed pleasure (Figure 1.3, detail). The lady-in-waiting’s right arm disappears underneath Miriam’s left arm in an illusion of a sort of Siamese twinning; if not for its skin color, this arm could belong to either woman, reinforcing the connection between the two figures. In fact, save for her glowing, milky skin and sumptuous robes, she could be Miriam’s twin, but it is exactly these features—including the color of her gown, sky-blue, shot through with gold iridescence—that replicate in precise detail those of the profiled figure in the self-portrait. The enigmatic lady reappears in the 1655 Saint Peter and Saint John Curing the Lame Man (Figure 1.4). At the right edge of the painting, a young temple attendant approaches the central grouping. On her head she balances a basket containing an ewer and basin. Unlike the rest of the assembled, she exhibits no astonishment or fear, but is serenely unperturbed by the miracle in process—St Peter and St John exhorting a man, “lame from birth,” to, “in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk” (Acts 3:1–6). Like Miriam, the temple attendant has a “twin,” the female figure at the far left, who also carries a basket and calmly retreats into the shadow of a pillar. Given the temple setting, the first attendant likely carries the “clay pot” and “fresh water” for ceremonial purification rituals performed there, stipulated after the resolution of “unclean conditions,” including sin, menstruation, childbirth, and, most interestingly, infectious “defiling skin diseases” (Leviticus 14:3–8). The second attendant’s basket carries two birds, which surely reference the “two live clean birds” required for various sacrifices, including that specified for the last stage of ceremonial purification.5 If, as its architectural set suggests, we approach St Peter and St John as a theatrical drama, the narrative might begin with the temple attendant entering at stage right with materials for healing and purification rituals, and might end with her double exiting at stage left to prepare for the final sacrifice. At the temple steps, a destitute beggar woman with her baby raises her arms in abjection to the well-dressed man who hands her a coin—an indication, perhaps, that the lame man is not the only one who aided here. This exercise allows a potential metaphorical interpretation of St Peter and St John, his gratitude for the healing of Poussin’s own “defiling skin disease,” his syphilis. Between 1628–1629, Jacques Dughet, a fellow

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Figure 1.4 Upper: Poussin, St Peter and St John Curing the Lame Man, 1655, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lower: details Image: Wikimedia Commons

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French expatriate, housed and cared for him as he would his own.6 In 1630, Dughet’s daughter, Anna Marie, who nursed Poussin, married him, despite his diseased status. In 1651, when Poussin painted Moses Saved, his health had begun to again deteriorate, presumably from the syphilitic recrudescence that would shortly cause a disabling tremor. His unsteady hand is already evident in the 1655 St Peter and St John, whose emaciated lame man evokes Michelangelo’s strapping Adam, reaching to receive the gift of life from God in the Sistine Chapel. Both figures reaching to touch the hand of divinity, Poussin implicitly likens the healing of the lame man to a rebirth of sorts. St Peter and St John portends the increasing disability and paralysis of late stages of syphilis, and may speak to a wish for a cure as rejuvenating and life-giving as the (albeit temporary) one rendered by Anna Marie and her family before his marriage. The 1657 Birth of Bacchus presents another example of the reiterated twinned profile. As related by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Juno, Jove’s jealous wife, tricked Semele—pregnant with Jove’s son—into demanding that Jove prove his divine identity by presenting himself to her in “all the trappings of his high office” (III:365). While she was thus “incinerated by Jove’s gift” (III:399), their son, Bacchus, was safely retrieved from his mother’s womb and sewn into his father’s thigh, where he gestated to maturity. Although “kept from harm by Fate’s decree” (III:7–8), the “twiceborn” (III:6) baby Bacchus was nonetheless deprived of his mother. Her sister Ino cared for him until his delivery to the nymphs that would raise him—a narrative of rescue reminiscent of Moses’. In Birth of Bacchus, two nymphs receive the baby Bacchus with the same joy that the baby Moses elicits in Moses Saved; while painted with considerably less precision, they also recall the self-portrait profile, once again differentiated by their skin tone. The last example of the iconic profile is found in Poussin’s last painting, the great Louvre Apollo and Daphne (1664), which he left unfinished (Figure 1.5). Seated at the right, Daphne, who pledged her virginity to the goddess Artemis, clings to her father, the aging river spirit Peneus. He will grant her wish to be transformed, so as to escape the advances of Apollo, in red robes at the left. On the other side of Peneus is a vaguely drawn nymph who echoes Daphne’s features, reddish golden hair, and posture; she, too, has a decidedly rosier countenance than her double. She is further linked to Daphne by her location, directly underneath the huddled corpse of Hyacinthus—another beloved casualty of Apollo.

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Figure 1.5 Upper: Poussin, Apollo and Daphne, 1664, Musée de Louvre. Lower: detail Image: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin__Apollo_and_Daphne_-_WGA18345.jpg

Based on a sketch of a lost terracotta bust of Anna Marie, Unglaub (2004) suggests that Poussin modeled the doctress Erminia of the 1631 St Petersburg Tancred and Erminia—painted within a year of his marriage —on his new wife, honoring her care and self-sacrifice (Unglaub, 2004). A more detailed sketch of the bust, bearing a striking resemblance to Daphne, allows the argument that Poussin fashioned Daphne after his dying

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wife’s likeness (Tutter, 2011). Given Daphne’s similarity to the iconic profile, then the profile also resembles the bust, and is not merely an idealized motif, but a representation of Anna Marie (Figure 1.6). If Poussin’s Daphne is a portrait of the youthful Anna Marie, then his Peneus may be a self-portrait of the aging artist (compare Peneus in Figure 1.5, detail, to Poussin’s self-portrait, Figure 1.1). At the end of his life, Poussin might have related especially to Peneus, who had to give up his daughter (and his hopes for grandchildren), as when Apollo and Daphne was painted it was Anna Marie who was more ill—dying, in fact—and in need of his care. Having become, as he wrote in a letter shortly before his death,

Figure 1.6 Top left: drawing of terracotta bust of Anna Marie Dughet, François Duquesnoy, Lewis Walpole Collection, Yale University; thence, from left to right: profile details from Scipio, Self-Portrait, Moses Saved, St Peter, and Apollo and Daphne. For purposes of comparison, the images of Scipio and Moses are rotated, and the image of Scipio is also reversed Image: Courtesy of Lewis Walpole Collection, Yale University

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a hopeless “paralytic,” he lost her just before setting down his brush for the last time, leaving his last masterpiece unfinished (letter of November 16, 1664, Poussin, 1824, p. 345).

The Inspiration of the Painter The personal significance of the theme of benevolent salvation in Poussin’s oeuvre can be traced to 1631, the year that he married his nurse, Anna Marie, and painted her as the doctress Erminia rushing to aid her wounded beloved (Unglaub, 2004). Ten years later, the iconic profile debuted in the 1640 Scipio, in which a beautiful woman is returned to her man—painted when Poussin was facing the imminent separation from his wife for a period of time that was, at least initially, uncertain. After another decade, in the 1650 self-portrait, the profile resurfaces, her features highlighted by the heightened definition of maturity. Then, as Poussin’s health began to fail, he painted a series of works that link the twinned profile with the theme of the rescue of a vulnerable baby who cannot be cared for by his mother. The formal doubling in these paintings echoes the narrative doubling in their textual sources: Miriam saves Moses, who has two mothers, and in Moses (1651) she and her twin together cradle him in his basket; twin attendants in Saint Peter (1655) prepare for ceremonies of purification while Saints Peter and John heal the lame man and a beggar mother and child receive alms; and in Bacchus (1657), the baby Bacchus is delivered twice, from his mother’s womb and his father’s thigh, and is thence given to the nurturing arms of the twinned nymphs. And, from then on, Poussin’s golden-haired muse is detectable in many other female subjects, including the Madonna in any number of Holy Families, as well as the Magdalene in the Prado Noli me Tangere. She appears in another tale of heroic rescue, the 1657 Esther Before Ahasuerus, completed the same year as Bacchus (Figure 1.7a). Following convention, Esther appears before her husband, King Ahasuerus, pleading for his mercy on behalf of her fellow Jews. Unglaub (2003) argues that Poussin invokes Esther’s grace and incomparable beauty via her swoon, an allusion to the epitome of grazia, Raphael. That Anna Marie was Poussin’s epitome of beauty is indicated by Esther’s striking similarity to the bust of Anna Marie; most importantly, Esther also wears the striking golden diadem that crowns the self-portrait profile (Figure 1.7b and c, respectively), as well as her

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golden hair—as does another rescuing woman, Pharoah’s daughter, in the earlier 1647 rendition of Moses Saved (Figure 1.7d). The theme of saving rescue is as ubiquitous in Poussin’s oeuvre as his muse; Blunt (1967) observed that his “Old Testament themes turn out, with only one exception, to belong to the category of types of salvation” (p. 179).

Figure 1.7 a, upper: Poussin, Esther Before Ahasuerus, 1655, Hermitage; b, lower left: Self-Portrait, detail; c, lower middle: Esther Before Ahasuerus, detail; d, lower right: Moses Saved, detail, 1647, Musée du Louvre Image: Wikimedia Commons

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This encourages the proposition that from the 1650s, when the political upheaval in France began to threaten the survival of his mother country (Olson, 2002), an ill Poussin sought to represent his vulnerable self in themes whose subjects seek and find rescue. Accordingly, he may have portrayed Anna Marie’s protective nurturing in Erminia, Miriam, the temple attendants, and the nymphs, the “nurses of Bacchus . . . [who] nourish fruits and haunt meadows . . . and give sustenance and growth to many” (The Orphic Hymns, p. 131). All these women are plainly marked by their substantial, capable arms that lift, carry, and hold. One could say Poussin returned their embrace, metaphorically and literally, in his self-portrait. Carrier (1993) points out that Poussin painted his self-portrait by looking at his reflection; he notes that while Poussin’s left eye (on the right of the canvas) makes contact with the viewer, his right eye wanders peripherally, focusing not on the viewer, but on the reflection of the lady’s profile in the mirror in front of him: “a visual ray running from Poussin’s eye will intersect the reflection of the female figure in the mirror before him” (p. 18).7 In contrast, his body turns away from the painted female image, while she looks away from him, toward the unseen figure residing outside the frame of the canvas. We do not know if her gaze is met—but, if she follows the pattern of her likenesses elsewhere, it is not. Miriam looks at the Pharaoh’s daughter, who has eyes only for Moses; Miriam’s double looks at baby Moses from behind him; Scipio does not see the maiden who crowns him; the temple attendants do not look at anyone; and, like Daphne, Bacchus closes his eyes, blind to the nymph who stares at him so intently. One could hypothesize, as does Carrier (1993), that such an absence of visual connection indicates loss, or frustrated desire; extending this argument, it may reflect the necessary renunciation of desire, as personified by Scipio. There are also different interpretations of the doubling of the profile, its various iterations both similar and similarly distinguished. Having been nursed back to health at least once by Anna Marie, Poussin may have used her doubled motif as an apt visual metaphor for the second chance at life she granted him, in the very canvases (Moses Saved, St Peter, Birth of Bacchus) that thematize that second chance. Alternatively, the doubles may represent mother and her subsequent surrogates. Indeed, Poussin continually returned to the stories that literalize the conceit of the double mother, devoting no fewer than three differently conceived canvases to both Moses’s discovery and adoption, and to the “twice-born” Bacchus’s birth and nurture.

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Poussin was the second of his mother’s two children. His half-sister Reneé was 11 years old when Nicolas was born, and was entrusted with some, if not all, of her little brother’s care—a second mother. And yet we hear nothing of her—let alone his parents—in the painter’s letters. As Desjardins notes, “[t]here is no trace in Poussin’s letters of any feeling of obligation toward his parents. He never in later days showed any regret at having left them; transplanted to Rome of his own free will, he lost all desire to return to his home—and even, it would seem, all recollection of it” (Desjardins, quoted in Gide, 1950, p. 164).8 Poussin’s actual feelings for his family and mother country thus remain as opaque as he seems to have wished. And yet the multiplicity of subjects that Anna Marie played in his painting is consistent with the hypothesis that his memory of early relationships was not in fact lost, but resurrected in his muse—in person, and in paint. This duality is implicit in the self-portrait, wherein Poussin maintains an occult focus on the mirrored reflection of the painted representation: unseen yet present, if only to him. Certainly Anna Marie played a maternal role in caring for her chronically ill husband. As the daughter of Poussin’s father figure, Jacques Dughet, she would have at least initially played something of a sister role, potentially recapitulating his sister Reneé’s position during his early life. Nineteen years younger than him, Anna Marie could have been as much a daughter as a sister. All these roles are reprised in Poussin’s art, in which his wife appears as nurturing nymph and sister Miriam, Pharaoh’s daughter and daughter Daphne, doctress Erminia and Esther, righteous queen. The reduplicated profile may specify this very multiplicity: like the chorus of women at the close of Goethe’s Faust—Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, Maria Aegyptica, and Mater Gloriosa—its continual and versatile appearance evokes that haunting embodiment of multiplicity and life-giving generativity, the eternal feminine. At the same time and from a completely different perspective, the doubled profile may symbolize the magical creation of the likeness of a person, its virtual double, in paint on canvas: identical in form but distinguished from its original, just like the twinned profiles, by differences in their pigmented essence. Poussin painted several canvases that take creative inspiration as their subject, including The Inspiration of the Poet, painted one year before his marriage, and Apollo and the Muses (Parnassus), painted one year afterward (Figure 1.8). The latter canvas was

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Figure 1.8 Poussin, Apollo and the Muses on Mt. Parnassus, 1632, Museo del Prado, Madrid Image: WikiPaintings

taken after Raphael’s Parnassus (see Figure 0.1 in the Introduction to this volume); Poussin thereby places himself squarely in the Master’s classicizing tradition, designating him as his aesthetic muse. And yet Poussin’s Parnassus displays telling differences from its inspiration. At the center is not Apollo, but a blind poet, most likely Homer, who kneels before Apollo. His privileged placement is a bow to the inestimable importance Poussin placed on the epic texts of Homer, Ovid, Virgil, and Tasso: the epic poet as narrative muse to the interpretative artist. And, unlike Raphael’s rendering, in Poussin’s there is a female muse for every male artist, hinting at the nature of his relationship to his own. Indeed, Poussin’s greatest departure from Raphael is undoubtedly the beautiful alabaster nude, reclining at left centre. She is Venus, an unprecedented inclusion in depictions of the Muses, and thus the source of some controversy. Keazor (2007) argues that she is instead the nymph Castalia, whose spring offers inspiration to those who drink from it (p. 21). But a similar stream also flows in Raphael’s Parnassus, attributed to

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Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses and goddess of Memory, whose waters confer the ability to remember—an emphatic representation of the centrality of memory to creativity (see the author’s Introduction to this volume). Given that in Poussin’s canvas, the stream flows from Venus’s urns, Poussin leaves no doubt as to his conception of inspiration: infused with Memory, and with Eros.

The Eye in the Diadem Cropper and Dempsey (1996) interpret the painted woman in Poussin’s self-portrait, as have others, as La Pittura, an allegorical representation of “Painting”; in the context of an artist’s gift to his patron, she signifies a friendship based on the love of art. Accordingly, they argue, her third eye invokes Poussin’s flattering description of “Chantelou’s ‘favorable eye’ . . . the eye of [good] judgment” (p. 187)—a reading he may have supported, given that the portrait was painted for Chantelou, a major patron. Cropper and Dempsey identify the diadem worn by the painted woman in Poussin’s self-portrait as referable to Juno, protectress of Rome and goddess of women, marriage, and childbirth. But the eye in the diadem is not a standard feature of Juno iconography. In an alternative theory, Posner (1967) posits that the third eye specifies a particular aspect of the painter’s craft, “perspective seeing,” or Prospettiva (“Prospect” or “Perspective”).9 I will venture that it might also represent the third eye dreamed of in legend by Plato, a corporeal symbol of the intellectual vision with which he divined the metaphysical world; such a reading is consistent with the third eye’s signification of Prospettiva, especially since the popular neo-Platonic Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino emphasized the Pythagorean aspects of Plato’s third eye in his meditations on aesthetics, important to cinquecento and seicento artists (Allen, 1982)—so much so that Poussin paraphrased them in his own notes on art and painting (Blunt, 1938). In yet another possibility, the third eye could allude to the Orphic Hymn to the Sun: “O blessed one, whose eternal eyes are on all . . . You are the clear, brilliant, and all-encompassing cosmic eye” (Orphic Hymn 8, p. 15). Curiously, no commentaries thus far have suggested that the third eye might represent a woman’s wise intuition. I suggest that it indicates even more. Note the third eye’s placement in the diadem—not at the expected midline position, but laterally, directly over the female figure’s left eye

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(Figure 1.9). This may be a device to render the eye more noticeable or complete, but Poussin could have easily placed it closer to the center of the diadem. If one assumes symmetry, the position of the third eye would suggest a corresponding eye over the female figure’s unseen right eye. The third eye may thus be less a third eye than one of four eyes—making the profile another kind of double. Further, the eye in the diadem differs from the woman’s rounded one: unlike hers—but like Poussin’s—the eye is not deeply set, and the outer corner of its eyelid sags. Moreover, unlike the

Figure 1.9 Details, Self-Portrait

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woman’s smooth, unlined forehead, the diadem’s “brow” is furrowed, as is Poussin’s pensive, knitted brow (Figure 1.9). In other words, the “third” eye is more like Poussin’s eye. Poussin’s identity, place of birth, occupation as a painter, and the year are inscribed on the back of one of the canvases within the self-portrait (Figure 1.9). If we conceptualize the sense of “self ” as constructed from internalized self- and object-representations, and we accept the proposition that a painting within a painting reflects something of the essence of the work, then the fact that the canvases depicted within the self-portrait— signifiers of an artist—are fragments suggests that they stand for the selfand object-representations that comprise the painter’s self.10 The fragment of the painting containing the aesthetic representation of Anna Marie can thus be understood as specifying her object representation—in other words, not just picturing her Anna Marie, but symbolizing the extent to which she is an integral part of Poussin’s self. The association of the experience of looking with processes of internalization is an intuitive one, and expressed in the visual and oral imagery of common idioms (“taking it all in,” “a feast for the eyes,” etc.). Highlighting the potential significance of Anna Marie’s aesthetic representation, and, in particular, of her painted gaze, Fenichel postulated that internalized representations of important others are at their inception visual, and that their incorporation into the forming self is effected via the mutual recognition of eye contact: “the magical property of a look” (Fenichel, 1937, p. 29, emphasis original). Likewise, in the self-portrait, Anna Marie recursively incorporates and contains the “seeing” part of Poussin: his eye(s) in her crown. With them, I propose, Poussin honors his muse— through whom the artist “sees” the world. And just as Poussin incorporates Anna Marie, his most important bond, into his self-representation, she incorporates him—his eyes and all he sees, his vision of his self, of her, and of his world.

A Private Act of Love If Anna Marie bears Poussin’s eyes, then, in a manner of speaking, she may also hold his hands. Remembering that Poussin painted his self-portrait while looking in a mirror, and that left and right are thus reversed, in the painting, his right hand and left thumb are hidden. The hands in the embedded painting are not reversed; the female figure in the embedded

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painting obscures all but the thumb of the left hand that reaches to embrace her, and a superimposed canvas masks the distal part of the right hand (Figure 1.9). If we hypothesize that these mysterious hands are Poussin’s, then they reconstitute some of the missing right hand and the entire left thumb of the “portrayed” Poussin. Within this proposition, his self is complete only in connection with his internalized representation of Anna Marie, as specified by her aesthetic representation, which he literally holds. The assembly and completion of that self from its parts is highly private, as indicated by Poussin’s draping of all but his face and left hand in his “portrait”; the barring of the viewer from all but a fragment of the embedded paintings; the unspecified identity of the embracing arms; and, perhaps most importantly, the repeated occlusion of the right hand in the painting and the painting-within-the-painting: the painting hand, the precious instrument of a painter, which is, like the concealed paintings, a signifier of the painter, never completely revealed—the act of a painter widely believed to never “show his hand.” And everything he states about himself in the text inscribed on the reversed canvas in the self-portrait— which, it must be said, he painted reluctantly, and under a degree of pressure from Chantelou—we of course already know. Behind the stack of paintings is a heavier frame, possibly a door or less likely a window. A framed aperture invites a person to look, to pass through and discover what lies beyond. Likewise, a self-portrait is an entrée—a metaphorical door or window onto its subject, or a part or aspect thereof. But the canvases depicted within Poussin’s remarkably modern self-portrait literally block our access to its mysterious door or window, and the part that we see is solidly opaque, as if to maintain that his selfportrait closes, rather than opens the door to his inner world—a barricade solidified by his own, rather forbidding figure, standing guard in a stance that cannot be described as welcoming. Similarly, the embedded canvases —potential doors and windows in their own right—are only partly there, and even those parts that are present largely refuse inspection, except for the painted profile. The artist thus reveals the anatomy of his self and its parts, but discloses little of their content: he portrays his muse, but not his right hand. The two more-prominent embedded canvases face each other, creating an envelope; alluding to a feminine interiority, almost all of their clandestine contents are kept out of sight. In opening a small yet critical window onto those contents, the image of a woman, Poussin specifies a

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tiny entrée into a gendered secrecy, creating a strain between the multiple potential meanings containable by that image and the practically adamant non-disclosure of the rest of the portrait. Could this “self-portrait” of a painter be read as a portrait of his preoccupation with the feminine, embodied by his muse? If so, the trope of the double extends to Poussin too, there being two of him in the portrait: the sentinel, unyielding one ostensibly on public display, and the unseen, private one who exists— literally and figuratively—outside the “portrait.” We sense him there, on and beyond the periphery, seeing from his beloved’s crown and reaching to embrace her, but he will not let us witness this private act of love. Another personal doubling or division of Poussin is indicated by the shadows that neatly bisect the painting, and, within it, Poussin, into two exact halves, one illuminated by the light that bathes his wife’s face, and the other darkened by shadows within the door or window frame, facing the specification of his identity and origin (Figure 1.9). His head casts another shadow, which cleaves that inscription, separating Nicola of Rome from Pousinnius Les Andelyensis, his family name and hometown (Carrier, 1993). The split portrait of Poussin thus also epitomizes the emphatic divide between Poussin’s receding, dimly lit past on the right; and, on the left, the brighter light of the present day, emanating from a glowing woman. By the time Poussin agreed to paint a self-portrait for Chantelou, his patron had driven him to distraction with his petty competition with other patrons and friends for his affection, let alone the best of his work. Chantelou was especially jealous that a competing benefactor, Jean Pointel, had already commissioned and received a self-portrait (the first one, in Berlin) from their protégé; Poussin mollified him by assuring him that his self-portrait was the better painting. The painter might have thought it wise to include at least a potential reference to the patron upon whose good graces he depended; if so, then the conventional interpretation of the embracing arms as Chantelou’s, the embedded profile as “Friendship,” and the self-portrait in toto as a paean to Poussin’s affection for him demonstrates his “remarkable posthumous control over the reading of his images” (Carrier 1993, p. 71). Surely the possessive Chantelou would have preferred to imagine the embraced lady as Amicitia or La Pittura and not Poussin’s wife, a competitor for the painter’s attention and love—just as surely as he would have wished the portrayed Poussin to be looking at his patron, not at his beloved wife’s reflection.

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Thus the reading of the embedded painting as Poussin embracing his wife may have easily eluded its intended audience, an end facilitated as much by its cryptic devices as by the unique disavowal available to embedded works of art. Poussin would have further encouraged such neglect by neglecting the profile himself, turning his back on her and (seemingly) looking at the viewer; he also exaggerates the profile’s features in a somewhat cartoonish manner suggestive of allegory. Similarly, by utilizing Anna Marie in classical and historical narratives, including programmatic groupings (Moses’s lady-in-waiting, Bacchus’s nymphs) and literally peripheral figures (St Peter’s attendants, Scipio’s maiden), he does nothing to encourage her recognition as a person central to his oeuvre, or to him—promoting, rather than preventing, his reputation as a consummately impersonal artist. But, as the critic Louis Marin (2001), in writing about Poussin, observes, “a work of painting shows and even if it holds back, even if it does not have everything on the surface, it shows, and it shows that it is holding back” (p. 59). By leaving us the subtlest clues, the tiniest windows, what Poussin reveals most clearly is the conflict with which he approached his art: the tension between the wish for privacy and the push for self-expression. And what about Poussin’s reference to the goddess of fecundity? On the surface, crowning Anna Marie with Juno’s diadem seems a cruelly ironic comment on their marriage, which, although by all accounts a long and loving one, disappointed Poussin in a critical way: it yielded no children. While this fact has received barely any attention, his lamenting description of himself in his letters as childless, and even more, his compelling depictions of children—the compassion for the slaughtered infants in the Chantilly Massacre of the Innocents, the tender empathy extended to the reluctant subjects of the Belvoir Castle Confirmation, the affectionate humor with which he renders innumerable amusing putti—would suggest that his own childlessness was no trivial issue. Poussin did officially adopt his wife’s younger brother Gaspard, who took his name, studied under him, and became a recognized painter in his own right. But their relationship soured, and father and adopted son grew estranged; it is not possible to know whether Poussin’s dissatisfaction with Gaspard was deserved, or, more perversely, instigated by the clinical paranoia often seen in late stage syphilis. It is no more possible to know whether Anna Marie was infertile, and, if so, whether this was a consequence of being infected with syphilis by her husband; or, if Poussin, like many syphilitics, was impotent or sterile.

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In any case, it is difficult not to imagine that in painting effigies of Anna Marie with babies like Moses and Bacchus to foster and love, Poussin was not only representing his own need for dependent nurturing, but also symbolically gratifying his own wish for a child. At the time Poussin painted the self-portrait, he had been married for 20 years; by then, to conceive a child would have indeed been a miracle, on the order of the healing of the lame man. Picturing Anna Marie as Juno may have not only expressed a wish; it may have also been a gesture of apology or an act of forgiveness. In crowning his wife with Juno’s diadem, he reverses their fate, turning his childless wife into the goddess of Romans, fertile women and childbirth. But despite the homage Poussin paid Juno, she did not intervene on his behalf.

A Woman Emerges As the self-portrait might suggest, Poussin’s canvases comprise a progeny of sorts, the parts of him that survive him and revive his essence—a more intimate legacy than is perhaps generally appreciated. The many artists he influenced and inspired also number symbolically as his descendants. Extending Poussin’s injection of personal meaning into the themes he interpreted, Picasso, an avowed admirer, adapted some of the master’s works for his own use. In the best-known example, upon the liberation of Paris Picasso painted a celebratory panel patterned after Poussin’s Triumph of Pan (Newman, 1999). Years before, in Paris in 1927 Picasso was commissioned to illustrate an edition of The Unknown Masterpiece (1832), Balzac’s novella about a legendary master artist and his futile attempt to render fully incarnate that elusive ideal, the eternal feminine (Figure 1.10a). Full of references to Goethe’s Faust and its celebration of the eternal feminine, the story features one fledgling artist named “Nicolas Poussin,” who offers up his mistress, Gillette, as a model of ultimate female beauty, hoping to aid the frustrated master. One of Picasso’s illustrations, a meditation on the relationship between artist and his muse, shows Gillette not as the painter’s model, however, but rather watching “Poussin” paint a profile bust—recalling Balzac’s description of an artist’s studio, filled with “fragments of classical sculpture-torsos of antique goddesses, worn smooth as though all the years of the centuries that had passed over them had been lovers’ kisses”

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Figure 1.10 a, upper: Pablo Picasso, Working Artist Observed by a Nude Model, lithographic illustration from The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac, engraving 1927, published 1931, Musée Picasso; b, middle: catalogue entry with engraved illustration, “Le buste de la femme de N. Poussin,” Catalogue raisonné des différens objets de curiosités dans les sciences et arts, qui composaient le Cabinet de feu Mr Mariette, Paris, 1775, Museum of Fine Arts Boston; c, lower: Et in Arcadia Ego, c.1637–1638, Musée de Louvre Images: © Museum of Fine Arts Boston Image: © 1927, Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Jean-Gilles Berizzi, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, used with permission

(Balzac, 1932, pp. 16–17). Sitting behind the canvas, and suggestively halfmasked by it, Picasso’s bust cannot help but recall the bust of Anna Marie. Picasso would have had access to a sketch of Le buste de le femme de N. Poussin in a Parisian auction catalogue (Figure 1.10b) when he illustrated The Unknown Masterpiece, which may account for the likeness of the sculpted head in his engraving to Anna Marie’s portrait bust.11 Furthermore, Picasso’s shaggy artist and onlooker plainly quotes the bushy haired, bearded shepherd and the friend that observes him tracing the inscription on a tomb in Poussin’s celebrated painting Et in Arcadia Ego (Figure 1.10c). The painted profile in Picasso’s engraving emerges from a swirling darkness, akin to the shepherd’s shadow on the tomb. From the shadow of a man, a woman’s profile emerges. In painting the portrait bust, “Poussin” is also painting himself, Picasso seems to suggest, evoking the blended identity of Poussin’s famous self-portrait—which, along with Et in Arcadia Ego, hangs in the Poussin rooms in the Louvre where Picasso loved to linger. Picasso, like Balzac—whose “Poussin” sacrifices his love, Gillette, for art—thus name their aesthetic predecessors, with Poussin as exemplar, as their true “muse.” The fertile woman was the first focus of worship; revered for her lifegiving power, she is the subject of some of the earliest known works of art. The notion of the eternal feminine personifies her mystery and distills her essence: her apparent ability to defy mortality. From the first painters and sculptors inspired to depict her, man and woman have sought a life beyond the mortal realm through the strange permanence of art, the cultural elaboration of the eternal feminine. In Et in Arcadia Ego, the encounter with death is mitigated by the making of art; widely understood as literally “foreshadowing” his death, the shepherd’s shadow may also allude to the

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mythical origin of painting: according to Pliny, “the commencement of the art of painting . . . originated in tracing lines round the human shadow” (Natural History 35.5.1). From this perspective, it is not so surprising that “Poussin” gave up Gilette, a mere mortal, for immortal art. In accord, by the close of Balzac’s novella, the shattered Gillette relinquishes her love for “Poussin.” She nevertheless reassures him: “I shall still live on, as a memory on your palette” (p. 247). Was Picasso moved by the strange profile with an eye in her diadem in Poussin’s self-portrait to compose the radical two-eyed profiles of his own beautiful muses, a series not begun until after his illustrations for The Unknown Masterpiece (Figure 1.11)? If so, the woman in Poussin’s self-portrait is indeed immortalized, her visage ever youthful in its reincarnations, visualizing the eternal feminine: a veritable “memory on his palette.” Heavily classicized, she also survives in her portrayal in Et in Arcadia Ego. And in his self-portrait, the painter, too, lives on, divining the world through the timeless gaze of his saving muse, the woman who brought him to life and made him whole, who bore him aloft and gave him sight—Poussin’s eternal feminine.

Figure 1.11 a, left: detail, Self-Portrait; b, right: Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman (Marie-Thérèse), 1937, Musée Picasso, Paris Image: © 1937, Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Jean-Gilles Berizzi, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, used with permission

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Notes 1 Goethe, 1832, p. 23. 2 When not specified, references to Poussin’s self-portrait specify the 1650 Louvre painting for Chantelou, and not the earlier self-portrait in Berlin. 3 See also, for example, Bätschmann (1999), Cropper and Dempsey (1996), and Posner (1967). Only Carrier (1993) disputes this view. Posner (1967) identifies the embedded painting as Hera embracing Zeus on her wedding day, a means to represent Poussin’s marriage—an interpretation that comes closest to that offered here, yet remains in the realm of allegory. 4 Exceptions include Carrier (1993), Cropper and Dempsey (1996), and Unglaub (2004). Barker (2004) emphasizes Poussin’s response to the plague, which did not reach Rome in his time, over the effect of the epidemic to which he did succumb. It remains wholly unclear whether Poussin’s childlessness derived from self-imposed abstinence, a lack of virility, or other causes of infertility on his or his wife’s part. 5 In Christian iconography, the pitcher or ewer represents purification and innocence. Germane to the setting of St Peter and St John, it is also a symbol of the tribe of Levi (the “Levite ewer”), whose members included Moses and St John the Baptist and whose priests were responsible for ritual cleansing ceremonies. The Book of Leviticus describes in great detail the care and purification of infectious skin conditions, including the required final sacrifice: “If they have been healed of their defiling skin disease, the priest shall order that two live clean birds and some cedar wood, scarlet yarn and hyssop be brought for the person to be cleansed. Then the priest shall order that one of the birds be killed over fresh water in a clay pot. He is then to take the live bird and dip it, together with the cedar wood, the scarlet yarn and the hyssop, into the blood of the bird that was killed over the fresh water. Seven times he shall sprinkle the one to be cleansed of the defiling disease, and then pronounce them clean. After that, he is to release the live bird in the open fields” (Leviticus 14:3–8). 6 Little more is known about the specifics or course of Poussin’s actual illness. See Barker (2004) for documentation of Jacques Dughet’s solicitation of medical treatment. 7 The author is indebted to Carrier’s (1993) discussion of the two self-portraits. 8 Quoted from Paul Desjardins’s biography of Poussin, André Gide was so taken with this comment that he later used it as an epigram for his novel, The Counterfeiters. 9 Posner’s conclusion is based on an illustration for an edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s 1651 Trattato della Pittura, for which Poussin executed some sketches for its engraved illustrations by Poussin’s friend Charles Errard. The illustration of a figure standing for “Perspective” wears a diadem with a single eye. 10 Bätschmann (1999) also notes the fragmentation of the embedded paintings.

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11 Horace Walpole purchased Duquesnoy’s terracotta bust of Poussin’s wife at auction in 1775; the illustration in Figure 1.10 is from the catalogue. After its sale in 1842, the bust was lost.

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Pliny the Elder. The Natural History. (J. Bostock & H. T. Riley trans.) (1855). London: Taylor & Francis. Retrieved August 11, 2014, from http://data.perseus. org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0978.phi001.perseus-eng1:35.5. Posner, D. (1967). The picture of Painting in Poussin’s Self-Portrait. In D. Fraser, H. Hibbard, & M. J. Lewine (Eds.), Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (pp. 200–203). London: Phaidon. Poussin, N. (1824). Collection de lettres. (A. C. Quatremère de Quincy trans.). Paris: Imprimerie de Firmin Didot. Digitized by Google Books, from an original copy in the Oxford University Library, June 15, 2006. Retrieved from www. books.google.com/. Tutter, A. (2011). Metamorphosis and the aesthetics of loss: I. Mourning Daphne—the Apollo and Daphne paintings of Nicolas Poussin. Int. J. PsychoAnal., 92, 427–449. Unglaub, J. (2003). Poussin’s Esther Before Ahasuerus: Beauty, majesty, bondage. Art Bull., 85, 114–136. Unglaub, J. (2004). Poussin’s reflection. Art Bull., 86, 505–528.

Chapter 2

Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, as Painted by her Husband, Paul Susan Sidlauskas

The nearly 30 portraits of his wife that Paul Cézanne painted between 1877 and 1894 stand out for their sheer number, their striking variability (she rarely looks the same twice), and their contentious reception history. The only rival to Hortense Fiquet Cézanne’s primacy as her husband’s subject is the artist himself. For over a decade, she prevailed as the painter’s most significant Other.1 Yet, as Joseph Rishel (Cachin & Rishel, 1996) once observed, she has never been identified as the artist’s muse. In fact, historically she has been regarded as a veritable counter-muse, an uncooperative helpmate who not only failed to provide sufficient inspiration for the artist, but actively hindered his achievement. She barely exists in the early accounts of the painter’s life in Aix—even when authored by someone who actually met her. Cézanne’s protégé Émile Bernard wrote a lengthy description of a dinner one evening in 1904 at the Cézanne family’s home, and gave a passing mention of “Madame Cézanne,” in the same way that one might notice but then immediately dismiss a servant. The enduring resistance to granting Hortense importance to her husband extends to an assumption about her lack of significance to his work (Doran, 2001, p. 26). Bernard Dorival (1948) would later write that the painter: was almost completely indifferent to his models, who were monotonous or insignificant, and sometimes both . . . As against Delacroix, Cézanne did not try to portray remarkable people with a complex inner life; otherwise why would he have painted his wife so often? (p. 57) For Émile Bernard, Hortense’s occasional presence in her husband’s art was nothing more than expedient: “In his portraits, for example, the matter

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was hardly concerned with choosing a model. [Cézanne] painted the first willing person whom he found nearby: his wife, his son, and more often simple people, a ditch digger, a milkmaid” (in Doran, 2001, p. 42). In sum, Hortense was assumed to possess a personality so nondescript, a presence so void, that Cézanne could project whatever he wished onto her. I am convinced that the reverse is true: that in this prolonged series of portraits —the longest in the painter’s career (the over 40 self-portraits excepted) —it was precisely her physical presence, her quietude and containment, that allowed the painter to fully experience a visceral and perceptual engagement in the presence of the other. Throughout his life, Cézanne was profoundly concerned with the varying permeability of the barriers—psychological, sexual, emotional, and physical—between himself and the world. His anxiety about human contact has been much mythologized since Bernard’s disclosure that the painter had a profound aversion to being physically touched (Doran, 2001, p. 71). Hortense’s proximity, familial and physical, was as critical to Cézanne’s enterprise as her difference and detachment. For her husband, she was simultaneously within and without. She was related to him, at first by common law (he referred to her as “my wife” in his earliest letters to his friend Émile Zola) and later by marriage, but she was not of his flesh. The possibility of detachment remained, allowing the artist a greater range of experimental freedom than was available to him in the presence of his father (whom he feared) or his son (whom he indulged). Difference could be elaborated on in the space between the artist and his subject, a space that we might call—borrowing a term from Merleau-Ponty (1962)—the “interworld,” a liminal zone in which two subjectivities interact. Hortense’s portraits offer variations on the “density” of that interworld, material evidence of the relative porousness of each encounter, the painted surfaces giving form to an unstable, ever-shifting conjunction of intimacy and distance. Sometimes the boundaries between self and other seem almost transparent, scattered paint strokes barely cohering into a gauzy scrim; at other times, the surface appears obdurate, as impenetrable as a wall. Hortense’s lack of fixedness is, in part, the subject of Cézanne’s series—an expression of the instability inherent in any human contact and the unpredictability of being simultaneously mirrored, resisted, complemented, and challenged by another human being. Cézanne’s fluctuations of mood and temperament were legendary. As Richard Shiff (1998) nicely understates the case, “[a]n individual so willful

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in both aesthetic and human relations does not fare well in the social world” (p. 14). Sitting for him cannot have been easy. Ambroise Vollard claimed to have posed well over a hundred times for his portrait (Cachin & Rishel, 1996). But making a portrait, especially of someone other than himself, was no less difficult for the painter. Cézanne had a paradoxical desire to touch the world as if skinless, while maintaining his physical distance. In fact, he enjoyed referring to himself as the écorché (“the flayed one”) (Gasquet, 1991, p. 221). The painter accommodated this longing by activating an exhaustive (and apparently exhausting) vision that possessed the intensity and, for him, the transitivity of physical touch. This allconsuming form of looking was a profound physical strain. “I can’t tear my eyes away,” he confessed. “They’re so tightly glued to the point I am looking at that it seems to me they are going to bleed.” To his young friend Joachim Gasquet, the painter ruefully quoted Hortense’s own description of the effects: “And my eyes, you know, my wife tells me they jump out of my head, they get all bloodshot” (Gasquet, 1991, p. 106). Scrutinizing and painting his wife so intently and so often, over a span of roughly 10 years, allowed Cézanne to explore with an attention both fierce and protracted the relationship between other and self, while sidestepping portraiture’s conventional strategies. The painter did not, for example, lay claim to a consistent or identifiable physiognomy. He did not try to conjure his subject’s inner life, and he did not—unlike most portrayers of women—use the customary range of feminine expressions, postures and ornamental accessories. Like the painter, we can only guess at Hortense’s interior life, which her husband may have sensed but misinterpreted. We cannot know with any certainty what she was “feeling” (let alone what her husband was feeling when he painted her). Yet his portraits of her insist on the sheer presence of emotion—generated by the interaction itself—in all its liveliness, conviction, and changeability. Cézanne preserved his wife’s changeableness and the mutability of his response to her; she was a shifting force against which the painter could measure his mutating self.

Worthiness The relatively sparse but vexed reception history of the paintings of Hortense raises questions about the expectations attached to portraits of women more generally, whether these are overt conventions or unvoiced

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but collectively understood ideals. In contrast to the wide range of historically acceptable reasons for portraying a gentleman (property associations, political or religious affiliation, and familial interests, to name just a few), the woman worthy of having her portrait painted more than once or twice was expected to be either an authority of some kind (a queen, a mythical or allegorical figure, a seer) or, failing that, to be beautiful.2 The beautiful woman’s sublime personal appearance was confirmed by the artist’s virtuosity in representing it. Thus, beauty was transferred from the subject’s presentation of self to the artist’s orchestration of brushstrokes that represent her. Painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, whom Cézanne much admired, invited viewers to savor their subjects’ seductive surfaces— “transparently” displayed for the metaphorical taking. In contrast, Cézanne constructed the paintings of his wife from a series of “touches” of color that figure the physical traces of his own presence, specifically the pressure of his hand upon the canvas, short-circuiting the illusion of possession that paintings such as Rubens’s erotic female figures were designed to convey (Shiff, 1991). Historical instances of highly regarded collaborations that set the standard for how “the muse” might be envisioned include François Boucher’s portrait Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1758, Fogg Art Museum; Lajer-Burcharth, 2001; Hyde, 2000), in which the artist conflates his crimson pigment with the powdered color that the subject is poised to apply to her lips and cheeks; and Joshua Reynolds’s portrait Sarah Siddons as Tragic Muse (1784, Huntington Library, San Marino; Asleson, 1999), in which a display of dynamic brushstrokes suggests the actress’s ardent vitality. In Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (c.1785, National Gallery of Art; Hayes, 1980), a delicate application of silvery pigment suggests a gossamer cloud of hair floating around the subject’s aquiline face, blending seamlessly with the delicately agitated setting. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s propensity for classicized form found its ideal human exemplar in the marmoreal figure of Madame Moitessier (1856, National Gallery, London; Bryson, 1984; Kleinfelder, 2000), whose burnished skin glows like alabaster. Cézanne may have fashioned his portraits of Hortense with consummate skill, but his mastery of oil looks nothing like the deft displays of his predecessors. The artist’s critics equated his repudiation of conventional painterly virtuosity with his construction of a provocatively “not-beautiful” female

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subject. And, indeed, the history of women’s portraiture includes subjects whose celebrity was inversely proportionate to their lack of beauty. Isabella Stewart Gardner, for instance, the builder of a Venetian palazzo on the Fens in late nineteenth-century Boston, was as widely known for not being beautiful as she was for being enviably and ostentatiously rich. But even those critical of her plain face conceded that her figure was pleasing. In a portrait of her painted about 1888 (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Art; Weil-Garris Brandt, 1990–91; Ormond and Kilmurray, 1998), John Singer Sargent pays homage to her hourglass figure by placing her before an enlarged pomegranate pattern (magnified to monumental scale from a scrap of Italian textile in her collection), and calls attention to the curvature of her hips by wrapping them in a black shawl.

Figure 2.1 Paul Cézanne, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, c. 1879–1882, possibly reworked 1886–1888, E. G. Bührle Collection, Zurich Image: Courtesy of the E.G. Bührle Collection

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Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense are admittedly difficult. At first glance, most present to us a remote, even unapproachable, figure. Consider the Portrait of the Artist’s Wife in the Bührle Collection (Figure 2.1), in which Hortense is painted as a stern-faced, erect woman with a commanding, almost muscular presence. She gazes out directly but enigmatically from unevenly spaced, ebony eyes whose dark irises swell to fill the narrow ellipses. Her eyes are fixed asymmetrically in a face so apparently inexpressive as to prompt some writers to dub it “mask-like,” a term applied, incidentally, to nearly all of Cézanne’s portraiture. We can understand why John Rewald compares Hortense’s impassive face here to Picasso’s representation of Gertrude Stein, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Gertrude Stein, 1906; Rewald, 1986; Lubar, 1997), especially when we discover that Stein was the original owner of the Bührle portrait. She displayed the Cézanne high up on her drawing-room wall, from where it haunted Picasso as he struggled to realize his vision of his subject in one aborted sitting after another. The stubborn opacity of Hortense’s portraits—and Stein’s—frustrated critics accustomed to the disclosure of self that the genre is expected to offer—especially when the subject is a woman fixed in the controlling gaze of a male painter. Recent studies examine the series of exchanges by which the maker and the sitter together produce the portrait (Woodall, 1997; Brilliant, 1991; Berger, 1994; McPherson, 2001). Historically, viewers have seen this encounter as especially fraught if the subject is, or is thought to be, the companion of an artist of genius. In this role, Hortense is consistently found wanting, much maligned for her regrettable lack of conventional beauty, her sour disposition, and her failure to smile—a refusal to ingratiate that many writers have considered her most damning offense.3 Her portraits have largely been consigned to the role of “illustrations” of her husband’s troubled personal history; and she herself has been excluded from the inventory of Cézanne’s prime attachments (i.e. Mont St-Victoire, apples, and his son, Paul fils). But perhaps, as Rishel (1993) suggests, the Cézannes’ marriage was no less conventional than many long-term bourgeois liaisons of the nineteenth century. Admittedly, they did not always share a residence, and neither spouse seems to have depended upon the other for deep intimacy or sexual passion. It is more likely that the two married to render Paul fils a legitimate heir to the fortune that was soon to be his father’s. Nonetheless, husband and wife remained in contact for

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the duration of the painter’s life; the portraits serve as material evidence of the abiding nature of that affiliation, despite its inevitable lapses.

Selves William James (1890) wrote that, “[p]roperly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” (p. 335). By the late nineteenth century, this multiplicity of selves was widely understood to define the modern human persona. Could that account for the diverse, even contradictory, forms of Hortense’s appearance in the portraits her husband painted of her? Were female subjects allowed to court such a “multiplicity of selves”? Generally not. To critics of Hortense’s portraits, this notion would be far too generous an explanation for her looking so unattractive in so many different ways. Indeed, Cézanne’s repeated refusal to represent an adoring helpmate has routinely been understood to result not from the artist’s pictorial decisions, but rather from the failure of the woman who inspired them: her failure to ingratiate, to entertain, and, above all, to seduce. Linda Nochlin (1996) drily observes that history has ill served the wives and mistresses of modernist artists. “Artists’ wives get bad press,” she writes: Delacroix, Gericault, Courbet, Degas, van Gogh and Seurat never married; Manet’s wife is often denigrated, despite the fact that he continued to live with her, write to her, and paint her throughout his life (she was fat, an added negative); Mme Pissarro was a demanding, ignorant shrew; Gauguin shucked off his Scandinavian spouse as an inconvenience fairly early in his career; Picasso, succumbing momentarily to bourgeoisification during his marriage to Olga, retaliates by transforming her into a castrating monster on canvas . . . and so it goes. Only Cézanne, the lone-wolf master of Aix, paints his wife so often, with such attentiveness. (pp. 65–66) Hortense’s constancy in her husband’s paintings distinguishes her from wives of other painters of her generation—Suzanne Leenhoff Manet, Camille Doncieux Monet, and Aline Charigot Renoir, for example—and allies her with the better-known “muses” of an earlier age. The affectionate portraits of Rembrandt’s first wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh, and, later,

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Figure 2.2 a, left: Paul Cézanne, Woman with Green Hat (Madame Cézanne), c.1891–1892, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. b, right: Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Suzanne Fourment (or, The Straw Hat), c.1620–1625, National Gallery, London Images: © The Barnes Foundation, reproduced with permission, all rights reserved

after her death, the artist’s companion Hendrickje Stoffels, come to mind, as do Rubens’s seductive paintings of his two wives, Isabella Brandt and Hélène Fourment. Rubens’s portraits may have played a generative role in Cézanne’s representations of his wife (Sidlauskas, 2009). There seems to be a dialogue, if not an outright competition, between the latter’s Woman with Green Hat (Madame Cézanne) (c.1891–1892, the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia: Figure 2.2a) and at least one of Rubens’s portraits of his second wife, Hélène Fourment with Carriage (c.1639, Musée du Louvre), as well as another of her sister, the Portrait of Suzanne Fourment (c.1620–1625, National Gallery, London: Figure 2.2b). The Flemish painter posed the young Hélène Fourment, nude and clutching a sensuous fur to her luminous skin, in The Furlet (c.1638, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). But he also painted her, sumptuously dressed, with their offspring in Hélène Fourment and Her Children (c.1636–1638, Musée du Louvre), a painting Cézanne explicitly admired.4

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“La Boule” Perhaps it is precisely because of Cézanne’s attentiveness that Hortense stands out among the more vilified mistresses and wives. By and large, attitudes toward her have tended to fit into two general categories: benign neglect, as in a number of relatively brief discussions in exhibition catalogues and one article promoting the dating of her portraits through dress; and aversion, even hostility, not only toward her representation but also her person, about whom we actually know very little (Butler, 2008; Van Buren, 1966; Cahn, 1996). The predominant narrative of Hortense as an impediment for the artist to overcome took shape early on, in correspondence between Cézanne’s friends and acquaintances. Two of the painter’s closest childhood friends, the critic Paul Alexis and the novelist and critic Émile Zola, describe her with casual contempt in the letters they exchanged. On several occasions, Alexis (1971) refers to Hortense as “La Boule” (the ball), a cryptic but no doubt unflattering nickname; he reports that Cézanne confided that his wife liked nothing but Switzerland and lemonade. Alexis’s bitterness toward Hortense never abated, and seems to have deepened when he reestablished contact with the painter after a lull of several years. He offhandedly describes Cézanne as “furious” with his wife for forcing him to accompany her on a trip to Switzerland, and affirms that the painter greatly prefers the company of his sister and mother—the idea being that, even though the painter insists that Hortense live in Aix, he will not grant her the opportunity to live with him there. Alexis seems to have relished Cézanne’s draconian strategy for controlling his wife’s itinerary. Some years later, Roger Fry (1972), the English art critic who forged Cézanne’s reputation as the father of modern painting, dashed off a particularly nasty comment. Writing in 1925 to a friend about his struggles to understand Cézanne, Fry confides, “[i]t’s complicated to begin with, and life changed him enormously. Perhaps that sour-looking bitch of a Madame counts for something in the tremendous repression that took place” (p. 568).5 Writer Jack Lindsay was even less decorous. He expressed incredulity at Hortense’s relationship with the painter and proceeded to enumerate all of her supposed flaws: her addiction to cheap romantic novels (one thinks of Emma Bovary), her coarse skin and heavy chin, her reputation as a chatterbox, and her merely “superficial interest in people and things.” But Lindsay maintained that her “stunned stupidity,”

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confirmed for him by the impassivity of the portraits, was the primary factor that enabled the painter to continue his relationship with her (Lindsay, 1969, pp. 131–132). Lindsay was only the most explicit of those for whom Hortense’s apparent unpleasantness “explained” Cézanne’s legendary difficulties of temperament, thereby elucidating, and forgiving, the crankiness of a painter who was described as “a bit of a misanthrope, and strange” by one of his greatest admirers (Bernard, in Doran, 2001, p. 21). One of the most influential critiques emanates from John Rewald, the dean of Cézanne studies. Insisting that Hortense had no impact whatsoever on the painter’s art or life, he rather ironically follows this assertion by observing that, shortly after Cézanne met her, his subject matter revolved around scenes of intermingled eroticism and violence, such as The Murder (c.1867–1870, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Rewald, 1986, p. 18). In fact, Rewald draws his speculations about Hortense’s physical attributes from a fictional character: an artist’s model in Zola’s L’Œuvre (1886), the novel that likely hastened the end of Cézanne’s friendship with the man who was not only his closest friend in childhood, but also an important companion during his early years in Paris. To this day, authors remain unsure how to position Hortense in relation to her husband (the story that she failed to arrive at her husband’s deathbed because of an appointment with her dressmaker remains a favorite).6 Still emphasized in nearly all accounts are reports of the couple’s long periods of estrangement; their incompatibilities in class, temperament, and preferred place of residence; and the questionable assumption that their sexual relationship ended after the birth of their son.

Vanity Cézanne’s peers, for all the radicalism that critics perceived in their portraiture, in fact preserve many familiar conventions of the feminine in their representations of their respective spouses. Consider Suzanne Manet’s luminous white dress in Reading, Madame Manet and Her Son (1868, Musée d’Orsay); Camille Monet’s sophisticated, windblown silhouette in Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son (1875, National Gallery of Art); and Aline Renoir’s cherubic face and sensuously rounded figure in just about every work her husband painted of her. Suzanne Manet and Camille Monet, Saskia van Uylenburgh, Hendrickje Stoffels, Isabella

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Figure 2.3 Paul Cézanne, a, upper left: Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair, c.1888–1890, Art Institute of Chicago; b, upper right: Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress, c.1888–1890, Museu de Arte, São Paulo, Brazil; c, lower left: Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair, c.1890–1894, Beyeler Collection, Basel; d, lower right: Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress, c.1888–1890, Metropolitan Museum of Art Images: © The Art Institute of Chicago; Wikimedia Commons

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Brandt, and Hélène Fourment all appear to varied effect in their husbands’ portrayals of them, yet while their roles and appearance—their ages, weight, and costumes—may have varied over the years, recognizable signs of their identities persist in their portraits.7 The shifts in Fiquet Cézanne’s portraits, in contrast, suggest that her husband reconceived her and remade her—and her relation to him—each time he looked at her. Even when Hortense wears the same dress or has her hair fashioned in a similar topknot, we hardly recognize her from one version of herself to another. The transformations she undergoes are of a different order. Two clusters of portraits in the series demonstrate the irrelevance of Hortense’s vanity, as well as Cézanne’s deference to it. In one series of four paintings she wears the same nondescript red dress: the portraits in the Art Institute of Chicago (Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair), Fondation Beyeler, Basel (Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Madame Cézanne—Hortense Fiquet, 1850–1922—in a Red Dress), all of which were produced sometime between 1888 and 1890 (Figure 2.3). The styleless red garment, likely a house dress with a floppy collar and a limp ruffle trailing down the front, is the only feature—other than the title—that links these four paintings. In each, Hortense possesses a different facial structure, bodily proportion, and affect. Her face in the Chicago portrait (Figure 2.3a) is an opaque, rounded Noh mask with almond-shaped eyes; the Basel figure (Figure 2.3b) has a hawk-shaped nose and sunken, bony eye sockets. In the São Paulo painting (Figure 2.3c), both the head and the body seem pinched, attenuated, and expressionless, with generic features; and the New York portrait (Figure 2.3d) features a divided body and a bifurcated face that shifts abruptly from rough-hewn masculinity to doll-like charm. In another triad of images—the portraits in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (Figure 2.4a), the Detroit Institute of Arts (Figure 2.4b), and the Musée d’Orsay (Figure 2.4c)—Hortense wears an unstructured blue “sack jacket.” In the Houston painting, a powder-blue garment encases a large lumbering body crowned by a stalk-like neck and a long, austere oval head. In the Detroit version, the same dress is closer to teal blue, and the figure’s tooshort arms are encased in truncated sleeves; the head is rounded and compact, with a narrow forehead. In the Musée d’Orsay portrait, the dress is pale blue again, and the head is a rounded mask, with the subject’s gaze

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Figure 2.4 Paul Cézanne, a, upper left: Madame Cézanne in Blue, c.1888–1890, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; b, upper right: Madame Cézanne, c.1886, Detroit Institute of Arts; c, lower: Portrait of Madame Cézanne, c.1885–1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris Images: Wikimedia commons; Ellen Meiselman, http://thedesignspace.net, used with kind permission; © RMS-Grand-Palais/Hérve Lewandowski/Art Resource, NY

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averted and concentrated through narrowed eyes. Flecks of vivid color punctuate and enliven the pale skin and garment. In the two clusters of images just described, Cézanne effectively reverses the usual understanding of “costume”—as Reynolds, Rembrandt, and Rubens might have used it. In Cézanne’s portraits, the garment remains more or less the same, or retains recognizable features, from image to image (even if color and proportion are altered), and the setting and the poses may be similar. But everything else changes: the subject’s proportions, her skin tone and hairstyle, the shape of her face and the space between her eyes, the contours of her nose and mouth, the disposition of her hands, the slope of her shoulders: in other words, all the external attributes that customarily differentiate one individual from another.

Differences Among Cézanne’s peers, Manet, Degas, and Courbet were also castigated for refusing to paint the silken skin and coy gazes of their female portraiture subjects. Yet the interventions they made were of a fundamentally different character from Cézanne’s. Manet, Degas, and Cézanne may have worked in the same genre, but the latter’s inventions rely on a radically different idiom, destabilizing the very category of the female subject in representation. Cézanne was outspoken in his admiration of Courbet, and grudging in his praise of Manet, but he remained ambivalent about Degas, whose cantankerousness resembled his own (it should be noted that Degas was an active admirer and collector of Cézanne’s works).8 This painter’s representation of female sensibilities (of women of his own class) was radical, to be sure; distinctive facial features, stilled but revealing gestures, wary glances, and bourgeois costumes were Degas’s shorthand for the rich and troublesome intersection of his female subjects’ inner and outer lives. Perhaps Cézanne felt that Degas’s portraits—pathbreaking as they were— relied too heavily on these strategies, those of an earlier generation. A comparison with the portraits of Degas, in particular, is useful for sharpening the distinctions. In his Bust Portrait of a Woman (c.1887–1890; Figure 2.5a), Degas offers the viewer a quizzical, lively, and slightly wary female intelligence (in fact, Degas was one of the few nineteenthcentury painters to embrace womanly intelligence as a favorite subject). The woman’s face pivots three-quarters toward the viewer. She wears a

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Figure 2.5 Edgar Degas, a, left: Bust Portrait of a Woman, c.1887–1890, private collection; b, right: Woman with Umbrella (Berthe Jeantaud), c.1876, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Image: © National Gallery of Canada

bourgeois walking costume with a fitted jacket; the bonnet tied artfully under her chin is the type of costume detail that Cézanne rarely incorporated. Degas painted his subject’s olive-toned skin in shades of ocher inflected with delicate shadows in blue and brown. Out of these subtle contrasts, he molded a finely formed double chin, a blunt nose, and faintly pursed sensuous lips. Straight, firm eyebrows and a wide forehead arc over deep brown eyes. Here, Degas posits a direct and slightly provocative confrontation with a potent, vigilant feminine presence. He artfully conjures the force of the subject’s personality through hue and tone, shadow, and physiognomic details. In other words, Degas calls up the entire roster of illusionistic means, marshaling them with economy, vigor, and the idiosyncratic and ruthless naturalism that distinguishes his work from that of salon-friendly “realist” peers such as Jean Béraud and Alfred Stevens. Despite Degas’s ostensible realism, his sitter’s expression remains ambiguous, attesting to the artist’s boldness. We cannot resolve our impression of the subject. Does

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she welcome our gaze? Is she defiantly reserved or simply uninterested in us? Degas compels us to consider all the options but provides no evidence to help us reach a resolution. Although his subject’s edgy withdrawal contrasts markedly with Fiquet Cézanne’s self-containment, both subjects, in their own ways, appear unapproachable. Nonetheless, even if the nuanced inner life of Degas’s subject remains unknown to us, the sheer presence of what we might call her “consciousness”—and the external evidence that testifies to it—are not in doubt. Another portrait by Degas offers a more literal instance of a “notbeautiful” woman subject and thus provides a pertinent comparison to portraits of Hortense, with her reportedly unattractive features. In Degas’s Woman with Umbrella (Berthe Jeantaud) (c.1876, National Gallery of Canada: Figure 2.5b), painted about a decade earlier than his Bust Portrait of a Woman, the anonymous subject gazes squarely at us, magnifying the impact of her rather strikingly homely face. Heavy-lidded eyes, a prominent bone structure, and a large, irregularly shaped nose render her bold frontal stance and unapologetic air an exceptional instance of female presentation for this period. The woman’s carefully realized face crowns an unfinished body. Her coat is only half-sketched, and the contour of an umbrella’s handle is tucked under her arm. A vaguely drawn furry collar contrasts sharply with the severe, angular contours of her face. In displaying her plainness so forthrightly, this subject confounds expectations. Neither of the two female subjects just discussed is identified, but their anonymity in no way compromises their seeming authenticity as portrait subjects: each convinces us that she lived and breathed and was “known” by the artist. In both portraits, Degas titillates viewers with the prospect of eventual disclosure—never fully realized—of his subjects’ interior lives, subtly orchestrating details of physiognomy, hair, dress, and traces of fashionable accessories to convey a fully present (even if not pictorially finished) character. One could easily spin tales about each of these women, or at least imagine the palpable force of their personalities. The possibility of satisfying our curiosity whets our appetite to engage with these portraits and compels us to scrutinize them thoroughly, for they seem somehow knowable. However, the illusion of authenticity in Degas’s portraits does not depend on conventional narrative tropes. Instead, we instantly recognize in these works the terms of ordinary (if avowedly upper middleclass) human sociability; a fragment of this historical person’s authentic

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psyche—however remote from the present-day viewer—seems to lie within our grasp. In Degas’s portraits—as with Suzanne Manet’s plain face and rounded figure or Camille Monet’s sad dark eyes—the “real” person seems recoverable, an illusion that Cézanne completely defies in his portraits of his wife. Cézanne conceived and generated content in a different way, and he demanded a new intervention by his viewers, even as he required a new, if unvoiced, intervention by his subjects. Strictly speaking, Hortense’s portraits offer no “clues”—no minute facial tics to catalogue or quirks of expression to decode. Class markers appear occasionally, but they are ambiguous and inconsistent, as are allusions as to setting. Degas painted out of his own shrewd, analytical psychology, recognizing in each subject—even at times paying homage to—another well-defended persona. Cézanne looked and painted as the écorché: the “skinless” one who becomes imaginatively fused with the object of his attention, encountering and navigating boundaries of varying penetrability. Given his reputation for prickliness and his terror that someone would get his or her “grappins” into him (Bernard, in Doran, 2001, p. 58), we should be surprised that he does not, in fact, gaze at his principal female subject from within the armature of his own defenses. Despite Degas’s evident empathy for, and perhaps even identification with, many of his upper middle-class female subjects, he always remained fastidiously solitary—the célibataire of legend. In many ways, Cézanne’s reciprocal intimacy with his wife— however unconventional—constituted a riskier venture.

Reciprocity The “content” of Hortense’s portraits was shaped by the interaction itself— by its time, space, and duration, as well as the emotions and associations it conjured. If Cézanne was afraid of the physical sensation of touch, as he insisted to Émile Bernard (in Doran, 2001), then the painted canvas might have served as the intervening surface that conjoined self to other, artist to subject: a manufactured “skin” for the écorché, across which the artist could orchestrate variations. Naturally, the composition of the fragile skin of pigment lying upon his canvases shifted from one portrait of Fiquet Cézanne to another (capturing the relative “density” of the interworld), but variations also occurred within each image’s frame.

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In Suspensions of Perception, Jonathan Crary (1999) writes that: Cézanne learned what Manet had intuited: the creative discovery that looking at any one thing intently did not lead to a fuller and more inclusive grasp of its presence, its rich immediacy. Rather, it led to its perceptual disintegration and loss, its breakdown as intelligible form. (p. 289) This way of experiencing the world, according to Crary, was “no longer a question of recording the evanescent appearances of the world but of confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception itself.” Crary argues that Cézanne’s production around 1900 paralleled William James’s (1890) investigations into the shape of consciousness, which was not, the psychologist argued, a contained and discernible entity but characterized by porous borders and unpredictable paths (p. 294). A visualization of the plurality of “dissolving views,” as James describes the mechanism of the modern consciousness, is evident in an 1885 portrait of Hortense. In Madame Cézanne (Figure 2.6), the subject at first seems to look frankly out at the viewer with an intense engagement that is unusual in this body of work—and relatively rare in Cézanne’s portraits in general. Hortense appears to be piqued, even a bit angry. Mid-nineteenth-century writers believed that the force of anger could muster a powerful, and potentially attractive, effect. As psychologist Alexander Bain (1859 [1865]) put it, [a]ctive feelings may, however, acquire a certain beauty by their exaggeration, the beauty of strength . . . Anger, when it is taken to its paroxysm, has superb attitudes; it looks you straight in the face and, gathering all its forces, gets ready to pounce. (p. 203) On closer inspection, however, one can see that Fiquet Cézanne’s apparently unflinching gaze is concentrated only in her right eye—its brown-violet iris is full and centered, her eyelid generously arched and fully open. While this eye rivets the viewer, the other is deflected and hooded by a flaccid, heavy lid. Its iris floats nearer the nose than ocular muscles would actually permit. Cézanne distinguishes, moreover, between the faint curve of violet encircling the interior of the outer-directed eye and the more darkly painted fragmentary ellipse defining the other, reinforcing the

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Figure 2.6 Paul Cézanne, Madame Cézanne, c. 1885, Nationalgalerie Museum Berggruen, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Image: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin/Jens Ziehe/Art Resource, NY

sensation of withdrawal. Anatomical symmetry is undermined, along with the subject’s accessibility. The strokes of blue, rose, pale ocher, and green composing Hortense’s face diverge from a conventional “expression.” Cézanne’s careful placement of tones does not reflect a desire to render his wife’s physiognomy more recognizable, or her facial expression more revelatory. For instance, while pale crimson strokes define his wife’s cheeks, these patches of color are far too apparent as paint, and far too irregular, to serve simply as markers for features (a blushing complexion, for instance). They signify something different. Likewise, the curves of blue violet that partially rim Hortense’s brow and eye sockets—once again uneven, distinct, and

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singular in their irregular trajectory—do not hint at fatigue or distress, as comparably placed violet shadows might in a portrait by Degas. Consider, for example, the painter’s magisterial double portrait of his sister Thérèse with her husband, Edmondo Morbilli (1867, The Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Degas paints the deep circles below his sister’s eyes with a violet gray that softens, but saddens, her expression. Thérèse seems melancholy and diminished, both physically and psychologically, by the hulking presence of her husband. Her melancholy becomes all the more palpable when we learn that she had recently suffered a miscarriage. This biographical detail does not necessarily “explain” all the portrait’s nuances, but it does make some of Degas’s formal choices all the more acute. Cézanne animates selected surfaces of his subjects and reconceptualizes the entire notion of expression. We cannot extract from the portraits of Hortense evidence that she was melancholy or discontent, despite critics’ assertions.9 Cézanne is not interested in “capturing” his subject’s nose wrinkled in curiosity, her brow contracted in worry, her mouth pursed in disapproval—all physiognomic markers that nineteenth-century viewers would adroitly recognize. Instead, in a series of infinitely variable color shifts, Cézanne impels the viewer’s eyes, and mind, to flicker over the surface of the composition, responding incrementally, irregularly, to a process that never reaches a conclusion, to “features” that never cohere in any conventional way but seem to alter their shapes and positions as we gaze upon them. And this inconclusive response is precisely the point: the very act of perceiving another figure in time and space is unstable, as are the human features from which we believe we are extracting meaning. What is disclosed and concealed fluctuates in the act of perception; what is apparent and what is intuited never achieve balance. Crary (1999) situates this instability in a larger context: “[p]erhaps in spite of himself, [Cézanne] became attentive to the body, its pulsings, its temporalities and the intersection of that body with a world of transitions, of events and of becoming” (p. 56). Although Crary concerns himself mostly with Cézanne’s late landscape Pine and Rocks (c.1899, Museum of Modern Art, New York), the analogy helps illuminate the fluctuations of color and form in the painter’s portraits of Hortense, particularly in light of emerging concepts about the fluidity of the self. Indeed, Cézanne seeks to paint moments of “becoming.” His vision and his experience—and his subject’s —necessarily changes from moment to moment. He wrestles with the

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question of how to give visual form to natural phenomena—a dilemma at its thorniest when the subject is not a tree or a rock but a woman, the artist’s intimate, who gazes back at him.

Stasis and Shift One of Cézanne’s strategies in painting the portraits of his wife was to create an unsettling marriage of the infinitely changeable and the ineffably still. The changes that do occur—relentlessly—never seem to derive from a notion of narrative progress. For example, Cézanne displays no interest in revealing his wife’s age. In the oil paintings, we are hard-pressed to distinguish her twenties from her forties (the drawings suggest a greater range of ages, although they too are unpredictable). Although Hortense’s “self” changes in each portrait, the differences clearly do not stem from a conventional aging process, to which she seems largely immune.10 But time does not stand still for this subject. Nor does her husband render her as perpetually youthful—as Vigée-Lebrun often softened the effects of time on her female patrons (as on herself), usually portraying them in the blush of their youth even when they were long past middle age (Sheriff, 1996). In Hortense’s portraits, “time,” in the conventional sense, seems beside the point—particularly as artists tend to suggest its passage in their portraits of women. Such time-based indictments of the female sex continue to this day. Women as they grow older are said to suffer “the ravages of time”; their looks “decline”; their beauty “fades.” If Cézanne denies viewers the satisfaction of charting his wife’s age— a matter traditionally requiring the greatest delicacy—he also strips the conventional portrait pose of its rhetorical power. Just as critics disdain Fiquet Cézanne’s lack of expression, they fret about the seeming inertness of her pose. Harry Berger (1994) argues that a subject’s pose reveals a great deal about the interaction between the portrayer and the portrayed: “[i]n terms of what we assume about the actual painting and posing process, the portrait gives us a selectively abstracted and idealized image of posing. It creates a referential illusion.” Hortense’s poses, however, have a studied neutrality, as if the painter deliberately suppressed the type of performance of self that one can extract from the carefully arranged limbs of the subjects of Rembrandt, Titian, or Veronese. Cézanne’s seemingly bland formats send a message that his wife is not posing, at least not with the self-conscious flourish displayed in a portrait such as Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as Tragic Muse, for example.

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Despite the general conviction that Hortense is neither posed nor posing, she never sits, stands, or turns with convincing ease. Nor is her body stably fixed in space, as it might initially appear. Consider her disorienting tilt in Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (Figure 2.3d), the awkward compression of the portrait in Detroit (Figure 2.4b), and the strange torsion of Woman with Green Hat in the Barnes Foundation (Figure 2.2a). Often, Hortense seems to float unanchored or to tilt without provocation. In the historical context of women’s portraiture, her images are exercises in gracelessness. Traditionally, the painter’s and subject’s complicity in orchestrating the latter’s pose has been considered a critical—and potentially revelatory—aspect of their collaboration. While Rubens presumably coached the young Hélène Fourment to perform as if for different audiences, moving from modest, if lush, sensuality to conspicuous maternity, Hortense’s impresario issued no directions, other than the probable order to remain absolutely still and, most likely, silent (Gasquet, 1991). How did Cézanne collaborate with his wife, if in fact this term “collaboration” is relevant here?

Agency Elisabeth Bronfen (1994) has written of the anxiety both artist and sitter typically suffer in collaborating on a portrait. Folk traditions often express the sitter’s fear that something might be “stolen” in the process of representation; on the flip side is the artist’s nervousness about effecting the necessary transformation from life to art. Writing about Degas’s portraits, Bronfen argues that, [w]hile the image potentially captures and contains the soul of the model, so that having one’s portrait taken was also often thought of as a harbinger of death, the maker or owner of a portrait in turn was thought to gain possession, power and control over the portrayed—at times even the ability to exercise a fatal influence over the model. (p. 240) Was Hortense a willing partner in her husband’s enterprise? She must have given over many hours to posing for him, if Vollard’s disclosure that he sat 115 times for Cézanne for his 1899 portrait is even remotely accurate (Cachin & Rishel, 1996). As a one-time artist’s model, possibly a bookbinder, and the daughter of a provincial clerk, Fiquet Cézanne occupied a

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considerably lower social rank than did Cézanne’s family. She apparently lacked an independent income; many of the painter’s letters to Zola—even in the 1880s—are filled with requests for money for his mistress and son. Until he came into his inheritance, Cézanne depended on an allowance from his father, who diminished and increased it at will. During the 1870s, in particular, this dependence sometimes left Cézanne desperate to secure enough money for Hortense and Paul fils, whose existence he strove to keep from his father, even though Cézanne père seems to have known about his grandson from very early on (he himself had fathered Cézanne fils illegitimately). After Monsieur Cézanne died and left his progeny very well off, the painter was apparently almost as erratic with Hortense’s allowance as his father had been with his. The painter cut her income in half so that she would have no choice but to leave Paris for more modest quarters. She came to the south of France, where, living in rented rooms with her son (but not her husband), she reportedly did not get along well with her motherand sister-in-law, who continued to indulge the painter’s domestic needs in the house of his childhood, the Jas de Bouffon.11 Hortense Fiquet Cézanne left few records, and no correspondence with her husband or son survives, although we cannot be sure that it never existed. At least one letter exists from her to Émile Bernard, giving the younger artist permission to publish a number of drawings by Cézanne (Cahn, 1996). In this letter, Fiquet Cézanne also complains about the labor entailed in mounting an exhibition of her husband’s work—a comment that challenges the assumption that she had nothing to do with her husband’s painting career; additionally, the letter affirms that Hortense was not illiterate, as a number of writers have suggested. We also know that in July 1896, at the request of his wife and son, Cézanne traveled to Taloiris, Switzerland, where on the shore of Lac d’Annecy he executed one of his most sublime landscapes, The Lac d’Annecy (1896, Courtauld Gallery, London). A few reports that we might term anecdotal evidence about disputes within the marriage survive. André Gide reported to Maurice Denis that: [i]t seems the artist had consecrated a room in his apartment to his mother’s memory. His wife, in a fit of jealousy, burned all the bibelots. On discovering this, Cézanne left and spent several days in the countryside. (Denis, 1957, p. 175)12

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In Isabelle Cahn’s chronology of the artist’s life, the saddest entry about Fiquet Cézanne occurs on September 26, 1902, when Cézanne drafted a holograph will, left with “Maître Monravit,” naming his son as his sole heir. The will states, “[c]onsequently my wife, should she survive me, will have no legal claim on the property that will constitute my estate on the day of my death” (Cahn, 1996, p. 561)13 (apparently, after Cézanne died, his wife did give up the studio, Les Lauves, which she had owned jointly with the painter). Yet, despite this apparent renunciation of ties to Hortense, in July 1905 the painter responded to the news from his son that she was ill by asking Paul fils to take good care of his mother, to seek the “well-being, coolness, and diversions appropriate to the circumstances.”14 Did Hortense’s ornery husband invite her to sit for him, or did he order her to do so? We have no way of knowing, nor can we judge with finality what Cézanne’s attitude was toward his most constant sitter. Whatever idiosyncratic and shifting mix of affection, dominance, neglect, disdain, and indifference Cézanne may have felt toward his wife, she was nonetheless a figure through whom he chose to explore, with great intensity and cogency, the fluid boundaries between the self and what the late nineteenth-century dictionary author Émile Littré (1869) called the nonsoi, the “non-self.” A passage in a chapter entitled “Other Selves and the Human World” from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962) helps to understand the interactions between Cézanne and his wife. Describing how the human self is shaped through interdependence with another, the philosopher concludes, “[h]enceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon” (p. 354). This was a question Cézanne obsessively posed and reposed in paint: where does one self stop and the other begin? And how can we tell? Analyzing the reciprocity between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso that produced the famed portrait of her, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lubar (1997) argues that the painting depended on a “circuit of exchanges” between artist and subject. Some trajectories between the two were probably accidental; others were deliberately sought and experienced. We know a great deal about Gertrude Stein, a larger-than-life persona who continues to be defined and reinterpreted through her own words and those of her life companion, Alice B. Toklas. Photographs of Stein and Toklas show them both individually and together, and a variety of pictorial and literary art works have emerged in homage since their

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deaths. Picasso’s thoughts about Stein are recorded, as are the canny observations of his mistress at the time, who dryly chronicled the interaction between the ferociously ambitious young painter and the more sophisticated, no less ambitious writer and collector. Stein’s agency in the production of her own portrait is indisputable, if not, in the end, conclusive. When Stein complained to Picasso that she did not look like her portrait, the artist reassured her with every confidence, “You will” (Lubar, 1997, p. 58). Hortense Fiquet Cézanne was far more reticent than Stein, and her husband, needless to say, did not possess Picasso’s bravado. Nonetheless, the evidence of the paintings suggests that the “circuit of exchange” between husband and wife was no less potent and complex, in its way, than the uneasy confrontation between the American writer and the young painter from Málaga, Hippolyte Taine, in De l’Intelligence (1871), which emphasized the transcendent importance of sensation: “[w]hen we come to the sensation, we are at the limits of the mental world: between it and the physical world there is a gulf, and as it were, a deep sea” (p. 151). Sensation is the word Cézanne most often chose to describe his impressions and responses before nature. For a sustained period, Cézanne’s portraits of Fiquet Cézanne arrogated the place of that deep sea: they represented for the man who executed them an exploration, and a testing, of the “limits of the mental world.” Their surfaces exist as evidence of the artist’s struggle to knit together the sum of his sensations, mingled with those of his subject, and thereby to bridge the ineffable space dividing self from other. That Cézanne launched a similar struggle through, and with, other subjects —Gustave Geffroy, Ambroise Vollard, the gardener Vallier, and Henri Gasquet, among others—is not in doubt. Indeed, his comments about painting the elder Gasquet offer the closest thing we have to his insights about portraiture (Gasquet, 1921).

Conclusion For a concentrated period, however, Fiquet Cézanne acted as the principal field for experimenting with the self/other dyad, and her portraits can help us learn more about the questions the artist posed about the relation between the self and the world throughout his career: how does one see, and represent, emotion? How does one engage with the world yet preserve a semblance of autonomy? And how does one assess, and represent,

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difference—not only between self and other, but between male and female, and between what is human and what is not? (Cézanne seems to have wondered whether the differences mattered.) Fiquet Cézanne may not fulfill anybody’s fantasy of what a “muse” might look like, but her husband kept coming back to her in his work. In a late graphite and watercolor image, Seated Woman (Madame Cézanne) (c.1902–1904, private collection), the painter came back to her one last time (Figure 2.7). She sits at a table, her right arm laid heavily across its surface. Her body seems faintly pneumatic, as if the dress has been pumped with air. Her face oscillates between nothingness and a near-grotesque presence, with a cursory but unmistakable eyebrow, a faint shadow for an eye, and a small cartoon-like grin. The subject is massive yet incomplete: Hortense is both here and gone.

Figure 2.7 Paul Cézanne, Seated Woman (Madame Cézanne), c.1902–1904, private collection

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Consider the overscale hands that dissolve into nothing but shadow, the jaw that looms even as it disintegrates, and the body absent but for the dress that inflates around it. Her relative “formlessness” is transmuted into a radiance of color, painted by a man who produced this radiance as he teetered on the edge of extinction. Cézanne’s subject, his wife, sits at the table that provided the stage for so many of his still life arrangements— at the center of his studio, the heart of his practice. By being there, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne sat with her husband—and became his art.

Notes 1 This essay is adapted from material drawn from Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense, published by the University of California Press, © 2009 the Regents of the University of California. My thanks to the Press for granting permission to reprint material from the book, and to Adele Tutter for inviting me to contribute to this volume. For a complete bibliography on Cézanne’s portraits in general, and those of Hortense in particular, see pp. 271–285. 2 For discussion and bibliography on this theme, see Sidlauskas (2008) and Sheriff (1996). 3 On the assumption that a woman must appear attractive, see Simons (1988) and Cropper (1986). 4 Cézanne had a special interest in Rubens’s family portraits. He rhapsodized about another, with Hélène Fourment holding her nude son on her lap (Hélène Fourment and Her Son Frans, c.1634). J. Gasquet quotes Cézanne: “Rubens tried to do that [a psychology of color] with his wife and children, you know, the fantastic Hélène Fourment in the Louvre, all golden red, in her hat, with her little naked baby” (Doran, 2001, p. 154) (this painting was actually in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek during this period, but was perhaps on loan at the Louvre). 5 Fry wrote this to Helen Anrep on May 1, 1925, while he was at work on his 1927 volume Cézanne: A Study of His Development. 6 The most recent instance of this rumor appears in Danchev (2012, p. 358), although this writer is actually quite sympathetic to Hortense overall. 7 On Renoir’s representations of his wife, see Garb (1985); on an early portrait Monet painted of his first wife, see Groom (2012). See Armstrong (2002) for her discussions of the women the artist painted most often— Victorine Meurent and Berthe Morisot. On his preoccupation with Meurent, see Sidlauskas (2012). 8 J. Gasquet quotes Cézanne: “Degas isn’t enough of a painter; he doesn’t have enough of that! . . . With a little temperament a person can become a painter. All you need is a sense of art, and it is just this sense, without doubt, that terrifies the bourgeoisie” (in Doran, 2001, p. 136).

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9 The one possible exception is the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Madame Cézanne with Her Hair Down, c.1890–1892, which critics have long regarded as an image of melancholy. 10 To some degree, Cézanne’s many notebook drawings of Fiquet Cézanne offer an exception. The artist likely made many of these drawings when his wife was in her forties, or possibly older. They contain signs of double (or triple) chins, jowls, and sagging skin—features that Cézanne almost never paints in oil. 11 See Cahn (1996) for a chronology, which lists many of Cézanne’s requests for money. The artist directed some of these pleas to his father but most went to Émile Zola. Also see Rewald (1995) for Cézanne’s letters to Zola asking for money for Hortense and Paul fils. One wonders about the limits of Zola’s patience with his friend. 12 André Gide evidently reported this episode to Maurice Denis around 1901. See Denis (1957, pp. 175–176). 13 See Cahn’s Chronology, entry for September 26, 1902, quoting the “Archives, Tax Bureau, Aix-en-Provence” (Cahn, 1996, p. 561). It is of course entirely possible that Cézanne worded his will in this way for legal reasons. The will was read on October 29, 1906. Less than a month later, Fiquet Cézanne surrendered her life interest in the rural property (the studio Les Lauves) that the couple had owned in common. The minutes of sale by auction (Archives, Lower Civil Court, Aix-en-Provence) affirm that after the sale, the proceeds were distributed to the son’s sole benefit. See entries for November 20, November 28, and December 10, 1906 (p. 569). 14 See Rewald (1995). Almost every letter of these years is signed with either, “Your father, who sends a kiss for you and Mamma,” or “I embrace you and mamma with all my heart.” See, for example, pp. 326–327.

References Alexis, P. (1971). “Naturalisme pas mort”: lettres inédites de Paul Alexis a Emile Zola, 1871–1900 (B. H. Bakker trans.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Armstrong, C. (2002). Manet Manette. New Haven: Yale University Press. Asleson, R. (Ed.). (1999). A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Bain, A. (1859 [1865]). The Emotions and the Will. London: Longmans, Green. Berger, H. (1994). Fictions of the pose: facing the gaze in early modern painting. Representations, 46, 87–120. Brilliant, R. (1991). Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bronfen, E. (1994). Facing defacement: Degas’s portraits of women. In F. Baumann & M. Karabelnik (Eds.), Degas Portraits. London: Merrell Holberton. Bryson, N. (1984). Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Butler, R. (2008). Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: the Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cachin, F., & Rishel, J. (1996). Cézanne. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York. Cahn, I. (1996). Chronology. In F. Cachin & J. Rishel. (Eds.), Cézanne (pp. 528–569). Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art. Crary, J. (1999). Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cropper, E. (1986). The beauty of women. In M. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, N. Vickers (Eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Danchev, A. (2012). Cézanne: A Life. New York: Pantheon. Denis, M. (1957). Journal (Vol. 1). Paris: La Colombe. Doran, M. (Ed.) (2001). Conversations with Cézanne (J. Lawrence Cochran trans.). Berkeley, CA and London, UK: University of California Press. Dorival, B. (1948). Cézanne (H. H. A. Thackthwaite trans.). New York: Continental Book Center. Fry, R. (1972). The Letters of Roger Fry. (D. Sutton ed.). London: Chatto & Windus. Garb, T. (1985). Renoir and the “Natural Woman.” Oxford Art J., 2, 3–15. Gasquet, J. (1921). What he told me. In M. Doran (Ed.) & J. Lawrence Cochran (trans.) (2001), Conversations with Cézanne (pp. 107–160). Berkeley, CA and London, UK: University of California Press. Gasquet, J. (1991). Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations (C. Pemberton trans.). London: Thames & Hudson. Groom, G. (2012). Claude Monet: Camille. In G. Groom (Ed.), Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity (pp. 44–51). Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago and New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hayes, J. (1980). Thomas Gainsborough. London: Tate Gallery. Hyde, M. (2000). The “make-up” of the Marquise: Boucher’s “Portrait of Pompadour at her toilette.” Art Bull., 82, 453–475. James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology (Vols. 1 and 2). New York: Henry Holt. Kleinfelder, K. (2000). Ingres as a blasted allegory. Art Hist., 23, 800–817. Lajer-Burcharth, E. (2001). Pompadour’s touch: difference in representation. Representations, 73, 54–88. Lindsay, J. (1969). Cézanne: his life and art (pp. 131–132). Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society. Littré, E. (1869). Dictionnaire de la langue française. Paris: Hachette. Lubar, R. (1997). Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude: queer desire and the subject of portraiture, Art Bull., 70, 56–84. McPherson, H. (2001). The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith trans.). London: Routledge.

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Nochlin, L. (1996). Cézanne: studies in contrast. Art Am., 84, 56–67, 116. Ormond, R., & Kilmurray, E. (Eds.) (1998). John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings (Vol. 1). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rewald, J. (1986). Cézanne: A Biography. New York: Harry Abrams. Rewald, J. (Ed.) (1995). Paul Cézanne, Letters. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Rewald, J., with Weitzenhoffer, F. (1979). Cézanne and America: Dealers, Collectors, Artists and Critics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rishel, J. (1993). Essay. In R. Wattenmaker (Ed.) Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: From Cézanne to Matisse, exhibition catalogue (p. 112). New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Lincoln University Press. Sheriff, M. (1996). The Exceptional Woman: Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shiff, R. (1991). Cézanne’s physicality: the politics of touch. In S. Kemal & I. Gaskell (Eds.), The Language of Art History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shiff, R. (1998). Sensation, movement, Cézanne. In T. Maloon (Ed.), Classic Cézanne. Sydney, Australia: Sydney Art Gallery. Sidlauskas, S. (2008). Not-beautiful: a counter-theme in the history of women’s portraiture. In S. Shifrin (Ed.), Re-Framing Representations of Women. London: Ashgate. Sidlauskas, S. (2009). Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sidlauskas, S. (2012). The spectacle of the face: Manet's portrait of Victorine Meurent. In T. Dolan (Ed.), Perspectives on Manet (pp. 29–48). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press. Simons, P. (1988). Women in frames. History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians, 25, 4–30. Taine, H. (1871). De l’Intelligence (T. D. Haye trans.). London: L. Reeve. Van Buren, A. (1966). Madame Cézanne’s fashions and the date of her portraits. Art Quarterly, 29, 111–27. Weil-Garris Brandt, K. (1990–91). Mrs. Gardner’s Renaissance. Fenway Court (pp. 10–30). Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Woodall, J. (Ed.) (1997). Portraiture: Facing the Subject. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Chapter 3

Van Gogh’s Arlesian Muses Bradley Collins

The conventional image of a male artist and his female muse usually involves a nubile young wife or mistress who inspires a middle-aged, but still passionate, creator. One thinks of Rubens and Hélène Fourment, Rembrandt and Hendrickje Stoffels, or Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter. Channeling lust into art, these painters immortalize every pucker and hollow of their beloved’s curvaceous flesh. Love and work seem as one. Unfortunately for Vincent van Gogh, a beautiful female muse, like so many other perquisites of a great artist’s life, eluded him. The closest he came to such a traditional muse was Sien Hoornik, the haggard prostitute with whom he lived in The Hague for nearly two years. Instead of a Het Pelskin or Le Rêve, the most memorable work this relationship produced was the pregnant, scrawny-limbed figure of Sien as the embodiment of Sorrow. But if there was never a Phryne to Vincent’s Praxiteles, various women had a great hold on his artistic imagination. Two of the most important were Marie Ginoux and Augustine Roulin, whose acquaintances he made during his famous sojourn in Arles. These two women not only served as the subjects of numerous paintings, but also became extremely significant figures in his emotional life. One of the reasons for this was their intimate connection in Vincent’s mind with his great male muse, Paul Gauguin. Both Vincent and Gauguin used Madame Ginoux and Madame Roulin as models, sometimes working side by side, and Vincent made no less than five painted versions of Gauguin’s drawing of Madame Ginoux. The artists’ depictions of these women became a means of sending complex conscious and unconscious messages to each other—persisting, in Vincent’s case, long after the failure of their collaboration in the Yellow House. During Vincent’s stay in Arles in 1888, no one loomed larger than Gauguin.1 The two artists most likely met for the first time in late 1887,

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when Vincent’s brother, Theo, began to exhibit Gauguin’s paintings and ceramics in his Montmartre gallery. Gauguin’s paintings from Martinique made a tremendous impression on Vincent, and admiration booms out from his letters: Gauguin is “superior,” “has such a great talent,” and is “so great an artist” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 512, vol. 2, p. 580, vol. 3, p. 36). In May of 1888, Theo and Vincent offered to pay Gauguin’s living expenses in Arles in exchange for paintings. But, much to Vincent’s distress, Gauguin lingered for months in Brittany until finally arriving at the Yellow House on October 23. Although only five years separated them in age— Vincent was 35 and Gauguin 40 in 1888—the latter would have appeared older to Vincent for several reasons. While Vincent’s life up to this point seemed like a protracted adolescence, Gauguin had married, fathered children, and successfully pursued a financial career. In the realm of art, he was not only much more established, but had shown in the Impressionist exhibitions, which were now taking on something of a mythical quality. So it was easy for Vincent to turn Gauguin into a towering father figure. But his idealization was even more extreme than that: Vincent had grand visions for the Yellow House as the center of an artists’ collective. This “Studio of the South” would attract advanced painters from all over France, who would share expenses and promote each other’s art; in this way, they would overcome the oppressive gallery and salon system in Paris. This group, however, would not be a society of equals. Gauguin, whom Vincent characterized as a “very great master” and a “man absolutely superior in character and intellect,” would become the unquestioned head of the studio (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 62). “I stipulate at the outset,” Vincent told Theo, “that there must be an abbot to keep order, and that would naturally be Gauguin” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 60). Under Gauguin’s leadership, the community of artist-monks would usher in nothing less than a new age. And, to ensure the abbot’s comfort, Vincent had assigned to Gauguin the better corner room on the second floor of the Yellow House and had devised an elaborate decorative program of paintings for his walls. On the eve of Gauguin’s arrival, Vincent had everything on the line and everything at stake. The prospects for the Studio of the South, the Yellow House and its decorations, the worthiness of his art, and his very character would be subject to Gauguin’s judgment. Gauguin for his part was far less invested in the collaboration and had much less exalted reasons for agreeing to the offer. He preferred spending the winter in Arles than in Brittany; he needed lodging and financial support; and he wanted to remain in the good

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graces of a dealer as important as Theo. Although his motives were not entirely mercenary, he certainly didn’t see himself as the “abbot” of an artists’ colony in the Midi. Instead, he entertained the notion that Arles would amount only to a relatively short interlude during which he would recover his health and save enough to make another trip to Martinique. As it turned out, Gauguin was not overly impressed with Arles, and soon after his arrival announced his plans to return to the Antilles. With this one statement Gauguin would have destroyed all of Vincent’s dreams of a permanent Studio of the South: how could he attract artist-monks to his new monastery if the “abbot” had one foot out the door? All his calculations, all his pleading, and all his furnishing and decoration of the Yellow House were for nought. There would be no artists’ collective, no final cure for his loneliness, and no lasting solution to his financial problems. Vincent put the best face on all of this for Theo’s sake. He even adopted Gauguin’s idea of a “Studio of the Tropics” as his own. In a typically masochistic manner, he championed the very cause that had ruined his utopian vision. “What Gauguin tells of the tropics seems marvelous to me,” he wrote to Theo, “surely the future of a great renaissance in painting lies there.” Arles would now become merely a “way station” between Europe and sunnier, more exotic regions (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 99). But, despite his attempts to mask his disappointment, Gauguin had triggered a time bomb in Vincent’s psyche; one of the greatest sources of tension in the Yellow House would be his fear and dread of the older artist’s departure. Two weeks into their collaboration, Gauguin convinced Marie Ginoux to pose for them. She was the wife of Joseph-Michel Ginoux, who managed the Café de la Gare, which Vincent had so dramatically depicted in The Night Café and where he had stayed from May to mid-September. The childless Marie was 40—the same age as Gauguin—and ran the café with her husband, 12 years her senior. She had dark Mediterranean looks and was presumably adept at putting on a pleasing front for customers. It would have made more sense for Vincent, who had known her for months, to have invited Madame Ginoux to model; Gauguin had only recently met her when he got off the train in Arles, where she recognized him from a self-portrait sent earlier. But Gauguin, as Vincent often enviously observed, was much more confident and assured with women. Marie came to the Yellow House dressed in traditional costume consisting of a black dress, white fichu, and a small cap with a sash (the

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Figure 3.1 Paul Gauguin, Madame Ginoux, 1888, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco Image, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

Arlésienne coiffe Mirielle). She sat facing Gauguin in the first floor studio with Vincent at her side. While Gauguin carefully sketched Madame Ginoux with chalk and charcoal (Figure 3.1), Vincent rapidly painted a canvas, “slashed on in an hour” (Figure 3.2a; Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 100). This was typical of one of their many artistic differences: Gauguin liked to work deliberately and to make studies before committing himself to a canvas; Vincent, on the other hand, loved to jump in without preparation and wield his brushes as fast as he could. They also markedly diverged in their approach to the subject. Whereas Gauguin created a more frontal, stable, and rounded composition with volumetric modeling, Vincent’s version emphasizes the angularity of Madame Ginoux’s dress and physiognomy. He depicts her in a three-quarter view, and takes a special delight in the play of flat, jagged shapes created by the silhouettes of her costume and armchair. Indeed, the same model emerges so

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Figure 3.2 Vincent van Gogh, a, left: L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), 1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; b, right: L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), c.1888–1889, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Images: Scala/Art Resource, NY; © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY

differently in the hands of the two artists that the portraits barely resemble each other: Gauguin’s Madame Ginoux has a lantern jaw, echoing the round bottom of her fichu, a broad nose, and evenly curved brows, while Vincent’s figure is all sharp edges, with a triangular chin, pointy nose and arched brows. Gauguin’s drawing of Madame Ginoux served as a preliminary study for her appearance in his painting The Night Café (Figure 3.3). Here, Gauguin takes Vincent’s canvas of the same subject as his starting point. Like Vincent, he boldly contrasts the red wallpaper with the green baize of the billiard surface and makes jutting diagonals out of the edges of the pool and café tables. He also includes a sleeping figure and still life objects such as the blue seltzer bottle found in the earlier work. But, these elements aside, Gauguin has made an entirely new picture, an elaborate portrait of Madame Ginoux in situ. She presides over the foreground while sitting at a marble café table and giving the viewer a sidelong glance; behind her one sees the unused billiard table and a frieze-like row of customers seated

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against the wall. In his much calmer composition, Gauguin has rejected all of Vincent’s most powerful expressive devices. Gone are the extreme clash of complementaries, the vertiginous rush into space, and the hypnotic glow of the overhead lamps. Instead, Gauguin neatly organizes the wall, dado, billiard table, and marble tabletops into stacked horizontal zones over which hang blue wreaths of smoke. In addition, he stabilizes the foreground orthogonals, which belong more to Degas than to Vincent, by a series of vertical forms. Structure and order have replaced what Vincent described in his own painting as “delirium tremens in full swing” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 31). Yet more troubling to Vincent than the avoidance of his signature formal conceits would have been the picture’s undercurrents of mockery toward some of his favorite subjects. Gauguin’s Night Café has a snickering prurience that makes clunkily obvious the “terrible passions of humanity”

Figure 3.3 Paul Gauguin, The Night Café, 1888, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow Image: Erich Lessing/Art Resource

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that Vincent saw in his own painting (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 28). Contemporary viewers would have recognized the women sitting in the background as prostitutes; Gauguin identifies them as such in a letter to the young artist, Émile Bernard. This fact significantly alters the meaning of Madame Ginoux’s expression. In the drawing she appears both thoughtful and welcoming, but in the painting, her smile widens into a leer and her eyes narrow into a knowing, cynical look. She has become the procuress for the girls behind her. And with whom are they drinking? It is none other than Vincent’s beloved postman, Joseph Roulin. Although Vincent knew Roulin as a hearty drinker, he also admired his down-toearth wisdom, his fervent Republican politics, and his position as the head of a large family. To depict him carousing with whores is to undercut Vincent’s idealized image of Roulin as the kindly patriarch who possessed a “silent gravity” and “tenderness” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 148). Gauguin also places the Zouave lieutenant Paul-Eugène Milliet, Vincent’s friend and occasional drawing partner, next to a figure collapsed on a tabletop, thereby associating him with the café’s dissolute company. As is the case with the easygoing Roulin, the setting isn’t completely improbable, but it reduces Milliet to his most undignified level. Adding insult to injury, Gauguin renders all of these important figures in Vincent’s visual novel of the south in an abbreviated, nearly caricatural manner far removed from Vincent’s probing and generous approach. If any of this offended Vincent, he didn’t let on. In these first weeks he seemed determined to see everything in the best light and wrote that Gauguin’s picture “promises to turn out beautiful” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 519). Gauguin himself, however, sensed that something had gone awry. In a letter to Bernard, he stated that he liked his painting less than Vincent did and found the subject “not in my line.” Gauguin then displaces criticism of the picture’s prurient tone onto its formal qualities. The “local colors,” not the prostitutes, are “vulgar,” and the figure of Madame Ginoux fails not because she has become a leering procuress, but because he has rendered her in much too “orthodox” a manner (Merlhès, 1984, p. 193). This is only one of many examples of blindness, on both Gauguin’s and Vincent’s part, to the hostile and competitive subtexts of Gauguin’s paintings. Eventually, however, Vincent seems to have acknowledged the damage that Gauguin had implicitly caused to Madame Ginoux’s reputation and made attempts to repair it. In early December, he painted the much more

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finished and carefully rendered version of L’Arlésienne (Figure 3.2b), which currently hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to attentively modeling her facial features, he replaces the seltzer bottle and absinthe glass, which Gauguin had prominently placed before her, with paperback novels. Far from playing the role of an insinuating madam in a low-class brothel, she has now become a woman of refinement as literary as Vincent himself. And, after Gauguin left, he also returned to his sketchy original and inserted the more ladylike appurtenances of gloves and a parasol (Figure 3.2a). Later in the fall, the two artists would once again paint the same female subject when the postman Roulin’s wife, Augustine, sat for them. As Vincent’s version in the Kunstmuseum Winterhur (Figure 3.4a) and Gauguin’s portrait of Madame Roulin (Figure 3.4b) share a similar horizontal format, one assumes that they were painted at the same time in late November and early December. But not all of the details coincide. In Gauguin’s picture, Madame Roulin’s costume and the placement of her hands more closely resemble her portrayal in Vincent’s later La Berceuse (The Lullaby). Thus, it is likely that Gauguin worked on his portrait throughout December while Madame Roulin sat for both paintings. Gauguin, not surprisingly, makes a more enigmatic figure out of Madame Roulin. He takes advantage of the gaslight that illuminated the Yellow House during the winter months and retains the lurid green tones on Madame Roulin’s face and the exaggerated shadows that fall on her right cheek, the wall, and the doorjamb. He also rounds out and schematizes her face so that it becomes a mask. All of these effects, combined with her unseeing, hypnotized gaze, give her a strangely diffident, almost Buddha-like presence. Vincent, by contrast, renders her more straightforwardly with rapid brush strokes and a simpler palette of red, green, and ocher. Yet Vincent has added his own invention in the form of a view out the window next to Madame Roulin’s head. It looks out on flowerpots of sprouting bulbs, which no doubt allude to the recent birth of her daughter, Marcelle Roulin. Behind the plants, a winding path snakes up parallel to the picture plane. The counterpart to Vincent’s window in Gauguin’s portrait is the section of Blue Trees that frames Madame Roulin’s head. In the recently finished Blue Trees (Figure 3.5), Gauguin belatedly put into practice the famous advice he had given the young painter Paul Sérusier in Pont-Aven. Defending the artist’s absolute right to deploy color as he pleased, Gauguin

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Figure 3.4 a, upper: Vincent van Gogh, Augustine Roulin, 1888, Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland; b, lower: Paul Gauguin, Madame Roulin, 1888, St. Louis Art Museum Images: Upper: Oskar Reinhart; lower: St. Louis Art Museum

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Figure 3.5 Paul Gauguin, Blue Trees, 1888, Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen, Denmark Image: Wikiart

told Sérusier, “How do you see the trees? They are yellow. Well then, put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.”2 In this case, Gauguin not only gave the trees a non-naturalistic color but also left them branchless and unmodeled, so that they turn into undulating ribbons on the picture surface. Behind the trees are a flattened field and a bright yellow sky above a high horizon. In the foreground, a young couple, partially obscured by the tree trunks, stare in different directions as if they have just had a confrontation. Why did Gauguin choose this particular work as the backdrop for his portrait? On the formal level, he could rhyme the contours of Madame Roulin’s arms and shoulders with the gentle curves of the path and patches of grass in the landscape. But Gauguin may also have used Blue Trees as

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yet another jibe at Vincent and his favorite Arlesian subjects: he has placed Madame Roulin’s head over the couple in such a way that the figures become a hidden comment on her life and thoughts. As one would expect from Gauguin, the truth that “lies behind” Madame Roulin is witheringly unsentimental. He originally gave Blue Trees the title “Vous y passerez la belle,” which roughly translates as “Your turn will come, my beauty.”3 The man, in other words, has warned the young woman that, however much she may resist now, her turn for sexual initiation will come; she must inevitably take her place in the life cycle. In the context of Madame Roulin’s character, this allusion to sexual desire becomes especially mischievous and irreverent, given that Vincent had come to regard her as an idealized maternal figure and in several versions of La Berceuse (Figure 3.6), apotheosized her as a comforting Madonna. Vincent had met the Roulins in the summer of 1888. The 37-year-old Augustine Roulin was a fitting symbol of motherhood, as she had just given birth to a girl, Marcelle, in July. She also had two sons: Armand, 17, and Camille, 11. But she was hardly an elegant Botticellian Virgin, and appears careworn in Vincent’s depictions of her. She and her family had to get by on Joseph’s meager salary of 130 francs a month—half of what Theo sent Vincent. La Berceuse was made at the end of an extensive campaign of painting the entire Roulin family. Earlier, Vincent had taken Gauguin’s advice and tried to paint from memory and imagination—de tête—but happily returned to reality with the Roulins as ready models: although he reserved the right to alter and distort a subject, he always needed to ground his work in actuality. As he wrote to Bernard, “I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in a motif; but for all that I do not invent the whole picture” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 518). In La Berceuse, Madame Roulin sits in a chair and holds a rope connected to an unseen cradle, which she can rock by pulling the cord. In the background, an elaborate floral wallpaper pattern surrounds her. Vincent began the painting just before his breakdown on December 23, and it is very much a product of the desperation he was experiencing at the time. He had been acting erratically; Gauguin wrote to Theo in midDecember that he must leave Vincent and return to Paris. A few days later Gauguin recanted, but the threat of his departure hung heavily over the Yellow House. Other future losses also included the Roulins themselves: Joseph had been transferred to Marseilles and would eventually relocate his family to that city. Even more devastatingly, Theo was about to become

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Figure 3.6 Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse (The Lullaby), 1889, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Image: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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engaged to Johanna Bonger, which would make it much harder for him to support his brother. Finally, Christmas, a holiday that had always been extremely fraught for Vincent, was approaching. Vincent insisted repeatedly that La Berceuse was meant to be consoling. In describing the painting to Theo, he writes: [Gauguin] and I talked about Icelandic fishermen and their melancholy isolation, exposed to all the dangers alone in the sad sea . . . the idea came to me to paint such a picture that sailors, at once children and martyrs seeing it in the cabin of a boat of Icelandic fisherman, would experience a feeling of being rocked reminding them of their own lullabies. (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, pp. 399, 402) Vincent alludes here to Pierre Loti’s 1886 novel Pêcheur d’Islande (“An Icelandic Fisherman”), in which sailors plying the rough waters of the North Atlantic mount a porcelain Virgin on the cabin wall and direct their earnest prayers to it. La Berceuse thus takes on associations with the Holy Mother, the ultimate intercessor for human suffering, a connection reinforced by one of the visual sources for the painting: the motif of a woman holding the cords of a cradle, taken from Rembrandt’s Holy Family (1638–1640). La Berceuse’s patterned wallpaper also recalls the Cloth of Honor, the traditional drapery that hangs behind enthroned Madonnas in Renaissance altarpieces. Vincent went even further in this direction, insisting that La Berceuse should be flanked by his Sunflowers, so that the arrangement took the form of a “triptych” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 21). For Vincent, the title of La Berceuse referred both to the woman rocking the cradle and the lullaby she sings. But Madame Roulin’s lips are closed and she gives no hint of singing: it is the canvas itself that is supposed to provide the equivalent of soothing sounds. Vincent, like other postImpressionist artists, felt that painting should abandon the attempt to slavishly reproduce reality and should instead aspire to the abstract beauty of music. As he said to Gauguin while describing La Berceuse, “Ah! My dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us . . . a consolatory art for distressed hearts!” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 393). Elsewhere, he claimed that in La Berceuse he had “sung a lullaby with color” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 395).

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One person that La Berceuse was meant to console was, of course, Vincent himself. Like the Icelandic fishermen, he was “at once child and martyr.” In the face of all of his troubles, he fell back on the most primal fantasy of returning to infancy and being rocked by one’s mother. The regressive urges expressed in La Berceuse extended into his breakdown. After the ear cutting, he told Theo about his intensely vivid and “primitive” memories of their childhood home in Zundert: “During my illness I again saw each room . . . each path, each plant in the garden, the views round about, the fields, the neighbors, the cemetery, the church, our kitchen garden behind” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 397). He identified not only with the unseen child that hears the lullaby, but also with the maternal figure that sings it, writing to Gauguin that: [i]n my mental or nervous fever or madness . . . it seems that I sang then, I who can’t sing on other occasions, to be precise an old wetnurse’s song while thinking of what the cradle-rocker sang as she rocked the sailors and whom I had sought in an arrangement of colors before falling ill. (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 393) The other intended recipient of La Berceuse’s consolation was Gauguin: if he were properly comforted and admired, perhaps he would stay. In the first week of their collaboration, Vincent discovered that Gauguin had spent years in the merchant marine, and announced to Theo, “he was a real seaman . . . He has—if he’s to be compared with something—links with those Icelandic fishermen of Loti’s” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 346). And so La Berceuse sings her lullaby to Gauguin as well. Like those forlorn sailors in arctic waters, he too must be rocked and soothed. With La Berceuse, Vincent could indulge the fantasy of both securing Gauguin’s presence with maternal affection and turning the tables on their relationship; now Vincent would be the parent and Gauguin the child. In addition to this mothering fantasy, La Berceuse abounds in allusions to the older artist. Madame Roulin sits in “Gauguin’s chair,” the broad bottomed wooden armchair that appears in Vincent’s symbolic portrait of the same name (Gauguin’s Chair, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). The nearly abstract and purely invented wallpaper with its bursting dahlias not only recalls the nosegays in the background of Gauguin’s Self-Portrait (Les Misérables, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), but also shows Vincent following the Master’s advice to work from the imagination. Vincent pays

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further stylistic homage to Gauguin by suppressing his love of impasto and using large areas of flat, relatively uninflected color bounded by thick outlines for Madame Roulin’s bodice, the floor, and the chair. One can even argue that the unseen cradle reflects Gauguin’s Symbolist preference for the mysterious and enigmatic: Marcelle’s presence is merely suggested, not literally depicted. Vincent was probably aware of his desire to comfort himself and Gauguin. But La Berceuse contains darker unconscious themes. To begin with, there is nothing welcoming about Madame Roulin. Although her head’s flaming yellow and orange tones have something of the effulgence of the Sunflowers, Augustine’s expression is unsmiling. If Madame Roulin is a Madonna, she is of the sibylline type whose somber expression reveals her mystical foreknowledge of her son’s death. Among the five versions of La Berceuse, Augustine is variously sad, stern, and blank-faced, but never warm or engaging. She neither looks in the direction of her child nor is the child present. She doesn’t even actually rock the cradle, as she does not pull the ropes. This absent cradle may have been a Gauguininspired Symbolist trope, but it adds to the sense of emotional distance between mother and child. This distance extends to the barely visible title, La Berceuse, which Vincent painted in red paint on the red ground of the floor. It is there, but not there. Why would an image meant to console “distressed hearts” contain such a coolly unresponsive figure? Not surprisingly, the answer to this question lies in Vincent’s relationship to his own mother. A startling fact of the artist’s infancy is that he was a “replacement child,” preceded by a first, stillborn Vincent, who died exactly a year to the day before his own birth (Meissner, 1994). The death of a first child deals a severe blow to any mother, but this loss would have been particularly harsh for the 33-yearold Anna van Gogh, who married late and eagerly wished for a family. The official mourning period extended beyond Vincent’s birth and may have been more than a formality. Vincent may have found himself with a mother consumed by her grief and unable to lavish undivided attention on him. Making matters worse, Vincent would continue to suffer displacement in his mother’s affections first by his sister, Anna, born when he was two, and then by Theo’s birth when he was four. These successive disappointments during the crucial first years of infancy affected him profoundly, and for the rest of his life he would become strongly attached to women who were in mourning or preoccupied with others.

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We can find such a woman in Vincent’s The Potato Eaters, which also reveals much about the dynamics of the artist’s childhood (Figure 3.7). The picture famously depicts a peasant family gathered around their humble meal. At the left, a young man sits in a chair, which Vincent has signed on the back. He looks toward his mother at the other end of the table. Between them are the father, an older daughter, and a younger one with her back to us. Steam from the plate of potatoes creates a nimbus around this young girl and she becomes like the spectral Christ in one of Vincent’s favorite paintings, Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus. But this figure has more than a religious significance: as Lubin (1987) argues, she can be seen as an unconscious representation of the first Vincent. Just as the stillborn first Vincent never came to possess either a concrete identity or particular features, so does the little girl facing away from the viewer. Moreover, her central position within the painting serves as a metaphor for Vincent’s displacement by his namesake. If the young man, who sits on the chair bearing Vincent’s signature, is the artist’s symbolic

Figure 3.7 Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Image: Google Art Project

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counterpart, then the older woman on the right represents Anna, preoccupied by her grief. A strangely protruding partition blocks her off from the rest of the group; failing to meet the young man’s imploring glance, she stares downward and inexplicably points toward the earth as if fixing on the first Vincent’s grave. Between the “Vincent” and “Anna” figures looms the special, transfigured child, who literally and figuratively comes between the mother and her ability to respond to her son’s yearning for affection (Lubin, 1987). Thus, one of the reasons that Madame Roulin in La Berceuse is so dour, despite Vincent’s intentions, is that she is another unconscious representation of Anna. Vincent has tried to compensate for this with the warm tones, the intensely vibrant complementery colors, and the festive wallpaper. But his memory of his unresponsive mother persists and determines the sitter’s withholding character. If La Berceuse’s image of a nurturing mother involved more ambivalence than Vincent was willing to admit, so too did its allusions to Gauguin. The cradle rope that is cropped by the bottom edge of the canvas resembles the cut rope in Alphonse Daudet’s 1896 novel Tartarin in the Alps. Daudet was one of Vincent’s favorite authors, and he mentions him more than 60 times in his letters. His humorous and sharply observed stories set in Provence provided a literary filter through which Vincent viewed the south. However, the theme of abandonment raised by Tartarin in the Alps was not so humorous for him. In this novel, the short, fat, and boastful Tartarin of Tarascon meets his fellow Tarasconnais, Bompard, in Switzerland. They find themselves about to ascend Mount Blanc. After hearing of an accident on the Matterhorn in which a guide cut the rope to lose some climbers but save others, Tartarin and Bompard showily take an oath never to cut the line between them and to live or die together. Their pledge is put to the test when they end up dangling on either side of a ridge. As neither can see the other, they both cut the rope and flee in opposite directions. Both Bompard and Tartarin make their way back to Tarascon, each thinking he has killed his friend. They are comically reunited at the Alpine Club when Tartarin unexpectedly returns after Bompard has flamboyantly eulogized his friend and displayed some of his scattered “remains.” Although Tartarin and Bompard are equally guilty, Vincent clearly saw Gauguin as the traitor. Tartarin in the Alps is a story of betrayal, and Vincent’s inclusion of the rope may have served as an accusation against Gauguin. He made this charge explicit in a letter to Theo written several weeks after his breakdown and Gauguin’s departure, asking:

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Has Gauguin ever read Tartarin in the Alps . . . Does he remember the knot in a rope found high up in the Alps after the fall? And you want to know how things happened, have you read Tartarin all the way through? That will teach you to know your Gauguin pretty well. (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, pp. 121–122) Gauguin and Vincent were tied together in their mission to establish the Studio of the South. But it was Gauguin who went back on his oath, cut the cord of their collaboration, and left his partner to die. When Vincent began La Berceuse, his emphasis on the cropped rope would have been an expression of his fears of what Gauguin might do. Vincent anticipated that Gauguin would fail him just as Anna had failed him as a child. He may also have had in mind the ending of Pêcheur d’Islande. Loti’s hero, Yann Gaos, prays fervently along with his fellow Breton fishermen to the Virgin as the protector of seafarers. But the Stella Maris—Our Lady, Star of the Sea—cannot save him. Lost in foggy Icelandic waters, his boat, like the Studio of the South, founders. As the hero drowns, Loti turns the sea into a maternal figure that is as ambivalent as La Berceuse: “To that sea that had nursed him and rocked him to sleep; that had made him a stalwart youth. Now that sea had taken him back in the flower of his manhood, to keep for herself alone” (Loti 1946, p. 280). The sea both nurtures and destroys. It is perhaps not an accident that Vincent made the cradle ropes dangle from an area near Madame Roulin’s groin before cropping them below. This looks forward to the castrating gesture of the ear cutting, and is in keeping with the phallic imagery that powerfully appears in works from Arles such as his The Night Café, Van Gogh’s Chair, and Gauguin’s Chair. The severed rope may also have unconsciously signified the infant’s cut umbilical cord; this part of La Berceuse was so charged for Vincent that he had difficulty with the hands and could not complete them before his breakdown. Few events in an artist’s life have been so over-analyzed as Vincent’s ear cutting. One psychologist has, in fact, identified no fewer than 13 explanatory models for Vincent’s bizarre act (Runyan, 1982). These range from the impact of a bull’s severed ear in the local bullfights, to the effect of newspapers stories on Jack the Ripper, to Vincent’s memory of the story of Simon Peter cutting off Malchus’s ear in the Garden of Gethsemane. Much about the circumstances remains unknown, but the generally

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accepted facts are the following: on the evening of December 23, Vincent acts in such a disturbing manner that Gauguin decides to spend the night in a hotel. Vincent severs the lower portion of his left ear and presents it to a prostitute named Rachel at eleven thirty in the evening. On the morning of December 24, Gauguin finds police at the Yellow House and discovers that Vincent has injured himself. He wires Theo, who takes the train to Arles. Theo visits Vincent in the hospital on Christmas Day and then returns to Paris the next day with Gauguin. Vincent has lost much blood and his condition is serious. Eventually, he recovers under the care of Dr. Felix Rey, but goes in and out of the hospital in the ensuing months. Vincent appears to have been completely amnesiac about his thoughts and actions immediately before, during, and after his self-mutilation. But he could not help knowing how severely he had sliced his ear, and much of what happened on the night of December 23, including many of the lurid details, would have been related to him by Theo, Roulin, and Dr. Rey. His first reaction was to do everything possible to minimize his mental collapse. In his letters to Theo he characterizes his breakdown in remarkably euphemistic terms as merely a “trifle” and “simply an artist’s fit” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, pp. 112, 114). And he became particularly exercised at the fact that Theo had to make the trip to Arles, since “after all no harm came to me, and there was no reason why you should be upset” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 111). The closest he could come to acknowledging the disturbing reality of his madness was to speak of it in a speculative mode. “Suppose that I was as wild as anything,” he muses at one point and, at another, allows that he was “after all probably the primary cause of it all” (italics mine; Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, pp. 119, 112). Eventually, Vincent contended with a wide spectrum of emotions: anger, guilt, humiliation, and remorse. How mortifying it must have been for Vincent to have made such an effort to bring Gauguin to Arles, to have extended Theo’s precarious financial support even further, and to have invested so many hopes in the Yellow House, only to see it all fall to pieces as a result of his mental breakdown. Unable to face the responsibility for such an enormous defeat, Vincent projected much of his guilt and self-hatred onto Gauguin. His anger at Gauguin for abandoning him was interlaced with attempts to turn him into the scapegoat: it was Gauguin, not Vincent, who was profligate, irrational, and self-destructive. In a letter written to Theo on January 17, Vincent rails against his former collaborator. In addition to being a Bompard-like traitor, Gauguin is “the little Bonaparte

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tiger of impressionism” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 122). And his “vanishing” from Arles is comparable to the “return from Egypt of the aforesaid Little Corporal, who also presented himself in Paris afterward and who always left the armies in the lurch” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 122). He acrimoniously concludes by observing, “Fortunately Gauguin and I and other painters are not yet armed with machine guns and other destructive implements of war” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 122). Vincent’s letter of January 17 seems to have had a cathartic effect, as his subsequent remarks about Gauguin adopt a much softer tone and he never again speaks so harshly. Only five days later, he tells Theo that he wants to copy a sunflower still life for Gauguin. In the January 17 letter he had mentioned Gauguin’s intention to take one of the original sunflower canvases in exchange for studies left behind in Arles, which had provoked a furious blast from Vincent. He refused to give up his sunflowers and even considered giving back Gauguin’s Self-Portrait (Les Misérables) and reclaiming his Self-Portrait as a Buddhist Monk as part of a complete nullification of their previous exchanges. But now Vincent will redo one of his signature works because he would “very much like to give Gauguin real pleasure” (Van Gogh, 1978, vol. 3, p. 128). These warm feelings remained until Vincent’s death, and several times he went so far as to write to Gauguin about joining him in Brittany, only to be politely rebuffed. A few days after the letter of January 17 to Gauguin, Vincent returned to La Berceuse, and within two months completed five nearly identical versions. He had never made so many “repetitions” of a work (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 399). Why this compulsive reiteration of La Berceuse? One of his motives would have been to repair the trauma of his ear cutting. He could return to the moment just before his breakdown and complete the work that was giving him difficulty: instead of helplessly succumbing to his illness, he could regain control. Beyond this, the image of Madame Roulin answered a host of emotional needs. In addition to gratifying the regressive impulses that we have discussed, she would have made absent figures more immediately present in his imagination. Obviously, it brought him close again to Augustine, but it would also have revived memories of Joseph Roulin, his family, and Gauguin. Vincent could recall happier moments when the Yellow House functioned as it should have and the two artists shared Augustine as a model. Gauguin’s portrait of Madame Roulin was, in fact, still in the studio. Finally, Vincent could reintegrate himself into his circle of friends by giving away the

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portraits as gifts. Madame Roulin, Gauguin, and Bernard all got one. He also intended one for his family in Holland. Yet, as we have seen, great tensions underlay La Berceuse and the period during which he made the copies was marked by a severe relapse, which may explain why his copies stuck so closely to the original, thereby safely relying on a preconceived composition without having to wade into the dangerous waters of invention. He made subtle changes in the palette and the paint handling, but the only significant alterations are to the hands in the third version and to the wallpaper in the fifth. This wallpaper background of La Berceuse itself has the paradoxical quality of demonstrating control and, at the same time, its loss. The pattern teems with blossoming dahlias, tendril arabesques, and dotted blue ovals, which have the look of inseminated fish eggs; all of these elements suggest the fertility of nature in general, and of Madame Roulin in particular. Vincent carefully copies the pattern in the first four versions, but he never rigorously works out the design. He tries to repeat the pink dahlia motif twice, but the uniform structure of an actual wallpaper pattern completely breaks down: here, Vincent comes closer than he ever will to the art of the seriously mentally ill. Generations of art historians have rightly defended Vincent against the charge that his art was a product of insanity, but La Berceuse’s wallpaper has all of the qualities—horror vacui, manic repetition, and endless ornamentation—that are often found in the work of a schizophrenic artist such as Adolf Wölfli. Particularly unsettling are the raking diagonal axes on which Vincent aligns the petals and stalks that appear in the later versions, which become more abstractly decorative than the first.4 A similar hallucinogenic patterning also appears in the background of portraits from this period of Dr. Rey and Joseph Roulin. These months were full of strain; Vincent not only suffered a three-day breakdown during which he believed he was being poisoned, but was also confronted by a petition from his neighbors demanding his eviction from the Yellow House. Vincent himself was of two minds about La Berceuse. On the one hand, he boasted to Gauguin that, “as an Impressionist arrangement of colors, I’ve never devised anything better” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 393). On the other hand, he described the painting to Theo as “badly painted,” “failed and weak,” “incomprehensible,” and no better than a “chromolithograph from a penny bazaar” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 406, vol. 5, p. 92, vol. 4, pp. 412, 402). And in a letter to Bernard, he used La Berceuse as an example of the dangers of abstraction:

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When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led into abstraction, as you know, in a woman rocking a cradle . . . and at that time abstraction seemed an attractive route to me. But that’s enchanted ground—my good fellow—and one soon finds oneself up against a wall. (Van Gogh, 2009, v. 5, p. 148) Vincent may have recognized that his series was ultimately a failed attempt at reparation: he could not find in his art a substitute for his losses. A little more than a year later, Vincent once more began a series of five nearly identical portraits (Figure 3.8a). They were all based on Gauguin’s drawing of Madame Ginoux, which had been left behind in Arles. Why did Vincent again feel the need to compulsively repeat the image of a female sitter? He was now in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, had just undergone a severe breakdown exactly a year since his ear cutting, and was anticipating or had heard about the birth of Theo and Jo’s first child. When he received the news about his new nephew, also to be named

Figure 3.8 a, left: Vincent van Gogh, L’Arlésienne (Marie Ginoux), 1890, private collection; b, right: sketch of L’Arlésienne (after Gauguin), from a letter to Willemein van Gogh, detail, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Images: left: Wikipedia; right: Van Gogh Museum

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Vincent, he wrote to Theo that it “gives me more pleasure than I could express in words” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 194). But his enthusiasm must have been combined with conscious and unconscious fears. On the conscious level, he knew he would have to compete not only with a wife but also a son for Theo’s limited emotional and financial resources. On the unconscious level, little Vincent’s birth would have reawakened infantile anxieties about his mother’s preoccupation with the stillborn Vincent and his displacement in her affections by newly arrived siblings. That Vincent began copying Gauguin’s drawing at the same time that he painted a blossoming almond tree to commemorate his nephew’s birth points to the unconscious links between the events. Work on what Vincent called “L’Arlésienne” would, like La Berceuse before it, provide a means of consoling himself in the face of ever increasing difficulties. L’Arlésienne also allowed him an even better opportunity to attempt to reestablish a connection, or even a fusional identification with Gauguin, as he was now actually using one of Gauguin’s works as a basis for his own art. A collaboration could not get any closer than this, and Vincent wrote to Gauguin that he should consider L’Arlésienne “a work by you and me” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 322). Vincent was again entertaining the idea of participating with Gauguin in a collective studio. He offered in a letter to join Gauguin and the artist Meyer de Haan in Brittany, and still insisted that if Gauguin had remained in Arles it would have benefited them both. Vincent included in the same letter a sketch of his Road with a Cypress and a Star, which brims with doubling motifs—two men strolling on a road, two cypresses, two figures in a carriage, and two heavenly bodies, a radiating star and a crescent moon. The two cypresses are literally fused and it only becomes apparent that the branches do not form a single tree when one notices two trunks at the bottom. All of this imagery expressed Vincent’s doubling fantasies, which originated with his knowledge of the first Vincent and extended to attempts to merge with the important men in his life—first, his father, then Theo, and, finally, Gauguin. Unfortunately, each relationship followed the same pattern. Vincent would excessively idealize the male figure, attempt to collapse any boundaries, and when that inevitably failed, angrily attack his “double.” But at this point he had forgotten or denied such memories, and wanted to start the cycle again. Vincent made it clear to Gauguin that L’Arlésienne was a sincere homage. He assured him that he had based his copies “rigorously” on the

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original and had “tried to be respectfully faithful to [it] while taking the liberty of interpreting . . . the sober character and style of the drawing in question” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 322). His portraits in oil were meant to be a “summary of our months of work together” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 322). And, as in La Berceuse, he quoted in one version the floral background of Gauguin’s Self-Portrait (Les Misérables; Figure 3.8a).5 Vincent intended to give Gauguin an Arlésienne, and made sure that Theo delivered one to him. But the vehement protestations of fidelity in Vincent’s letter disguised more complicated motives. First, he wanted to reclaim for his own art the woman that Gauguin had turned into a procuress in his Night Café. As in the Metropolitan Museum’s L’Arlésienne, he places books before Madame Ginoux. But they are not just any books. Now they have titles indicating that these volumes are not only very dear to Vincent’s heart, but are the spiritually and morally uplifting Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Charles Dickens’s Christmas Stories. A vulgar brothel madam would hardly surround herself with these exemplary tomes. Second, he asserts his own artistic independence by using near-complementaries of soft pink, yellow, raspberry, and green, which differ significantly from Gauguin’s more astringent palette. He also masculinizes Madame Ginoux and renders her head and hand as far more rough and bony than they appear in the original. Nor does he really respect Gauguin’s drawing style. He replaces Gauguin’s incisive, rhyming contours with a jagged, notched line more characteristic of his own painting. Yet, at the same time that Vincent challenged Gauguin, he might have preemptively punished himself. Vincent may have unconsciously intended to give Gauguin one of the copies as a covert self-portrait. His wish to assume a female role in relation to Gauguin had informed his Self-Portrait as a Buddhist Monk. And he made self-castrating gestures both in his ear cutting and in his Van Gogh’s Chair and Gauguin’s Chair, where his symbolic phallus is markedly smaller and more flaccid than Gauguin’s. In the case of L’Arlésienne, his competitive attempt to make a “better” version of Gauguin’s original would have been accompanied by a perhaps masochistic insistence on his feminine identification. Vincent himself acknowledged the turbulent emotions behind L’Arlésienne, telling Gauguin that, “To do it, I for my part, paid with another month of illness” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 322).

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One also has to wonder what influence Daudet’s short story L’Arlésienne may have had on the series. Daudet’s tale, which appeared in in his Letters from My Windmill (1869), was turned into an opera with music and chorus by Georges Bizet. The original 1872 performance in Paris had been recently revived in 1885. The story involves Jan, the young son of a farmer, who falls in love with a pretty girl from Arles and gets engaged to her. But the wedding is called off when a man appears to inform the family that the girl has been his mistress for two years and has no right to marry anyone else. Jan pines for the girl, becomes extremely troubled, and finally jumps to his death from a hayloft window. Vincent could identify with Jan as he had become attached to the “unfaithful” Gauguin, had consequently gone mad, and had committed a self-destructive act. If the story informed Vincent’s unconscious thoughts about his repetitions of L’Arlésienne, it would have provided yet another opportunity to reengage with traumatic aspects of his relationship with Gauguin and then attempt to master them in his series. The other focus of L’Arlésienne is, of course, Madame Ginoux herself. Why would his thoughts have turned to her at this moment? Steven Naifeh and Gregory Smith (2011) make a strong case in their recent biography that Vincent was infatuated with Marie. He had a long history of inventing romantic relationships with women who hardly knew him, and Madame Ginoux’s professional friendliness as a café manager might have encouraged him. Indeed, he had actually become involved in Paris with another middle-aged, dark-haired, Mediterranean café owner named Agostina Segatori. She ran a cabaret in Montmartre called Le Tambourin and allowed Vincent to paint her portrait and to display his canvases and Japanese prints on her walls. The affair ended badly, with Vincent getting into a fight with an employee and being thrown out. According to Naifeh and Smith, this sad history is the reason why Vincent was so reticent in his letters to Theo about his ardor for Madame Ginoux, only admitting to concern about her health and his loss of her as a model. At one point, Vincent tells Theo that “there are a few people” in Arles whom he “feel[s] the need to see again.” Presumably, the most important of these “few people” was Madame Ginoux. In the very next sentence, Vincent denies that he has “here in the south . . . a mistress who holds me captive” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 114). But the implication is that his concern for Madame Ginoux approaches a lover’s obsession.6

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Whatever the exact degree of erotic desire in Vincent’s affection for Marie, she was certainly psychologically important for him. This becomes strikingly apparent in the close connection between his visits to her and his breakdowns. Two days after seeing her in January of 1890, he had an attack that lasted a week. A month later, he went to Arles with the specific purpose of giving Madame Ginoux one of the Arlésienne paintings. This proved to be such an emotionally loaded task that he had a completely debilitating seizure during which he became extremely disoriented and lost the portrait. This breakdown was so severe that the asylum’s director had to send two men to bring him back; his illness lasted two months. It is also significant that Vincent, who was so often modest about his work, chose to boast in his letters to Madame Ginoux and her husband about recent successes such as exhibiting his paintings in Belgium and Paris and receiving a favorable critical reaction in two articles. One powerful source of Vincent’s preoccupation with Marie was his identification with her as a fellow sufferer. Just as his mental illness started near Christmas 1888 and still persisted, so she too became sick at the same time and continued to bear the burden of her ailments. Vincent never gets very specific about her symptoms, and only refers vaguely to “influenza” and “nervous complication” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 187). But his letters to the Ginoux are full of solicitous concern for Marie’s health. In one letter, he explains that he is trying to “distract for a moment our dear patient so that she can resume her habitual smile” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 188). As with La Berceuse, L’Arlésienne expresses the wish both to mother and to be mothered. The books, in particular, express the hope of recovery for both of them. They are about redemption and transformation. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin can lead to the freedom of the slaves and if Ebenezer Scrooge can regain his humanity, then Vincent and Madame Ginoux can become well again. Even more than the Berceuse series, the Arlésienne copies contain artistic lapses. Vincent often had difficulty with figures, but none of his portraits is as ugly as these of Madame Ginoux. Her left hand is awkward, her features are lumpy, and her expression, which fluctuates from a smile to a simper to a grimace, seems painfully forced. Interestingly, his worst stumble in rendering her comes in a letter to his sister Wil, where he attempts to sketch the version intended for Gauguin (Figure 3.8b). He makes such a botch of the mouth that it reads as little more than a wide

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gash across an agonized face. He has to admit, “I can’t manage a good croquis [sketch] of it” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 5, p. 254). As he demonstrated in his symbolic portraits Van Gogh’s Chair and Gauguin’s Chair, Vincent was able to make surpassing works out of the most vexed artistic and psychological aspects of his relationship with Gauguin. Why did La Berceuse and L’Arlésienne cause him so much more trouble? The answer may be that he placed an impossible burden on himself by attempting in these paintings to repair emotional traumas with both important male and female figures in his life. To wrestle with fathers as well as mothers may have been too much. Gauguin went on to find muses among the teenage vahines (wives) he took in the South Pacific. As exotic as these native women may have appeared to Western eyes, Gauguin’s treatment of them falls into the conventional pattern of a middle-aged male artist turning to adolescent female flesh. What makes Vincent’s Arlesian muses different is not that they included a man. Leonardo and Michelangelo, among many other artists, had male muses. It is that none of them was young or beautiful. Instead of responding only to external attributes, Vincent was inspired by non-idealized muses, people who resonated with his inner life. This, in fact, shows up the obvious limitations of the traditional image, which goes back to classical antiquity, of the muse as a comely young woman. Many other kinds of significant figures in artists’ lives can profoundly affect them and touch on deeper psychological levels. Madame Roulin and Madame Ginoux were such figures—ones who took Vincent back to his earliest days when, in fantasy or reality, he rocked in a cradle and listened to his mother’s soothing lullaby.

Notes 1

Some of the observations in this paper draw on my book Van Gogh and Gauguin: Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams (Collins, 2001). 2 For Gauguin’s encounter with Sérusier, see Rewald (1986), pp. 183–184. 3 For the relationship between Gauguin’s Madame Roulin and Blue Trees, see Jirat-Wasiutyenski and Newton (2000), pp. 132–135. 4 For a new account of the ordering of the Berceuse series, see Rathbone et al. (2013), pp. 118–139. 5 For the L’Arlésienne series in general and for the relationship of one version to Gauguin’s Self-Portrait (Les Misérables), see Homburg (1992), pp. 127–138.

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Vincent’s misperceptions about his actual relationship with Madame Ginoux are made apparent by the 1889 petition to the mayor of Arles, signed by 30 of his neighbors, claiming that he was a danger to the community. Vincent told Theo that “the real neighbors, those whom I know, weren’t among those who got up that petition” (Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, p. 419). But, in fact, Madame Ginoux signed the petition and her husband made a statement confirming the neighbors’ complaints. For the petition, see Van Gogh, 2009, vol. 4, pp. 413–415, 419.

References Collins, B. (2001). Van Gogh and Gauguin: Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams. Boulder, CO: Westview. Homburg, C. (1992). Affirming modernity: van Gogh’s Arlésienne. Simiolus, 21, 127–138. Jirat-Wasiutyenski, V., & Newton, H. T. (2000). Technique and Meaning in the Painting of Paul Gauguin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Loti, P. (1946). An Icelandic Fisherman (G. Endore trans.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lubin, A. J. (1987). Stranger on the Earth: A Psychological Biography of Vincent van Gogh. New York: Henry Holt. Meissner, W.W. (1994). The theme of the double and creativity in Vincent Van Gogh. Contemp. Psychoanal., 30, 323–347. Merlhès, V. (Ed.) (1984). Correspondance de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoinages, 1873–1888. Paris: Foundation Singer-Polignac. Naifeh, S., & Smith, G. W. (2011). Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House. Rathbone, E. E., Robinson, W. H., Steele, E., & Steele, M. (2013). Van Gogh Repetitions. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Rewald, J. (1986). Post-Impressionism: From van Gogh to Gauguin. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Runyan, W. M. (1982). Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Gogh, V. (1978). The Complete Letters of van Gogh (3 Vols). (J. Bonger ed.). Boston: New York Graphic Society. Van Gogh, V. (2009). The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition (6 Vols.) (L. Jansen, H. Luitjen, & N. Bakker eds.). London: Thames & Hudson.

Chapter 4

Spilling It Out Dalí’s Signature Claire Nouvet

“To Gala–Gradiva, the one who advances” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. v): such is the dedication of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, an autobiography where Dalí fabulates for himself, as Catherine Grenier (2011) has shown, a life worthy of the “modern genius” that he intends to invent.1 The life of this “genius,” it is to “Gala,” his lifelong companion and muse that he offers it, a muse whom he elevated to an unprecedented level. Not only did he never miss an occasion, as Francine Prose (2002) points out, to make a public declaration of gratitude to her, he joined her name to his name in his signature.2 Shortly after meeting her, he decided indeed to sign his paintings with their two names: “Gala–Dalí.” In a remarkable gesture, Dalí, the self-proclaimed megalomaniac, not only credits his muse for his entire work, but also gives her precedence. Such a signature is puzzling, for it suggests that Gala painted his work as much as he did, and maybe even more, since she comes first. Why give her such credit? And to whom— or, rather, to what—is it given under the name of “Gala–Gradiva”? In Wilhelm Jensen’s story Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy (1918), Norbert Hanold, a young archaeologist, gives the name of “Gradiva” to the woman with a singular gait represented on an antique bas-relief with whom he falls in love and who, he believes, perished during the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii. “Gradiva,” Jensen explains, means “the girl splendid in walking,” “an epithet applied by the ancient poets solely for Mars Gradivus, the war-god going out to battle, yet to Norbert it seemed the most appropriate designation for the bearing and movement of the young girl” (Jensen, 1918, p. 5). According to Freud’s (1907 [1959]) interpretation, Gradiva represses the figure of Zoë, a childhood friend. More precisely, repression bears on the erotic trace left by this childhood passion, a trace that the figure of Gradiva “reawakens.” On Freud’s reading, Hanold, who used his passion for antiquity to repress his love for Zoë, falls in love

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“with the marble portrait of Gradiva, behind which, owing to an unexplained resemblance, the living Zoë whom he had neglected made her influence felt” (Freud, 1907 [1959], pp. 35–36). The childhood love returns through the love of antiquity that was used to repress it, and this by means of a strange physical resemblance: Gradiva, the dead antique figure, “looks like” the contemporary Zoë, whose very name means “life” in Greek. For Freud, the figure of Gradiva therefore condenses two movements: the repression of Hanold’s love for Zoë, and the return of this repressed love, which comes back through her without, however, becoming conscious. As for the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii under ashes, it provides the perfect analogy for repression: There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than the burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades. (Freud, 1907 [1959], p. 40) Hanold has “made his own childhood coincide with the classical past” (p. 51). Pompeii is thus the other name of the disappearance-conservation of the past that is repression, as long as we understand that the past preserved in this burial is not simply dead, but active, a past that keeps acting. Dalí refers explicitly to Freud’s interpretation in a footnote to his Secret Life, where he explains why he calls Gala his “Gradiva”: Gradiva. The novel by W. Jensen, interpreted by Sigmund Freud (Der Wahn und die Träume) . . . When I began to read this novel, even before coming upon Freud’s interpretation, I exclaimed, “Gala, my wife, is essentially a Gradiva.” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 233) If Gala is a “Gradiva,” then the muse may have to be reassessed as the figure that marks the site both of a repression and of a return of the repressed that “advances” through her with a gait that is, for Dalí, one of “victory”—“She was destined to be my Gradiva, ‘she who advances,’ my victory, my wife” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 233). But, as I will suggest, what pushes forward in and through “Gala–Gradiva” is not simply, as in Freud’s

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interpretation, the return of a repressed love for a childhood girlfriend, but the return of the trace left by a desire that, like Gradiva, is more “antique” because maternal, an erotic trace that pushes forward without ever becoming visible through all the figures that Dalí claims to have loved. Jensen’s story already suggested this additional torsion. Although Hanold has recognized that, through his love for Gradiva, it was in fact his repressed love for Zoë that returned, he asks Zoë to perform a curious gesture. As they walk through Pompeii, he asks her to go ahead of him. “She understood him,” Freud comments before citing Jensen’s text: and, pulling up her dress a little with her left hand, Zoë Bertgang, Gradiva rediviva, walked past, held in his eyes, which seemed to gaze as though in a dream; so, with her quietly tripping gait, she stepped through the sunlight over the stepping-stones to the other side of the street. (Freud, 1907 [1959], p. 40) And Freud goes on: “With the triumph of love, what was beautiful and precious in the delusion found recognition as well” (p. 40). Ika Willis (2007) rightfully points out that: At the end of the novel, then, Zoë is in fact standing in for Gradiva, rather than the other way round, as Freud’s reading would have it: Hanold desires Zoë insofar as she is a substitute for a substitute. The novel appears to end by fulfilling not Hanold’s desire for Zoë (which would return him to “real life”), but his antiquarian desire for Gradiva. (p. 227) Gala, I will suggest, is also for Dalí a “Gradiva Rediviva” (Gradiva Revived). What returns through her, however, is not just an antiquarian desire (for Willis, Gradiva names “the desire for immediate communication with the past” (p. 229), but the trace left by an “antique” because of a maternal desire, an erotic trace that the muse “reawakens,” to which she gives a “figure,” and that we may begin to approach (as in Jensen’s story) via a strange resemblance. What indeed qualified Gala to become Dalí’s muse? A resemblance that Dalí inscribes, unbeknown to him, in his Secret Life. There, Gala appears as perfection incarnate. Her body is “an impeccable architecture of flesh and bones,” which reflects a no less perfect psychic architecture: “the

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architectonic contours of a perfect soul” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 4). But her “perfect soul” is itself a reflection of sorts, since it resembles the “saintly soul” that Dalí grants to his own mother, Felipa, whose “moral values,” he insists, “were high above all that is human” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], pp. 152–153). Although adored, this mother is strangely absent from the pictorial corpus. As Carlos Rojas (1993) points out, “Even though . . . her son repeatedly portrayed all the other members of his family, Dalí never painted his mother” (p. 121). In fact, Dalí did paint two early paintings of her, both entitled Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, Dona Felipa Dome Domenech de Dalí and both painted in 1920.3 But Rojas is quite right in pointing out that the mother is strikingly absent from representation in Dalí’s mature paintings. When she appears, she is not represented visually but only linguistically, reduced to the status of a mere word—a word, moreover, written in French and not in Catalan, his mother tongue. Such is her status in two of his most famous paintings, both from 1929: Parfois je crache par plaisir sur le portrait de ma mère (Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on my Mother’s Portrait) and L énigme du désir, ma mère, ma mère, ma mère (Enigma of Desire – My Mother, My Mother, My Mother). Excluded from pictorial representation, the mother does appear in the literary corpus, but discreetly. Gala, I will suggest, is a stand-in for this Holy Mother, who, for all her immaculate perfection, remains banned from representation. And nowhere is this substitutive status more blatant than in the two paintings of the Madonna of Port Lligat (1949 and 1950), where Dalí plasters Gala’s face where the face of the Holy Mother should appear, but does not (Figure 4.1). A maternal substitutive figure, Gala appears in Dalí’s Secret Life as the very embodiment of a “perfect” maternal care that provides, he claims, what he was missing and without which no work of art would be possible: a sense of reality, structure, and order, a protection from the outside world as well as a “fanatical devotion” to his work and his “genius” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 317). For Dalí, whose grasp on reality is elusive, Gala is reality itself,4 as well as the one who deals with it for him and in his place, the necessary buffer between him and a world for which he has no aptitude, and from which she protects him by turning herself into the hard shell that sets the limits he is incapable of drawing: Instead of hardening me, as life had planned, Gala, with the petrifying saliva of her fanatical devotion, succeeded in building for me a shell to protect the tender nakedness of the Bernard the Hermit that I was,

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Figure 4.1 Salvador Dalí, Madonna of Port Lligat, 1949. Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Image: Courtesy of Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, used with permission

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so that while in relation to the outside world I assumed more and more the appearance of a fortress, within myself I could continue to grow old in the soft, and in the supersoft. And the day I decided to paint watches, I painted them soft. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 317) As a shell, Gala functions as the outside skeleton that he so admires in the crustaceans: By virtue of their armor, which is what their exoskeleton actually is, these are material realization of the highly original and intelligent idea of wearing one’s bones outside rather than inside, as is the usual practice. The crustacean is thus able, with the weapons of its anatomy, to protect the soft and nutritive delirium of its insides, sheltered against all profanation. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 9) Gala offers the carapace, the much-needed defensive apparatus that will allow him to launch his conquest of the art world by protecting the “soft delirium” that “nurtures” his work. She also intensifies his artistic ambitions and gives him the means to achieve artistic “victory.” Within the walls that she erects, she orders his life, calms his anxiety attacks, and grooms his appearance for polite society as she grooms his texts and paintings for public consumption. When he meets her, Dalí writes “unintelligible scribbles” in an idiosyncratic language that defies all grammatical correction, be it in French or in Catalan. Gala instills in him the ambition of becoming a “writer,” one “of some philosophical scope,” and proceeds to order and correct his scribbles to give them a form that is “communicable” and therefore marketable: Gala had in fact gathered together the mass of disorganized and unintelligible scribblings that I had made throughout the whole summer at Cadaques, and with her unflinching scrupulousness she had succeeded in giving these a “syntactic form” that was more or less communicable. These formed fairly well-developed notes that on Gala’s advice I took up again and recast into a theoretical and poetic work which was to appear under the title, The Visible Woman. It was my first book, and “the visible woman” was Gala. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 250)

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She will order and correct other manuscripts as well (including the manuscript of his Secret Life), with a hand that Frédérique Joseph-Lowery describes as “heavy and firm” (Dalí, 2006, p. 33).5 In the Introduction to her remarkable critical edition of the French manuscript of Dalí’s Secret Life (La Vie Secrète de Salvador Dalí, Dalí, 2006), which restitutes both Dalí’s original text and Gala’s corrections, Joseph-Lowery provides indeed an excellent assessment of the extent and impact of Gala’s corrections. As she points out, entire pages of Dalí’s text are “doubled” with her corrections to the point that Dalí’s text seems nearly “to disappear” under them. Moreover, Gala’s corrected text erases Dalí’s idiosyncratic language, a language that Joseph-Lowery describes as a “childhood language,” one “that we have not yet learned to write, control, master” (Dalí, 2006, p. 37, my translation). Gala’s literary ambition is thus tied to a version of literary “correctness” that ultimately leads, as Joseph-Lowery puts it, to “a dead text” cleaned up of all the “incorrections” that gave it a life of its own (Dalí, 2006, p. 21, my translation). Gala infuses Dalí with the same ambition in the pictorial field, for it is she, according to Dalí, who gave him the ambition to emulate the fame of the Old Masters and suggested the means to do it. Following her lead, he learns to work with ingredients such as the “liquid amber” that she buys for him because “[t]hey say Vermeer used to paint with it” and adopts an increasingly retrograde style that sets him apart (Dalí, 1964 [2007], p. 25). Architecture, order, equilibrium, correction—Gala is the ultimate provider because she is the ultimate believer. With “her devoted and pressing fanaticism” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 249), she dedicates herself to the birth of his genius by transfusing in him at all times both the strength of her “structured” personality and the relentless drive of her ambition. The signature Gala–Dalí acknowledges the bond and the transfusion. The one who paints is “Gala–Dalí,” that is, neither Gala nor Dalí, but the bond that links them. This bond is the site of a transfusion that creates a new entity, the symbiosis “Gala–Dalí,” that substitutes in fact for another and unnamable symbiosis: the mother–child symbiosis. Marked as it is by a transfusion of ambition and personality, the bond Gala–Dalí seems at first sight far removed from the mother–child relationship that Dalí describes in his autobiography. The ambitious muse and the saintly mother could not appear to be more different. A closer look at the “saintly” portrait that Dalí draws of his mother nevertheless detects traces of a maternal transfusion that is as lethal as it is vital. It is inscribed, for instance, in the gaze that a saintly mother casts on her son in the following passage:

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My mother’s death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her; her image appeared to me unique. I knew that the moral values of her saintly soul were high above all that is human, and I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the blemishes of my soul—she was so good that I thought that “it would do for me too.” She adored me with a love so whole and so proud that she could not be wrong. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], pp. 152–153) Dalí gives himself a perfect mother who adores him with a “proud” love that is in fact cruelly conditional: she will love the child on condition that he make her “proud” by reflecting back to herself her own immaculate perfection. To adore him means therefore erasing all that, in him, might detract from this divine self-reflection. The loving maternal gaze blinds itself to what Dalí calls the “blemishes of my soul,” thereby relegating whatever does not fit her conception of perfection to the status of shameful “imperfections” and “stains” on the immaculate Madonna, faults that she cleans up by refusing to see them. As for the child, he looks fascinated into the mirror of her gaze, contemplates the perfect image that it sends back to him, and tries to coincide with it, and this in spite of the fact that this image relegates a part of himself to inexistence and shame. He will try to identify his very self with it even at the cost of becoming partly invisible in the process. To be loved with such adoring pride entails, I will propose, to be annihilated as one is being perfected into the flawless reflection of a supposedly flawless mother. The same maternal narcissism insinuates itself in the care with which a saintly mother dresses her child every morning: “a sailor suit with insignia embroidered in thick gold on the sleeves, and stars on my cap,” “wellshined shoes with silver buttons,” “a lace handkerchief that bloomed from my pocket,” and a “slender and flexible new bamboo cane adorned with a silver dog’s head by way of a handle” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], pp. 36–37). Such a perfect child reflects well on the mother who dressed him with such loving care: his flawless perfection mirrors her own saintly devotion. The maternal costume, I will propose, is the visual and outward translation of the imago that the mother transmits to the child, and to which she demands that he conform his very “self,” an imago that he internalizes and to which he will try to coincide. This imago can be summarized in a few traits: to be exceptional and superior to all others both in “aristocratic” distinction and in money. Dalí will never let go of this maternal imago that, in one

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fashion or another, he will wear for the rest of his life. Indeed, it is dressed as a little sailor that he represents himself in several paintings, looking and sometimes pointing at the figures he just painted. The one who paints is, it seems, a child dressed up by a mother as the glorious reflection and incarnation of her desire for perfection, a desire that he seeks to satisfy by painting. Gala takes the relay of this maternal desire for excellence when she instills in him, as Dalí claims, her taste for the perfection of Renaissance technique. This taste seems innocent enough, sublime even, as sublime as the colors that he will use to paint a perfect picture of a no less perfect Madonna. It is sublime until we realize that perfection consumes the one who incorporates it. A child-painter in whom is transfused such perfect taste is in fact a child who is ready to be eaten up. A hint of this consumption was already present in the costume that the mother fashioned. As she dresses him, she also perfumes him, a maternal scent that troubles, and rightfully so, his poor schoolmates: I alone had hair that was combed a thousand times and that smelt good of a perfume that must have seemed so troubling to the other children who would take turns coming up to me to get a better sniff of my privileged head. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 37) A mother tenderly smells the perfumed head of her son. Gala, the mother substitute, reiterates this apparently tender gesture in a painting from 1933, Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder (Figure 4.2, upper).6 In the background a child holds a hoop that identifies him as the little Dalí; a hoop indeed often completes the sailor’s outfit in Dalí’s paintings. In the foreground, an ecstatic Gala smells two lamb chops that take the place previously occupied by Dalí himself in a photograph of him and Gala (taken around 1933) that shows Gala with the very same expression and head position. Eyes closed, Gala seems to inhale the hand that Dalí has wrapped around her shoulder (Figure 4.2b). Preempting analysis, Dalí gave his own psychoanalytical interpretation of the picture: As soon as we got settled in Port Lligat I painted a portrait of Gala with a pair of raw chops poised on her shoulder. The meaning of this,

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Figure 4.2 a, upper: Salvador Dalí, Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder, 1933. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Spain. b, lower, Salvador and Gala Dalí, 1933 Images: a: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society, used with permission; b: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society, used with permission

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as I later learned, was that instead of eating her, I had decided to eat a pair of raw chops instead. The chops were in effect the expiatory victims of abortive sacrifice—like Abraham’s ram, and William Tell’s apple . . . In the same vein I painted a picture of myself as a child at about the age of eight, with a raw chop on my head. I was trying thus symbolically to tempt my father to come and eat this chop instead of me. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 319) The lamb chops mean that I want to eat her; or that he, my father, wants to eat me. What is not even considered is the possibility that she, Gala, the mother substitute, might be eating, and even inhaling me: “me,” that is, not the grown up, but the child, the little Dalí, who pointedly turns his back to the scene going on in the foreground. What is also not being considered is that the flawless child in the background and the raw piece of meat in the foreground might be one and the same thing. Dalí’s psychoanalytic interpretations function as a screen. It is not the father who eats the child, but the mother, and not just any mother, but the Madonna herself who is here, through Gala, inhaling the child that she so lovingly perfumed. At the very moment when she conceived him as the reflection and container of her own desire for perfection, the Holy Mother indeed sacrificed him. She turned him into lamb chops, a sacrificial lamb thoroughly cannibalized by the maternal desire that fills him up. The devouring father veils a cannibalistic Madonna whose face is foreclosed from representation, be it literary or pictorial. “Cannibalism” and “Madonna” will indeed be kept separate, split off from each other, especially in the pictorial corpus where we find, juxtaposed to paintings of Gala as the Holy Mother, other and much more sinister-looking versions of the maternal face such as the Portrait of Gala (1965–1967), also known as Gala Against the Light.7 These two faces of Gala will never be conjoined in one single face. While painting keeps them radically distinct, literature inscribes both the split and the conjunction. Alongside the immaculate Mother, another version of the maternal face discreetly appears. It invades the face of Galuchka, the fictive little girl of Dalí’s childhood. Her face indeed progressively takes on maternal traits. She is first presented as an anticipation of Gala: “I shall call her Galuchka, which is the diminutive of my wife’s name, and this because of the belief so deeply rooted in my mind that the

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same feminine image has recurred in the course of my whole love-life” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 43). A forerunner of Gala, Galuchka is (like Gala) from Russia, a Russia reduced to the immaculate blankness of its snow: “A little girl appeared to me swathed in white furs and deeply ensconced in a sled” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 41). She comes, in other words, from the immaculate field of the Holy Mother. Immaculate like the snow on which she glides, she conjoins what seems to be opposite traits. At first, she evokes the Madonna. Her face “has the infinite sweetness and serenity conveyed by an oval face and a combination of features as miraculously harmonious as those of a Madonna of Raphael” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 41). Although apparently harmonious, this divine face bears the marks of what Dalí calls “a contrast.” Cannibalistic savagery starts indeed to creep in. Galuchka takes on an “awe-inspiringly proud expression” (which recalls the pride of the maternal gaze) that “oppressed my heart; her little nostrils were as lively as her glance, which gave her something of the wild look of a small forest animal” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 41). The strange wolves that surround Galuchka and fix their gaze upon her as she herself fixedly gazes at Dalí only amplify the savagery of the scene. It is with the gaze of a she-wolf that the Madonna Galuchka fixates her gaze on Dalí the child. Dalí notes the contrast without being able to explain it to himself. Galuchka’s gaze certainly anticipates Gala’s gaze, which contemporaries (and Dalí himself) described as extraordinarily “piercing” and that Max Ernst would paint in a picture entitled Gala Éluard (1924) (Gala was indeed married to the surrealist poet Paul Éluard when she met Dalí). But it also inscribes the “proud” devouring gaze of a mother who demanded nothing less from a child than perfection itself. This gaze appears most notably in the following hallucination, a “false memory,” as Dalí calls it, which is likely truer than any “real” memory could be. As he listens to the strident sounds of a military fanfare, little Dalí starts hallucinating that Galuchka fixes him with a gaze which is both “unendurable,” since it provokes an overwhelming shame, and annihilating: “Everything seemed to melt and vanish around me” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 51). Faced with annihilation, he summons another figure, a “nourrice,” a “wet nurse.” A maternal substitute, the wet nurse is called forth to protect him from the maternal gaze that pierces through Galuchka’s eyes. She provides a “tender” and “unconsciously protective” back behind which he can hide: “Everything seemed to melt and vanish around me and I had to lean my little head against the nurse’s broad insensitive back, a parapet of my desire” (Dalí, 1942 [1993],

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p. 51). To the annihilating mother is opposed another kind of mother who would unconsciously protect her child by allowing him to stay behind her, in a space close to her but different from her, a space in which she can neither look nor enter, and where he can have desires that are his, and not hers. The attempt is futile. The protective nurse is no match for Galuchka’s penetrating gaze: [A]t each new contact with her penetrating glance, it seemed to me that the latter, with the miracle of its expressive force, actually pierced through the nurse’s back, which from moment to moment was losing its corporeality, as though a veritable window were being hollowed out and cut into the flesh of her body, leaving me more and more in the open and gradually and irremissibly exposing me to the devouring activity of that adored though mortally anguishing glance . . . In fact, I saw a real window transpierce the nurse. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 52) As he is exposed to the devouring maternal gaze, Dalí is replaced with an empty space that marks his annihilation. Through the window that opens in the nurse’s back, he contemplates what is left by an annihilation that he cannot recognize as such: “I distinguished only a vast beach utterly deserted, lighted by the criminally melancholy light of a setting sun” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 52). Where the child stood now stands a desert, nothing: a self-portrait of sorts. As for the “crime,” it will never be acknowledged. The annihilation is indeed so complete that it annihilates the capacity to witness it. As the maternal gaze pierces through all protections, the child “shuts” his eyes: I shut my eyes. When I reopened them they were fixed on the bare arm of a lady sitting beside me who was parsimoniously lifting a cup of chocolate to her lips. The strange sentiment of absence and of nothingness, which seemed to envelop me more and more, formed a vivid contrast to the sharpness with which I perceived the tiniest details of the skin on the wrist of the lady in question. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 51) The image of a lady “parsimoniously lifting a cup of chocolate to her lips” transcribes the “crime” that is taking place. A child is indeed being drunk,

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sip by sip, slowly consumed by the maternal gaze and by its demands. As the Tragic Myth of the Angelus of Millet puts it, when a mother pours her desire into the cup that is the son, this cup is devoured, thoroughly consumed: “The cups will be devoured” (Dalí, 1963 [1986], p. 99). The hallucinatory image both transcribes the consumption and veils it in this very transcription. Dalí will never recognize that the lady stands for the mother, and that he has become the cup from which she drinks the chocolate that she has poured into it. The consumption is so radical that it leaves no “I” to witness it or, for that matter, consciously remember it. In the Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Poised on Her Shoulder, the child who is being consumed turns his back to that very scene of consumption: he is so thoroughly eaten that he cannot possibly know, see, or feel it. If he did, he would drop the maternal costume of the perfect little child. How does one create anything when one has been so blanked out? Compliance seems to be the solution. Dalí dedicates his life to being “Salvador Dalí,” a persona to which he refers (as he does in the very title of his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí) in the third person, and rightfully so, since “Dalí” is the persona that a divine mother fashioned of his “self.” He will also comply by dedicating his work to her, and this on the occasion of her death: My mother’s death struck me as an affront of destiny—a thing like that could not happen to me—either to her or to me! In the middle of my chest I felt the thousand-year-old cedar of Lebanon reach out its gigantic branches. With my teeth clenched with weeping, I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that some day would savagely gleam around my glorious name! (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 153) Dalí dedicates his future work to the task of reflecting and immortalizing maternal perfection. He will fight her death (which is also his own) by painting a glorious pictorial corpus that will replace an all too mortal human body with an immortal pictorial body. And he will do so by using a specific sword: technical perfection. It is indeed on the perfect technique of Renaissance painting that Dalí will count to gain a pictorial glory that is both the reflection and immortalization of his mother’s perfection.

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Gala is selected as muse because she provides the occasion to reenact this maternal dedication. From their very first meeting, Dalí knows full well what she expects: She considered me a genius—half mad but capable of great moral courage. And she wanted something—something which would be the fulfillment of her own myth. And this thing that she wanted was something that she was beginning to think perhaps only I could give her! (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 230) Like the mother who reflected herself in her “superior” little boy, Gala wants a genius whose work will reflect and magnify her “inspiration.” Like the mother who dressed her child according to the bourgeois definition of good taste, Gala favors, for this work of magnification, the Renaissance technique recognized as the standard of pictorial excellence. Dalí will oblige and create her myth by signing off his work to her, as he did much earlier when he dedicated his future glory to his mother’s immortalization. He will also oblige by participating in their collaborative fashioning of the “Dalí” persona, and this in spite of his initial fear. The desire that he senses in Gala provokes indeed at first both a regression to childhood—“my regression to the infantile period became accentuated” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 233)—and an intense fear of being depersonalized: The same rancor that I had felt toward Dullita was beginning to make its way into my heart in respect to Gala. She too had come to destroy and annihilate my solitude, and I began to overwhelm her with absolutely unjust reproaches: she prevented me from working, she insinuated herself surreptitiously into my brain, she “depersonalized” me. Moreover I was convinced that she was going to do me harm. I often said to her, as if bitten in the nape of the neck by a sudden fear, “above all don’t, please don’t hurt me. And I mustn’t hurt you either. We must never hurt each other!” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], pp. 233–234) The muse, in other words, is less a source of inspiration than the occasion of a reawakening: far from being a “source,” her desire in fact takes the

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relay of a previous desire. The desire that drives Gala, the modern-day muse, reactivates, but with a renewed intensity, the trace left by a maternal desire. Through “Gala–Gradiva” comes forth indeed an antique and “Pompeiian” desire that keeps pushing forward. What comes back from the “antiquity” of childhood and traverses with a victorious gait all the feminine images of Dalí’s life (from Galuchka to Dullita and finally to Gala, the muse) is precisely not an image but a repressed maternal trace which keeps being reawakened, a trace that inspires the work but seems doomed to withdraw from the work that it stimulates. In a drawing that Dalí made for his Secret Life, Gradiva advances at the center of a whirlpool of lines without showing her face.8 Gala, the muse, reactivates the maternal desire for supreme excellence and fame that filled the child and annihilated him in the process. What it left in its wake is a “self” that is but the cast both of her desire and of his disappearance. Against this annihilating desire, Dalí protects himself by isolating himself, as he did in his childhood when he carved for himself a small working room at the top of his childhood home. Ultimately, he assuages his fear by convincing himself that Gala, far from depersonalizing him, will allow him to become even more himself: “himself,” that is, the persona of the modern-day genius that he has tried to compose, but cannot quite “get right.” 9 Although Gala is impressed at their first meeting “by the rigor which [Dalí] displayed in the realm of ideas,” she is much less impressed by the persona that he had fashioned for himself: She even admitted to me that earlier, as we were drinking in the shade of the plane trees, she had thought me an unbearably obnoxious creature because of my pomaded hair and my elegance, which she thought had a “professional Argentine tango slickness.” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 226) For the task of constructing the persona of the modern-day genius, Gala’s classical sense of proportion is needed: Since Málaga, I had become the pupil of Gala . . . She taught me how to dress, how to go down a stairway without falling thirty-six times, how not to be continually losing the money we had, how to eat without tossing the chicken bone at the ceiling, how to recognize our enemies.

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She also taught me the “principle of proportion” which slumbered in my intelligence. She was the Angel of Equilibrium, the precursor of my classicism. Far from becoming depersonalized, I got rid of the cumbersome, sterile and dusty tyranny of the symptoms and of tics, tics, tics. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], pp. 316–317) The “Angel of Equilibrium,” Gala trims the excesses that make Dalí unpalatable for public consumption while at the same time keeping the proper dose of eccentricity and delirium that appeals to the popular taste for sensationalism, the kind of taste that he detects in the American press, which greets his arrival to America. She also encourages him to package his eccentricity within a technique that popular taste has been taught to appreciate as the very sign of pictorial excellence. Taking over the maternal desire for glory, she dresses him up, refashions his persona and style, and constructs, with his full cooperation, the persona of the eccentric genius that will attract fame and money. As Prose (2002) remarks, she brings to the maternal fashioning unique qualities of her own that Brassaï (who photographed the couple) noted: “She took control of the ‘Dalí phenomenon,’ and its enormous success is due in great part to her. A remarkable businesswoman, she was the one who negotiated and signed his contracts” (p. 215). Prose rightfully points out that Gala “was the muse of a new vision of the artist” (p. 197), the commodified celebrity artist, who opened the much wider field of international media consumption to Dalí’s desire for fame: Perhaps more (or more consciously) than any artist before him, Dalí wanted to become famous. And his muse, his Gala, ever attuned to celebrity and image, combined the muse’s traditional functions (inspirer, facilitator, lover, mother, accountant, nurse) with the newly required skills of a spin-doctor and an impresario who gave Dalí the confidence to successfully market himself as a personality. (p. 195) Far from being an extraneous addition to the maternal role, Gala’s successful marketing of the Dalí persona for international consumption in fact belongs to it. The mother who created the child in her image and for her benefit had already marked him for consumption by offering him to

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the Other’s desire. Ironically, the crowds that consume the Dalí phenomenon that “Gala–Dalí” manufactured only consume consumption itself: the personality that is fed to their appetite is but the trace left by an annihilating maternal consumption. Is this the creative solution that Dalí has to offer to those who have been blanked out? Will they create on condition that they become the medium through which the desire of another, her desire, realizes itself and for her benefit? I do not think so. If Dalí offers any creative solution, it is not, I believe, simple compliance, but resistance within compliance, a double game of sorts that requires the kind of rage and duplicity that he manifests in the scene where he adopts his new signature: She [Gala] followed the anguish of my picture with more intensity even than myself, for I would often cheat, in order to derive pleasure from my drama, and even to see Gala suffer: “It is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures,” I said to her one day, and since then I have always used her name with mine in signing my work. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 301) While apparently conforming himself to the maternal demand, Dalí “cheats” and steals his work away from her to whom he dedicated it. How? By failing to give exactly what she demands. This failure is not new. As a child, he had already found the strength to fail. The gifted child disables himself: “I was capable of remaining locked up in a room a whole afternoon, not knowing how to turn the door-handle to get out” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 38). He unlearns what he has been taught (“each day I knew less well how to do each thing!” (p. 38), disappoints at school, and makes his mother cry: One day at dinner, my father created a general consternation by reading aloud a report from my teachers . . . [T]hey concluded by saying that “I was dominated by a kind of mental laziness so deeply rooted that it made it almost impossible for me to achieve any progress in my studies.” I remember that my mother wept that evening. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 66) This failure is the very sign of a resistance without which, I believe, no creativity would be possible, for the failure is his, the one thing that a Holy

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Mother cannot possibly want. Although he relentlessly labors to achieve “absolute” technical perfection, Dalí knows enough to call this labor a “sin.” Even more, he learns to “savour” in his technical “mistakes” the very mark of his originality: “I became conscious of the most original origin of my mistakes. I savour these mistakes” (Dalí, 1964 [2007], p. 109). As for his texts, they too are “faulty,” marked by a blatant disrespect for the laws of spelling and grammar to the point that some wondered if he did not suffer from dyslexia. In her critical edition of the French manuscript of the Secret Life, Joseph-Lowery mentions that experts to whom she showed the manuscript do not believe that their distortions of the French language are the result of dyslexia (Joseph-Lowery, 2006, p. 29). Something else is happening. Dalí’s faulty French, I will suggest, tortures the mother tongue by resisting its demand for impeccable correction, and any language that insists on correction will be the mother tongue, especially French, the language placed under the maternal watch of an academy.10 Writing will flow on condition that it is faulty: “Everything, absolutely everything, that I shall say here is entirely and exclusively my fault,” proclaims Dalí (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 6). “Faute” in French means both guilt and defect. As far as the maternal law is concerned, the two are strictly equivalent: any failure to perform according to maternal expectations is a defect and a sinful resistance, a “blemish” on her immaculate perfection. One resists by cheating and also by bleeding. “I paint with your blood,” Dalí says to Gala. Her “blood” is both the pain that he inflicts upon her by failing, by not giving her exactly what she demanded. But her “blood” is also the blood that flows in him, the very figure of an ongoing maternal invasion that Dalí intimates, without ever acknowledging it, when he declares that: “my mother, my blood, was always present” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 5). Painting and writing spills out the maternal foreign body within and, in so doing, perpetrates a major “fault,” for this is not what was asked, on the contrary. One was supposed to paint and write correctly, thanks to her, and for her. One was not supposed to leak out the secret that the vital transfusion is in fact a lethal injection. This was the secret to be kept, a secret so secret that it would remain forever inaccessible to its bearer. Dalí spills out in his writing the secret that he cannot bear to know but that he paints. The very matter of his paintings is made of the maternal liquid within, a liquid that he leaks out in an unbroken chain of meta-

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phorical substitutes: first the saliva that drools out of his mouth as he paints,11 then the oil which flows through his brush. Oil painting is indeed the medium that he chooses over all other media. Before oil, he writes, “there was still a too violent traumatism, composed of rasping, repelling and unyielding materials, too much hardness of outline, too many contours separating each object” (Dalí, 1948 [1992], p. 26). Oil alone is capable of uniting materials, “of making them glide, of lubricating them in a synthesis” (Dalí, 1948 [1992], p. 26). The medium that unites, melts and fuses, it allows one to work within the maternal symbiotic link on condition that one avoid two equally deadly dangers: too thick, oil becomes glue in which the brush remains stuck; too thin, it fails to fuse the materials and gives painting a brittle quality that Dalí violently stigmatizes, since it spells detachment, that is, for the one who has been so thoroughly transfused, quite simply death.12 She must keep flowing. The transfusion must go on, and will go on. Dalí will remain attached to the bitter end. Attached—but not completely, for he has managed to thin enough the glue of symbiotic attachment to be able to work with it, to deposit it on the canvas, where it congeals into “a beautiful pictorial matter” “composed of mysteriously blended films,” which are, thanks to the medium of oil, “superposed, spread one over the other”: A color as it comes from a tube does not exist as a beautiful and transcendent pictorial matter. The latter, on the contrary, is constituted and formed . . . by a succession of subtle, quasi-spiritual and infinitely fine successive layers, as transparent as possible. (Dalí, 1948 [1992], pp. 21–22) Pictorial matter is created according to the maternal principle of fusion. This fusion produces visible matter on condition that it remains itself invisible. Oil colors are deposited in layers “as transparent as possible” in order to emulate that which, for Dalí, will remain the very embodiment of transcendent matter: the blue of the sky, the kind of blue in which he will drown his paintings of Gala as Madonna, and that, he contends, every young painter should contemplate in order to learn how to paint. He will then “observe that this blue is composed of a precious matter which eludes his rational faculties.” This matter beyond rational understanding is opaque, “materially corporeal,” hard like “an agate sphere,” and “violent” in its opacity (Dalí, 1948 [1992], p. 21). This opaque violence

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is made, however, of thin air: “the hardness and the violence, so to speak, of such a blue are constituted of nothing but infinite layers of superposed transparent air” (Dalí, 1948 [1992], p. 21). Blue—the color of the Holy Mother—is the color of air itself. Before she can be contained in a figure, a mother is indeed, as Beth Seelig puts it, “like the air.”13 An uncontainable body without limits, she surrounds, penetrates, and in Dalí’s case, blends invisibly, continuously, and violently, for she does not tolerate separation. The maternal body is made up of the layered fusions that she inflicted over time on a child who, in turn, replicates this layered fusion on the canvas over time, the time that it takes to paint. The pictorial matter of which Dalí was so proud is maternal fusion spilled out on the canvas. It repeats the invisible fusion, and reveals it to be at the very origin of matter and bodies. Oil, symbiotic glue, is the “secret” that gives birth to the bodies that we admire while remaining blind to the oily symbiosis from which they proceed. The “transcendence” and “spirituality” of the pictorial matter that Dalí admires in the Old Masters become, under his brush, something quite different: the index of a violent, corporeal, and ongoing symbiosis. His matter is opaque, suffocating, impenetrable: it is invisible symbiotic glue spilled out, over and over again, on the canvas where it hardens into the luminous flesh of bodies and the hard “consistency” of a gem.14 Dalí spills out both the invasion and the pressure that it exerted. The maternal desire is indeed “pressing.” It inflicts its pressure and its imprint on the body of the child dressed every morning in a perfect costume that he cannot take off without strangulating himself: “I couldn’t even manage to take off my sailor blouse which slipped over the head, a few experiments in this exercise having convinced me of the danger of dying of suffocation” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 38). She, the Holy Mother, in fact exerted the full pressure of her demand on his very being, and from within. Dalí accepts, and turns this pressure into the very condition of all forms. As JosephLowery (2007) points out, Dalí indeed valorizes “constraint” (2007). Dalí’s creative process, she argues, supposes two actions that his use of the term “coaction” summarizes: a pressure and a counter-pressure, that is, a reaction and even rebellion against this pressure.15 And, as she notes, it is not just organic matter that takes shape in the act of resisting, but the matter that is Dalí himself, “not only his words but also his body,” as he both welcomes and resists constraints such as the “influence of tradition, of homeland (Inquisition, Escurial and elsewhere . . . Gaudí)” (Joseph-Lowery, 2007, p. 92, my translation).

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Forms, Dalí claims, are pressed into being by a coercion that he consistently likens to the tortures of the Inquisition: We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter—the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space which chokes it on all sides, and forces it to express itself in swellings which exceed its own life to the exact limits of its possibilities of reaction. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 2) And the most “original” forms derive from the most inquisitorial pressure, for it is their very reaction against that pressure that produces “originality” and “individuality.” The agates will be the case in point. Their seemingly “fanciful” and “free” “arborescent blossoming” results from the most ferocious constraint of a colloidal environment, imprisoned in the most relentless of inquisitorial structures, subjected to all the tortures of compression and moral asphyxiation, so that their most delicate, airy, and ornamental ramifications are, it seems, but the traces of its hopeless search for escape from its death agony. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 3) And it is not only the natural world that is subjected to this formative pressure, but his mind itself: “the colloidal environment of my mind was to find in the unique and inquisitorial rigor of Spanish thought the definitive form of the bloody, Jesuitical, and arborescent agates of my curious genius” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 4). Dalí’s “genius” is a “colloidal” environment. “Colloidal,” as Joseph-Lowery (2007) observes, is a word “formed from eidos (form) and kola (glue)” (p. 90). Dalí’s mind, in other words, is “soft,” that is, formless until the “rigor of Spanish thought” shapes it into “arborescent agates.” This arborescent shape may look graceful and even “free.” But its apparent “freedom” is in fact the trace left by what he calls the agate’s “hopeless search for escape from its death agony.” Like an agate, his genius is formed through an inquisitorial process of constriction and “moral asphyxiation” from which it tries vainly to escape. It is but the trace left by a “death agony” reminiscent of the auto-da-fé of the Spanish Holy Inquisition. Indeed, he will go so far as to claim that “anarchistic minds,” such as his, need the tortures of this “Holy Inquisition” to find their “morphology”:

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Even as men with unilateral, one-way minds were burned by the fire of the Holy Inquisition, so multiform, anarchistic minds—precisely because they were such—found in the light of these flames the flowering of their most individual spiritual morphology. (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 4) “Holy” is, I offer, the unconscious code word for the maternal. It is in the maternal “holy” fire that Dalí finds his unique “morphology,” the very form of his genius as it tries to escape from annihilating consumption. While he acknowledges the pain that maternal inquisition inflicts, Dalí loves its imprint. To be attractive, bodies must bear the mark of the maternal pressure that keeps shaping him from within. Galuchka is loved because her waist is so slender “that I feared to see her break in two at any moment.”16 Her body evokes the “strangulated” “waist” of the diabolo (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 110), the toy with which he plays, and which figures the toy that he, in fact, is. Dalí, in short, loves in the other what made him lovable: a shape pressed and strangulated to perfection. As for painting, it too is done under pressure, under the coercion of classical style and perfect technique. Paintings, Dalí suggests, are indeed the result of a “Holy Inquisition” of sorts when he refers to two of his early paintings, two “capital works,” as being “as impressive as an auto-da-fé— which is what they were” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 174). As the translator H. M. Chevalier notes, an auto-da-fé means “an act of faith” and was “the name given to the ceremony of burning alleged heretics by the Spanish Holy Inquisition” (p. 174). Dalí both subjects himself to this coercion and resists it by painting (and especially drawing) the distortions that it imposes. An invisible pressure strangulates the waists of his bodies to the breaking point. The same pressure compels shapes to swell, spin or morph into other shapes. This delirious morphing testifies to the unbearable quality of a constriction that exceeds, as he puts it, the possibilities of reaction. One cannot react and push back. One is literally forced to ex-press oneself, to escape from the oppressive imposition of one shape only to find another shape, as unbearably oppressive as the previous one. Through all of them, the pressure of an invasive maternal body is felt. Dalí’s “paranoiac vision” blindly looks for this maternal body through all the strange bodies that it sees hidden within the familiar shapes of the world. From one single shape, he can extract the shape of a horse, of a

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sleeping woman and of a lion. This pictorial extraction provokes the same pleasure and the same desolation that he derives from the extraction of blackheads, a game to which he dedicates an entire text, “Apparitions aérodynamiques des ‘êtres-objets’” (Dalí, 1971 [1979]). The happiness he experiences when they spring out is soon replaced with “the most inconsolable desolation” (Dalí, 1971 [1979], p. 44, translation mine) once they are all extracted. Dalí need not fear. All the strange bodies that he extracts from the flesh of the world stand in for a foreign body that will never be extracted. It retracts itself in any figural extraction, for it is precisely that which was experienced as a limitless and uncontainable invasion, an invasion so overwhelming that it left no subject to know, see, or feel it. There is no longer an “I” but an impersonal “one,” an indeterminate and amorphous mass, the kind of mass upon which Dalí writes, in French, “ma mère” in the picture entitled Enigma of Desire – My Mother, My Mother, My Mother. Dalí can write “my mother”; language does not provide the representation that is missing from painting. The very proliferation of the word “my mother” bears witness to the impossibility of ever being able to say her: “ma mère.” No more than she can be contained in a visible figure, can she be contained in a word. The maternal body will never be leaked out. One can spill it out. One will never spill it out once and for all. It will traverse all words and shapes, escape all figural and linguistic containment. It is both an intractable resistance and an inexhaustible resource, a creative matrix of sorts.

Notes 1 My translation, since the dedication is left untranslated: “A Gala–Gradiva, celle qui avance.” 2 “Always gratuitously, deliriously extreme, Dalí raised the bar for the artist who chose to make a public declaration of gratitude to his muse. If Lewis Carroll repeatedly thanked Alice for having inspired two books, if Rilke fervently acknowledged his debt to Lou Andreas-Salomé, Dalí credited Gala—over and over, and on every possible appropriate or inappropriate occasion—not merely for having influenced his work and his philosophy, but for having taught and enabled him to survive” (Prose, 2002, p. 196). 3 I thank Rebecca Wessell for having called my attention to an early painting of Dalí’s mother, and Adele Tutter for having pointed out to me the existence of a second portrait of Dalí’s mother painted around the same time. 4 “Gala, you are reality” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 248).

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5 Joseph-Lowery also rightfully notes that Dalí willfully participates in this enterprise of publication where the birth of the published text coincides with a form of death, a conjunction that is, in fact, the “mot d’ordre de sa création” “the watchword of his creation” (Dalí, 2006, p. 33, translation mine). 6 Carlos Rojas aptly describes this scene as “the confrontation of Gala’s face with Dalí as boy holding a hoop, though not dressed in a sailor’s outfit” (Rojas, 1993, p. 121). 7 Indeed, the surrealist poet David Gascoyne (who was not fond of Gala) describes this painting in the following terms: “Entitled Portrait of Gala against the Light (‘Retrato de Gala a contraluz’), it shows her framed by a window against a menacing sky, her face the colour of gun-metal and wearing an expression of malignity reminiscent of Arletty’s in the role of an emissary of the Devil at the beginning of Carné’s Les Visiteurs du soir. The Chanel bow that became an inseparable feature of Gala’s coiffure during her last decade appears indistinguishable from a brutal pair of horns” (Gascoyne, 1998, p. 430). 8 For a more extended study of the figure of Gradiva through Dalí’s work, I refer the reader to the analysis of Frédérique Joseph-Lowery and Isabelle Roussel-Gillet that focuses on the relation of the Gradiva figure to dance, movement and temporality (Joseph-Lowery & Roussel-Gillet, 2007, pp. 37–47). They note the whirlpool of lines within which Gradiva advances in the drawing of the Secret Life (p. 46). 9 Catherine Grenier rightfully points out that Dalí devoted much of his time and energy to what she calls the “invention” of his very self, that is, of his artistic persona. She mentions the different phases (corresponding to different costumes) in the creation of this artistic persona such as the “bohemian artist”, the “dandy” as well as the persona of the “exotic and high society painter” that he composes for Gala when he meets her (Grenier, 2011, p. 73, translation mine). All these artistic phases are phases in the creation of what will ultimately become the Dalí “persona,” a persona which, as Grenier points out, ultimately “liberates itself from the existing typologies of the artist in order to create an original figure” marked by “the classical characterization of exception: the genius” (p. 79, translation mine). 10 Frédérique Joseph-Lowery notes that France is “one of the only countries to see in his language a Treasure,” a treasure that Dalí, according to her, “dilapidates” in his writing (2006, p. 20, translation mine). She also points out that Michel Déon, a member of the Académie française, corrected and adapted for publication Dalí’s French manuscript of his Secret Life, an adaptation into “proper French” that she describes as being in fact a destruction of Dalí’s idiosyncratic writing (Dalí, 2006, p. 30). 11 “It is undeniable that every good painter drools. This results from the concentration of his attention and the satisfaction which the visions appearing before his eyes procure him . . . When the painter paints, his two hands are busy, and his attention is wholly absorbed by his dream. It is quite useless to

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tell him to wipe the corners of his lips every five minutes, and even if his loving Gala, in her maternal solicitude, were to try to wipe them for him, she would run the risk of being pushed away, if not bitten so much is the painter with his picture like a dog with his bone” (Dalí, 1948 [1992], p. 93). Dalí, the painter, deposits metaphorically his saliva on the “bone” that is the painting, an act that is in explicit defiance of Gala’s “maternal solicitude” which seeks, for its part, to prevent all drooling, all “spilling out.” If badly handled, oil color “is stigmatized by a crude, repulsive opacity or by a ‘dull discontinuity’ as of ejected matter, now soft and at the same time brittle” (Dalí, 1948 [1992], p. 22). It is this brittleness that characterizes modern paintings: they do not age well but become “quickly outmoded, turning yellow, darkening, breaking out in cracks and all the stigma of decrepitude” (Dalí, 1948 [1992], p. 19). In the paintings of “ignorant modern painters,” “the colors pulverize, immediately disintegrated by the solvents of druggists, the poison of laziness” (Dalí, 1948 [1992], pp. 22–23). Beth Seelig, “Maternal altruism and boundary violation,” unpublished presentation to the Atlanta Psychoanalytic Society, April 2008. This hardness is also accentuated, as Adele Tutter notes, by a lack of surface texture and a surface shine that repels engagement (pers. comm.). Joseph-Lowery (2007) traces this imposition of constraint on Dali’s writing. Gala subjected Dalí’s texts to “the constraint of orthography and syntax that Dalí never wanted to respect in any of the four languages which he speaks fluently (French, learned since he was five years old, Catalan, Spanish, and English)” (p. 87, my translation). This constraint is redoubled when, as she points out, Dalí entrusted his text to the French academician Michel Déon to “rewrite, retitle and recompose” (p. 87, my translation). My translation from the French; the English translation reads: “She had a waist so slender and so fragile that it seemed to separate her body into two independent parts” (Dalí, 1942 [1993], p. 75).

References Dalí, S. (1942 [1993]). The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (H. M. Chevalier trans.). New York: Dover. Dalí, S. (1948 [1992]). Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship (H. M. Chevalier trans.). New York: Dover. Dalí, S. (1963 [1986]). The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus: Paranoiac-Critical Interpretation including The Myth of William Tell (E. R. Morse trans.). St Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum. Dalí, S. (1964 [2007]). Diary of a Genius (R. Howard trans.). Washington D. C.: Solar. Dalí, S. (1971 [1979]). Oui 2. L’archangélisme scientifique. Paris: Denoël Gonthier.

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Dalí, S. (2006). La Vie Secrète de Salvador Dalí Suis-je un génie? Édition critique des manuscrits originaux de La Vie Secrète de Salvador Dalí (F. Joseph-Lowery ed.). Lausanne: L’âge d’homme. Freud, S. (1907 [1959]). Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva. Standard ed., 9. London: Hogarth Press. Gascoyne, D. (1998). “Gala Eluard.” Selected Prose 1934–1996 (R. Scott ed.). London: Enitharmon Press. Grenier, C. (2011). L’invention de soi. Paris: Flammarion. Jensen, W. (1918). Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy (H. M. Downey trans.). New York: Moffat, Yard and Company. Joseph-Lowery, F. (2007). De la contrainte par corps, dans l’oeuvre écrite de Salvador Dalí. Formules/revue des créations formelles, 11, 85–97. Joseph-Lowery, F., & Roussel-Gillet, I. (2007). Danser Gala: L’art bouffe de Salvador Dalí. Geneva: Notari. Prose, F. (2002). The Lives of the Muses: New Women & the Artists They Inspired. New York: HarperCollins. Rojas, C. (1993). Salvador Dalí or the Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait (A. Amel trans.). Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press. Willis, I. (2007). “She Who Steps Along”: Gradiva, Telecommunications, History. Helios, 34, 223–242.

Chapter 5

“Herb and Dorothy” Vogel The Art Collector as Muse J. David Miller

Thinking of the collector as a muse, as dedicated to inspiring artists, seems counter-intuitive: we tend to think of major collectors as dedicated only to themselves, buying art to gain prestige and power from its display, and to diversify their portfolios. This view is reinforced when the media trumpets “new record price!” for art that many consider of dubious value. We meet a very different sort of collector in Megumi Sasaki’s documentary film Herb and Dorothy (Sasaki, 2008).1 Sasaki, a Japanese woman making

Figure 5.1 Herb and Dorothy Vogel, c.1970 Image: University of Oregon

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her debut as a filmmaker, traces the married life of the Vogels, a couple of modest means who nevertheless acquired and then gave to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) a major collection of Minimalist and Conceptual artworks (Figure 5.1). NGA curator Jack Cowart considers their achievement “an astounding phenomenon.” Moreover, for at least some of “their” artists, they functioned as a muse—broadening our view of what it can mean to be a collector, as well as what it can mean to be a muse, and providing an entry point to study the role of the muse from a psychoanalytic perspective. Sasaki’s documentary is especially sensitive to this subject because the filmmaker herself was touched by their inspiration. She says that she was “so moved” by the Vogels’ collection when reporting on it for Japanese television that she felt compelled to make Herb and Dorothy, which she both produced and directed, her first such effort after years of working in television news. She was further motivated by working with them: as she explains in the film, their open-ended idea of what art can be released her from an artistic block triggered by a “bad art teacher” in the eighth grade that shut down her desire to become a painter, creative energy that was released in her film on the Vogels. The winner of many “Best Documentary” awards at international film festivals, her film is an artful blend of looseness and rigor, alternating scenes of the Vogels with their artist-friends and sensitively edited interviews. Sasaki creates a narrative of subtle logic that interweaves their past with their present at each stage of the Vogels’ development as collectors.

Would-Be Artists who Became Collectors Early in their marriage, Dorothy says, they were “wannabe” artists: in 1962, they attended art class together and hung their paintings in their apartment. Her painting style was one of neatly contained segments of color, while— to Dorothy at least—Herb’s energetic streaks and smears were “abstract expressionist.” They soon decided they liked the work of other artists better than their own; and so, always together, they began to buy art. Analogous to their styles as painters, they had very different styles as collectors. Artist Will Barnet says, “Dorothy was always more in the background, restrained,” but with Herb, “we’d go into the gallery . . . he made an immediate jump.” In his double portrait of them, he paints Dorothy on the vertical, holding back and reflective, while Herb is horizontal, leaning into

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the art with devouring passion. Artist Lucio Pozzi notes that Herb “comes in and points at the art like a hound.” In the film, we see Herb at the National Gallery, literally “pointing” his nose at the first piece he bought with Dorothy: a small “crushed car” sculpture by John Chamberlain. Though it had been stored away for decades, Herb states authoritatively, “I’ve never seen it in this position.” At his instruction, the curator turns it 90 degrees. Although they would become famous, they initially gave no thought to public recognition. When Herb and Dorothy began buying art, they were not at all interested in display—either of their prowess as collectors, or of their art. According to their friend, the sculptor Linda Benglis, “They lived only for the art, loving the art and caring for it the way they did.” They bought from artists who were not yet represented by galleries and tried to keep their purchases private. The pieces on their apartment walls and floors, such as Donald Judd’s wooden strip cubes, seemed strange to their friends and relatives, and, for that matter, to most of the art world. Living on Dorothy’s income as a New York City librarian, they made the decision to spend all of Herb’s postal worker’s salary on art, which enabled them to buy many pieces from artists who were still unknown. They quickly ran out of wall space in their tiny apartment, and kept most of their art wrapped securely and stacked against the walls. In the film, artist Chuck Close jokes that “the bed was getting higher and higher and higher as they shoved more art underneath.”

Like Amelie for Matisse 2 It seems incongruous to connect art connoisseurship or the muse with a plain, middle-aged couple, schlepping off to galleries each night after leaving their mundane jobs. In our culture, we typically imagine the muse as a beautiful lover, real or imagined, who inspires and energizes, helping the artist give form to an inchoate potential. A famous and informative example is Amelie, the lover, and later, wife of Henri Matisse: she believed so fervently in his vision of art that she left her prosperous family to share the financial hardship of his early career, taking care of logistics and business so he could be entirely free to paint (Miller, 2013). Amelie devoted herself to Matisse not despite, but because of his refusal to pander to fashion: when his pictures failed to sell, she ran a millinery shop, so that he would never have to depart from his own vision. Her example helps to understand what a muse can mean to the modern artist: she, too, knew her own mind.

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Amelie watched with admiration as Matisse adopted and then rejected a succession of styles, first an academic style, then Pointillism, and finally Fauvism, each time alienating the art-buying public, and also the artistfriends who clung to once new styles long after they had become commonplace. But Matisse had an idea about art that Amelie could embrace passionately, that style emerges organically if the artist aims to evoke his inner life, his authentic individuality. She loved that about him and supported it with everything she had. Matisse’s approach was to engage the painting in a dialogue, reacting to each stage of its development until the image resonated with the conflict, ambiguity, and mystery of his inner life, and integrated it all harmoniously. Rejecting formulaic styles, he wanted his works to be new—to make the viewer “look at everything as though he saw it for the first time” (Flam 1973, p. 148). He felt he could achieve these aims through spontaneity, by making art that mirrored his unique and ever-shifting inner vision (Miller, 2013). Amelie’s steadfast support while Matisse turned his back on mainstream art exemplifies a central role of the muse: to help an artist find the courage and confidence to express his or her individuality and vision. Emerging in Amelie’s case in the roles of lover and wife, the muse can also appear in the role of a loving parent.

“Like Family” Sasaki demonstrates that the Vogels’ relationship to their artists grew out of genuine friendship. Christo and Jeanne Claude treasured their companionship, remarking that it enabled them to do their own work undistracted by the New York art scene, because at dinner with the Vogels they learned everything that was going on. One artist says that he and Herb had regular Saturday night “catch up” calls, and another refers to regular Sunday calls, while a third artist couple, Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, speak fondly of the Vogels’ semi-annual visits to their farm in upstate New York. As Herb says in the film, “we weren’t just collecting art, we were collecting friends.” Robert Mangold seems to concur: “they are friend collectors . . . not collection collectors . . . they’re like family.” On film, the Vogels relate to their artist-friends very much like parents visiting adult sons and daughters. Entering the studio of James Siena, an abstract artist in his fifties, the now-elderly Vogels greet “James” without

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a trace of condescension or entitlement, but with freely expressed parental warmth. Dorothy leans in and up for a kiss on the cheek, and Herb, as irreverently familiar as any dad, teases him a bit. He seems totally frank in his responses to the art. He often exclaims that he loves a work, or just utters a soft “wow.” In one scene he sits still, as if in awe, whispering, “It’s very beautiful.” But at other times Herb offers constructive criticism like a parent, firmly and authoritatively. He admonishes James Siena to stop further work on a painting. Siena objects, “it’s only half painted!” But Herb insists, “I would leave it . . . great painting . . . I wouldn’t touch it.” In another episode of the film, we see Herb and Dorothy as parents who imagine and foster possibilities not yet visible to their child. Herb shows Richard Tuttle that a group of his abstract watercolors works as a coherent series if the artist removes two of them: “There’s two in there that don’t work.” Tuttle removes them, recognizing the unifying theme after Herb notices it. Just as good parents appreciate and patiently foster the unique qualities of their children, the Vogels had intuitive faith in the artists they became attached to, infusing them with confidence by giving serious thought to whatever they said and whatever they made. Artists report that, unique among their collectors, Herb and Dorothy would insist on seeing all of their work, even early works they viewed as failures, and would purchase examples from each phase, like parents putting together a scrapbook of their child. Tracking the process of their artists’ growth was vitally important: as Robert Mangold notes, “they want to follow every step of your work, every change, every mutation you went through . . . they wanted to share in it.” Siena describes the Vogels’ unique grasp of his development: “I found a couple of drawings I almost threw away . . . immature work . . . but quite important to my development . . . They immediately identified that . . . they went ‘wow . . . this is so exciting.’” Herb also cared about the development of each artwork. To the surprise of Chuck Close, when he bought an early trial study for one of Close’s large photo-realist portraits, he insisted that everything—including the masking tape that outlined its crop and a wad of stuck-on extra tape—be left intact, later to be preserved in the framed piece on the Vogels’ wall. Close calls it “a souvenir of the process of making the painting,” an approach guided by Herb’s “eye.” Richard Tuttle adds: “Herb understands the nature of the artist . . . how is it best fulfilled in a created work.” His “eye” saw artworks not just as finished pieces, but as they developed over time.

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And, like parents who love their children even when they despair of understanding them, the Vogels also bought art that left them baffled. At the time they began collecting, the art “being done,” to use Herb’s phrase, was no longer fresh. Nor was it affordable. While Abstract Expressionist and Pop art were once scorned, by the 1960s, the public “got it.” But one of their closest artist-friends, Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt, was different. Herb says: “I thought he was an original artist . . . though I did not understand his work.” As Chuck Close recalls, “they’d like the most unlikable works, the least decorative, the most rigorous.” If they did not understand it at first, they would give it time. Dorothy says, “something you don’t like right at first . . . the more you live with it, the more you like it . . . it grows on you.” Herb explains this paradox, their liking what they did not understand: “I knew something was new . . . I like the idea of something that wasn’t done before.” This hunger for new art was not for its “shock” value, but for the reawakening of sensory and cognitive awareness—akin to Matisse’s goal, for the viewer to see “as though for the first time.” Herb wanted to help bring into the world something so new that he could not at first make sense of it. In the film, it is generally Herb, rather than Dorothy, who interprets the meaning of their art. Even when he speaks in his usual authoritative way, we can see that he genuinely loves art that is so “new” it baffles him: to make sense of it, he resorts to a free associative process in which he, like the artist, discovers something new within himself. For example, he says that the Minimalist Donald Judd makes him newly aware of the sleek perfection of factory-made objects, an awareness we lose with familiarity. He finds an appealing democratic message in Carl Andre’s assemblies of square metal plates lying flat on the floor: no matter how humble one’s life, the plates of steel or stone that we walk on in the street glisten in the shifting light. Given the chance, Dorothy also shares her responses: for her, “word art” is not about the meaning of the words, but the sense impression of the letters themselves when displayed as art. When Sol Lewitt was still unknown, he taught the Vogels that art can be even more “minimal” than the work of the Minimalists: it can be nothing more than the artist’s plan for a work that the buyer executes in his or her own way, each version in that individual’s style. To fully understand the meaning of this art, Dorothy created her version of one Lewitt piece on a wall of their apartment. A more mundane, but no less parental aspect to the Vogels’ collecting was the vital financial support they gave their artists, especially in the early

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years, when their work was so radical they could barely earn a living. Interviewed on film, several artists recall that when the Vogels came calling, they were barely scraping by. Chuck Close recalls, “[t]hey were passionate . . . when no one was interested in what we were doing.” Of his and his wife Sylvia’s work, Robert Mangold states, “[t]here was no market for what both of us were doing . . . there was very little coming in.” And Lucio Pozzi admits, “[a]t the time it was exciting for me to sell anything to anybody.” The words “patron” and “paternal” derive from the same Latin root pater, or “father.” By collecting unknown artists, the Vogels were true “patrons” of the arts: in the traditional paternal role, they literally provided artists with a roof over their heads. Jeanne Claude relates that when they called, she’d tell her husband, “Christo, it’s the Vogels . . . we’re going to pay the rent.” While the Vogels indeed acted as generous, loving “parents,” Herb also showed unmistakable aggression, like a parent who needs to be in control: he would demand to see everything, bluntly critique the works, and haggle over price. Yet he would refuse to accept art as a gift, in one case “paying” Christo and Jean-Claude by taking care of their cats. Herb’s tough, dogmatic tone links up with his fond accounts of Greenwich Village’s Cedar Tavern, where he regularly witnessed heated arguments between the art stars of the 1950s, including Rothko, Kline, Pollack, and de Kooning. In the film, he sadly recalls that to get to his night shift by midnight he had to leave just as the arguments were getting good. He never joined in with his own comments, nor did Herb ever join his art heroes as a painter. His aggressive style may have expressed not only parental concern, but also rage at his lost opportunity, and envy of the giants of modern art, including those whose careers he himself helped launch. Nevertheless, the Vogels’ intense engagement fed their artists’ senses of worth and confidence, encouraging them to make art that would reflect their unique vision. In time, many of the artists whom they had befriended and nurtured as unknowns began to receive recognition—as did the Vogels, first in art circles and eventually more widely. As their fame spread around the world, they were featured in art magazines, profiled in newspapers, pictured in People Magazine, and interviewed on television by Charlie Rose and on Sixty Minutes. Many individuals and institutions wanted to buy the Vogels’ art, but they always refused; their income remained modest, but they never sold a single piece. Eventually, their holdings filled nearly every inch of floor space, leaving no room even for a couch. They sat and talked at their kitchen

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table when not out at openings and exhibitions. Asked why they wanted to keep so much more art than they could possibly display, Herb answered, “it gives me the greatest pleasure knowing it’s there”—like a parent who will not part with the artwork of his children. On film, Dorothy explains that she “never thought that the artists we collected in those days would become so famous . . . when they got recognition . . . we sort of shared their joy . . . we became like a part of it.” She adds, “Unfortunately, we don’t have children, but . . . we have the art works . . . and we have each other.” Formerly, Dorothy might have said, “we don’t have children, but we have our artist-friends,” but the artworks had also become their “children.” With them always, their art reinforced their identification with and connection to their artist-children, many of whom were now famous, allowing the Vogels, like typical parents, to bask in their reflected glory. As “parents,” the Vogels seem to complement each other perfectly: Dorothy, reserved and warmly chatty, Herb, passionately assertive and deeply reflective about the art. I believe they could “parent” their artists effectively because Dorothy’s moderation and consistent warmth tempered Herb’s pugnacity, gently reassuring artists that her husband’s feedback was well meaning. With their contrasting styles, they generated an atmosphere both stimulating and serene, a harmony of opposites derived from their deep love for each other: Dorothy says, “I think I can count on one hand when we were apart . . . we’ve done everything together . . . that’s the way we like it.” In normal development, when the child has no doubt the parents love each other, it lessens the threat of engulfment or competitive defeat and mitigates Oedipal anxiety. With the Vogels, there was more than enough love to go around; artists could therefore allow their relationships to each “parent” to deepen without risk to the other one. And they could accept Herb’s authoritarian critiques more readily because of Dorothy’s affection both for them and for Herb. Despite their personality differences, their love was so unwavering that they evoked a unified, energizing, symbiotic spirit, which one can visualize as a muse—conceived out of love, like the nine mythological Muses conceived through the love of Zeus and Mnemosyne. It was not Herb alone, but with Dorothy, that served the artist as a muse.

In the Context of Analytic Theory While the Vogels’ object relationships with their artist-friends, and later with their collection, can be conceptualized as exemplifying the muse as

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parent, psychoanalytic theory allows a deeper understanding of this role. A core dynamic of creativity, as articulated by Melanie Klein (1940) and Hanna Segal (1952), is the symbolic repair of loss; by encompassing in harmony both good and bad objects, creative expression can restore wholeness to inner life. In her paper on the great Czech photographer Joseph Sudek, Adele Tutter (2013) shows how the actual loss that art repairs is not singular—the loss of a parent or, for Sudek, of a limb—but any and all loss, including even the loss of one’s past, good, bad, or indifferent, as a universal existential predicament. In the context of analytic theory, the ultimate loss, which all subsequent loss represents and screens, is the loss of the bond with the primary caregiver. According to Freud, Segal, and many others, the creation of art— and, in fact, all sublimation—is an attempt to repair this loss: in effect, a return to Eden. Freud (1923) asserts that in sublimation, the ego “tries to force itself onto the id as a love-object” (p. 30): in other words, the ego aims to become a worthy love-object for the id, or, more specifically, the narcissistic libido, creating a capacity for self-love. The artist may achieve this aim by creating and identifying with work that contains the entirety of his or her inner life, good and bad. As Matisse put it, this “synthesis” must obey “the laws of harmony,” mirroring both love and hate, sensual yearning and moralistic self-denial, in a state of “equilibrium” (quoted in D’Alessandro and Elderfield, 2010, p. 310). When his work achieved this aim, it induced in him an elated calm, la sérénité, a description that evokes a peaceful union of infant and mother. Later in the twentieth century, analysts focused on the love of infant and mother as the beating heart of the drive to create. For Winnicott (1967), the matrix for all creativity, what he called the “origin of culture,” is the “transitional space” of imaginative play between infant and mother (pp. 368–372). Loewald (1988) places it even earlier, stating that the “works we admire most in every field” (pp. 80–81) are the symbolic equivalent of the mutual “invention of the breast” within the “infant– mother psychic matrix” (p. 32). In his view, the creativity of the nursing couple and the creation of an artwork (or of an art collection) both reflect the underlying force of Eros, binding together what otherwise would tend toward disintegration. By extension, Loewald’s theory suggests that when an object relationship inspires creativity, as in the muse phenomenon, it evokes the mother-love of infancy. Through transference phenomena, a wide variety of object relationships, whether actual or fantasied, may serve the function of a muse by resonating with the earliest maternal bond.

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The muse says to the artist: “I know you can do it. You deserve it. Go for it!” This message echoes what a good-enough mother conveys to the nursing infant. Such an internalized selfobject relationship emerges as an underlying transference paradigm with marked clarity in some scenarios, as with Matisse’s choice of a wife: his mother adored him and encouraged his artistic pursuits, giving him his first set of watercolors when, at age 20, an intestinal ailment kept him in the hospital for weeks. She backed his career fully, preventing his father from cutting off his allowance when Matisse chose art over law. Later, Matisse chose a wife, Amelie, who was much like his mother and was at least as strong in her support for his art. Although the traditional female muses, like Amelie, are often and manifestly mother figures, the muse may also be a man, inspiring a woman or man as lover, as friend or rival (Gauguin and Van Gogh were both; see Collins, this volume), as dealer (Arnie Glimcher for Louise Nevelson), or even as critic (Alberto Longhi for Giorgio Morandi). And, as we have seen with the Vogels, the muse may emanate from a parental couple. Indeed, there were maternal as well as paternal features of the Vogels’ patronage. Evidence for an infant–mother transference includes the oral incorporative aspect of their collecting: they identified with the artists who were hungry for their support. The Vogels may have fed their artists encouragement, but, consistent with Loewald’s idea of the “infant–mother psychic matrix,” the feeding went both ways: the art also fed them. Artists describe their buying style with oral imagery: one of their favorite painters, Pat Steir, remarks that “[t]hey bought work as though they were starving for art”; similarly, Robert Barry describes their “voracious appetite for art.” The way they stuffed their apartment with works, even taking in a Sol Lewitt concept and projecting it onto a bathroom wall, reflects this “voracious” need. In its insatiable intensity, the word “voracious” confirms that Herb’s relationship with artists, the “psychic matrix” he shared with them, involved considerable aggression. This oral aggression conforms to Freud’s idea of the infant who literally bites the breast, and Melanie Klein’s idea of the infant who expels the “bad” back into the mother, but is more at odds with Loewald’s Sublimation (1988), where he discusses the “mother–infant psychic matrix” almost entirely in terms of Eros. However, it is noteworthy that in the appendix to this, his final work, Loewald voices regret that he will not have time to take up the role of aggression and envy.

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Clearly, sublimation is not reserved for the artist: Herb seems to have partly sublimated his aggression and envy by transforming himself from a sorter of mail to a collector of art, thereby repairing his broken dream of being one of the star artists at the Cedar Tavern. Indeed, he became a “star” himself through his remarkable act of self-transformation, and through his creation, with his wife, of a major work of art, their collection: including not only Minimalist and Conceptual artists, but also scores of other contemporary artists, they conceived their collection to encompass the visual culture of their time and place, and of their lives together, to be passed on to future generations. While the Vogels’ relationships with each other and with their artists may illustrate a psychoanalytic theory of creativity, this theory in turn raises questions that may shed light on the mythology of the muse. Did the ancients envision the muse as female because they intuitively connected artistic inspiration with a return to the mother of infancy? Did they decide that the mother of the Muses must be Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory, because they intuitively grasped, as Loewald has explained, that to create is to remember—not only to recall one’s cultural history, but also to remember, by reexperiencing, the serenity of the nursing infant?

Herb and Dorothy as Zeus and Mnemosyne As presented in Sasaki’s film, the ways in which Herb and Dorothy relate to artists, and also to each other, recall the myth of the origin of the Muses. Their “chemistry” as a couple brings the myth to life, helping us to think about it psychoanalytically: in their joint interviews, they seem to be metaphorically making love, wonderfully in sync with each other and yet sparking their encounters with humor and surprise. It is out of this love that the Vogels conceived their “muse”—in spirit, rather than corporeally. Furthermore, in “Herb and Dorothy” they are so uncannily like their counterparts in the pantheon of the gods that they actually seem to embody Zeus and Mnemosyne—the parents of the Muses. Though Herb, unlike Zeus, appears to have been a faithful husband, he links his love of visual beauty to a passion for women that he shares with Zeus: “[i]t’s just beautiful, and beauty is enjoyable”—he smiles, ironically —“even women.” Clearly, he means, “and especially women.” As in their collecting, Herb took the lead romantically with Dorothy. He met her at a swing dance at the Statler Hotel and quickly decided that she was for him.

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In response, Dorothy let him continue to lead, following him into the world of art; it was through him that she learned art history and found herself in a painting class. Dorothy had come to New York because she loved the theater, and the Vogels did go to some plays, but they spent most evenings doing what Herb loved best, racing around to art openings, and spent most weekends at museums and galleries. Perhaps Dorothy sated her love of theater as the leading lady in the drama of life with Herb. At the gallery openings in Sasaki’s film, the artists may be the stars of the glittering “scene,” but, judging from the attention they get, Herb and Dorothy seem to be the presiding gods. Herb aspires to a Zeus-like grandeur: though small in stature, his pronouncements about art are issued with a vast sense of authority, and his collecting seems as much about competitive aggression and domination (buying the “most” and the “best”) as about love. He is also like Zeus in that he overthrew the previous regime of “gods”—his parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. Just as Zeus wrested control from the Titans, a relatively primitive dynasty, Herb rebelled against his parents, who “didn’t teach me to be cultured.” To their dismay, he left high school: “I hated school . . . I hated people telling me what to do . . . I always was a very independent person. I still am. Whatever I did . . . I did it without rules from other people. I did it because I wanted to.” Even in his clothing style, Herb was Zeus-like, wearing “zoot suits” with broad shoulders and dangling gold chain, a look that upset his father and signaled defiant power. Consistent with a godlike fantasized self-image, Herb never felt their collection was big enough. He and Dorothy amassed over 5,000 works in an unending campaign that one artist terms “obsessive.” In quality as well as quantity, Herb aimed to make their collection supreme. In a passing aside in Sasaki’s film, he points to a small drawing of a basketball suspended in a water-filled case and offhandedly declares, “quintessential Koons.” Though the modest size of their apartment, and of their budget, meant that the art they could acquire had to be small, Herb seems preoccupied with bigness. Maybe related to his un-godlike short stature, he favored art that, while small, was still imposing. Of his John Chamberlain sculpture, about 10 by 15 inches in size, he says, “It’s very hard to make a small piece that looks like a big piece.” Of another work he says, “People like big,” but adds that “what he has done in this small work of art, people haven’t done in a very large work of art.” He also shows concern with physical size in

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a jocular greeting to James Siena: “you look big compared to when I last saw you.” After he left home, Herb went to work sorting mail on the midnight shift at a postal depot. He would return to his apartment at eight o’clock in the morning, sleep for three or four hours, and then head to the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where he studied the art of the Western canon and of Asia: “I must say it was fantastic.” With a godlike reach, he amassed a vast knowledge of the art of the world. It is not surprising that, as a painter, his style was the heroic self-assertion of Abstract Expressionism: once he left home, Herb never looked back. In the film, he and Dorothy stand near his birthplace, on 103rd Street near Madison Avenue. He looks at the site blankly, and when Dorothy asks whether the structure built where his home once stood is a garage, he seems indifferent, emotionally cut off from his history. Whereas Herb turns his back on the past, Dorothy, by contrast, is profoundly nostalgic, a modern-day version of Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory. When the filmmaker brings the couple to her childhood home in Elmira, New York, she sadly points out to her brother that the small house where they grew up is no longer as she remembers it: “that’s terrible . . . it doesn’t look like my house. It was white with green shutters. It was very pretty.” She recalls her parents and her childhood with fondness, but also mentions her excitement about moving to New York to share an apartment with a longtime friend. She loved the city for its energy and its theater, but she never forgot Elmira: “it’s a good place to be born and grow up . . . and to die.” Reflecting her role as Mnemosyne to Herb’s Zeus, and reminiscent of Matisse’s Amelie, Dorothy handled the logistics of collecting: she maintained records and diligently protected their art. We watch as she places panels of fabric over hanging works that she earnestly explains would be damaged by light. Since their art is the repository of their shared past, in taking good care of it, Dorothy, like Mnemosyne, is preserving their memories. As Herb’s protective consort, she also functioned as his muse, supporting his Promethan self-creation as he becomes not just a great collector, but a larger-than-life figure. Unlike the gods, the Vogels were together for life. They were different from each other and yet complementary, he passionate and driven, she warm and reflective, like two chemicals that when mixed emit a spectacular energy. For Dorothy, “[m]y husband has the knowledge, he was the driving

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force.” Herb replies that his wife is “an essential part of the collection and an enormous stimulation to build it.” What they agree on is that, as Dorothy says, “we had fun . . . we’re still having fun. We’ll continue as long as we’re having fun . . . and then we’ll stop.”

In the Pantheon of Donors They never did stop having fun, but as mere mortals Herb and Dorothy eventually slowed down and started to think about where their art would go. Knowing that they could sell it for a fortune to the museums that came begging, in 1992, about 30 years after they began collecting, they decided instead to donate their thousands of works to the National Gallery of Art. Herb says, “You can place an artwork or a child in a very good place . . . I know they’re well taken care of . . . it’s like sending your children off to college . . . the collection has a life of its own . . . we formed it . . . but then it became its own identity.” These words confirm that the Vogels not only saw the artists, and, then, their artworks, as their “children,” but also came to see the entire collection as a work of art—one they had conceived and created: a child, in a sense, with “a life of its own.” By donating their collection intact, but never selling it, it remains “theirs.” And, since National Gallery policy forbids the sale of its art, their collection will live on “forever.” When its leadership insisted on giving them a small annuity, they (unsurprisingly) spent it all on more art, which they also bequeathed to the National Gallery. If they had spent their stipend otherwise, they would have in effect “sold” their art; by reinvesting in their collection, they nurtured their “child” residing at the National Gallery. And, in refusing to beat the annuity as income, Herb remained Zeus-like, defying authority and demanding his way till the end. Herb and Dorothy evoke Zeus and Mnemosyne in their character traits, and in what they accomplished. They clearly aided the careers of those artists they supported when they began to collect. And, after they became famous, their choices impacted the collectors, curators, and critics whose judgments and acquisitions shape art history. After it accepted the Vogels’ collection, the National Gallery magnified its influence by making it the nucleus of an expanded array of Minimalist and Conceptual art. Working closely with the Vogels, the National Gallery gifted 50 works from their collection to a museum in each of the 50 states, a project that is the focus of Sasaki’s second film, Herb and Dorothy 50x50 (Sasaki, 2013).

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One of the Vogels’ motives in choosing the National Gallery was altruistic: it appealed to them that anyone could walk in and see their art free of charge. But, of course, their lifelong project, and their choice of its home, was not entirely selfless. Near the close of the film, they gaze at their names, engraved in marble at the entrance to the National Gallery, and we see their payoff, their pride at joining the pantheon of great collectors.

Conclusion Herb and Dorothy leaves one eager to know more: what was it about their childhoods that might help to explain who they became? Why did Herb rebel so strongly against his family? How did he develop such a passion for art? How did their favorite artists perceive their influence on their art? To what degree did their fame contribute to the widespread acceptance of the difficult art they championed? These and other questions remain to be explored. But we learn a great deal from the film Herb and Dorothy. The myth of the origin of the Muses serves as an apt framework for our thoughts and impressions about the Vogels. It also broadens our view of collectors, reminding us of collectors such as Sergei Schukin and the Cohn sisters, crucial muses to Matisse, who by no means fit the stereotype of wealthy philistines. Conversely, the Vogels’ relationship with the artists they collected broadens our view of the muse far beyond its stereotypic link to romantic love. Herb and Dorothy related to their artists like parents who are admiring, loving friends to their adult children. Their return was rich: the childless Vogels “parented” a contingent of artists and an important collection of art. Their accomplishment invites us to think of the muse as a model of effective and gratifying parenting, mentoring, and teaching. Finally, what we learn in Herb and Dorothy offers a useful heuristic for clinical analysis: in a sense, the analyst is a muse, inspiring and nurturing their analysands’ development: their self-discovery and their self-creation.

Notes 1

Unless otherwise noted, quotations and biographical data about Herb and Dorothy Vogel and in this article are from Sasaski’s documentary films (2008, 2013). 2 Biographical data for Matisse is drawn largely from Spurling (1997, 2005).

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References D’Allesandro, S., & Elderfield, J. (2010). Matisse: Radical Invention 1913–1917. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Flam, J. D. (1973). Matisse on Art. New York: E. P. Dutton. Freud, S. (1910). Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. Standard ed., 11. London: Hogarth Press 1957. Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. Standard ed., 19. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 21, 125–153. Loewald, H. W. (1988). Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Miller, J. D. (2013). Matisse’s “radical invention”: A window on therapeutic change. J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc., 61, 283–309. Sasaki, M. (2008). Herb and Dorothy [DVD]. Fine Line Media. Sasaki, M. (2013). Herb and Dorothy 50x50 [DVD]. Fine Line Media. Segal, H. (1952). A psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 33, 196–207. Spurling, H. (1997). The Unknown Matisse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Spurling, H. (2005). Matisse: The Master. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tutter, A. (2013). Angel with a missing wing: Loss, restitution, and the embodied self in the photography of Josef Sudek. Am. Imago, 70, 127–190. Winnicott, D. W. (1967). The location of cultural experience. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 48, 368–372.

Chapter 6

Rebecca in the House Musings on Identification Nancy Olson

the shadow of the object fell upon the ego . . . —FREUD1

The Angel in the House In a lecture entitled “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf looks back on her beginnings as a writer:

Figure 6.1 Joan Fontaine (left) as “the second Mrs. DeWinter” and Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers in a still from the “bedroom scene,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca

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I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, “The Angel in the House.” It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it— in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure . . . In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. And when I came to write . . . [t]he shadow of her wings fell on my page. (Woolf, 1931, p. 3) In “Killing the Angel in the House: Creativity, Femininity, and Aggression,” an essay indebted to Woolf, the art historian and psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker further considers the angelic style of relating as it serves to defend against the fears and pleasures occasioned by creative work. The angel resides in the house of the mind as an internal voice or idealized object. She inhabits—and inhibits—the woman artist with her too-acute awareness of the audience and her imperative to please. She personifies: a state of mind in which the creation of a piece of work is dominated and determined by anxieties relating to its reception. Such anxiety is an inevitable component of creativity. A host of complex, often contradictory internal and external object relationships encourage or impede creative work. (1998, p. 757) The angel represents undue concern with the impact of the piece of work on others, “an audience of real or imaginary individuals (parents, partners, children, mentors, critics, editors, enemies, lovers, etc)” (p. 759). These relationships revive early parental and sibling rivalries, recreating Oedipal predicaments.

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In Parker’s view, creative work entails a “show of force” and the capacity to mobilize and tolerate degrees of aggression. She sees aggression as having “a pivotal place not primarily in instituting sublimation, reparation or reaction formation but simply because the processes of creativity demand it” (p. 757). To identify with the angel is to be out of touch with one’s aggression. The inhibition of aggression is here synonymous with the cultivation of a feminine identity, conventionally understood—and idealized—as receptive, concerned, mirroring, giving, and avoidant of conflict and desire. Parker notes that other relationships and identifications may serve as antidotes to the inhibiting angel: The father has been cited as the daughter’s savior, intervening between the child and her identifications with the maternal ideal. Bringing theory up to date, Andrew Samuels suggests that parents of either sex are able to mediate aggression as part of a relationship, rather than something to be eliminated. He has coined the term, “The good-enough father of whatever sex.”2 (p. 764) However, Parker departs from Woolf in considering the angel as also having positive effects. For the angel represents a concern with the impact of a piece of work on the other—a concern that is integral to the creative process. Rather than annihilating the angel, the task of those engaged in creative endeavor is to enable the angel to coexist with the devil—in other words to allow an element of aggression, assertion, and ruthlessness into the relationships that determine creativity without losing the critical awareness of the conditions of reception that is the positive attribute of the angel. (p. 758) In its attempts to integrate the show of force (assertion, challenge, destruction) with creation, reparation, and concern for the object, Parker sees the creative project as inherently ambivalent. Integration does not connote “balance,” but rather a passionate engagement with the vicissitudes of love, hate, and understanding. Parker notes that guilt is always present,

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as love and hate are never fully integrated. She refers to Janine ChasseguetSmirgel (1984), who considers two types of creative activity: one that attempts to repair the object (guilt-driven but not guilt-inducing) and another that aims to repair the self (often imagined to be at the object’s expense and may stimulate guilt). Based on the fantasied depletion or destruction of the object, this type of creative assertion would be problematic for the angel. The creative urge to repair the internal parental object that has been damaged by one’s aggression is also an attempt to repair the self that is identified with that object, and thereby damaged too. The work of art may be understood as an object or product, but also as a process that repairs and creates a subject: reparation of object and reparation of self are entwined. Along with the aggressive devil and the inhibiting angel, Parker considers the muse, which she defines as an internal good object. Citing unpublished work by Margaret Waddell on the development of such internal objects, Parker imagines the “sense of muse” to emerge over time as we develop and draw from our stores of positive experience for inspiration and assurance. “For creativity to flourish,” she notes, “the experience of love is needed to balance hate, mitigating both persecutory anxiety (I’ll be attacked for this) and depressive anxiety (this is too attacking)” (p. 767). The muses of antiquity were portrayed as goddesses or allegorical figures. In the Renaissance, the muse came to be seen as a flesh-and-blood woman, the beloved object of the male artist’s desire. For the female artist, this presents a dilemma (p. 767). Does she identify with muse or maker? Affiliate with muse or mentor (muses inspire, says Parker, whereas mentors instruct)? Aim to be inspiring or inspired? To be muse or be mused? Parker refers to a sense, or experience, of muse. This is vague as compared with Woolf’s angel and the forces of aggression. Parker does allow for disparate muses, but leaves it to others to define what they might be. Creative work and psychosexual development may be compared as kindred processes involving identifications, objects of desire, rivalries, the show of force, ambivalence, and guilt. In what follows, we will further explore these ideas, inspired by Woolf and Parker. We will take several excursions (musings) into the topic, beginning with Freud’s thoughts on identification, here understood as an erotic form. To illustrate these ideas we will look to Rebecca, a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by David O. Selznick (1940), based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier

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(1938). Our focus will be female development understood as a creative project, inspired by a muse, identified with and defined as an object, and a subject, of desire.

Identification: An Erotic Form In a brief but rich chapter (VII: Identification) in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud reviews his thoughts on identification, which he considers the earliest form of emotional tie. For example, the little boy exhibits special interest in his father and wants to be like him and take his place. In parallel to this, the boy develops another form of attachment to his mother, which Freud calls a “true object-cathexis.” The Oedipus complex results from the tensions between these ties. Because his father stands in his way with his mother, the boy’s identification with him and wish to take his place assume a hostile coloration. Indeed, Freud considers identification to be inescapably ambivalent, in keeping with its origins in the oral phase when the object of desire is taken in (you are what you eat) and as such destroyed. Freud considers the example of a girl who develops her mother’s nervous cough. Her identification is symptomatic, revealing in compromise form her love for her father and hostile wish to take her mother’s place. With this same cough she spites herself, as if to say, “You wanted to be your mother, and now you are—anyhow so far as your sufferings are concerned” (p. 106). He goes on to recall that Dora, in contrast, assumed her father’s cough. In her case, he imagines, object choice has given way to identification, has regressed to the more primitive tie. The object has been taken into the ego defensively in substitution for a (forbidden) libidinal tie to an object in the external world. This is akin to the ego’s response to the lost object described by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia (1917). As he had done in Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), Freud here considers one form of homosexual object choice as resulting from the boy’s inability to let go of his forbidden libidinal tie to his mother. He holds onto his mother by identifying with her and takes men (himself) as his (her) object of desire. Similarly, in The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman (1920), Freud sees his patient’s object choice, in part, as her response to an Oedipal defeat: her mother’s pregnancy, occurring at the time of her adolescent revival of unconscious Oedipal wishes (to have father’s baby). “It was not she who bore the child,

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but her unconsciously hated rival, her mother. Furiously resentful and embittered, she turned away from her father and from men altogether” (p.157). Instead of desiring men, she identified with them: She changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father as the object of her love. Her relation to her mother had certainly proved ambivalent from the beginning, and it proved easy to revive her earlier love for her mother and with its help to bring about an overcompensation for her current hostility towards her . . . There arose from this transformation of feeling the search for a substitute mother to whom she could become passionately attached. (p. 158) This patient’s mother, Freud adds, was happy to have her daughter retire from competition for the affections of men. In these examples, identification is employed defensively or symptomatically and may be considered part of the equipment with which we negotiate the separations and possessions, the passions, aggressions, and guilts of the Oedipal predicament. In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud moves beyond identification as symptom to consider its role in the formation of psychic structure, specifically the ego ideal or superego, which derives from the Oedipus complex through identifications with the primary objects, the parents: When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. (1923, p. 29) Freud notes, “[a]t the very beginning, in the individual’s primitive oral phase, object-cathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other” (p. 29). To what extent the two can be or should be distinguished is a question residing at the heart of this essay. He posits an early and direct identification, for example, of the boy with his father,

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experienced prior to any “true” object-cathexis. From his experience of hunger and satisfaction at mother’s breast, the little boy develops an objectcathexis or object choice of the anaclitic type.3 As the little boy’s sexual wishes become more intense and his father is seen as a rival, his identification with his father contains and expresses his ambivalence (it is both loving/bonding and aggressive/destructive). In having to give up his mother as a love-object, the boy may identify with her (the lost or relinquished object) or intensify his identification with father. Freud also notes that the girl, in giving up her father, may intensify her identification with mother, but some girls identify with their father instead.4 He theorized that “the relative strength of the masculine and feminine sexual dispositions” in a given person determines whether the Oedipal resolution will entail identification with the father or the mother. Although Freud mainly refers to the positive Oedipus, he also includes a “negative” counterpart that describes the child’s object love for the same-sex parent and identification/rivalry with the parent of the opposite sex. The full Oedipus complex gives rise to identifications with father and mother that form the ego ideal or superego. Through such identifications, erotic object choices are transformed into alterations of the ego. In this way, Freud notes, the ego obtains a measure of control and deepens its relations with the id: “[w]hen the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id’s loss by saying, ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object’” (1923, p. 29). Freud notes that this transformation— of object-libido into narcissistic libido—“implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization—a kind of sublimation” (such abandonment, I would submit, is never complete). In its derivation from the Oedipus complex and the first object cathexes of the id, the superego is closer than the ego to the id. Freud imagined that “identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects” (1923, p. 29). And he allowed for “cases of simultaneous object-cathexis and identification”: in which the alteration in character occurs before the object has been given up. In such cases the alteration in character has been able to survive the object-relation and in a certain sense to conserve it. (1923, p. 29)

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Given his prescience here as in so many things, this essay will be less an assertion than a reminder that identification is an erotic form. With Freud in mind, having, being, loving, losing, ambivalence, mourning, and sublimation are experienced as interrelated processes. When identification is viewed in this way, new aspects come to the fore. Consider the patient who appears intensely preoccupied with her boyfriend’s exgirlfriend, experienced as a rival. Might such an infatuation with the aggressor reproduce, in disguise, her erotic attachment to her mother? Such obsession with another woman—as rival—brings to mind Hitchcock’s Rebecca. As Freud consulted Sophocles, we will consult Rebecca, to revisit the Oedipal story with an emphasis on women and the importance of identification. Rebecca

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From the first line I was hooked and it just continued to the last page.— cryptgirl from Los Angeles, California, USA Not that many people seen this film . . . they NEED to though.—Brian Jasxkowiak from New York, NY

Remembering Rebecca gave me an urge to see it again. On some level, my desire to watch it was an urge to “eye-dentify” with it, take it in, remake it part of me. In material terms, I decided to buy it, and went on-line to amazon.com, where I stumbled onto a trove: hundreds of reviews of the movie (Hitchcock, 1940) and the book upon which it was based (du Maurier, 1938). These “Customer Reviews” are voluntary offerings from readers or viewers, each cast into the cybersurf rather like a message in a bottle. They read as spontaneous comments to an imaginary interlocutor, such as one might have while daydreaming, or on the analytic couch. Not quite free association, they are yet something like it, paraclinical. I read them, and include them, as a data set—not unlike Freud’s collections of dreams, jokes, and parapraxes—to be considered together with the movie. The reviews also may be seen as a ready-made set of protocols such as I. A. Richards employed in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929). Richards invited students to comment freely on a set of poems, then studied their collected responses. As he notes: here are our friends and neighbors—nay our very brothers and sisters —caught at a moment of abandon giving themselves and their literary

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reputations away with an unexampled freedom. It is indeed a sobering spectacle, but like some sights of the hospital ward, very serviceable to restore proportions and recall to us what humanity, behind all its lendings and pretences, is like. (pp. 6–7) Richards analyzed the protocols as both statements (whether of fact, observation, or opinion), and expressions that reveal the mental processes or habits of the author: The indispensable instrument for this inquiry is psychology . . . [T]he protocols do not supply enough evidence for us really to be able to make out the motives of the writers . . . But the beginning of every research ought to be superficial, and to find something to investigate that is accessible and detachable is one of the chief difficulties of psychology. (p. 9) Following Richards and Freud, I will use the Amazon reviewers to consult the popular psyche, letting them speak to us as a dramatic chorus. This device parallels the story, wherein the late Rebecca is described to the narrator by the other characters. Since my focus is the story, I will mix together reviews of the movie and book, distinguishing each review with a bullet point.5 My own comments refer primarily to the film. On-line reviewers may choose to identify themselves by name, nom de plume, or location. In our Amazon chorus, most of the voices appear to be young and female (Woolf might describe them as being early in their literary careers). This is good casting, inasmuch as Rebecca appears to be a reworking of Oedipal themes from a female, adolescent point of view. Most of the reviews appear to be unsolicited, individual efforts. There is a rating system of one to five stars that I have omitted, since most of the reviews award five stars. Some reviews have a short title or subject line, for example, “ooooooooooohh, so good.” Sometimes this constitutes the entire review, as in: •

Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!—A reader from The City that don’t stop partyin’!!

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Although I quote only a small number of the reviews, I allow a number of voices to make each point, the better to convey the chorus in its volume, polyphony, and free exchange of backyard, over-the-fence, remarkably psychodynamic interpretations. I have arranged the excerpts into seven themes or topics: 1. General Reactions; 2. The Plot; 3. The Narrator; 4. Her Marriage; 5. Rebecca; 6. Mrs. Danvers; 7. Manderley. 1. General Reactions

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Perfection • Breath taking • Fabulous, Fabulous, Fabulous THE REASON YOU READ FICTION • Absolutely legendary • Heart Breaker! This Book Restored My Faith in Reading • Better than Jane Eyre! Emblazened [sic] in my memory • You’ll shred your chemise in a fit of suspense Book of the century • The Modern Publishing Industry Should Pay Attention

As the above “marquee” proclaims, the audience response to Rebecca is “two thumbs up.” Only a handful of dissenters found the story a “stupid peice [sic] of poo,” or: •

Vile! This book is terrible. The whole thing could be summed up with “I’m depressed. Boo hoo.” Need I say more?—A Customer

Another dismissed it as: •

The archetype of the buck-fifty romance novel. It’s light reading, mildly entertaining, but it’s nothing spectacular. It appeals to the weaker sex (make of that what you wish).—A reader from Quebec, Canada

Other at first reluctant readers found the tale more persuasive than expected: •

I was forced to read this book in one of my literature classes my sophomore year in college. I thought it looked horrible and sounded

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worse. I was so wrong. It is simply wonderful. I got completely lost in the story and the lives of all the characters. Now, almost four years later, I still find myself randomly thinking about the story and the people.—Brandon Witt from Lakewood, Co United States When I first got the book (very recently) I didn’t expect much to it. I mean the sad reason I got it was because “REBECCA” was my name, and I’ve always wanted to read a book all about “ME.” But the moment I set my reading bud to work I absolutely fell in love with it . . . After reading the book (in just two days) I hated myself to death for finishing it. It leaves [sic] so puzzled and sad, I had to cry myself to sleep that night (which probably won’t happen to you because I’m in a very emotional stage of my life). But if you really don’t want your heart to break I suggest you to be very prepared, which I was not unfortunately. I would suggest this to anyone because after reading it, it gives you a very needed slap into reality.—madie-mae from Crowly, LA

Of course many, like cryptgirl, were immediately gripped: •

•

I received this book as a Christmas present when I was 12 years old. I started to read it one night and stayed up all night reading it.— A reader from Ballwin, Missouri, United States The plot had such great twists, especially spooky ones, that I must admit, I stayed up quite late when I should have left early for the SATs the next day. But I HAD to read it! The very slight love scenes were nicely done: less was certainly more, yet it still gave me warm chills.— Marquise de Merteuil

Of note, several readers were introduced to Rebecca by their mothers: •

My mother recommended me this book, and nagged me forever to read it. I finally did read it and finished it in 4 days. I simply could not put it down!—Lizzy from Wisconsin

Many reviewers testify to a relationship not just immediate, but lasting: •

My friends and I love watching it. We watch it over and over.— A viewer from Seattle, WA USA

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I read this in college and have not gone a year since without reading it . . . Even my sports minded husband has enjoyed it with me.— Michelle from Texas, United States

2. The Plot

Swanofswansea and various others piece together the story line: •

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Manipulative masterpiece. The story begins with one of my favorite opening paragraphs (second only to A Tale of Two Cities). From there we are swept into a seaside story of paranoia and excruciating love. Rebecca is a classic mystery story set in a lone English Manor by the sea and filled with dark secrets. It is a tale of rivalry. A new, young, painfully shy wife, is brought into a legendary estate, and forced to share her marriage with the presence of her husband’s beautiful and tragically departed wife—Rebecca. I read this book for the first time when I was 12 years old. I thought Mrs. Danvers, the obsessed (maybe possessed is a better word) housekeeper was the devil (still do). I remember lying in bed in the dark of night, hearing only the ticking of a clock in the hallway and feeling that Rebecca was watching me too. I was insanely in love with Maxim, and desperate for his approval of our heroine.—swanofswansea from MO USA A shy poor girl is swept off her feet by a rich, handsome man who marries her and carries her off to his estate. Sounds like the end, doesn’t it? No, that’s how it starts. Instead of riding off into the sunset to live happily every after, she finds herself in the role of great lady without any idea of how to pull it off. And then there is the matter of just how the last wife died . . .—Kelly from Nashville TN I remember reading this book in the 8th grade for a book report and had no clue what it was about. Needless to say I made up the report. Anyways a few years later I chanced upon it again and read it and it made perfect sense. Sense [sic] that time Rebecca has been one of my most read and beloved novels. In a story of a young girl raised as the companion of a shrew of a woman she finds love in the most strangest of places, Monte Carlo. Her love is for a man who is old enough to be her father. When he asks her to marry him she says yes and is wisked [sic] away to England and the majestic house known as Manderley. However, this dream romance is far from what it seems

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to be. She must deal with the sinister maid of her husband’s deceased wife and her lack of proper breeding that makes her ignorant of the ways of Manderley. Yet behind the face of this young girl’s husband is a dark secret that is waiting to be revealed.—nightgazer4 from Los Angeles, CA United States Not all reviews see the tale in such Oedipal terms, but most recognize Rebecca as a story of transformation and coming of age: • •

Through the story we witness this girl’s growth from a young girl into a women [sic].—emmy000 from United States The main characters are married, but the story does not focus on their courtship or their relationship, rather I would say on the individuals they are. I believe that the narrator’s journey from naïve, innocent, childhood to aware, mature, adulthood is very important. The fact that she remains nameless throughout the story, or is referred to as Mrs. de Winter, shows how easily she gives up her own identity to please others: her employer, her husband, even her own staff. It is only towards the end that she begins to assert herself. The book would probably be better classified as a psychological thriller.—princessarwen from Northridge, CA USA

3. The Narrator

•

Although somewhat mousy, she is not very difficult to relate to.— bookworm alanna from new york

Like swanofswansea and bookworm alanna, most reviewers identify with the narrator: •

This book makes you really connect with the main character, whom the author kept nameless in a stroke of genius.6 I could feel the anguish and pain of the main character as she tried to fill Rebecca’s place in the manor. I could almost see parts of myself in the main character, she was so realistic. We’ve all had doubts that we could fill the shoes of someone without messing up. Plus, Rebecca was so seemingly perfect in every way.—A reader from MD USA

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One of the most interesting things the author did was to never name the main character. It was very effective as a tool to keep her unimportant. She remained in the background of her own life. She let everyone, including her husband, keep her in the dark. By never assuming any status in her own home, and neglecting to ask even general questions of her husband’s past marriage, she built a fantasy life that overshadowed her own life.—nmcl43 from Massachusetts, USA

On the other hand, a number of reviewers are impatient with the heroine. She is described as “a simple young girl with the personality of a rabbit” by Mari from Venezuela, and “an incredibly naïve, silly and nameless young woman” by Adaisa from Bridgetown, Barbados, who exclaims, “is such silly simplicity possible in a grown woman?” Others comment: •

•

The narrator is so mean spirited, self-centered and just too stupid to be believed, searching & sifting through every conversation, the most minor social encounters, digging to find the insults she believes everyone is directing at her. Perhaps this character is dated and can only be appreciated through 1930s lenses as a sensitive, unworldly, eager to please young woman, but I found it hard to be on her side and couldn’t identify with anything she felt.—morganmax from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada The classic co-dependency novel. I wanted to take the second Mrs. de Winter, give her a good shake and tell her to get a grip! It’s no wonder de Maurier never gave her a name. Anyone with any gumption would have fired Mrs. Danvers after the second encounter, redecorated the west wing, given all those clothes to the local thrift shop, and had a life . . . the heroine is so useless I had no empathy with her at all. And Maxim is another neurotic.—A reader from Norfolk, VA

4. Her Marriage

The chorus has rather little to say about Maxim de Winter, the narrator’s husband: •

Olivier’s character is like a caged animal and one can practically feel his frustration boiling under his cool exterior.—Eddie Nguyen from Summit, New Jersey

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Despite the magnetism of Lawrence Olivier, who plays Maxim in the film, the de Winter marriage is seen by some reviewers as lacking in erotic chemistry: • • •

Their marriage takes on a sort of father-daughter manner. They “seem” to be happy.—Holly C. Iven from USA Rebecca herself had more romance than the anonymous narrator and Maxim.—A 12 year-old reader This is a FABULOUS book—except that for the first 200 pages literally nothing exciting happens. Another aspect I didn’t like was the lack of any kind of real relationship between the two main characters. They’re married, right? and they kiss maybe twice. It’s wrong. (In my opinion, anyway.) But I think it made for an interesting Freudian analysis of Max.—A reader from Wisconsin

Another perceptive reviewer suggests the more compelling relationships in the story are those between the women: •

Du Maurier’s greatest achievement is to have created a narrator who is so young and inexperienced that Rebecca (who of course is never present in the novel) seems more alive than the heroine! In a way, the heroine (who remains unnamed, what must be one of the master strokes of the novel) becomes more interesting as she, like Mrs. Danvers, becomes more and more obsessed with the dead Rebecca. The slight hint of a lesbian attachment between Rebecca and “Danny” adds spice to the otherwise conventional romance aspect of the novel. In fact, I found this story interesting as a tale of intimate relationships between women—even Maxim, the main male in the book fades into the background as Rebecca becomes more prominent in everyone’s memory.— Bragan Thomas from NYC

5. Rebecca

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“Tell Me, What Was Rebecca Really Like?” asks Joan Fontaine of Reginald Denny, hoping for a different answer than she gets.— TutorGal from Brooklyn, USA

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As the story unfolds, the audience, like the narrator, cannot help but imagine Rebecca, as she is presented through the impressions she has made on the other characters: •

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The entire body of the great palace is permeated by the influence of Maximilian’s late wife—Rebecca, and our heroine lives in her shadow, far too afraid to confide in her distanced husband. She feels that everyone is scrutinizing her—relatives, servants, in her mind she constantly compares herself to Rebecca—a brilliant, charismatic woman everyone loved to death—but was that all there was to her?— shadowfire from Rochester, NY Adding to the creepy suspense is grim Mrs. Danvers and the staff of Manderley, who dwell on Rebecca as much as if she were still alive. Mrs. de Winter can’t even pet the dog or sit in a chair without thinking how “this is what Rebecca did. . .”—Carol Irvin from Chesterland, OH United States

Some reviewers do not like Rebecca: •

During the time I was reading the beginning of the book, I found myself wishing I was like Rebecca . . . beautiful, clever, intelligent, adored by everyone . . . I later was glad that I’m not just like her. I found myself feeling sorry for Maxim (for all that he went through with her). I can sort of relate to him. I know people who are manipulative like HER and I know what he had to put up with . . . it is not pleasant!—A reader from TN, USA

Others are moved to speak in Rebecca’s defense: • •

The never seen, ever maligned, gutsy independent but very dead Rebecca is my true heroine!—Adaisa from Bridgetown, Barbados It was Rebecca who still ruled at Manderley, even if she is dead . . . And I love the parts where Mrs. Danvers and Maxim describe Rebecca, so you can get a real taste of the kind of voluptuous, irresistible devil that she was. She was so beautiful, so intelligent, nothing would stop her from having what she wanted. She had so many passionate affairs, etc . . . I think deep down we’re all a little envious of Rebecca.—tomcasteel from Minneapolis, Minnesota

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A friend of the id from Mudville, NC, agrees: •

Whereas Jane Eyre is a true heroine, a woman of moral courage and conviction, the protagonist of Rebecca is spineless and frightened from beginning to end. Both she and her husband are defined repeatedly throughout the book as being deeply conventional, and horrified at anything that would appear to make them otherwise. Seen in this light, it is Rebecca who has the strongest claim to being the heroine of the story: Rebecca has spirit, Rebecca is deeply, profoundly rebellious against all conventionality and, in her disdain of men and their love, against the patriarchal standards of her time as well. She emerges, to my mind at least, as a tragic character, in the classic sense: one who rebels against her human station, and pays the price. Bear in mind as you consider Du Maurier’s novel: is this really what you would call a happy ending?

6. Mrs. Danvers

If Rebecca is unforgettable, yet somehow elusive, Mrs. Danvers is indelible: • • • •

Last Night I Dreamt of Mrs. Danvers.—Tex J. from White House, Tennessee The tour de force is the great Judith Anderson as the housekeeper from hell Mrs. Danvers.—gail powers from Homewood, IL United States She’s so cruel you love to hate her.—the writer from Alabama, USA Judith Anderson is just magnificent in her role and her character is in a way Rebecca’s ghost personified.—Rebecca@SeasonedwithLove. com

Importantly, Mrs. Danvers is seen as both identified with Rebecca (“her ghost personified,” who does not want this bride to take her place) and infatuated with her (“I thought Maxim would have told you. She simply adored Rebecca”). •

And there is indeed that little tiny touch of lesbianism between the icy housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers . . . and Rebecca, the passionate and absorbing way she speaks of Rebecca . . .—tomcasteel from Minneapolis, Minnesota

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Hell Hath No Fury Like A Housekeeper Scorned!! Judith Anderson’s Lezbo-Devil “Mrs. Danvers” will send shivers down your spine!! No more hired help!—Frank M. Gentile from Delray Beach, Florida United States Juicy Stuff! I almost lost it the first time I saw “old Daney” fondling Lady DeWinter’s lingerie as she torments our confused, lovesick heroine in one of the most fabulous scenes in the movie.—Lisa Anderson, from New York, New York United States

7. Manderley

A good many reviewers responded not only to the characters, but to the house itself: • • •

The great house Manderly is as much a cast-member as Mr. and Mrs. de Winter.—Zack Davisson, Seattle, WA, USA beautiful Manderley, with fabulous gardens and deep dark mysteries.— Lesley West from Perth, Western Australia The most enjoyable part for me of reading Rebecca is the descriptions of the house and grounds, the dishes and the bushes. Maybe Martha Stewart read Rebecca in her formative years.—A reader

Blinded by the decor, another reviewer makes her Oedipal designs very clear: •

I wish I lived at Manderley. There is one scene I watch over and over . . . the scene between Mrs. Danvers and the new Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca’s bedroom. It sends chills up and down my spine . . . and one day when I win the Lottery, I’m going to have that bedroom.—A viewer from Florida

In my own childhood memories of the film, the house left a lasting impression. Especially haunting were 1) the narrator’s first vision of Manderley, in all its beauty and immensity, as the newlywed de Winters arrive by open car; 2) Rebecca’s palatial bedroom; and 3) the reprise of both images near the end in the immolation scene when Maxim de Winter drives back from London to find Manderley ablaze, and we see Mrs. Danvers, gone mad in Rebecca’s bedroom, having set the house on fire.

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To Have and to Be With help from the chorus, I will permit myself to analyze the narrator, the better to treat hers as an Oedipal story, imagined by and for a woman, with attention to the role of identification. Early in the movie, we follow the narrator into her memory, where she chances upon a mysterious man who stands at the edge of a cliff looking over the sea. She calls outs to prevent him from jumping to his death in the waters far below. He is startled and irritable, and they part uncomfortably, only to meet a short time later in their Monte Carlo hotel. Our heroine is now suffering her employer, Mrs. Edythe Van Hopper (described by reviewer witcherwill as “a fat woman more inquisitive and annoying than humanely [sic] possible”). Van Hopper gossips about de Winter, describing him as inconsolable since the death of his wife: “[h]e absolutely adored her.” That night the narrator is shown to us in a troubled sleep. Van Hopper’s words, “[s]he was the beautiful Rebecca Hendricks, you know,” are ringing in her head. Even as she is falling in love with de Winter, she is dreaming of Rebecca. We learn she has already had an Oedipal victory of sorts: as an only child, her mother long dead, she was her father’s devoted companion until his recent death left her to fend for herself.7 Having taken mother’s place with father, she will now take Maxim from Rebecca (another dead rival), as well as from Van Hopper, who fancies de Winter herself and underestimates this mousey “daughter.” As with Oedipus, her filial position (as Cinderella to Van Hopper’s Wicked Stepmother) has the makings of a family romance: •

When Fontaine meets, falls in love with and marries a rich still grieving widower, you cheer as she escapes Van Hopper’s cruelly [sic]. But not before she belittles Fontaine one more time and says out loud what Fontaine is thinking. Why would someone like Maxim de Winter (Lawrence Olivier) be interested in someone like her?—Vannie Ryanes

Like Oedipus, the narrator is blind to herself as a rival in seduction. She tells Maxim that her father was an artist who painted only one thing: the same tree. “He had a theory, if you should find some perfect place or person, you should stick to it.”8 His fidelity to one perfect object stands

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as a barrier to father–daughter incest, and will be transferred by the narrator to Maxim. She will torment (and defend) herself with the idea: Maxim is hers, but he still loves the perfect Rebecca. Beset with jealousy and envy, she finds—and seeks—her rival everywhere: •

What’s most excellent is that Rebecca, who’s dead, is portrayed differently by the people who knew her. Yet the contrasting portraits is [sic] VERY rather fascinating because you wonder, “Who is the REAL Rebecca?” because each portrait is biased and less than accurate.—Marquise de Merteuil

Brave, brilliant, beautiful—the emerging “group” portrait of Rebecca is an impossible collection of superlatives: “I suppose she was the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.” She is utterly feminine (Mrs. Danvers: “Have you ever seen anything so delicate?”), yet second to no man (unlike the narrator, “[s]he was not afraid of anything”). Like a figure in imaginative play or fantasy, she is not bound by gender role constraints. Beset by what Parker calls the angel’s undue awareness of her audience, the new Mrs. de Winter confesses her sense of inferiority to Frank, the manager of the estate, who assures her: “But you have qualities that are just as important—more important, if I may say so. Kindness, and sincerity . . . and, if you’ll forgive me—modesty . . . mean more to a husband that all the wit and beauty in the world.” This reluctant angel is hardly convinced. Although the second Mrs. de Winter is in love with her husband, she is preoccupied with her rival. She has moved into Rebecca’s house, but Rebecca has moved into her mind. On one level, the house—Manderley— may be said to represent her mind, with the narrator herself as the—as yet weak, but observing—ego, Rebecca as the unconscious or the id (which, Freud reminds us, cannot be known except indirectly), and Mrs. Danvers as the superego (housekeeper). Her preoccupation also reminds us that the girl’s first libidinal attachment is to her mother. Her obsession with Rebecca continues that passionate attachment, deformed and disguised by jealousy and envy.9 •

“Look, you can see my hand through it!”—christianlehrer from San Francisco

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In the scenes that take place in Rebecca’s boudoir, the sexual mysteries and curiosities of girlhood are given a late adolescent reworking. Since Rebecca’s death, her bedroom, “the most beautiful room in the house,” has been sealed. We see Jasper, Rebecca’s dog (who slowly forms a bond with the narrator) at the bedroom door as if guarding the chamber or waiting for his mistress to return. Inevitably, our curious narrator slips in to have a look, only to be caught by Mrs. Danvers: “You’ve always wanted to see it, haven’t you, Madam?” Danvers gives her a tour of the palatial boudoir, fingering Rebecca’s personal things, touching her furs to the narrator’s face, inviting her to sit at the vanity table, teasing her with stories of Maxim’s adoration of Rebecca. Feeling so unlike Rebecca, the narrator can hardly imagine herself as an object (or a subject) of desire. Rebecca’s is a perfection that prohibits, that leaves no room for competition or succession. To be Rebecca is identified with sexual empowerment. Does she need such a fantasy in order to feel like a sexual woman? When Mrs. Danvers, still identified and infatuated with her late mistress, holds up Rebecca’s negligée—“Look, you can see my hand through it”—the fabric between identification and erotic feeling was never more sheer. The narrator flees the bedroom, as if to escape from her homoerotic potential.10 After this encounter, she starts to assert herself a little. She confronts Mrs. Danvers (“I am Mrs. de Winter now”) and sets about to revive the costume ball for which Rebecca’s Manderley was famous. The idea of a costume ball recalls the “dress up” and imaginary play of childhood; it also brings to mind a débutante ball, the presentation to society of a young, marriageable woman. It is, as well, a theatrical, creative undertaking, in which the narrator hopes to make her mark in the domestic and feminine arts in which Rebecca was (of course) nonpareil. Mrs. Danvers maliciously refers her to the de Winter family portraits for inspiration. On the eve of the ball she makes her grand entrance as the beauty, Lady Caroline de Winter. Her husband and guests are appalled— she is wearing Rebecca’s costume! Her Oedipal challenge takes the form of identification, to which (like Oedipus) she has been blind (unconscious). Although innocent with respect to the dress (Mrs. Danvers has tricked her), she is guilty of wanting to be Rebecca, and revealed as such—a humiliating failure and exposure. We are “prepared” for this scene by an earlier one in which, hoping to impress Maxim, she “dresses up” in a glamorous way for dinner. His reaction is only to say, “Well, what on earth have you done to yourself?” (Throughout the film he refers to her—fondly—as childlike,

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as if blind to her womanly, seductive aspirations.) As if that weren’t bad enough, she has enraged her husband with this painful reminder of his loss and her own shortcomings. It is an Oedipal fiasco. If identification is a solution to the Oedipal dilemma, it is also a crime. She flees the scene and finds herself once again drawn to Rebecca’s bedroom. Mrs. Danvers appears and in lulling tones coaxes her to jump out the window. Below them lies the sea (la mer, la mère) in which Rebecca drowned. It is an invitation and temptation to submerge, to return to an undifferentiated, even amniotic state, in which she will cease to exist as a rival or contender. The spell is broken by the sound of an alarm: a ship has been wrecked and Rebecca’s sailboat, Je reviens (“I shall return”), will soon be found. In The Ego and the Id, Freud notes the superego’s relation to the id is not exhausted by the precept, “You ought to be like this (like your father).” It also comprises the prohibition: “You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does, some things are his prerogative.” (1923, p. 34) Thus, Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers may be respectively understood as different aspects of the superego, the idealized (ego ideal), and the forbidding. Like Mrs. Van Hopper before her, Mrs. Danvers embodies the prohibitive superego, based upon the “mother” who is critical and punitive because she is competitive with her daughter. Van Hopper and Danvers are married, but their husbands are “missing in action.” They are rivals with the heroine—Van Hopper for Maxim/father, Danvers for Rebecca/mother. As with the first boudoir scene, a perilous near-merger is followed by moves in the direction of assertiveness and individuation. With the discovery of Rebecca’s body, her portrait descends from delovely to debasement. The phallic Rebecca is found out to be ruthless, even sadistic. A seductress without scruples (had she been a man, she’d have been a cad), she kept a “bachelor’s” lair in a cottage by the sea, where, in defiance of her husband, she received her many lovers. She even flouted the incest taboo in liaison with a sleazy cousin. Faced with such a devil, an angel may become the avenging kind. Yet much as her homoerotic potential is given to Mrs. Danvers, her aggression—sadism—is largely given to Maxim. The narrator is stunned

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(yet, we suspect, gratified) to learn that Maxim, provoked by Rebecca, killed her in a moment of humiliated rage. As in imaginative play or fantasy, in the awful truth about Rebecca, there is a satisfying overkill: Rebecca was not loved (Maxim: “I hated her”); she was not pregnant; and, beneath her perfection, she was being devoured (eaten) by cancer. In contrast to the Oedipal scenario often described for the girl (to explain her supposed “change of libidinal object” from mother to father), here the (m)other woman is disempowered as love-object and rival not for her lack of a penis, but for lacking or losing coveted—angelic—attributes of femininity.11 She becomes less desirable as a woman. The girl may employ such devaluation to separate from her mother, to overcome a prohibitive superego, and to redirect her erotic potential from mother to father. Rebecca presents us with a familiar figure: the narrator/protagonist as detective or sleuth.12 In this genre, the heroine comes of age by solving a mystery, described in this case by her question “Tell me, what was Rebecca really like?” The story follows the developmental line of the girl’s wish to know—to identify with—her mother (here represented by a different rival) as a sexual woman. At the beginning of her research, she is childlike: Maxim repeatedly describes his bride this way. Some reviewers delight in her transformation as she begins to release herself from the persecutory Mrs. Danvers: •

Joan Fontaine’s character was, in essence, a non-entity, invisible and insignificant to everyone, including her own new husband, but also because of the wonderfully perverse and scrutinizing eye of Mrs. Danvers, who, in my book, is among the cruelest, creepiest, and most obsessive characters in film and literary history! . . . when Fontaine finds out the truth, the transformation she undergoes is so astounding and empowering, it made me want to go out and take on the whole world!—lisa brady from Houston, Texas United States

In a wonderful slip of the pen, reviewer Ercie Berwick calls the narrator “the meek Rebecca”: •

The most dramatic moment in the book, for me, was when the meek Rebecca, for the first time, finally stood up to Mrs. Danvers, looked her straight in the eye, and said, emphatically, that she was now Mrs. DeWinters!

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While Berwick and other reviewers see an angel blossoming, like an ego released from a too punitive superego, Dahl (2004) sees her as still haunted by her fantasies of a competitive Rebecca, to the ongoing depletion of her inner life and sexual vitality.13 Dahl points to the narrator’s sinister dream near the end of the book in which she “morphs” into Rebecca and watches Maxim twine the coils of Rebecca’s long dark hair around his neck. This disturbing image (not included in the film), coupled with their expulsion from paradise (the destruction of Manderley), takes us back to another reader’s question: “is this what you would call a happy ending?” In the best such tales, as they unfold, the distinctions—innocent and guilty, the hunter and the game, possession and destruction, to dominate or to submit—become less clear as the players grow more identified with each other. Little wonder the transformation from girlish detective agency to womanly sexual agency is uniquely problematic for every woman.14 Perhaps the ending of Rebecca is best experienced as ambiguous. In the words of reviewer madie-mae: “it gives you a very needed slap into reality,” wherein a woman is neither so innocent nor so guilty, so inadequate nor so exalted, as in her fantasies, be they conscious or unconscious.

Time to Murder and Create In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess on March 24, 1896, Freud included a poem by his son Martin, then eight years old, commenting: Recently Martin described the seduction of a goose by a fox in a poem. The words of wooing were: I love you from the bottom of my heart. Come, kiss me; You could be my favorite Among all the animals. Don’t you think the structure is noteworthy? (Freud, 1896, p. 306) Perhaps Freud was taken with more than its structure. He had already mentioned identification in his letter to Fliess of December 17, 1896, in which he plays with the idea that agoraphobia in women is a reaction to

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an envy of and identification with prostitutes (“public” women; Freud, 1896, p. 217).15 Here identification makes its first appearance in his writing as an erotic form. While Freud used Fliess as a sounding board for his ideas, we daresay he found Martin helpful too. The poem is a poignant invitation to submit, to surrender to the pangs and pleasures of eating and being eaten. His love-hungry goose will be devoured by a foxy lover. The little verse captures love’s associations with hunger, longing, biting, eating, and possession/destruction by incorporation that Freud will “unpack” in his subsequent use of the concept of identification. Returning to Parker, we might say the love poem, like love itself, depends on the dual nature of identification and the inescapable tensions between love and aggression, admiration and envy, worship and conquest, creation and destruction. We return to an impression and an image. The impression: the narrator is as obsessed with Rebecca as with her husband. She is fascinated with her and wishes to be like her, to possess her qualities. The image: in the first boudoir scene of the movie, when Mrs. Danvers holds up Rebecca’s negligée, the close—we might say clandestine—connection between wanting to be and wanting to have is “caught on film.” The scene seems to say that the one might dissolve into the other, as if the two forms of emotional tie Freud called identification and object-cathexis emerge from (and may return to) an original unity. In this light, identification no longer seems a desexualized (to use Freud’s term) retreat from object love. Rather, it seems another form that love might take in the erotic portfolio of human bisexuality. Rebecca concerns the coming of age of a heterosexual woman. In the beginning, the narrator is timid and unformed. She hasn’t made her mark in anything and seems erotically inhibited; she lacks confidence and does not feel “sexy.” Marriage to the parental and powerful Maxim only seems to intensify her sense of inadequacy. Her parents are dead, although her father is remembered tenderly as an artist, one devoted to perfection (the narrator’s own awkward sketches, shown in the film, are embarrassing to her). Her emerging obsession with the “perfect” Rebecca may be seen as a late adolescent reworking of Oedipal themes, through the medium of identification. For the narrator, even “winning” the coveted Maxim does not assuage her need to identify and struggle with a rival of the same sex. At stake are her capacities to love, and also to create or sublimate. In her

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mind’s eye, Rebecca was loved, and to be Rebecca is to have the experience of love that Parker finds constitutive of the muse. In this framework, becoming a woman is not unlike a career (at times the only career, or form of expression, permitted to most women). As Bette Davis puts it, as the actress Margo Channing, in All About Eve, “It’s one career all females have in common—being a woman. Sooner or later we’ve got to work at it no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted” (Mankiewicz, 1950). The reader will remember this as another film in which the ingenue, Eve, wants to be a star. Her fanship turns rapacious as she tries to become (replace) Margo, the established star, becoming her understudy, taking her part onstage, even trying to seduce her playwright/ lover.16 In the film Rebecca, an envious Mrs. Van Hopper predicts the aspiring heroine will fail in her womanly “career”: You certainly have your work cut out as mistress of Manderley. To be perfectly frank with you, my dear, I can’t see you doing it. You haven’t the experience, you haven’t the faintest idea of what it means to be a great lady . . . Of course, you know why he’s marrying you, don’t you? You haven’t flattered yourself that he’s in love with you . . . Hmmph! Mrs. de Winter! Goodbye, my dear, and good luck. As the story unfolds, Rebecca is exposed as loved but incapable of loving. In doing whatever she pleased, without concern for others, she was the very opposite of angel. Her aggression both inspires and absolves the assertiveness of “meek Rebecca.” Once Rebecca’s “mojo” is shattered (when Maxim says “I hated her”), the narrator is visibly empowered, taking her first passionate kiss and becoming newly assertive with Mrs. Danvers. What happens to the angel in the House of Oedipus? In these portrayals, becoming and being a woman are creative processes, entwined and underpinned by Oedipal dynamics. A woman’s work and her works of art may be understood as attempts to repair and create a subject, in battle with angel and devil. The bad-enough muse may empower the woman, and the artist, to part wings from her inhibiting angel.

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Notes 1 Freud (1917) p. 249. 2 Consider Loewald’s 1951 essay, “Ego and Reality,” in which merger and separation are represented, and mediated, by mother and father, respectively. Parker notes that men also wrestle with their version of the angel. 3 As Moore and Fine (1990) explain, “[t]wo types [of object choice] were described by Freud. An anaclitic object choice is based upon passive, dependent needs and the wish to be symbolically fed and protected, as one was by mother. A narcissistic object choice is based either on the subject’s own self—what he or she is, was, or would like to be—or on someone once experienced as part of oneself ” (p. 129). 4 Jessica Benjamin (1991) has written about the girl’s “identificatory love” of her father. One is reminded, too, of Wagner’s Brunhilde, who avows to her father, Wotan, “What am I, if not your will alone?” See Wagner (1856), p. 89. 5 From October 3, 1996, to March 11, 2004, there were 367 reviews of the book and 113 of the film. To minimize narrative clutter, I have omitted the dates of individual reviews, while retaining most of the original spelling, grammar, and punctuation. 6 Curiously, Freud, in The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman (1920), also “did not give the patient concerned a name, unlike the patients in his other case histories, who are all given pseudonyms,” as noted by O’Connor and Ryan (1993), p. 30. 7 In the book, the narrator’s father dies first and her mother five weeks later. Her devotion to her father is nonetheless emphasized. 8 The story of the “perfect tree” is from the movie, rather than the book. The narrator’s own sketches, as seen in the film, are unaccomplished. 9 It may also be seen as a passion that expresses her identification with her father. Benjamin (1991) emphasizes the girl’s identification with her father in the course of psychosexual development. She considers identification “an important basis of the love of the other: it is not so much the opposite of object love as an important precursor and ongoing constituent of it” (p. 277). 10 Rebecca’s “pet name” for Danvers is “Danny,” hinting perhaps at a butch– femme dynamic between them. 11 Balsam (2003) notes that female competition, envy, and jealousy have been little explored in psychoanalytic thinking. It is not uncommon, she observes, for a woman to have fantasies that “[o]ther women are more powerful than she. They are bigger/more beautiful/more powerful/older/have some magic/are winners—something she doesn’t have that enables them to get a man. (It is not having the man, but having the female essence to attract the man that is her concern.)” 12 As in Jane Eyre, Nancy Drew, or Harriet the Spy. We are reminded too of Oedipus (who sets out to solve the riddle of the plague), and of what Freud

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called “the sexual researches of childhood” (see for example The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900 [1953], p. 354). See Dahl (2004), wherein she argues “[t]o move into sexual maturity with a sense of bodily agency, the girl must internalize identifications with the mother as a sexual adult in her own right. These new identifications arouse intense internal conflict brought on by the nature of the process of internalization with its unconscious association with destructive oral aggression and the archaic fear of retaliatory maternal rage” (p. 657). In this developmental epoch, conscious fantasies of an innocent girl in deadly competition with an older sexual woman are not uncommon. “Projected onto the mother in an effort at escaping internal conflict over her own intense aggression, the girl experiences her own aggression now in the form of a deadly mother who will destroy her daughter’s sexuality. No new psychic structure can be created because the daughter fears the destructive power of internalization” (p. 675). Whereas Dahl attends persuasively to the aggressive implications of internalization, I return to identification as attachment and appetite—as an erotic form, albeit one linked to oral aggression. See Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), in which the detective-heroine, Charlie, named after the uncle she adores, discovers that he is a serial killer of widows. After she confronts him, he tries repeatedly to kill her, until she causes his death in self-defense. This film was Hitchcock’s personal favorite. Meissner (1970) notes that this letter contains Freud’s first mention of identification. The name, Eve, suggests the wish to taste the fruit of forbidden knowledge.

References Balsam, R. (2003). Thoughts on mothers, daughters, their bodies, and showingoff. Unpublished manuscript. Benjamin, J. (1991). Father and daughter: Identification with difference— A contribution to gender heterodoxy. Psychoanal. Dial., 1, 277–299. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1984). Thoughts on the concept of reparation and the hierarchy of creative acts. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 11, 399–406. Dahl, E. K. (2004). “Last Night I Dreamed I Went to Manderley Again”: Vicissitudes of maternal identifications in late female adolescence. Psychoanal. Inq., 24, 657–679. du Maurier, D. (1938). Rebecca. London: Galiancz. Freud, S. (1986). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 18871904 (J. M. Masson ed. and trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1900 [1953]). The interpretation of dreams. Standard ed., 4 & 5. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. Freud, S. (1910). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. Standard ed., 11. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.

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Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. Standard ed., 14. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. Freud, S. (1920). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. Standard ed., 18. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Standard ed., 18. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. Standard ed., 19. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. Hitchcock, A. (1940). Rebecca. DVD. Selznick International Pictures. Hitchcock, A. (1943). Shadow of a Doubt. DVD. Universal Pictures. Loewald, H. (1951). Ego and reality. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 32, 10–18. Mankiewicz, J. (1950). All About Eve. Twentieth Century-Fox. Meissner, W. W. (1970). Notes on identification: I. Origins in Freud. Psychoanal. Quart., 39, 563–589. Moore, B., & Fine, B. (Eds.) (1990). Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts. New Haven: Yale University Press. O’Connor, N., & Ryan, J. (1993). Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Parker, R. (1998). Killing the angel in the house: Creativity, femininity, and aggression. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 79, 757–774. Richards, I. A. (1929). Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Wagner, R. (1856). Die Walküre, trans. R. Sabor. London: Phaidon, 1997. Woolf, V. (1931). Professions for Women. In V. Woolf (1995) Killing the Angel in the House (pp. 1–9). London: Penguin.

Chapter 7

The Muse as Rescuer and Inspiration Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein Joseph D. Lichtenberg

When the creative artist is ready for it, the muse is there to inspire. But what if the creative artist is not ready, is in a funk, depressed, drugged, or ill? Then the muse must both rescue and inspire. I will discuss the experience of Saul Bellow as he presents himself as Chick in Ravelstein, his last novel (Bellow, 2000), which blurs the line between fiction and

Figure 7.1 Left: Saul Bellow, 1987, the year he provided the preface to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind; right: Allan Bloom, c. 1990 Images: left: adapted from www.youtube.com/watch?v=hls050A0We0; right: adapted from http://blogues.journaldemontreal.com/bock-cote/politique/petite-reflexion-sur-nos-leaderspolitiques-et-la-philosophie

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reality. In choosing the name Chick (no last name) for himself, with connotations of “innocence, even infantility” (Atlas, 2000, p. 594)—or of a young woman, and the name “Ravelstein” (and not his first name, Abe) for both the title of the novel and its eponymous central character, Bellow tells us this book is not about me, the writer, but about Allan Bloom, the guru, the man who inspired the writer (Figure 7.1). Based on what we know of Bellow’s actual experience, Chick is in a funk over not being able to write a promised biography of his ailing friend, Ravelstein, and then becomes gravely ill himself (Atlas, 2000). Fortunately for Bellow/Chick, a muse in the form of his fifth wife, Rosamund (in reality, Janis Freedman), is there to rescue him. In his biographer James Atlas’s words, Janis proved to be the wife Bellow had always longed for: steadfast, undemanding, utterly devoted to his needs . . . Janis was glad to do this work considering it her chosen role in life to be the great man’s guardian. She made sacrifices, subjugating her career to his, but her devotion was unwavering, and he depended on her as he had never depended on any of his previous wives. (Atlas, 2000, p. 586) And Janis provided another avenue to generative “creativity”: in 1999, at the age of 40, she gave birth to Naomi Rose Bellow, whose father, Saul Bellow, was 84. Ravelstein is the novelized biography of Allan Bloom, professor of classics, educational critic, and guru philosopher, a man of great influence with many politically and culturally conservative disciples throughout the world. After almost 10 years of writing little of any consequence—and only one novel, The Actual, published after Bloom’s death in 1992— Bellow, in an unexpected burst of creative productivity, wrote Ravelstein in the year his daughter was born. According to Atlas (2000), Bellow “had mellowed. Once a fugitive from the rigors of family life, he now enjoyed having his children and grandchildren around him” (p. 586). The narrator of the novel is Ravelstein’s friend Chick, a writer whom Ravelstein encourages, reassuring him that he is just the one for the task of writing his life story. Ravelstein/Bloom is a bon vivant who lives grandly, with an enormous appetite for luxury, sex, food, and drink—indulgences that have inexorably led him to his defiant death from HIV/AIDS. He requests

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that Chick write his biography, without softeners or sweeteners. While Bellow does so, revealing Ravelstein/Bloom’s many eccentricities, he also lays out “his friend’s fundamental assumptions: the belief in the ‘soul’, the hunger for a passionate life, the devotion to the best that had been thought and said” (Atlas, p. 593). Whether Ravelstein’s explicit request that Chick write a tell-all biography is fictional or corresponds to an actual request by Bloom is not known, but when (and whether) Chick will honor this mandate is crucial to the novel—a pivotal question that touches on the central theme of Chick/Bellow’s abiding fear of death and subsequent necessity of rescue by Rosamund/Janis. Chick, in parallel with Bellow, is, as he states, a serial marrier. While Bellow indicts his fourth wife, Alexandra Tachacbasov (“Vela” in the novel) for her indifference, Rosamund is presented as the ideal supporter of his creativity: his muse. Rosamund is also a link between Ravelstein and Chick. She was Ravelstein’s student and devotee, and, prior to their marriage, secretary to the much-older Chick. Chick had in turn functioned as a muse to Ravelstein, having successfully convinced him to present his philosophy and critique of education in a book that unexpectedly became a best seller, earning him a fortune (in reality, The Closing of the American Mind: Bloom, 1987). In turn, Ravelstein was a strong supporter of Chick’s writing—assuring him he was up to the task of writing his memoir/ biography. Chick’s assignment was to be Boswell to Ravelstein’s Johnson. In Ravelstein, as in most of Bellow’s novels, death is a frequent subject. Ravelstein and Chick frequently discuss their mortality—who will die first?—although Chick, a bit older, is unlike Ravelstein still in good health. Ravelstein dies, and Rosamund encourages Chick to begin the book. “But as the months—years—went by, I couldn’t for the life of me find [a] starting point.” Bellow writes, “Another woman might have pressed me unpleasantly. ‘After all he was a dear friend and you swore you’d do this’ . . . But Rosamund understood all too well that I thought of this myself, and oppressively all too often.” Then Chick adds a “kinky thought”: “If I were to write my memoir of Ravelstein, there would be no barrier between death and me.” Rosamund laughingly asks, “Do you mean that your duties would end, and there would be no reason to live on?” “No, no. Luckily I’d still have you to live for.” (Bellow, 2000, pp. 162–164, emphasis added)

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The plot then takes a sudden turn. Reminders of Ravelstein’s death are making Chick feel depressed, and Rosamund insists on a special treat—a trip to the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. I was grateful for the bay. It gave us enclosure. I am thankful for boundaries. I am fond of having the lines drawn around me. I wasn’t here to battle the seas but to swim and to float quietly. To open my mind to Ravelstein, often Rosamund towed or carried me in water just shoulder-high. She put her arms under me and walked back and forth. (Bellow, 2000, p. 185) Then the critical dramatic event occurs. Chick contracts ciguatoxin poisoning after eating improperly cooked red snapper and becomes deathly ill. He initially downplays the seriousness of his condition; Rosamund essentially takes over, and gets him on a plane to Boston, to a doctor and to a hospital where he is admitted in critical condition. She persuades the nurses to let her stay with him night and day, sleeping in a chair next to his bed. Delirious, delusional, and hallucinating, Chick falls and suffers an internal bleed. In response to his morbid preoccupations, Rosamund asks, “Why would it be always the worst things which appear to you so real? Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to talk you out of being sadistic to yourself.” He answers, “Yes.” He agreed. “It has a specific kind of satisfaction, the bad of it guarantees it as real experience” (Bellow, 2000, p. 218, emphasis original). What makes “bad” so real for Chick/Bellow? Why does Rosamund/Janis have to work so hard to rescue him, to make “good” seem real? Why does it take Rosamund’s prodigious “keeping me on this side of the death-line” to make a dent in his morbid preoccupation with death’s imminence (Bellow, 2000, p. 219)? Or, to state the problem another way, how does Chick’s terrible illness from ciqua poisoning—based, in each literal detail, on the author’s actual experience—become the critical final event in a novel purported to be a biographical memoir of Ravelstein? To answer these questions, we must explore a biographical detail not mentioned in the novel, the near-death experience of eight-year-old Saul Bellow. In 1913, the Bellow family narrowly escaped from Russia and immigrated to Canada, where, two years later, Saul (née Solomon) was born. Struggling with poverty, they eventually entered the US illegally, settling in Chicago. A sickly child afflicted with respiratory ailments,

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Bellow claimed that, unlike his robust older brothers, he was marked out for a more exalted destiny. Then, at the age of eight, “he developed peritonitis and pneumonia after an emergency appendectomy and was rushed to Royal Victoria Hospital . . . He stayed there for six months. The doctors feared tuberculosis” (Atlas, 2000, p. 15). In the hospital, Bellow was completely separated from his ethnic Jewish world and transplanted into an evangelical Christian environment. Five children in nearby beds died, and were removed in the night. In 1991, Bellow wrote about this experience: “My belly was haggled open—it was draining, I stank . . . I understood that I might die” (Atlas, 2000, p. 16). Atlas concludes, “the void created by his long separation from his family remained with him all his life . . . It was his crucible, the primary life experience that defined him. . . It showed him there was no one to count on” (pp. 16–17). After Chick’s climactic recovery from near death (and Bellow’s second such recovery), he and Rosamund reprise their prior conversation about his pathological belief that if he completes the memoir he will die. And after the crisis Rosamund said she never doubted that I would survive. And I seemed to believe that I wouldn’t die because I had things to do. Ravelstein expected me to make good on my promise to write the memoir he had commissioned. To keep my word I’d have to live. Of course there was an obvious corollary. Once the memoir was written, I lost my protection, and I became as expendable as anybody else. “But that couldn’t apply to you,” said Rosamund. “Once you had found your way up to it, nothing could have held you back. Besides, you’d survive for my sake.” (Bellow, 2000, pp. 221–222, emphasis original) Bellow then repeats a conversation about the afterlife that Chick had with Ravelstein, stating, “no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop” (p. 223). Returning to Rosamund’s question: “Why would it be always the worst things which appear to you so real?” and Chick’s answer, “it has a specific kind of satisfaction, the bad of it guarantees it as real,” we can ask why Chick doesn’t find “the good” to be real—only “the worst”? All lived experience is dispositional and tilts the direction our expectations take. Good experiences tell us to expect more of the same, and allow us to feel confident and to own our own accomplishments while also retaining the

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space to own our failures and failings. Trauma bends the direction our expectations take; sudden, unanticipated trauma, even more so. An evil force—death being the worst—is out there, ready to do in the traumatized person again, unexpectedly rendering him a victim one more time. Bellow, a sickly young boy afflicted with respiratory illnesses, develops appendicitis, ordinarily a curable illness. Instead, he develops peritonitis and a host of other complications, and almost dies. Hospitalized for nearly six months, he sees death all around him. He is isolated from his family, who are allowed to visit only once a week, and, while kind, the people who look after him threaten his religious ties to his family and heritage. Mortality is henceforth imprinted on his mind, despite his subsequent living to a relatively healthy old age. In the interval years between the trauma of the hospitalized eight-year-old boy and the trauma of the ciguatoxinpoisoned 80-year-old man, the evil force is the death of love, and the perceived danger to his creativity by what he experienced as the failing of his first four wives to provide the total dedication he felt was necessary to ensure his artistic productivity: the muse as rescuer, as well as inspiration. As each marriage (and many friendships) broke up, Bellow repeatedly saw himself as the victim. To be “real” is to be unsupported, abandoned, criticized. Then, unexpectedly, the pattern of near-death trauma is repeated. An idyllic trip planned for his benefit by a loving wife ends with the very real threat of physical death and with it the death of his planned creative program, the biography of his late friend Allan Bloom, the man who encouraged him, praised him, and may have honored him with the assignment of biographer. The dual threat of creative death, which had hung over him in recent years, and the promise of physical death, which had haunted him since childhood, were now entwined. But, luckily, the perfect confluence of disaster is met by the perfect confluence of rescue, in the form of Janis’s remarkable devotion to his health (as symbolized by her physical support of him in the waters that represent maternity) and creativity (as realized and symbolized by the remarkable subsequent conception and birth of their daughter). Now, the recovered Bellow can write about the fear that he will die if he completes his novel, rather than continuing to be paralyzed by that fear. This is a miracle: both forms of death have been overcome. With Janis’s apparently total commitment to his welfare, Bellow survives and writes his promised biography, exploiting his phobic preoccupation with death as a central theme. Via the rescue and inspiration of his muse—and the obligation, real or imagined, owed to his friend

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Ravelstein, another muse of sorts—Bellow achieves creativity and eludes death: the sublime for an author and, for his personal well-being, sublimation in the analytic sense. What about Ravelstein/Bloom? Although he is dead, he lives on, with all his faults and greatness, in the memoir his friend Chick/Saul creates for him. Indeed, Bellow resurrects him for most of the memoir, in which Ravelstein first lives, and then dies. But Chick/Bellow doesn’t let it end there: he keeps Ravelstein alive in his memory. Although he has died, “Ravelstein, dressing to go out, is talking to me” (Bellow, 2000, p. 231). Bellow describes Ravelstein’s bald head, sartorial habits, and taste in music: “[b]etter Bizet and Carmen than Wagner and the Ring”; “[h]e puts on his $5000 suit, an Italian wool mixed with silk” (p. 232). Chick then takes his animated imaginary companion outside and shows him an astonishing sight: a huge flock of parrots have miraculously escaped from their cages (the imprisonment of a death phobia?) and have built long nest sacks in Chicago’s back alleys, where they miraculously survive on berries (an actual event). Ravelstein/Bloom—who, with his bespoke suits and gold cufflinks, was something of a peacock—is released from life, and yet lives. The novel ends with this metaphorical vignette in the reader’s mind; its last sentence underlines the perpetuation of life via the memory of the living—a triumph over loss, but also a refusal of it: “You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death” (p. 233). Returning to the main theme of muse as both rescuer and source of inspiration, Rosamund had to rescue Chick, had to ensure his survival. Having then established her benign power, Rosamund could use it to confront and overcome his superstitious pathological fear-driven preoccupation with death. Unlike his previous wives, Chick could trust her: he discovers that “in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own” (Bellow, 2000, p. 152). She strongly supports the writing of the memoir, but does not cajole or insist. Instead, Rosamund displays patient faith that once the confidence of creative urge took hold—in other words, when he becomes “up to it,” and finds, “for the life of him,” a way to begin it— nothing will hold him back. I believe the eight-year-old Saul learned to equate death with abandonment. Both the fictional Chick and the 84-yearold Bellow gained the absolute security and direction of Rosamund/Janis’s “real” and “good” attachment necessary—in Bellow’s case, to complete his final major work, four years before his own death. The dedication of Ravelstein states, “To Janis, the star without whom I could not navigate.”

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Can the analyst be either (or both) rescuer or inspirer? Historically, the question would be answered with a categorical “No!” During my training in the 1950s, candidates were warned to beware of therapeutic zeal. The core triad of neutrality, abstinence, and anonymity guarded against suggestion, gratification, and any encouragement of dependence. Implicitly this led to a disparity of intentions. Analysands typically feel that they enter treatment to be rescued from something— symptoms, problematic patterns, and/or unhappiness. But in the 1950s, analysts saw themselves as explorers and conveyors of information about the patient’s unconscious, defended intrapsychic conflicts. In this skewed view, insight alone was thought to be all that was needed to open the path for alternative, more adaptive, self-originating conscious choices: the truth (about childhood-based intrapsychic conflict revealed through transference interpretation) will set you free. Or—if rescue were indeed a goal—insight would permit analysands to rescue themselves. While recognizing the therapeutic leverage of insight, such an exclusive emphasis undervalues the relational factors that can contribute to the analyst’s role as a rescuing muse. But I believe that, however much analysts strive to regard themselves as solely facilitators of insight, their patients nevertheless regard them as rescuers. “You changed my life around,” was, and is, a not uncommon statement or thought of a grateful patient after a successful analysis. To be true to the theory of technique of that time, an analyst would have to say, “No. The analysis changed your life around.” But to be true to his or her humanity, I would hope that the analyst did enjoy the patient’s personalized (and accurate) appreciation. I have used this familiar caricature of the often-silent, presumably depersonalized analyst to undermine the myth symbolized in the joke: “What do you remember about your analysis that was helpful?” “The time it was pouring down rain and my analyst loaned me his umbrella.” Fifty plus years later, contemporary analytic approaches are generally based on an appreciation of intersubjective relatedness, empathic listening, mirroring and idealization, mutual mentalization, and implicit and explicit factors combining in effective interpretation, mutually interacting processes of inference-making, and an appreciation of the impact of cultural and individual sameness and difference. In this changed therapeutic climate, the possibility of an analyst being and/or being viewed as a rescuer can be framed differently. The example of Ravelstein, with its illustration of Rosamund’s dramatic caregiving, was and is not representative of analytic

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experience, as a general rule; less-dramatic caregiving does occur and it can be essential in analytic therapy with patients who are suicidal, dangerously anorexic, hypomanic, seriously depressed, paralyzed with anxiety, or dependent on drugs or alcohol. Far more common are quotidien incidents of “rescue”—what might be designated positive enactments—for example, calling my patient for five minutes every night for a month until she could regulate her intense fears and excitement and go to sleep. Or helping analysands regain their connection after disruptions in the treatment through added patience, encouragement, and, if appropriate, accepting responsibility for the disruption. Finally, an analyst’s authentic, non-judgmental caring does rescue many patients from a lifelong, hopeless conviction that they are neither cared about nor worthy of caring. Inspirer: going back again to a much earlier time, many creative people had strikingly ambivalent attitudes about analysis. Gustav Mahler consulted Freud; many New York analysts such as Lawrence Kubie and Los Angeles analysts such as Ralph Greenson had busy practices with patients across a wide spectrum of creativity: Eugene O’Neill, Saul Bellow, Marilyn Monroe, and Woody Allen are just a few examples. At the same time, a widely believed myth held that creative individuals—artists, musicians, intellectuals, and scientists—ran the risk of losing their inspiration and impetus by entering analysis. The half-truth that gave credence to this myth was the theory that creative energy (libidinal or aggressive) was necessarily intertwined with conflict (either Oedipal or pregenital) and/or narcissistic grandiosity. Consequently, once the instinctual conflict or narcissistic pathology was interpreted and the neurosis resolved, the impulse to create might dissipate. Further, “resolving” the inner conflicts that provided the metaphoric content for plays, novels, musical compositions, paintings, and sculpture would leave those creative acts devoid of their intense personal meaning and any need to externalize or sublimate the resolved conflict into an art form. Within this fearful fantasy, the analyst (or analysis) is cast as a de-inspirer—an anti-muse. Analysts past or present legitimately take exception to this portrayal, which is based on a caricature similar to previously described. But, however distorted or exaggerated, myths arise from some basis in reality. An approach that focuses narrowly and intently on digging deeper to defuse defenses and expose sources of dreams and metaphoric expression that are presumed to arise from distortions of infantile life or retained pre-verbal omnipotence and grandiosity will inevitably cast a suspicious eye on

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intensely pursued endeavors. Sublimation—the original formulation for the displacement of instinctual energy away from conflict and toward egosyntonic creative endeavors—would hopefully be enhanced by the resolution of the conflict and abandonment of the grandiosity. Unspoken was the risk that what was considered “sublimation” was often a judgment call in the eyes of the beholder. Moving forward in time, analysts now have a much more balanced and nuanced view of what is conflictual and what is constructive in human development, both in theory and in approach. Self-psychology recognizes a leading edge and a following edge to human strivings. We recognize that new experiences of patients emerge from being mirrored and affirmed, from feeling deeply understood empathetically, from emotional sharing, and from consistent involvement and caring. The sum of these circumstances allows the analyst to be understood as a muse in a general sense: supporting the analysand in his quest to realize more of his or her potential. To the extent that the analyst is indeed prerequisite to that quest, the analyst will be experienced as a saving muse. But are analysts ever a muse in the iconic sense of inspiring creativity? My experience with my own patients and those of my supervisees and colleagues answers yes. I believe that many analysts today are alert to the fact that particular analysands evidence a capacity for innovation, novel integration, and synthesis; a special openness to serendipitous encounters; and a deep searching inquiry into endeavors that intrigue their curiosity. Creativity extends from the arts and humanities to science and a broad range of professional activities—legal, political, organizational, and humanitarian. From working with and studying creative individuals, we learn that all lived experiences, including those that are conflict-based, dispose the creator to particular themes of personal significance. It was not Bellow’s personal conflicts that resulted in the valuable creative product that is Ravelstein, but his ability to give aesthetic tension to themes chosen for their rich association to those conflicts. Creative individuals create because they have highly endowed imaginations and symbolizing capacities that lead to a head full of music, visual images, plots, poetic word play, novel solutions, humor, or ironic twists. A head full of creative ideas will remain that way, whether conflicts are resolved or not. Analysts who appreciate the nature of a person’s drive to translate what is in his or her head into a song, symphony, painting, poem, drama, novel, sculpture, photograph, or intellectual or scientific inquiry can and must mirror that

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creative urge, alongside whatever else they do to be helpful. No doubt our own constant, steady curiosity about our analysands’ inner worlds also functions as a constant, steady mirror of generativity. And in those moments when the analyst recognizes, validates, encourages, or stimulates the patient’s spark of creative imagination, the excitement of a novel solution, or an “aha” experience, the analyst will be experienced as an inspiring muse, and rightly so.

References Atlas, J. (2000). Bellow: A Biography. New York: Random House. Bellow, S. (2000). Ravelstein. New York: Penguin. Bloom, A. (1987). The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Chapter 8

An Unlikely Muse Anne Sexton and Martin Orne Dawn M. Skorczewski

But you, my doctor, my enthusiast, were better than Christ; you promised me another world to tell me who I was. —ANNE SEXTON1

It is no exaggeration to say that the American poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974; Figure 8.1) wrote her first published poems in Westwood Lodge, a psychiatric hospital, at the suggestion of her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne (1927–2000; Figure 8.2). It was the summer of 1956, and, at the age of 28, Sexton was struggling with a postpartum depression that left her unable to care for herself or her two young children. With Orne’s encouragement, Sexton began to draw from personal experience to craft what became known as “Confessional” poems—about depression, suicide, hallucination, women’s bodies, family secrets, love affairs, war, God, and the complexities of human relationships. By the end of an eight-year treatment, after which Orne moved to Philadelphia, Sexton had received fellowships from Antioch, Bread Loaf, the Bunting Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ford Foundation (twice). She had published two volumes of poetry, both nominated for the National Book Award, and received the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine. She had also written much of Live or Die, her third book, which would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. It is an extraordinary fact that in the cultural climate of the 1950s, in a suburban psychiatric institution, a psychiatrist’s encouragement helped a young mother become an internationally renowned poet in scarcely two years.

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Figure 8.1 Anne Sexton in her library on May 1, 1967, shortly after learning that she had received the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die Image: © Bettmann/Corbis

Unlikely Muse: Sexton and Orne

Figure 8.2 Portrait of Martin Orne, M.D., John Boyd Martin, 1996

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Just 29 when he was assigned to Sexton’s case, Orne was an ambitious Harvard-educated resident psychiatrist who was also pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology. He was the son of a surgeon and a psychiatrist who had fled Vienna in 1938 and moved to the United States. Indeed, Sexton’s first psychiatrist was Orne’s mother, Martha Brunner-Orne, whom she had seen for postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter Linda in 1953. Beginning when he was undergraduate, Martin Orne published papers on the role of memory in hypnosis, research that questioned the validity of patients’ memories that emerged when during trance states. In later years, he was to become known as an expert on false memory syndrome. When a graduate student and psychiatric resident, Orne’s colleagues considered him a bit of a maverick because of his interest in hypnosis. And yet, in many ways, Orne embodied the psychiatric scene in Boston in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a cultural and psychiatric climate in which women’s identities were mainly attached to marriage and children, and in which women’s roles as sexual objects for men remained largely uncontested. At the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (known as “Mass Mental”), where he took his psychiatric residency, his supervisors, most of whom were also practicing psychoanalysts, embraced Freudian and ego psychology theory and technique. In classic analytic style, questions from patients were very often met with silence to allow unconscious meanings behind the questions to emerge. Mass Mental was also home to Orne’s mentor, Elvin Semrad, a revered supervisor and clinician who was a training analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Semrad had a reputation for his folksy, empathic connection to patients and his reverence for the wisdom that could be reaped from the details of people’s lives. Orne clearly learned from his mentor about the value of his patients’ stories and their pain, and he added to this his own conviction that patients who had found something productive to do with their lives fared better in treatment than those who did not. This perhaps contributed to his encouragement of Anne Sexton that she “try writing”, because being a housewife clearly gave her little satisfaction. Anne Gray Harvey Sexton was born in 1928, the youngest of three daughters in a wealthy suburban Boston family in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Sexton’s father Ralph Harvey owned a wool business; her mother, Mary Gray Staples Harvey, educated at Wellesley, was the only child in a prestigious family that included journalists and politicians; her uncle was

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a former governor of Maine. The Harveys enjoyed an active social life and had their daughters when they were still in their twenties. They did not emphasize schoolwork or professional aspirations for any of their girls, anticipating their future lives as wives and mothers. As the youngest and most rambunctious child, Anne was often pronounced too clumsy and sloppily dressed to join in the family’s social activities. When she did attend the family’s formal dinners, she was often criticized by her father—who once left the table, claiming that her acne was making him physically ill. While Anne was asked to appear in formal dress at table, and to “put on the show” for her parents’ friends during social events, she remembered no loving touch from them. In fact, she later described embarrassing examinations of her genitals by her mother (she had a cyst when she was five), and enemas that were painful as well as humiliating. Her father, whose personality changed for the worse when he was drunk, once beat Anne with a riding crop because she had stolen her sister’s birthday money. His ambivalence toward Anne during the day became loathing and ridicule in the evening, after cocktails, when he often expressed disgust at her appearance or lewd sexual remarks about her and her sister Jane. Sexton’s great aunt, “Nana” Dingley, who lived with the Harveys until Anne was 13, provided Anne’s only memories of loving physical contact, offering afternoon cuddling sessions and backrubs, an especially intimate relationship compared with the formality and unavailability of her parents. Later, Sexton was to speculate about whether she had been sexually abused by Nana or her father, a question to which she returned in her therapy sessions dozens of times and which is the subject of many of her poems, as well as her Broadway play Mercy Street. During her senior year in high school, Anne garnered attention and praise when she published some of her poems in the school newspaper. But when her mother accused her of plagiarizing the poet Sara Teasdale, Anne stopped writing poetry. After high school, she eloped to marry Alfred Muller Sexton II, nicknamed Kayo, who soon obtained a job in Ralph Harvey’s wool business. The young couple lived with both sets of parents alternately until Kayo was shipped overseas with the Naval Reserves; Anne, pregnant, then stayed with her parents until Kayo returned. In 1953, she gave birth to their first daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, and the couple bought a house in Newton Lower Falls, Masachusetts, where Sexton was forced to take on the responsibilities of motherhood and housekeeping on her own for the first time.

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Kayo’s work as a traveling salesman in Anne’s father’s business kept him away from the house for weeks at a time. If daily life on her own with a two-year-old was not easy, it became unmanageable when a second daughter, Joy Ladd, was born in the summer of 1955. In the summer of 1956, as Joy neared the age of one, Sexton began to feel overwhelmed by the responsibilities of motherhood. Alone in the house with two children, she became paranoid, depressed, and suicidal. She heard voices, fell into apparent trances, and twirled her hair into knots. She could not care adequately for either of her daughters, nor could she function as a wife to her husband Kayo; frightened by the thought that she might kill herself and her children, she was admitted to Westwood Lodge. When Sexton began to see Orne in August of 1956, he asked her what she might want to do with her life. She was initially skeptical, telling Orne that the only thing for which she had a talent was prostitution, because she knew how to make men feel sexually powerful. Orne countered that intelligence and projective tests revealed that she was actually very creative. He suggested that she might want to write about her experiences, so that she could help others who suffered from similar problems to feel less alone. With Orne’s encouragement, and after watching a PBS special in which Harvard professor and literary critic I. A. Richards explained how to write a sonnet, Sexton began to write poems again, poems that Orne proclaimed “wonderful.” Over the next six months, fueled by his approval, she brought him more than 60 completed poems; as she later told an interviewer, she knew she had “finally found something to do with [her] life!” (Middlebrook, 1992, p. 43). In the fall of 1957, Sexton enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education, where she met the poet Maxine Kumin, who became a second prime interlocutor as her closest friend. Kumin and Sexton sat on each end of the telephone wire, writing poems in silence and whistling when either wanted to try out a line. Kumin (1998) was later to assert that writing poetry enabled Sexton to endure her illness, and to stay alive as long as she did. Sexton did not only study poetry during this period: she also became a student of her own therapy sessions as texts in themselves. When at the end of 1960 it became clear to Orne that Sexton was unable to remember much from one session to the next, he suggested that they tape her sessions so that she might listen to what they discussed and reflect upon it before her next appointment. Transcribing the sessions, Orne thought, would help Sexton “understand what she was doing” (in Middlebrook, 1992, p. 44).

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Faithfully transcribing each tape, Sexton often arrived at a session prepared to discuss what had transpired in the previous hour. She often commented that she only “heard” his part of the dialogue when she wrote it down. On several occasions, she told Orne that she was grateful for the tapes, and that she hoped one day that they could help someone else. Sexton’s therapy tapes and notebooks provide a vivid portrait of a woman’s transformation from a high school-educated, depressed housewife into a nationally recognized public intellectual. They also contain a firsthand account of at least one version of how a male psychiatrist shaped the life of a female patient in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Orne was both muse and audience for at least the first hundred, if not hundreds more of her poems. When considered in relation to Sexton’s work, the tapes have the potential to deepen our understanding of how Anne Sexton developed into a woman poet, at a time when American culture left little room for members of her sex to become powerful artists and scholars in their own right. Most critics who discuss Sexton’s mental illness note that, in her time, there was no existing diagnosis for what is now thought to have been a bipolar illness with borderline features, in the terms we use today. It is difficult to imagine how she, her family, and Orne himself tolerated Sexton’s dark depressions, her self-absorption in the face of the emotional and physical needs of her daughters, and her almost constant demand for all the attention in a room. And yet she struggled to improve. Throughout three years of recorded tapes, we listen to her attempting to come to terms with her illness, and wishing to leave it behind forever. She asks Orne to help her be honest about her feelings, although she admits that it feels almost impossible at times. For his part, Orne urged Sexton to avoid the trap of intellectual discussions, which might conceal her “real” affect accompanied memories of the past, in keeping with theories of therapeutic action circulating at the time of her treatment.2 When Sexton met Orne, she felt worthless; together, they crafted her now-brilliant career. As we turn to the therapy tapes of 1963–1964, the final year of Sexton’s recorded therapy with Orne, we hear the voice of a woman poet who is already quite established in the Boston literary scene. In various ways, Sexton pushes Orne to acknowledge the fact that with his help she had made herself into a poet. Given her depression, agoraphobia, and suicidal preoccupations, her desire to have Orne affirm the value of her poetry seems to reflect her need to build a sense of identity

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that could fill the vast emptiness she experienced every day: as she had written published, much-celebrated poetry, she could not be as worthless as she imagined. But this was not enough; she also wanted this to be her doctor’s impression. She also had cultural reasons to seek recognition as a public figure. Emerging as a significant American poet just as women writers were beginning to receive attention from places like the Radcliffe Institute, Sexton was exposed to new perspectives on women’s identities and realities that challenged established notions of “reality” and “woman” that dominated the psychoanalytic world of the early 1960s. And didn’t her creative accomplishments count as a sign of psychiatric progress that might otherwise have been overlooked? She returned to this question many times. For his part, Orne often deflected attention from the value of her poetry to her value as a human being: Anne Sexton: Dr. Orne:

My poems are my accomplishment. No. You are your accomplishment. (Tapes, November 7, 1963)3

Orne learned to be an objective observer who helped patients correct defensive distortions of external and internal reality; mental health came from being able, as he once told Sexton, “to keep reality straight.” While acknowledging her many talents, he tried to push Sexton toward an acceptance of herself as more than a poet, but as a real and creative person, as opposed to her more narrow acceptance of her creative products. But Sexton was also keenly interested in Orne’s influence and impact on her work. Once she decided her poetry was worth a public audience, Sexton never left the subject of therapy far behind. And, even if he denied his influence on her career, the truth is that Orne did more than encourage Sexton’s writing: that writing was continually inspired by her process of self-examination, and the transferential relationship at its heart. Long before the notion of the “analytic third” became commonplace in psychoanalytic discourse, Sexton’s poetry and her exchanges with Orne about her poetry and its value assert her own and very different theory of the relationship between psychiatrist and psychiatric patient, a vision in which they work together to construct something larger than themselves—a third thing, beyond the already-existing “you” and “I,” which her poetry both symbolized and realized. Therapy and poetry informed and influenced each other.

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Beginning with the epigraph to her first volume, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Sexton identified writing poetry as a struggle both toward and away from self-disclosure. Taken from a letter from Goethe to Schopenhauer, the passage asserts: [i]t is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher . . . But most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God’s sake not to inquire further. (Sexton, 1999, p. 2) Throughout her career, she would remain preoccupied with the conflict between making a “clean breast of it” and not “inquiring further,” between exploring her early experiences and current conflicts and forgetting what she had discovered, repeatedly entering and exploring the murky waters of the incest that Jocasta begs remain undisturbed. But nowhere are the dialectics of disclosure and concealment more apparent than in her therapeutic conversations with Dr. Orne, recorded precisely because of her tendency to forget what she said in her sessions. When Sexton transcribed each session before the next took place, she showed her determination to understand and remember exactly what she revealed to her therapist as she “made a clean breast of it.” Moreover, she saw her self-analytic work— inquiring further—as essential to her creative work: as she advised an aspiring poet in a letter from 1960: writers . . . must try not to avoid knowing what is happening. Everyone has somewhere the ability to mask the events of pain and sorrow, call it shock . . . But the creative person must not use this mechanism any more than they have to in order to keep breathing . . . Hurt must be examined like a plague. (Sexton, 2004, p. 145) Sexton’s poetic representations of the therapist/patient relationship poignantly reflect Orne’s effect on her work. In To Bedlam and Part Way Back, she stages a number of dialogues between therapist and patient, dialogues in which the “you” and the “I” both play pivotal roles in the making of the poetic object. The very first poem in the volume, “You, Dr. Martin,” is addressed to a psychiatrist who happens to have Orne’s first name:

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You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk. (Sexton, 1999, p. 3) Dr. Martin walks from the sensible world of breakfast “to madness,” traversing the clear boundary between the inside and the outside worlds. The “I,” in contrast, moves between observation and participation in a world that rapidly shifts from “tunnel” to “hotel” to “stalk.” First portraying its long hallways as tunnels, the speaker turns the hospital into a “summer hotel,” a temporary dwelling-place, and then into a “stalk,” a part of a living plant, outside with the bees. The image of the speaker as a “laughing” Queen Bee is undoubtedly feminine, with its incumbent suggestion of generativity. We may associate the speaker’s queenly role with primacy, but the surrounding images remind us that her power extends only within the boundaries of the hospital. The other mental patients act as “moving dead,” oxymoronic live corpses struggling to return to life by “pushing” against “the thrust/of cure.” The images evoke both sexuality and death. Note that the “thrusting” and “pushing” occur simultaneously; the contested movement is from death to life. Each party here is active, in procreation and in conflict. If the speaker–patient–poet plays a fluid role, addressing one world as she makes an art form of another, the doctor being addressed walks a seemingly straight line from the real to the unreal, a division emphasized in the trochaic staccato of “breakfast” and “madness.” Once the doctor enters the hospital, he becomes “god of our block.” However ironically, the speaker proclaims her attachment to the doctor, and her adoration of him: “[o]f course I love you.” (p. 3). Yet she undercuts the psychiatrist– god’s divinity in images that assert his temporality: “you lean above the plastic sky,/god of our block” (p. 3). Doctor “Martin” is the god of a plastic world, a small space of land, a “block.” He “leans” from above, looking down at the patients as if he were always, inevitably above them, even as he bends toward them.

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The “I” does not cast herself as a helpless victim in juxtaposition to the image of the doctor. Instead, she emphasizes her power, and her power to repress, in lines in which the “I” figures prominently: I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf. (Sexton, 1999, p. 4) The speaker moves away from an identification as a beautiful woman toward one of a “queen[ly]” mental patient who writes poetry. Questioning if she is still “lost,” perhaps because of her “sins/forgotten,” the speaker does not seem to think so. She makes a number of first-person assertions: “I am queen/I was beautiful/Now I am myself.” When she asserts that she is now her own self, a self who “counts” and “waits,” she points to the boundaries of her situation, even as she gestures beyond it, to a time after the waiting might end. She also repeats the verb, “to be”: I am/I was/I am. Cataloging the loss of one self in the service of another, the speaker reminds us that she also uses language to describe and transform experience. Note the contrast between the mask, “I was beautiful,” and what it concealed: “now I am myself.” The self is a mental patient, but also a maker of poems. Leaving behind a seemingly false, socially fabricated self, she embraces one with multiple potentialities. The “beautiful” self belongs to a world that places value on appearances; the new self values and enjoys words more. The final image of the poem, the “silent shelf,” leaves the reader with a sense of potential; there might be more words, more images to come to this world. The “I” has not died, but merely stopped speaking. There is a power in her silence. A poem that begins with a “you” ends with an image, and not only an “I,” but the creative and authentic I, “myself,” an “I” who makes images, and who clearly will make more. The “silent shelf” is not an empty vessel, moreover, as Sexton often described herself, but a place of potential meanings, a marker for ideas or images to come. And the “moccasins”—or “mock-a-sins”—that sit on the silent shelf aptly demonstrate the power of the imagination to turn the paralyzed patient into a maker of new meanings, one who can mock her sins, when not forgotten.

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December 1963: “Flee on Your Donkey” In early December of 1963, Sexton felt plagued by violence and loss. She told Orne that she could not stop thinking about the Kennedy assassination and her husband Kayo’s revelation that he had killed a prisoner of war in Korea. She also experienced tremendous anxiety as she considered the possibility of Orne’s departure: a month previously, he had told her that he might be accepting a position in Philadelphia. At the same time, she continued to work on “Flee on Your Donkey,” a long poem which she described as “the definitive poem about my illness.” She told him she found the poem very difficult to finish; in fact, she did not publish it until three years later, in The New Yorker. “Flee on Your Donkey” addresses an earlier period in the treatment to which Orne himself had drawn her attention the week before. Over 200 lines in its final version, it conveys the long months of turmoil that ensued during the winter and spring of 1962 when Orne, fearing Sexton would discover that he had just married, attempted to push Sexton to “get better” so that she could end her treatment with him. In a sudden shift of his behavior, he refused to hold her hand any longer, as he had done so many times, reduced her sessions to two per week, and attempted to set dates for the termination of therapy. Sexton experienced these changes as a painful rejection, culminating in a breakdown outside Orne’s office and a subsequent admission to Westwood Lodge psychiatric hospital for an overnight stay in “the scene of the disordered senses” (Sexton, 1999, p. 99). Writing “Flee on Your Donkey” offered Sexton a way to narrate her multilayered struggle with Orne. Studying her therapy notebooks and sessions provided another: an opportunity to make sense of the past, not only for repair but as a way to prepare for the future. She tried to find ways to connect with Orne, even though she knew his career might take him away; carefully examining the times when he withdrew from her and encouraged her to end the treatment, and fearing he was about to push her away again, she raised important issues about their relationship. Reading and rereading several of her therapy transcriptions, she revealed feelings about the events they described that she had never before spoken aloud to Orne. Both in her current sessions and in the poem, however, the question of “what really happened” remained far less important than the solitary anguish of feeling abandoned by Orne. Their work together on these

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sessions constituted one of their most productive collaborations; it also led them to explore the role of therapy in her writing process. In the key sessions of December 10 and 12, 1963, he and Sexton worked together, despite some initial reluctance on Orne’s part, to reconstruct the therapeutic impasse of the prior year. Orne took responsibility for pushing her too hard or pushing her away (depending on whose version we believe), which led Sexton to important insights into the nature of their ongoing efforts to make her well. The negotiation process itself allowed them to better understand what had transpired between them during the impasse and how those interactions might relate to Sexton’s painful childhood experiences, and offered possibilities for how she and Orne could work in the months to follow. It also illustrates two of the most prominent patterns in their work together: Orne’s persistence in pushing Sexton to identify what he saw as the intrapsychic nature of her emotional distress; and her insistence that her treatment, her poetry, and even her identity were created through the work they did together. This important step in Sexton’s therapy offered her a new way to work through difficult personal problems, and also pushed Orne toward a shift in technique. As she urged him to reconsider how his decisions and actions affected her, he adopted a more relational stance; Sexton was in some respects as much of a muse to Orne as a clinician, as Orne was a muse to Sexton as a poet. During the December 10 session, Sexton mentioned “Flee on Your Donkey” to Orne for the first time, along with a number of concerns that would appear in the poem: the loss of a physical intimacy with Orne when he refused to hold her hand during their sessions, her childhood isolation, and her fear that she would always be abandoned by those close to her. She was struggling, attempting to capture in writing her intense experiences of the past weeks, including images of choking and a description of an affair. She was not depressed now, she insisted, but trying to face Orne’s eventual departure. Reviewing her notebooks, Sexton spoke about his sudden refusal to hold her hand: Sexton:

You wouldn’t hold my hand, trying to stop the three times a week appointment. I started feeling pretty sorry for myself . . . I started feeling so badly for myself because I am so manipulated by you. Your need to get me well created such a distance and hurt me so much and it reminded me of the hurt that I am about to feel. I suppose

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Orne: Sexton:

I am kind of angry about it. You wouldn’t hold my hand. I begged you and you wouldn’t. And your hand nowhere existed. And I thought to myself I’d rather have you go away than ever do that again . . . the thing I couldn’t bear was you suddenly decided to stop holding my hand. (long silence) I read from January to May [in her notebooks] . . . (silence).

In the first part of this exchange on the tape, Sexton speaks clearly and definitively as she articulates what she discovered as she read through her notebooks. When she arrives at the point of saying she was angry with Orne, her voice becomes a bit uncertain: “I suppose I am angry about it.” Sexton speaks of the thing she “could not bear,” and how sudden it felt to her. She told Orne that it “hurt me so much” that, even though she “begged,” his “hand nowhere existed.” The word “hand” repeats again and again in these sentences, as if it were being offered and taken away each time the word was uttered, her voice trailing off as she waits for a response. Still, Orne does not speak. Finally, she resumes talking, but she seems deflated. She emphasizes that she had done a lot of research, as she had read sessions “from January to May.” With still no response from Orne, she goes into a trance. Orne: Sexton: Orne:

Sexton: Orne:

Sexton: Orne: Sexton: Orne:

Anne, Anne do you have to go through that again? Yes, only really worse. No, at that point we weren’t able to be close but this is something that we have to face and we can face it together. How? I don’t know. Anne, Anne (seems to move to hold her hand, which she initially resists) . . . You are not going to hold my hand? That doesn’t solve it. You went away from me. You did. Yes, it’s true. I tried to force you to be well then. I recognized much later that that was wrong. You wouldn’t be close to me. Well I don’t want you at all. It’s not true Anne. I know that you’re angry with me. That doesn’t mean we can’t be honest.

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I don’t want to be here when you tell me. I think it’s essential that we work together . . . Anne, Anne, Anne, Anne, now try to reason. You don’t have to pull away.

Although she clearly feels rejected by his silence, Orne easily coaxes Sexton back into contact. He holds her hand, acknowledges her anger, and admits that he tried to “force [her] to be well.” “Flee on Your Donkey,” the poem Sexton was having difficulty finishing, presents a number of images that seem directly related to the above exchange. The poem addresses a therapist who works on Marlborough Street (where Orne’s office was located), whom the speaker refers to as a “new God.” Its epigraph is from Rimbaud: “Ma faim, Anne, Anne,/ Fais sur ton ane” (“My hunger, Anne, Anne/Flee on your donkey”). The first lines present the speaker on a trip to a mental institution, “because there was no other place to flee to”: without luggage or defenses, giving up my car keys and my cash, keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes the way a child holds on to a toy. Surrendering her symbols of adult independence, keys and cash, while grasping her cigarettes as a child grips a teddy bear, the speaker is “without luggage or defenses.” She is running away, but the place to which she flees “is a mental hospital/not a child’s game.” She is a mentally ill woman, a poet, who has been left all alone with only her “muse” and her cigarettes to provide comfort or solace: Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse. Unlike the dropped hand of Sexton’s own psychiatrist, this muse “stays in [her] hand,” providing soft, live comfort, a benign promise of poems to come. And yet this harmless mouse/muse will also provide temporary

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comfort, for we cannot imagine a mouse staying in anyone’s hand for very long. After describing the other patients in the hospital, the speaker tells about the recent loss of both her parents: Meanwhile, they carried out my mother, wrapped like somebody’s doll, in sheets, bandaged her jaw and stuffed up her holes. My father, too. He went out on the rotten blood he used up on other women in the Middle West. He went out, a cured old alcoholic on crooked feet and useless hands. (Sexton, 1999, p. 100) The mother is a childlike mummy, evoking the dead mother that Andre Green (1986) described decades later. “Wrapped like somebody’s doll,” she is less a maternal object and more a needy child. The father, once a drunk and philanderer, and later a cripple, is also dead. He may have been “cured” of his disease (his crooked feet might even denote the demonic), but he is of no use to the poem’s narrator. Not only were both of Sexton’s parents recently deceased, the images she uses to describe them suggest that they were dead to her even when alive. “Flee on Your Donkey” juxtaposes these helpless and utterly un-parental images with those portraying a god/doctor/cheerleader: You, my bachelor analyst, who sat on Marlborough Street, sharing your office with your mother and giving up cigarettes each New Year, were the new God, the manager of the Gideon Bible. (Sexton, 1999, p. 100) Addressing her doctor directly, the speaker pronounces him her savior, her “enthusiast,” a man who promises to show her another world and to tell her who she is. A “god” who doles out bibles as if in a hotel, the doctor is “better than Christ” and also more human. He is a comical exception to

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what the speaker has experienced, but his ironically painted identity becomes more complex, his saving powers tempered by human limitations. The speaker admittedly struggles, circling as she does around her childhood pain, but her “bachelor” doctor is still entwined with his own mother. Even as the patient waits for him to save her, he has other preoccupations; he, too is sick: he is an addict, and his office is “confusing.” In contrast to her doctor/savior, the speaker is “damned”: I spent most of my time, a stranger, damned and in trance – that little hut, that naked blue-veined place, my eyes shut on the confusing office, eyes circling into my childhood, eyes newly cut. Years of hints strung out – a serialized case history – thirty-three years of the same dull incest that sustained us both. The childhood she cannot escape from emerges after years of “hints/strung out”: incest, at the crux of the history, sends her back into a childlike posture in the “naked” office, womblike with its blue veins. Later, the speaker considers what she learned in her doctor’s office: You taught me to believe in dreams; thus I was the dredger. I held them like an old woman with arthritic fingers, carefully straining the water out – sweet dark playthings, and above all, mysterious until they grew mournful and weak. O my hunger! My hunger! I was the one who opened the warm eyelid like a surgeon and brought forth young girls to grunt like fish.

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Here the doctor teaches the patient to values her unconscious, which transforms her from an arthritic old woman to a surgeon who awakens young girls and brings them to life. The value of the doctor’s belief cannot be underestimated here, for with it the speaker can be a vital, rather than a dead mother, even, we might imagine, reawaken her younger, frozen child self. With her doctor/teacher, the patient becomes playful and flexible— like him, a professional: a surgeon who opens her own, warm eyes to the world. In the final lines of “Flee on Your Donkey,” the speaker cries directions to herself—and perhaps gives voice to her doctor’s imperative—with little success. She attempts to mobilize her despair, to carve out a space for herself in a new world—impossible in the old one, with its flattened heart and rotted brains. Turn, my hungers! For once make a deliberate decision. There are brains that rot here like black bananas. Hearts have grown as flat as dinner plates. Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey, flee this sad hotel, ride out on some hairy beast, gallop backward pressing your buttocks to his withers, sit to his clumsy gait somehow. Ride out any old way you please! In this place everyone talks to his own mouth. That’s what it means to be crazy. Those I loved best died of it – the fool’s disease. The speaker needs “somehow” to “ride out” and away from her pain; repeating the words of the doctor who exhorts her to be well, rather than risk death from “the fool’s disease”—whether it be self-pity or selfindulgence. She gallops backward on a clumsy donkey, unable to take her eyes off the “sad hotel,” and the man who urged her to flee it.

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In April 1964, Sexton saw Orne many times, but kept only four tapes, perhaps expressing some feelings about his imminent departure: he was to leave Boston for Philadelphia in the coming August, where he became the first director of the Unit for Experimental Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. As is generally the case with termination, Sexton and Orne revisited the key themes of her therapy in these sessions, especially his role in her desire and ability to write and publish “great” poetry. They laughed a lot, seeming closer partners than ever; their affectionate nostalgia conveys the strength of their relationship and of Sexton’s “best self,” as she told Orne. Yet she also displays in these sessions what she learned with him: that she was capable of analyzing herself, a sign of a healthy patient who is terminating a productive treatment. At times, she seems almost celebratory as she evaluates what she and Orne accomplished together, and concludes that their work together amounts to much more than the creation of a great poet: it was “the discovery of a human being!” On the other hand, it sounds as if she may have been intoxicated in at least two of these sessions, suggesting that the stress of separation from Orne was overloading her ability to cope, and that she was recruiting her deserved pride in her success to defend against sadness and loss. In the midst of the turmoil of separation from Orne, she wrote a poem based on their conversations of late April, “The Wedding Night,” which appeared in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Live or Die (1966). Once again, poetry provided a vehicle in which Sexton could express her emotional tie to Orne and her pain over his loss, and use this experience to fuel her creative work.

April 1964: “The Wedding Night” Sexton linked the workings of poetry and therapy in the recorded session of April 23. She had written to a psychiatrist friend, Anne Wilder, that her personal growth in therapy was a “creative process,” anticipating in many ways a theory of therapeutic change that would develop long after her death. Orne comments that much of what Sexton experienced in therapy she had “never had growing up.” Sexton replies that for Orne to have realized this at such an early point in the therapy attests to his gift “as an artist.” She went on to explain that she had been writing to her psychiatrist friend Anne Wilder about her progress in therapy after seven years:

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Sexton:

Orne: Sexton: Orne: Sexton:

I told her I just started to grow in therapy: I’m now about seven years old! [Anne Wilder has] this idea that psychiatry isn’t creative . . . But I said I am seven years old! You could call that the discovery of a human being. How is that for a creative process? Because surely this is a creative process . . . There’s a great element of trust in our relationship, and me recognizing my needs. That’s the most impressive part. Well, you know, if you get something back and you’ve got something to give, it’s really rather delightful. That’s the most remarkable part. So that’s what I meant about the discovery of a human being, or whatever you want to call it. And that’s a pretty creative process.

Sexton repeats “the discovery of a human being” twice in this short exchange, and insists that it is a creative process thrice. With a kind of urgency, she once again asserts their co-construction of her self, and seeks Orne’s recognition and confirmation of her theory. Crediting Orne with having helped “discover” her, at the same time she credits herself with another particular aptitude, for shaping her own subjectivity—but only while there with him. She is a “much better me” when she is in fact “you and me,” and she is afraid of “losing who me is,” that newborn discovered self, when he leaves; if he has been essential to her creation, then he is, she fears, essential to her very being. Sexton: Orne: Sexton: Orne: Sexton:

Orne:

[Being a poet] isn’t all of me, you know. That’s just what I do. It’s impressive to hear you say that. Someday you’ll even believe it. I am talking about the you and me. The me here. mm hmm The only trouble is that if I am a me here I am a much better me here than I am anywhere else. Who’s me? I know it better in here. That’s why I don’t have so much tolerance for not seeing you for stretches of time. I start losing who me is. Of course.

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Well I’m gonna lose you entirely. How do I keep me? You won’t lose me entirely. Except for occasional visits when we’ll pretend it’s okay. Right back in the closet. . . . You’re going to have to own, you know, take into you parts of me.

Sexton knows that Orne cannot be replaced, even by the most qualified therapist, and her fear of losing her self along with him is palpable and plaintive. Orne in turn urges her to “own” him, suggesting that if she can internalize parts of him she will be able to keep the self she had been developing in dialogue with him as her own. This implicit reassurance may have served to ward off his own sadness and guilt, let alone the pain of Sexton’s very real loss: of their real connection, and of the real opportunity to continue to grow in dialogue and interaction with him. For Sexton realizes—in a way that Orne could or would not—that her capacity for self-regulation was not nearly as developed as her capacity to create a self in dialogue with a loved and trusted other. Orne argues that her mother’s need to have top billing contributed to what Sexton called “acting dumb” and “wanting nothing for herself” as a young child: Orne: Sexton:

Orne: Sexton: Orne: Sexton: Orne: Sexton: Orne: Sexton:

You were actively trying to be dumb. If I had such a big investment [in being “dumb”], how did I let you convince me to do something so fast? If I hadn’t really wanted to do a lot how could I have allowed you to convince me? It wasn’t that fast. First year of therapy. First poem was at Christmas time and I started seeing you in the summer. And I saw you for two hour periods. Yeah (both laugh). I didn’t know it, Dr. Orne! It was wasted on me. It doesn’t matter. The point is that I had to get important. . . You did get important. Two hours is a long time. Yeah. Yup.

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Orne:

Sexton: Orne:

Sexton: Orne: Sexton:

Orne: Sexton: Orne:

But I was the first person you’d ever known who genuinely cared about you doing something. And where you found that you wouldn’t be rejected for it. But you had to make a very positive statement. Yes. Because when I pointed out that you had a high IQ, your mother pointed out to you that she had the highest IQ at Wellesley and it didn’t mean a goddamn thing. That statement by your mother typified your relationship like nothing else ever did. I can’t think of a more harmful, destructive, more paralyzing thing that she could have done. Meaning it well. She thought she was supporting you. She was pretty sure I’d score badly. She was wrong. How confused she must have been as my poetry started to get better and meanwhile she was dying. See how awful it is, that terrible parallel. I know. Still it was worth it. To kill her. It’s inevitable. Yes that you would have fantasies of that sure. Talk about a twin relationship . . . she had to be the dominant twin.

As Orne points out, a daughter might want in fantasy to kill her mother in order to surpass her. In reality, however, Sexton’s mother competed directly with her daughter—in his view, “damaging” and “paralyzing” her. When Sexton began to publish, the timing was unfortunate, for her mother was dying from cancer. But, to Sexton, it seemed as if she was in fact killing her mother; on some level, she felt guilty about her success, which made her the dominant twin. She also needs very much to affirm Orne as a kind of author of her creative potential. On the one hand, she may have seen her new “self ” as fused with and insufficiently differentiated from her creator/discoverer/ author (“the you and me”), conveying the critical importance of his presence and the critical nature of its loss. On the other hand, she also might have fantasized that if, as a successful author, she was capable of killing her mother, then if she differentiated from Orne and took full credit for herself and for her writing she could “kill” him too, becoming once more

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the dominant twin and crushing the muse that had liberated her gifts. Unlike her mother, Orne consistently admires and supports Sexton, demonstrating that she need not be afraid of his envy or “dumb herself down” for him; but while this no doubt helped her to develop, the anxieties of her maternal transference were of course immune to such implicit reassurances. However deserved, granting him her elevated status—insistently labeling Orne a fellow “artist” and his work “creative”—may have mitigated the imagined danger of her success, preventing him from being envious and protecting herself from her own contempt. While in the session Sexton argues that the poems “express things more honestly than fact,” Orne contends that “what they do is give a vignette of it.” He disagrees that poetry speaks the truth of the unconscious, but Sexton remains firm in her belief that feelings are best captured in poems, which had a more direct route to the unconscious than any rational conversation, however intimate. As if to illustrate her philosophy, during the next few days she composed a powerful and evocative poem about the subjects they were exploring. Framed by the notion that creativity can somehow transform loss and mortality, the session of April 25 focused on Sexton’s trip to the Charles River the night before, during which she had thought about suicide. She had an inexplicable, “beautiful” feeling that moved her tremendously as she sat looking at the river, and she wanted to explain it to him, for it summoned her as if death itself were calling. Sitting in her car before this session, Sexton began to compose “The Wedding Night,” a poem that concerns themes of loss, self-transformation, and the passage of time, and she discussed the poem’s imagery with Orne during the following hour. Sexton asks Orne to help her understand what she was trying to accomplish at the river. She finally hypothesizes: I guess very much that I do want to matter, and sometimes you convinced me that I mattered to you. I’m not going to matter to [her new psychiatrist, Frederick Duhl, who she had begun to see] . . . I guess I just wanted more of him than I got. This was also true for her and Orne. Orne wonders why Sexton chose not to throw herself into the river; she explains that the feeling by the river had something to do with perfection, which she associates with suicide:

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Sexton:

Orne: Sexton:

I’m so fascinated with Sylvia [Plath’s] death. There’s so much. It really needs to be analyzed. The idea of dying perfect, certainly not mutilated. Mmm. There was something very perfect. It was getting dark, just a little light in the sky. But I kept hearing this voice say “Come on, you’ve got to go call Dr. Orne.” You hadn’t left for good yet; you’d be there the next day. And the very effort to do that was healthy whether you were there or not.

Sexton’s urge to kill herself, triggered by a feeling of being utterly alone, was tied to an experience of jouissance and to a sense of perfection, evoking the experience of being with idealized mother, or even of being back in the womb, a regressive, defensive response to separation and loss. Viewed thus, suicide, with its fantasy of reunion and reparation, is a far better alternative to the desolation of abandonment—or her own destructive, isolating power. Perhaps in order to test his ability to share her feelings by the river, Sexton asks Orne whether he understands what she is talking about. He replied that he does, and that it reminds him of a poem by Heinrich Heine. Orne: Sexton: Orne:

Sexton: Orne: Sexton:

Orne: Sexton:

Heine wrote a poem about it. Say it me so I can write a better one (both laugh). I don’t know the name, but at one point he looks at the ocean lying very deep, drawing him in like a magnet. It is very well done. I can’t describe it. But at end the captain comes by and says “Stop. Are you mad?” (laughing) I think that’s funny. God, you have a good sense of humor. It isn’t my poem. Well, I know, but saying it you are offering a free translation. Well, Dr. Orne, I hope that magnet doesn’t draw me too hard. Just remember the poem. That doesn’t help me at all. I think the captain running the ship is the one that’s mad.

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This love poem to death is a fascinating gift Orne gives Sexton, one which admits of something personal and very meaningful: his own love of poetry. It also unleashes a competitive, perhaps jealous aspect of Sexton, as she not so gently mocks him, and immediately plans to write a poem that will surpass the one that enjoys a coveted place in Orne’s memory. Her challenge is apparently meant quite literally: “The Wedding Night” bears significant similarities to parts of “The Ocean Spectre” from Heine’s “Pictures of Travel.” And downward hasten I to thee, And with wide-spreading arms Throw myself down on thy heart. But just in time I was seized by the foot by the Captain, And torn from the side of the ship, While he cried, laughing bitterly: “Why, Doctor, are you mad?” (Heine, 2009, p. 249) Death is described as a lover in this poem, from whom the speaker (ironically, a “doctor”) is rescued “just in time.” The rescuing captain, afraid that the speaker is mad, does not realize the appeal of death as a beloved object, yet Sexton, who joked that it was the captain that was “mad,” clearly did. Replete with images of death, loss, sexuality, femininity, nature, and transformation, “The Wedding Night,” dated April 27–May 1, 1964, represents many of the terms discussed in the session of April 25. The speaker describes “a short celebration” of magnolia trees that burst into bloom, a festival in the natural world, but one which happens abruptly, even violently, and ends far too soon. The poem accomplishes in metaphor what Sexton sought in her trip to the river, an articulation of ephemeral beauty that promises so much more and then vanishes, like Orne’s hand. From the first lines of the poem, the threat of an ending echoes in images of departure and abandonment. The magnolia trees are “southern,” their branches “stiff as drivers’ gloves,” conveying the notion of someone driving away—perhaps “south,” as Orne was soon to drive to his new home in Philadelphia. The speaker begins the poem by telling us that she has already been left, and yet she is driven back into memories of the past.

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For weeks the buds had been as sure-bodied As the twelve year old flower girl I was At Aunt Edna’s wedding. Will they bend, I had asked, As I walked under them toward you, Bend two to a branch, Cheek, forehead, shoulder to the floor? I could see that none were clumsy. I could see that each was tight and firm. Not one of them had trickled blood— Waiting as polished as gull beaks. (Sexton, 1999, p. 144) Images of unsullied, “polished” beauty recall not only the “sure-bodied” 12-year-old Sexton once was, but also the “new person” that Orne “discovered” and nurtured, who exploded into creative flower, and whom she stood to lose all over again when he finally withdraws his hand for good. “Before spring was ready,” it is a time of promise, but this promise is too premature. There was this time in Boston Before spring was ready—a short celebration— And then it was over. I walked down Marlborough street the day you left me Under branches as tedious as leather, Under branches as stiff as drivers’ gloves. I said, (but only because you were gone) “Magnolia blossoms have a rather southern sound, so unlike Boston anyhow,” and whatever it was that happened, all that pink, and for so short a time, was unbelievable, was pinned on. (Sexton, 1999, p. 144) This verse echoes the questions that were very much on Sexton’s mind as she approached the end of her therapy with Orne: is this new me real? Will it last without him? Or was it “unbelievable,” only “pinned on”?

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Why must this relationship, which has so nourished me, be bloodied, mutilated even, and have to end? The poem ends in a kind of meditation about what has happened, the speaker recalling having visited the place repeatedly, much as Sexton visited the same office on Marlborough Street for many years. She attends a kind of vigil: I stood under them for nights, hesitating, And then drove away in my car. Yet one night in the April night Someone (someone!) kicked each bud open— To disprove, to mock, to puncture! The next day they were all hot-colored, Moist, not flawed in fact. Then they no longer huddled. They forgot how to hide. Tense as they had been, They were flags, gaudy, chafing in the wind. There was such abandonment in all that! Such entertainment In their flaring up. (Sexton, 1999, pp. 144–145) In the final two stanzas, the speaker moves the poem into a fast symphony of almost simultaneous flowering and decay. Unseen, “someone (someone!) kicked each bud open.” The image is violent, even as the perpetrator is unnamed, but both the speaker and her listener know who that “someone” is. He acts to “disprove, to mock, to puncture” the virginal blossoms, and they appear to enjoy the process; “Moist, not flawed in fact,” they engage in “such abandonment” and “entertainment/In their flaring up.” There is beauty in the letting go; the blossoms no longer need to hide, “they no longer huddled.” Although expressed in intensely sexual and violent terms, and speaking to both liberation and obliteration, there is more than an undercurrent of shame and distrust. The liberator also means “to disprove, to mock”; and the ambiguity of the passively stated “There was such abandonment in all that!/Such entertainment” implies that liberation was also a violation—especially if the “someone” that “kicked each bud

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open” had been entertained by the spectacle, or abandoned it once it was over. On her “Wedding Night,” her flowering becomes a defloration. Once the opening of the blossoms has been registered, the speaker moves to a more melancholy position. Sexton leaves the blossoms and turns to what they symbolize—the discovered, blossoming, abandoned Sexton and the blossoms of her discovered creativity, her poems. After that, well— Like faces in a parade, I could not tell the difference between losing you And losing them. They dropped separately after the celebration, Handpicked, One after the other like artichoke leaves. After that I walked to my car awkwardly Over the painful bare remains on the brick sidewalk, Knowing that someone had, in one night, Passed roughly through, And before it was time. (Sexton, 1999, p. 145) Her poetic representation can no longer contain and protect her from the pain of loss; the metaphor’s symbolizing function breaks down as she can no longer distinguish the natural phenomenon from her own personal experience of “losing you.” Orne had “passed roughly through” her life, “kicked open” her self so that she could finally flower, and then left, “before it was time.” From a Kleinian perspective, the paranoid-schizoid position in which the poem resides yields to a depressive position, as she confronts her auto-interpretation of the poem, its anguish, its rage, and its realities. Sexton wrote “The Wedding Night” on a weekend while Orne was away at a conference, a prelude to his definitive departure in August. In their final recorded session, she traverses the entire period of the treatment, like the season of the magnolias, in one brief hour. Familiar topics of incest, creativity, mental illness, weddings, losses, deaths, poetry, and betrayal were all on her mind, intertwined with her protean transferential relationship to Orne.

Unlikely Muse: Sexton and Orne

Sexton: Orne: Sexton:

Orne: Sexton:

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I love you like a brother! (Both laugh) It is complicated. You don’t have a sister. But now you have one—me! I am really so much a daughter I don’t know how I could be a sister. This is very upsetting. Shit on the whole thing. I don’t like talking about such rejecting situations. I don’t know that you were rejected. I guess I think so. You know it really is a whole human being you know. Even a sick one. Any old one you want. There are about six of me, you can pick one. Huh. We have to stop in a bit.

Sexton’s conclusion, that she is a “really a whole human being,” is nothing short of remarkable, even though she is still segregated into “about six of me.” Correspondingly, she summons a few transferential identities simultaneously. While thorough formulation of her transference is outside the scope of this essay, she is at times Orne’s daughter, at times his sister or the mother of his child, her poems, and at all times, perhaps, a would-be but refused lover. Orne, unlike her next psychiatrist, wisely refuses to allow Sexton to actualize any of these transferential positions, but in light of his impending departure she experiences them as “rejecting situations.” Sensitive to this, and perhaps guiltily, Orne replies, “I don’t know that you were rejected,” disavowing at the same time the fact that he is about to abandon her. But Sexton, “a whole human being,” knows better. In “The Wedding Night,” written after this session, she speaks to what Orne will not hear, and protests her rapid—perhaps too rapid—creative flowering, her blossoms left to wilt and decay, naming her abandonment by her muse, who acutely recognized her gift, allowed it to gestate, witnessed its precocious growth, and then demanded that it be enough to heal her. Anne Sexton was a poet who had achieved as much in her realm as Martin Orne had in his. That he was her muse as well as her doctor, enabling her and allowing her to bloom, is no question. But her becoming and owning her “whole human being” is surely the achievement, of her treatment, the flower that she also celebrates, if only for a fleeting moment, in “The Wedding Night”: “There was such abandonment in all that!/ Such entertainment/In their flaring up.” And yet, as the poem attests, it all went by too fast. As if to demonstrate that Orne left “before it was time,”

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her new self just born, Sexton committed suicide in the context of a grievous boundary violation and abandonment by the psychiatrist charged with taking over her care. She was only 45, and at the height of her literary power, but in the end this new life was only: a short celebration— And then it was over.

Notes 1 From “Flee On Your Donkey,” Sexton (1999, p. 100). 2 Personal communication, Dr. John T. Maltzberger, June 17, 2009. Maltzberger trained as a resident with Orne at Mass Mental in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 3 This and all following citations of Sexton’s therapy tapes are courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, and may not be requoted or otherwise used for any other purpose without permission.

References Green, A. (1986). The dead mother. In On Private Madness (pp. 142–173). London: The Hogarth Press. Heine, H. (1891). The Poems of Heine: Complete (E. A. Bowring trans.). London: George Bell & Sons. Kumin, M. (1998). Selected Poems, 1960–1990. New York: Norton. Middlebrook, D. (1992). Anne Sexton: A Life. New York: Vintage. Sexton, A. (1960). To Bedlam and Part Way Back. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Sexton, A. (1960–1964). Taped sessions with Dr. Martin Orne. The Papers of Anne Sexton, The Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Sexton, A. (1999). The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton. New York: Mariner Books. Sexton, A. (2004). Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (L. Ames & L. G. Sexton eds.). New York: Mariner.

Chapter 9

Alison Bechdel’s Mystic Muse A Psychoanalytic Allegory Vera J. Camden

Allegory and Autography Alison Bechdel’s “autographic” narrative Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (Bechdel, 2012) creates an allegory, a “pilgrim’s progress” of psychoanalysis (Bunyan, 2008).1 Bechdel contemplates the mystery of human identity itself, told through her personal experience and study of psychoanalysis. Against her mother’s implicit charge of narcissism, Bechdel defends her focus on herself as subject matter: “But don’t you think that . . . that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life . . . you can, you know, transcend your particular self?” (p. 201). Highly particularized self-depiction leads, she hopes, to a universal “I.” There is an intense abstraction, an erudition in her text, devoted as it is to conveying clinical theory and dramatizing the practice of psychoanalysis, which at the same time renders these concepts incarnate within the minute and rigorous portrayal of her subjectivity. Her particular experience thus comes to embody a transcendent truth. The frank didacticism of Are You My Mother? has distanced some of Bechdel’s fans, who find her recent work “therapized and flat” (Garner, 2012) as compared with her first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Tragicomic—a book so popular it inspired a hit musical that ran for nearly half a year at New York’s Public Theater and is now heading to Broadway (Brantley, 2013)! Other readers, however, bask in the glow of Bechdel’s capacity to achieve “the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are.”2 A recent review in the Journal of the American Psychoanalyic Association is one measure of contemporary analysts’ enthusiasm for Bechdel’s rendering of psychoanalytic theory and clinical experience (Chaplan, 2014). The utile et dulce that long held court as an

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unembarrassed artistic measuring rod in previous centuries is revived in her use of allegory as a mode of expression that is intensely human while edifying and downright educational. There is pleasure in knowing, and there is pleasure in narrative: when the two come together, as they do in Bechdel’s most recent triumph, the result may well be called an allegory for our time. Seeking to redeem and define the peculiar power of allegory and its transformations for the modern reader, Gay Clifford (1974) writes, “allegory is a natural language for visionary strangeness and intensity, and its moral and intellectual preoccupations strengthen rather than diminish this visionary power” (p. 4). In allegory we encounter a strange world, distinctive yet uncanny—both familiar and elusive. Above all, allegory renders conception concrete: it illustrates, illuminates, and bodies forth ideas through the particulars of dramatic, precise personification. C. S. Lewis’s resonant celebration of William Langland’s allegorical dream– vision rendering of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation points to how the pressure to produce a meaningful articulation of experienced spiritual truth fostered a poetry saturated in the physical world: This power of rendering imaginable what before was only intelligible is nowhere . . . better exemplified than in Langland’s lines on the Incarnation. They are . . . perfectly accurate and clear in doctrine; and the result is as concrete, as fully incarnate, as if the poet were writing about apples or butter: “. . . For heaven might not contain it, it was so heavy in itself, until it has eaten its fill of the earth. And when it has taken flesh and blood of this world no leaf on a lime tree was lighter thereafter; and it was easy to bear and sharp as the point of a needle, so that no armour might hinder it nor any high wall.” (Lewis, 1936, pp. 160–161) Allegory similarly relies on the evocation of the visual, the image, to condense and convey the lived and affective potential of otherwise arid abstraction. This assists and directs interpretation in allegory: narrative drives the limits of meaning, but visual material establishes the kinetic relationship “between the various elements, abstractions, and powers in the imaginative system” (Clifford, 1974, p. 71). There is a certain “magic” to the gathering together into and translation into image of abstract theological truths:

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When the external surface of description is thus intimately connected with the ideological and metaphysical patterns of the narrative, the image does indeed serve to show us “the groupings of nature as bound together with magical and associative links.” (p. 89])3 Apologists for allegory also explain the power in terms resonant with recent discussions of comics as a medium that universalizes human experience through bold and abstract lines: as an example, comics scholar Hillary Chute remarks, “comics—a form once considered pure junk—is sparking interest in literary studies,” guiding conversations about the human self (2008, p. 452). Emphasizing the negative component of the visual, Chute (2010) explains that the medium: compels because it is so capacious, offering layer of words and images—as well as multiple layers of possible temporalities in its basic structure. The words and images entwine, but never synthesize. The frames—which we may understand as boxes of time—present a narrative, but that narrative is threaded through with absence, with the rich white spaces of what is called the gutter. (p. 5) The frames of comics form the containing skin of the sequential scenes; the “gutter, the rich empty space between the selected moments that direct our interpretation” enlists the spectator/reader as participant in making meaning; in imagining what is missing in action or affect in the blank space that both separates and secures the sequence of the image blocks, the spectator/reader projects “causality in these gaps that exist between the punctual moments of the frames” (p. 8). Such processes afford the comics medium intensity and universality, which in turn foster projection and identification: when you look at a realistic portrait of a face, you see the face of “another”; when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see “yourself,” the world within. Indeed, the accessibility of the “simplified reality” of the cartoon borders on “thrall”: it is the pull of the abstracted image to enlist our identification that creates a state of childlike attachment in the reader. Cartooning abstracts an image, such as a face, not so much through the elimination of detail as through focusing on specific detail: in Scott McCloud’s influential explanation, the clout of cartooning is “Amplification through simplification . . . By stripping down an image to its essential

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‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t” (McCloud, 1993, p. 30, emphasis original). The “real action” of comics, like allegory, is the “reader’s learning how to read the text properly”; aided by the visual, the reader learns “how to read” along with the allegory’s protagonist. And, as with allegory, this involves unlearning critical assumptions and entering into fusions of new forms (Quilligan, 1979, pp. 24, 226). Through the “simplification” of her cartoon rendering of her two analyses— drawn together in her graphic memoir—Alison Bechdel “amplifies” our understanding of psychoanalysis, and ultimately, of ourselves. The medium of comics allows Bechdel as an author and artist to capture “time into space,”4 through which she shows herself going through her personal psychoanalysis associatively. Memories of childhood and young adulthood, various literary and cultural figures, archival artifacts and reference texts—all is graphically rendered while being commented upon by the narrative presence of her “voice over,” which frames each panel. It must also be noted that the comics medium allows Bechdel an astonishing fidelity to the very textures of the archival items that she both draws from and meticulously hand-draws on her comics’ pages. This intricate conglomeration of textual and visual matter typifies the style of self-representation in her first graphic narrative, Fun Home, and her second, Are You My Mother? As is by now well-known, these two narratives are an autobiographical pair, both of which demonstrate her self-proclaimed “archiving impulse” (Chute, 2014, p. 161). The ways that Bechdel’s “filial sleuthery” unearthed within her family history the inscription of her own childhood trauma in Fun Home remains foundational to its virtual sequel.5 What’s more, Bechdel actively invites a consideration of genre with the comics medium when she boldly experiments with the naming of her narrative productions, giving them each a different subtitle, each of which asks us to consider the characteristic claims of their respective forms. Thus it can be said that Are You My Mother?, which she calls “A Comic Drama,” is predicated on her first graphic memoir Fun Home, “A Family Tragicomic.” Both subtitles play upon the words “comic” and “tragic,” invoking a venerated, even classical theatrical legacy, while at the same time pressing boundaries to assert “comics” within multiple literary and media associations. Considering precisely the impact of comics as a new media, Chute cites the suggestive passage from Jacqueline Rose’s early reflections on psychoanalysis and artistic practice: “repetition as insistence, that is, as the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten”—in other

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words, repressed—“can only come into focus by blurring the fields of representation where normal forms of self-recognition take place” (Chute, 2010, p. 4). Indeed, as a form that brings into conjunction the visual and the verbal, the graphic narrative seems particularly to foster what Gillian Whitlock (2006) terms “autographics.” If, as Rose has remarked, the repressed comes into focus when the fields of representation are blurred (Rose, quoted in Chute, 2010, p. 4), Bechdel’s forays into literary nomenclature surely signal the author’s intensely self-conscious awareness that she is carving out new territory, alerting her reader to a new thing. The particular claim that comics as a medium, and Bechdel’s graphic memoirs in particular, have made upon public and private archives—the rendering of political and personal history, often traumatic—is brilliantly explored in recent critical studies of the medium of comics (for example, Cvetkovich, 2008; Chute, 2011). What is less acknowledged, however— to reiterate the thrust of this essay—is the intellectual, even didactic impulse that dominates Are You My Mother? This impulse organizes and inspires it in ways that distinguish it from her earlier narrative, defining its unique contribution to an emergent, new media. Lee Konstantinou (2014) clarifies Bechdel’s quest for her mother: Knitted into this mother-daughter story is Alison’s engagement with the ideas of British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott. “I want him to be my mother,” Alison confesses to one of her therapists. Although the memoir includes long reflections on the writing and life of Virginia Woolf . . . Winnicott is the main reference point in Are You My Mother? (The New Inquiry, blog) This reference point takes on a kind of scriptural authority that guides Bechdel in her search for meaning, identity, and, ultimately, transcendence in everyday life. She searches—as does the little bird in the eponymous child’s story by P. D. Eastman, Are You My Mother? (1960)—for the sacred “True Self ” that grounds Winnicott’s clinical practice with his patients and organizes his psychoanalytic contributions. In her narrative quest for her mother, Winnicott’s psychoanalytic writings function like oracular guideposts for the narrative’s progress. Bechdel creates an allegorical embodiment of the influence, and indeed, the inspiration of this “psychoanalytic mystic” and muse (Eigen, 1998).

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Alison Bechdel, Dreamer John Bunyan, in his “Apology” to The Pilgrim’s Progress, advises: Wouldst thou be in a Dream, and yet not sleep? . . . Wouldst read thyself, and read thou knowest not what, And yet know whether thou art blest or not . . . Oh, then come hither, and lay my book, they head and heart together. (Bunyan, 2008, p.10) This is the allegorists’ aim and entreaty to the reader: “read thyself” through the interpretive power of his or her mystical, doctrinal truth. So it is that Bechdel, in identification with her psychoanalytic muse, searches for a form that will invite her readers to see themselves in the rigorous particulars of her own story, which she tells through the lens of her muses’ psychoanalytic theory of interpretation. Unsurprisingly, she also structures her narrative around a dream “vision”: as an analysand might structure a session around a dream, Bechdel “dreams a dream” for each chapter of Are You My Mother? Each dream is framed in black background, signifying the descent into the unconscious, and thus set off from the ensuing panels of the chapter, which, by contrast, are set against white or rose-colored background. Each dream/chapter is also paired with a major essay by D. W. Winnicott, and in fact takes its name directly from that essay, just as the book takes its name from a well-known children’s story. Thus, while two actual therapists from different periods in Alison Bechdel’s life guide the free associative-like chronicle that flows from the dream and actively interpret her psychic explorations, the analyst whose Beatrician voice guides Bechdel’s journey into the underworld of the unconscious is Donald Winnicott. In lectures and interviews, Bechdel has herself acknowledged that it is as dreamer that her character kinesthetically provides both conceptual coherence and progressive transformation of her character as she undergoes therapy and journeys into the underworld of the unconscious.6 Yet there has been very little direct interpretation of the dream work in the narrative; it is almost as if the critics and reviewers have themselves resisted the very allegorical intensity that Bechdel identifies as its core. The first dream opens the first chapter in a “dark cellar” from which Bechdel must escape. Like John Bunyan, whose dream allegory starts in a “den,” which stands

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Figure 9.1 Are You My Mother?, p. 3 All illustrations in this chapter are from Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, © 2012, 2007 Alison Bechdel, respectively, and reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved

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for the prison in which he literally was incarcerated, Alison is trapped in her cellar by a “home improvement” project—a term loaded for one who at the moment of this dream is struggling to complete Fun Home, whose title references her family home. This dream is replete with symbols, which she does not interpret so much as depict in her drawings, left like traces for the astute reader to hold in mind and memory as the narrative progresses; one is the spider, which lingers in several panels. Karl Abraham (1922 [1927]), among many other analysts and artists, most notably Louise Bourgeois, links the spider to the mother as representative of captivity. Bourgeois’s spiders tower in a maternal matrix, suggestive of the web of memory, desire, and dread that pervades Bechdel’s depiction of her long journey through therapy and art itself to find freedom: what seems the only “way out” of the cellar is a small window, draped with spidery webs. Prefiguring the course of her narrated therapy, the dreamer discovers (as noted by an exclamation in the word balloon above her head) that she can simply walk out through a door that she had not seen before. In dream logic this door leads to a running river, deep, murky, with submerged stepping-stones. She leaps right in into a jumping pose that resembles nothing so much as a fetal position (Figure 9.1).7 She feels sublime surrender, despite some concern for the dirty water. The next panel takes us out of the dream: the waking panel holds the image of Bechdel herself and one word: Mom. She relates, “The emotion of the dream stuck with me for days. I had gotten myself out of a dead place and plunged with blind trust into a vital, sensuous one” (p. 5). Bechdel returns to the symbol of the spider throughout the narrative, where it comes to stand less for her unconscious entrapment, and more—precisely as the dream forecasts—for creative, intricate industry; we understand from the myth of Arachne that the artist enrages the gods by her brilliance (Figure 9.2). In a breakthrough confrontation with her own aggression and destruction in relation to her creativity at the end of the narrative, she analyzes the “arachnophobia” she shares with her mother.8 The point to emphasize here is that the teachings of psychoanalysis on dream symbolism and interpretation provide unifying threads to her narrative progression: repetitively, almost ritually, they weave each dream chapter into an allegory of the self, freed and re-born in psychoanalysis.

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Figure 9.2 AYMM, p. 40

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Figure 9.3 AYMM, p. 258

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The Transformations of Allegory Allegories narrate aspects of human experience according to a set of ideas and texts whose interpretive power is personified for the protagonist, who is often presented with considerable obstacles to progress. Above all, the allegorical imagination depicts human transformation. In order to demonstrate effectively how an ideal or principle should operate, the allegorist shows it in action in several different but comparable situations . . . There is however one recurrent element in allegorical writing that prevents it from becoming a seemingly endless process with the overall effect of stasis: a belief in the process of transformation. (Clifford, 1974, p. 29) Like the superhero comics that undergird much of the formal history of the graphic narrative from which it evolved, Bechdel’s two memoirs share with this popular comic book form their unabashedly heroic categories and their stories of redemption, empowerment, and transformation.9 The traces of superhero comics manifest in Bechdel’s allegorical imagination as she draws upon their conventions and traditions to explicate precisely how the powers of psychoanalysis operate in her therapeutic, transformative odyssey—which is, after all, the subject of Are You My Mother?10 For Bechdel, the progress of her analysis is the revealing emblem of her personal journey, also charted by the depiction of what Winnicott calls the “going on being” of the emergent True Self, whose fundamental essence must be freed from the dominant False Self, developmentally constructed in compliance to external pressures (p. 91). To be sure, Bechdel also takes inspiration from other revelatory texts like Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), an immensely influential text that Bechdel turns to (somewhat self-mockingly) for comfort: “At bedtime I turned to that endlessly consoling ode to sensitive children everywhere” (p. 167). But, more regularly and reverentially, she returns to Winnicott’s canon of essays to interpret herself and, ultimately, to draw the very lineaments of human identity. His essays are grafted into her pages like swaths of scripture: always hand-copied, through painstaking transcription, the very font of Winnicott’s text is rendered from her editions of his books that have been “read, marked, and inwardly digested” (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 236). At key points in the narrative, his biography and clinical

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Figure 9.4 AYMM, p. 57

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practice are also depicted and described (p. 281). Bechdel personifies his psychoanalytic ideals and principles through drawing illustrative figures: she copies his own hand-drawn diagrams (Figure 9.3), embeds his words into her images and texts (Figure 9.4), and cartoons moments from his personal life, even going so far as to imagine a post-coital cigarette with his second wife and collaborator, Clare (Figure 9.5). The cartoons of the “Piggle,” Winnicott’s case of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl named Gabrielle, who fears the dark “Babacar”—the “black inside” of the mother’s body “where the baby is born from”—virtually illuminates Bechdel’s childhood sense of the unknown beast within her own body. The cartoonist identifies with this little girl, whom she calculates to be “exactly” one year younger than herself (Figure 9.6). More to the point, little Gabrielle’s questions about the “mysteries of sex, birth, love, hate, death, the self, the other, and whether God exists” parallel Bechdel’s depiction of her own passionate childhood investigations. Winnicott’s “living” words, and the life and clinical practice from which they flow, narrate a subtext, an interpretive counterpoint to Bechdel’s transformation within her analysis and the creative flow that, we are to understand over and again, this enables. Her wish that Winnicott were “her mother” takes on an almost hallucinatory fulfillment, as if cutting and pasting his prose into hers will fuse his being and her own. Bechdel even implies in a providential wish that she take up her childhood diary shortly after his death, as if his spirit had been passed to her: “Winnicott died on the twenty-second of January, 1971 . . . One month later in February 1971, I began keeping my diary” (p. 278). Winnicott’s work and life thus personify an idealized, heroic psychoanalytic history and heuristics, constructed through Bechdel’s “autographics.” As she has said “bringing Winnicott to life brought his theories to life” (promotional interview, advance copy of Are You My Mother?). Bechdel’s conversion—turning her False Self into her True Self—charts a revival from death of authentic being to creative life, and appeals to the mystical and transcendent bond of human relationship. Through her lens, it is the language of conversion, rebirth, and recovery of what was lost that must, I aver, be further appreciated if we are going to more fully understand what he actually deems a “rebirth” in psychoanalysis, and the peculiar allegorical power of this graphic narrative.11 If Winnicott is the muse that facilitates her analytic and self-analytic gains and their translation into personal change, then Bechdel emerges as an interpreter of Winnicott.

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Figure 9.5 AYMM, p. 191

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Figure 9.6 AYMM, p. 155

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The Child and the Psychoanalytic Mystic Flannery O’Connor (1969) states that bold, exaggerated figures become necessary when coming up against an audience nearly blind to the “mystery” of transcendence: “for the almost blind you draw large, startling figures” (p. 34). Bechdel invites us to enter into the discursive domain of mysticism when she confronts us with a graphic providential sign quite early in Are You My Mother?: she invokes the mystery at the heart of being itself. At the end of her first chapter, in as clear a visual indication as she can offer as to the meaning of her text, Bechdel ritually extracts one word from the script of her text, offering it up as a signifier that she gradually blows up from the sentence in which it occurred on the previous page (Figure 9.7). Bechdel’s enlarged, startling, singular focus on this word is meant, I think, to stop us in our tracks. By the same logic of the dream panels that are demarcated by darkness, this panel’s black background tells us that we are in the realm of unconscious meaning and radical truth. In larger letters than can be encompassed by any comic’s panel, the massively enlarged, demanding and inescapable centerpiece of the signifier, child, dominates writ large in this double-page spread.

Figure 9.7 AYMM, pp. 36–37: “. . . this seems to me as mystical, as transcendent of the laws of everyday reality, as it gets”

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Bechdel’s narrative leads to this moment with an extremely complex collage of photographs assembled from her earliest infancy, analyzed in the next section. What I first want to highlight is the psychoanalytic teaching that she immediately takes up in her narrative, which is premised, as it were, on a “disagreement” with Winnicott, which establishes the very core of her text and sets in motion—philosophically, even ontologically— the foundation of her narrative of her self and her mother. “‘She is the baby and the baby is her.’ I disagree,” writes Bechdel, “that there is nothing mystical about this. For two separate beings to be identical—to be one.” Then into this monumentalized and materialized signifier, child, the word that now stands as image as much as text, she inserts the inevitable interpretation that accompanies it like a refrain: “this seems to me as mystical, as transcendent of the laws of everyday reality, as it gets” (p. 36). In large type, Bechdel emblazons this word, child, on her page, accented with interpretive remarks that “disagree” with Winnicott’s demurring as to the mysticism in his own teachings about the “ordinary devoted mother” (p. 32). Bechdel’s disagreement with Winnicott is, of course more apparent than real, and in fact follows the spirituality, the “muted sacramental current” that flows in his teachings about the True Self, and the human creativity that is noted by many commentators; indeed, she summons the personage named by Michael Eigen (1998) as the “psychoanalytic mystic” (p. 150), who does not need an otherworldly divinity to see mystery, magic, and grace in human reality. She latches onto Winnicott’s notion of the “True Self”: “I was very taken with the recurring references Alice Miller made to the ideas of someone named Winnicott. Particularly resonant was the notion of a True Self that had to be kept hidden at all costs” (p. 54). Winnicott defines this notion at various points in his writing as elaborating on Freud’s instinct-driven subject. It would appear to me that the idea of a False Self, which is an idea which our patients give us, can be discerned in the early formulations of Freud. In particular I link what I divide into a True and a False Self with Freud’s division of the self into a part that is central and powered by the instincts . . . and a part that is turned outwards and is related to the world. (Winnicott, 1960, p. 140)

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He acknowledges the precedent of this idea in religion and other traditions, including traditional psychiatry: “This concept is not in itself new. It appears in various guises in descriptive psychiatry and notably in certain religions and philosophical systems” (p. 139). For Winnicott, “at the centre of each person is an incommunicado element, and this is sacred and most worthy of preservation” (1963, p. 187). In such passages, Eigen (1998) notes, “One senses the sanctity of individual personality, reverence for the vital spark” (p. 15). And it is this spark, Winnicott asserts, that contains the innate inclination toward maturation. In a 1949 radio talk, he observes, In each baby is a vital spark, and this urge towards life and growth and development is a part of the baby, something the child is born with and which is carried forward in a way that we do not have to understand. For instance, if you have just put a bulb in the windowbox you know perfectly well that you do not have to make the bulb grow into a daffodil. You supply the right kind of earth or fibre and you keep the bulb watered just the right amount, and the rest comes naturally, because the bulb has life in it. (Goldman, 1993, p. 112)12 Bechdel builds the story of her own growing edge, her transformative selfrecognition, around Winnicott’s conviction of the power of psychoanalysis to redeem the True Self from the deadening, eventually suicidal armament of the compliant False Self erected around it (Winnicott, 1959–1964, p. 133). The drama of Bechdel’s narrative is, obviously, the story of her own progression from one substitute mother to the next—a search, so to speak, to find her “True Mother,” until in her psychoanalysis she re-covers the True Self, amounting to what Winnicott himself called a rebirth, through the capacity to create. Winnicott full well knew that he was embracing a kind of mysticism in his conviction of the self and the soul; furthermore, he adamantly, if quietly, makes it very clear that he is convinced of two things: first, that creativity is not really possible without some sense of the True Self in the human person; and that, second, creativity is therefore not to be dictated or restricted by the dominant Freudian drives of aggression and sexuality, or relegated to their mere sublimation, but rather derives from a True Self, a mystical and transcendent origin of being with its own instinctive expression. His

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radical contribution to psychoanalytic thought in this regard has not it seems to me been adequately credited (Camden, 2014). Bechdel does not take up this history explicitly, but illustrates his divergence from Melanie Klein and weaves it into the story of her own struggle to create despite her mother’s stark, internalized criticisms that deadened her productive capacity for decades, as we shall see below. The point to stress here is her alliance with Winnicott’s notions of the True Self, and the way that this conviction literally inspires her, infuses even the most mundane stuff of daily life with transcendent originality. The discovery of the mystical in the banal is an allegorical convention—and a conviction—that informs Bechdel’s depiction of her spiritual and psychological progress.

The Meaning in Montage Bechdel has often explained in presentations and interviews that the inspiration for her book on her mother (after completing one narrative focused on her father) came to her as she assembled five photographs found in boxes scattered about in her family’s house, which, put into videographic order, depict her mother and herself at three months old, united in a loving, joyous, mirroring play.13 She interprets these snapshots as forming a meaningful “sequence” only when they are (literally) drawn together: “In my arrangement of these photos, the rapport between Mom and me builds until I shriek with joy” (Figure 9.8). As discussed above, this montage precedes the centerpieced word child at the end of the first chapter. Bechdel’s collage of photos and other items reconstructs the earliest months of her relationship with her mother; through it she both discovers and creates the “origin story” of her life—an “Ur” graphic that contains within its gathering the idea of the True Self, which according to Winnicott is present at birth (if not before). Its recursive import reverberates throughout the narrative: this pictorial sequence, and the textual elaborations that Bechdel builds around it, emerge as the psychic centerpiece of the entire narrative. Bechdel introduces the photographic group with the memory of one photograph in particular that had always been a favorite: this first, familiar snapshot captures her mother and baby rapt in “mirroring” smiles (Figure 9.9). All seemingly having been taken by her father in the same sitting, she found the other photos in various boxes. Bechdel presents these found photos not in separate comic panels but rather drawn together, laid out as

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Figure 9.8 AYMM, pp. 32–33

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Figure 9.9 AYMM, p. 31

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arranged by the artist on her desk, amidst the ink and pen, rulers and glasses that represent the cartoonist’s craft—itself an allegorical portrait of the artist and the emerging True Self within. So, too, does the artist’s drawing and describing of these photos give them narrative life and meaning. The “gutters,” such as they may be understood to exist in this spread, consist only of the borders of the old-fashioned photographs. We know of course that this entire book is drawn, but the self-consciously constructed, painterly nature of this particular layout highlights the built artifice of the assembly, and the interpretation that is organizing its construction. Into this centerfold page are interspersed snippets of ongoing conversations with her mother, enclosed in jagged word bubbles (most of which she is, in fact recording on a computer while her mother speaks).14 Here, in relation to her mother’s quotidien conversation about celebrity gossip and her friend’s children, Bechdel feels the “creeping in,” or, what O’Connor (p. 112) would call the “intrusions” of grace: “For a long time I resisted including my present-day interactions with mom in this book precisely because they’re so ‘ordinary’. . . Then I started seeing how the transcendent would almost always creep into the everyday” (pp. 32–33; Figure 9.8). The “interactions” with her mother that lead up to Bechdel’s foundational collage of baby pictures is what she eventually dubs “the head in the oven” conversation, in which, as she records, her mother “kindly, commiseratingly” reminded her struggling-writer daughter that Sylvia Plath “put her head in the oven” (p. 29). Bechdel ironically recalls that at the moment she felt glad her oven was electric, regardless of her mother’s commiserating intent. The irony, I aver, points to Alison’s attunement to the unconscious aggression in such a remark. Starting at least with the Brothers Grimm, and carrying through to traumatic associations of the gas chambers of the Holocaust and the suicidal option of the domestic version, ovens have not been safe places for children. In one contemporary German rewriting of “Hansel and Gretel,” the child must “outwit” the abandoning adult to save himself, for he explicitly states that “the ovens in the [concentration] camps are made for children, just as the witch’s oven was designed to cook Hansel and Gretel” (Whitehead, 2004, p. 41). We may well recall the story Bechdel narrates in Fun Home, which her grandmother told her when a little girl, about the oven her father was put in “to dry” when, as a toddler, he was found after having been left behind in a muddy field, “lost” and forgotten by his mother. In Fun Home, now Bechdel is the storyteller, and she narrates her father’s rescue by the

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friendly neighborhood milkman as a rebirth: now, she imagines the milkman maternally, all in white—tellingly, a “reverse grim reaper” (2006, p. 41, emphasis added).15 The “head in the oven” conversation takes its place in the anxious repertoire of associations to mothers and ovens in Bechdel’s private folklore, alongside an alternative maternal figure: a man who offers rescue, redemption, and good mother’s milk. Bechdel tells us that she called her mother the day after “the head in the oven” conversation; in the logic of the narrative, this second conversation also “signifies.” Her mother laments that her friend (perhaps relative) “Serena’s granddaughter” had begun to menstruate at 12 years old. Despite Alison’s assurances that “uhh . . . I think that’s kinda normal,” her mother replies, “Well, I am heartbroken, it means that she is not a child anymore” (p. 35). It is while typing of this conversation that Bechdel fixes on the word “child” which, as we have discussed above, she enlarges and develops with the investigative fervor of the photographer in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966). In this classic film, a photographer takes pictures of a couple and inadvertently captures images of a man lurking in the background. But not until he “blows up” the snapshots can the man be seen to hold a gun; he is, in fact, a murderer. In much the same way, Bechdel blows up the word “child” to look for something in the background. The hidden body, so to speak, in the cluster of words on the page is the body of a child: the child Alison, a child whose growth and individuation were not welcomed; a child that may have caused her mother to want to put her head in the oven; a child left in a muddy field. It is this child’s body that remains hidden, in need of being searched out and found. The oven of suicidal despair transforms into the oven that warms the child rescued by an angel in white. If her mother is “brokenhearted” by the menarche of a 12-year-old, Bechdel now illustrates her narrative version of her broken infant heart. Her mother, whose ordinary devotion was interrupted, lost her daughter before she was fully found.16 By situating the panels of this early sequence of photographs in its surrounding passages and their remembered conversations, Bechdel conveys this idea very early in the narrative psychoanalytic assessment, establishing a psychic map of the ensuring narrative. In order to secure the ideas and interpretations elaborated from this photographic sequence, Winnicott’s essays on infancy are marshaled to make psychoanalytic sense of the entire unfolding mix.

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Bechdel calls upon Winnicott as witness to the failed—interrupted— mirroring of her childhood and its lived consequences in her current adult life. According to Winnicott, “There are three main reasons” (Bechdel summarizes as she looks at the photos and listens to her mother talk), why a mother may not be able “to give herself over to this preoccupation with the care of her infant.” One, she dies. Two, she “starts up a pregnancy before the time that she had thought out as appropriate” . . . and three . . . a mother becomes depressed and she can feel herself depriving her child of what the child needs, but she cannot help the onset of a mood swing, which may quite easily be reactive to something that has impinged in her private life . . . we must be able to say: here the ordinary devoted mother factor failed, without blaming anyone. (p. 34) It is this phrase, of course, that entitles Winnicott’s essay and this first chapter of Bechdel’s book: the ordinary devoted mother, the “factor” that Bechdel shows as having failed in her own case. In this passage, she explains that these photos were taken at about the time her mother realized she was pregnant again—too soon!—and that, in retrospect, Helen Bechdel’s life with her children was certainly not supported by her husband. Bechdel explains that the baby in these photographs is, in Winnicott’s terms, “not maimed, only wounded, and perhaps not irreparably.” But one thing she does feel as she continues to cite the script of Winnicott’s insights: she is the infant who at “three or four months knows what it is like to be a mother, that is a mother who is in the state of being devoted to something that is not herself.” This mystical state of knowing such devotion is interrupted for the infant who is also heartbroken that her childhood, to use her mother’s words, has come to an end: “The picture of me looking at the camera feels like the picture of the end of my childhood” (p. 35). It must be said, therefore, that the conversations with her mother that Bechdel “composes” (p. 14) reference her sustained conviction that the normal relationship between her mother and herself, mirrored in the photographs, suffered an interruption in infancy from which neither ever fully recovered. The conversations further reference an intergenerationally transmitted pathology that extends into her adulthood—a web from which

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Figure 9.10 From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Bechdel, 2006)

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she is laboring to be free, as depicted symbolically in the opening dream of the spidery window. This pilgrim’s progress from entrapment to freedom, heroically traversed by Alison Bechdel as a protagonist in her own story, covers the psychoanalytic plot of Are You My Mother? Helen Bechdel’s depression throughout Alison’s growing up is, as it were, a given; indeed, it is the operating presupposition of Bechdel’s second book about her mother, having been well-established in its “prequel,” Fun Home. In that volume, Bechdel points us to the origin of her mother’s depression during the European honeymoon in which Bruce Bechdel revives a homosexual affair (2006, p. 71). The enigma of her mother’s identity is inscribed in this scene, as we are left to wonder about a woman who would stay with a man who starts his marriage in a state of rage, sexual resentment, and secrecy. The “absent” mother of Fun Home is brilliantly sustained by the simple yet profound depiction of the mother’s face, literally empty and blank throughout its pages (Figure 9.10; Bechdel, 2006, p. 72). There are very few situations where Helen Bechdel is shown smiling in these two stories: one is the news photo Alison revives from the family photo archive, in which she is starring in a theater role, a picture meant to show her as “happy” (p. 93); the other striking depiction of her mother as “happy” or smiling is when she constructs from old photos the enjoyable play space between mother and baby (Figure 9.9). Bechdel goes further in Are You My Mother? by using Winnicott’s summary to explain her mother’s sad or blank face: the too early pregnancy of her mother with her brother (“The photos were taken right about the time she realized she was pregnant again”), and a depression whereby, as she quotes Winnicott, “she can feel herself depriving her child of what the child needs, but she cannot help the onset of a mood swing, which may quite easily be reactive to something that has impinged in her private life” (p. 34). “Impingement” is an important word for Winnicott and one that he returns to when he talks about the destructive interference in an infant’s development (Winnicott, 1954, p. 222). It seems to me very clear that for Bechdel the immediate impingement that might have precipitated her mother’s depression is her masochistic submission to her husband’s secret sexual infidelity and criminal transgressions. But the depiction in the photograph of the infant’s recoiling from what Bechdel imagines to be her father’s rages (“At three months I had seen enough of my father’s rages to be wary of them,” p. 31) also suggests an interruption. The dread

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depicted in this final photo of the sequence reaches back into the “plot” of Fun Home: for if, in her infancy, Alison is robbed of the birthright of her bliss, surely her mother is also not “properly cared for herself by her man,” as Winnicott prescribes.17 Bechdel imagines her mother’s frustration over her failed breastfeeding and the lack of an evolving rapport with the growing Alison. Her images of her mother’s blank and depressed face allude to the resistance she may have sensed, like Winnicott before her, to the exciting, erotic bond with her child. Here, and throughout the text, Bechdel seems to postulate that her mother could not enjoy this bond, the pleasurable erotism of which remained latent, unacknowledged and un-integrated. Similarly, Bechdel suggests, it is the father’s excited envy of the nursing couple that interrupts her mother’s capacity for the bliss that might have provided her child a sense of special significance. The comic’s format allows the author to proffer this interpretation in context: that Alison admits to her therapist feeling like she was the mother; that she imagines her mother dreading her oral pleasure in “cunnilingus” (p. 62); and that the deep fear of rejection learned during infancy can give rise to a kind of withholding that masks desire. The tragedies depicted throughout the text are grounded in these early tragedies, in turn emblemized by the failure of breast-feeding, the “mutually pre-emptive foreclosure” that becomes the centerpiece of the montage of baby pictures. For in the previous photographs we see Alison’s mother enjoying the “normal” mirroring of the mother/infant pair, the only instance in this graphic narrative where this mother is smiling; indeed, it is one of the only instances where we see Alison herself smiling. Once again, Bruce Bechdel appears as the “interrupter”—the husband whose envy of the maternal function is accompanied by a perhaps less acknowledged envy, of the femininity he at once disparages in his wife and foists upon his daughter to no avail—the femininity that he himself masquerades in yet another photograph, unearthed by his daughter, who ransacks the closets of his perfect house in an effort to understand her own origins, conflicts, and desires, in which he appears elegant and lithe in a woman’s bathing suit (Bechdel, 2006, p. 120). Bechdel’s photographic sequence suggests that the imagined “man behind the camera” interrupts the mutuality of the mirroring gaze, contextualized by Winnicott’s description of the mother’s mirroring of her baby and, most crucially of all, how this mirroring sows the seeds of the child’s very self, the sacred core of his being—his True Self. In parallel, the great-

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lettered “invocation” of the word child realizes this “birth.” Bechdel is, it seems to me, following the same classical formula as John Milton, when in Paradise Lost he invokes the Holy Spirit, the Heavenly Muse, to help him sing of the fall of man from the paradisical bliss of human infancy, so briefly enjoyed before its disruption by that envious interloper, Satan.18 The inexorable fall from grace, instigated by her father’s envious peering into the garden of her infancy, is the narrative truth around which Bechdel constructs her mother’s failure to continue to nurture her development. She repeatedly shows her father in a similar, envious light, resentfully yelling at his wife while she struggles to nurse baby Alison: “Can’t you keep that brat quiet!” (p. 61, p. 95), thereby ensuring that his impatience intensifies whatever anxiety or tension the nursing mother may feel (p. 35). Helen Bechdel’s absorption of her husband’s humiliations, demonstrated in myriad ways throughout the text, are captured in one passage, which rings like a bell when she proclaims to her daughter that her mother— Alison’s maternal grandmother—taught her that “boys are more important than girls” (p. 264). Bechdel comes to understand, through her analysis and her voracious reading of psychoanalytic texts, that the male privilege, the systemic assault on female reproductive privilege and capacity, generationally inscribed in her family as inevitable and “natural” can be analyzed and understood as an anguished legacy of patriarchy. Indeed, much of the implicit didacticism in Fun Home charts Bechdel’s repudiation of the masculine privilege of high Modernism in Western literary history— the very texts her father loved and wanted his daughter to love.19 But in Are You My Mother? Bechdel takes up explicitly, and indeed heuristically, the psychoanalytic theory of “penis envy” as interpreted by the more sympathetic Winnicott, who: gave a talk on feminism to the Progressive League in 1964. Some of what he says is very much of that era. “Penis envy is a fact.” But then Winnicott “reminds” the audience that “male envy of women is incalculably greater.”20 (p.264) She admires his incipient feminism when she notes that, avant la lettre, he includes gender-inclusive language in his theories of child development. And, even more helpfully to her own progression in analysis, Bechdel explains that male envy of the female’s astonishing reproductive capacity

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accounts for the immeasurably greater fury of men toward women for their power. Using Virginia Woolf’s depiction of Mr. Ramsey’s rage in To the Lighthouse as contiguous to her memory of her father’s: “Even now I can find nothing to say of his behavior save that it was brutal. If, instead of words, he had used a whip the brutality would have been no greater” (p. 265). Bechdel portrays her father’s dismay at his wife’s first pregnancy, his envious interruption of the nursing couple, his repeated name-calling of his children as “brats” and other such moments in both memoirs, exposing but not explaining his behavior, which takes on a different light when seen through the Winnicottian theories she offers. Toward the end of her narrative, for instance, she cites Winnicott’s humane assessment of “misogyny”—the war between the sexes: The awkward fact remains, for men and women, that each was once dependent on woman, and somehow a hatred of this has to be transformed into a kind of gratitude if full maturity of the personality is to be reached. (p. 279)

The Child’s Body: Wounded but not Irreparably For Bechdel, the crucial point in her treatment is her gradual coming to a deeply compassionate, if heartbreaking realization that her mother was not capable of embracing her femininity, or of protecting the body and mind of her little girl. It is this body that Bechdel later will depict, as a child of about eight years old, no longer an infant, and bearing the scars of disrupted empathic attachment, and it is this body to which we will now turn. As the narrative unfolds, Bechdel illustrates this woundedness by enumerating various scenes culled from her memory, her childhood diary, family stories, and family archives, a chronicle of the myriad ways her family home was “not a safe place to be a little girl”—to quote her second analyst (p. 279). And it is precisely her feminine body that becomes the container of her True Self, and that must be relinquished within this home environment. “I think your mother had some resentment at being female that got passed on to you,” her analyst says (p. 279). From both graphic memoirs of her life, Bechdel makes it possible to “draw”— summarily—a picture of Alison’s life as a little girl.

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She lives in a household in which a father who venerates the “phallus,” surrounds himself with obelisks as he idealizes the boy babysitter, whose dishabille photograph Bechdel discovers and makes the centerpiece of Fun Home. One perversely educational scene in this memoir—a vignette that Bechdel almost always narrates in her lectures—demonstrates the “streak of sadism reserved, it would seem, for his only daughter,” as Judith Thurman notes in The New Yorker: One day, while [Bruce Bechdel] was prepping the cadaver of a young man, he asked Alison to help him in the embalming room. The body was laid out on the table, and, in her drawing of it in Fun Home, it resembles the fallen statue of a centurion: marbly and muscular, with imposing genitals. But what most disturbed her was the gaping, vulvashaped red hole where Bruce had started to extract the viscera. She was, at the time, about nine. (Thurman, 2012, p. 52) It is well to add to this exposition that Bechdel tells us this is only her first time in the father’s mortuary chambers, a fact that adds to the unexpected hazing executed by her father. Very helpful in Thurman’s suggestive summary of this scene is her capacity to read the traumatic hermaphroditism in the body of the dead man as drawn by Bechdel, the juxtaposition of what Bechdel calls the man’s “pile of genitals” gathered on body and the gaping contrast of the bloody “female” abdominal wound. Hillary Chute enlists trauma theorists to interpret the ways that contemporary women graphic narrativists capture traumatic memory in the lines of their pages; particularly powerful in this regard is her application of Cathy Caruth’s (1995) declaration that “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (pp. 4–5). This traumatic encounter with the male body thrusts the little girl into the obsessional episode of her childhood. Writ large on the riveting image of the cadaver is a map of the psychic conflict implicit in Bechdel’s rendering of her life, relative to her father’s tragic imposition on his family of his own sexual ambivalence. The grotesque drawing of the male body stands in stark contrast to the languid pose of Roy the babysitter (who like the cadaver is recumbent), and her father’s own cross-dressing. Bechdel juxtaposes her blankness when, at her father’s behest, she confronts a violated dead body, with an image of

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her father as a boy after having been forgotten—rescued, but betraying no expression of fear or fury. Both scenes—shocking and traumatic—are rendered in matter-of-fact tones. Bechdel’s awareness of the studied sobriety in both scenes is however betrayed by their proximity to a portrayal of her determined disavowal of feeling upon learning about her father’s death. She draws attention not only to her dissociation from any sense of the gravity or impact of this loss by explicitly illustrating her furtive, stolen perverse smile as she and her brother share the shocking and tantalizing truth of his apparent suicide and the secrets that may have propelled it. Against the background of the exhibition of the male cadaver’s genitals, we learn that when Alison asks the name of her own genitals when in the bathtub with her younger brothers, her mother carefully, explicitly names each part of the boys’ genitals, while only in private does she offer to her daughter in hushed, mildly repugnant tones the dreaded word “vagina” (p. 169). One turning point in these childhood years occurs when Bechdel’s mother ceases to kiss her goodnight or touch her after discovering a “dirty” picture that Alison had drawn of female genitalia being examined by a doctor. The cessation of physical and, apparently, emotional affection correlates with the little girl’s ontological crisis—understood retrospectively, through the lens of her analysis, as a detachment from her body and an attendant over-investment and identification with her mind (or “brain”). She identifies this as a besetting, entrapping state and, as if to convey not only its severity but also its implicit self-violence and loathing, she illustrates the imagined piecemeal destruction of her appendages and torso, a gradual process in which she is finally left with only her head (Figure 9.11). The depiction of the childhood fantasy of letting go of her body is haunting as it is explanatory: rendered with disturbing irony, this sequence is a tragic representation of the impact of the preceding events associated with the little girl’s sexual investigations, encounters, and rejections. Bechdel thus depicts the self-sacrifice of her body, in identification with the aggression implicit both in her mother’s repudiation of her sexual awakening, and in her father’s exhibition of the eviscerated cadaver (pp. 143–144). The diagrams of her medical dismemberment—surrendering limbs, torso, neck—also illustrate in fantasy what it means to over-invest in her “mind”: Bechdel wonders, “how much of me is me?” (p. 140). My point is this: the depiction of the “cathexis” of the intellect at the expense of the

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Figure 9.11 AYMM, p. 141

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body represents an aspect of her childhood compliance, the creation of an unsexed False Self. Thus her story is a story of how she was able to take her dis-membered body and, through the re-membering of psychoanalysis, put it back together again. Reversing Humpty Dumpty, her personal Grimm-reaper, Bechdel’s narrative is a frank and unembarrassed story of how she restores body to brain, thereby recovering her True Self. Bechdel describes her life at around eight or nine years old as a kind of neurotic watershed. Stressing the pathology of this period, she dramatically highlights the crippling inhibition of her normal childhood activities, which she diagnoses as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). In particular, she recounts how she attacks the entries in her childhood diary: in a radical qualification of all her assertions, she inserts the phrase “I think” before every entry, eventually condensing this phrase into a shorthand “circumflex” which she heavily, repeatedly imprints over her entries, obliterating them. Bechdel dates the onset of her OCD to a Christmas pageant in which she appeared at about this time (Bechdel, 2006, p. 63). While her text in this scene describes the pageant, the accompanying drawn image of a newspaper clipping zooms in on her maternal grandmother’s inscription: an arrow pointing to her granddaughter in the photograph, above which her name is written in block letters: “ALISON.” The arrow is the same shape as the circumflex that Alison later draws over all of her diary entries, which also reduplicates the cadaver’s vaginal wound (as many analysts in her audiences have opined). Bechdel understands this period as pivotal to her development as an artist. In a kind of après coup, she recognizes her self-dismembering fantasy in which she reduces herself to a head on life support as a representation of an existential anxiety about her existence and identity: she literally points us to her grandmother’s arrow, and its announcement of her name. Foreordained in the narrative, its symbolic derivative, the “circumflex,” comes to stand for her self, and in particular her own drawing of the genital that brought her shame and rejection. In drawing the circumflex, she names that genital: writing over her diaries with this obsessive, insistent, and darkened shape, she insists upon a different kind of signification. In terms more familiar to the Lacanian paradigms to which Bechdel alludes, the insistent embedding of the circumflex perhaps aspires to a different, “nonphallic” signification: in any event, it obliterates the symbolic order as represented in her diaries and, in its darkened determined and repetitive ^, demands to be recognized as precursor to the imagistic medium of comics

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that will eventually facilitate Bechdel’s self-fashioning.21 Thus, the sketches that Bechdel literally draws over the pages of her college textbook of James Joyce’s Ulysses (p. 209) constitute an “F-u” to her father, who crammed such modernist classics down her throat, ruining them for her.22 As Art Spiegelman (2009) has clarified in his tribute to the early underground comics of the 1970s, precisely the period when Bechdel was attending college, the signifying practices of the underground comics lap at the edges of the literary and artistic but claim a subversive stature that ultimately draws from and drives into the underbelly of culture, society, and the self. This cartooning impulse is what enables Bechdel to find a form that is her own: new, rebellious and raw.

A Comic Drama Alison Bechdel’s end is, of course, her beginning. Are You My Mother? is a comic drama—referring not only to its comics medium, but also to its being “comedic”: patterned and plotted with a happy ending. Comedy relies upon a narrative of providence for its fulfillment; Bechdel’s optimism pervades her drawing together of the meaning of the collage of pictures she assembles, despite their portent. Indeed, this montage is her “map of salvation,” its endpoint the mystical invocation of the child: a signpost that stands as a marker, a prospect of what is to come, rather like the “wicket gate” of John Bunyan (1994, p. 147). Before launching into the photographic sequence of the infant’s “shrieks of joy,” she informs us of her mother’s conviction that she and her daughter share a search for patterns, significance, and the “fit” of things. “Why do you and I do that? Patterns are my existence,” writes Helen Bechdel to her daughter, who is thrilled to be so enlisted. “Everything must fit” (p. 31) Paradoxically, therefore, the photographic collage that Bechdel presents to the reader at the very outset of the narrative contains the key to her formulation of her adult conflicts: depicting the interruption of her rapport with her mother, it thus forecasts their alienation, and the False Self she will cobble together in compliance with family and other social forces. But—and this is crucial to Bechdel’s providential sense of “pattern”—it also contains the seeds of her progress in her depicted psychoanalytic treatments, the basis of her transference to her two analysts, and the liberatory effects of her exploration, reading, and creative flourishing, which herald her narrative of transformation and what can only be called rebirth. With Winnicott as

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her guide, Bechdel promises a happy ending because in a very real sense she had a happy beginning, however interrupted. And, according to psychoanalytic predestination, her happy infancy establishes a foundation upon which her analysis can, and will, “work.” Thus Bechdel’s story is ultimately one of a fall from happiness, and her long odyssey to return to the home of her mother’s admiring gaze, even though that home must be “transferred” to her therapist’s proclamation that she is “adorable” (p. 266), and, ultimately, in the inevitable progress of her True Self, to the deeper attachment that she will make to the “home” of that self—the site of her creative liberation, and of her relinquishment of the fantasy of ever returning to the mother of her infancy. Surely the breakthrough, “rock-bottom” realization, achieved in a penultimate moment of her long odyssey, is that her mother could not give her what she needed, and that indeed she cannot go home again to the bliss of their early bond (p. 270). In the end, through the narrative that she constructs with the help of her analysts and the psychoanalytic hermeneutic that structures its progression, Bechdel reconciles with her mother, and with her own history. Allegory in this sense relies on providential fulfillment: it is derived upon the principle of dramatic explication, not realistic plotting, and certainly not suspense. For as Bechdel assures us from the very beginning of the narrative: all was not lost: “I was not irreparably damaged.” Underneath her dismembered, disembodied False Self, as Bechdel comes to discover, is the wellspring of creative capacity and astonishing accomplishment available to her if she can, as Winnicott prescribes, attain adequate knowledge of and confidence in her True Self. To further this conviction, and to further my argument that Bechdel is as an artist returning to an early allegorical, heroic, discursive paradigm in order to capture the story of her own return, I will conclude with Bechdel’s highlighting the origin of the name “Alison,” a medieval love lyric, and, significantly, the revelation that her mother fell in love, as it were, with this name when she herself was perhaps most alive, while reading medieval poetry in college (Figure 9.12). Drawing the imagined lecture in which her mother first heard this poem, she writes: Mom named me after a middle-English poem she learned in college. “From alle wymmen my love is lent, and lyht on Alisoun.” The subject

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Figure 9.12 AYMM, p. 218

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of the poem desires its object. He’s seized with longing. “Ichot from hevene it is me sent . . .” He’ll give up living if Alisoun won’t have him . . . “And lyht on Alisoun.” The refrain is translated as “My love has been withdrawn from all other women and settled on Alisoun.” Bechdel uses this story to teach Freud’s concept of “cathexis”: “The economic analogy is the same one Freud used to describe cathexis. Libido is invested in an object, withdrawn, invested in another.”23 Bechdel is perhaps suggesting here that her mother “cathected” her in her infancy, and had (as most “normal” mothers do) withdrawn her love from all others in order to enter into the bliss of early bonding with her baby. Such sustained enjoyment was indisputably missing in her childhood, but optimism remains at the heart of her allegorical imagination, and allows her to conceptually understand and concretely experience her predicament—in her analysis, and in in her allegorical art—and ultimately, to “progress.” And she marshals Winnicott’s eloquent and, as she puts it, “lapidary” prose to tower, as it were, over the intrusions of the resentful, intrusive father of her youth: Winnicott, with his penetrating insight into the endless wells of envy that the bounty of the woman can provoke, as well as the appreciation of the mother’s love affair with her baby and his endless gratitude, and generosity toward mothers, proffers Alison with an alternative, safe “maternal” man, much like the maternal Christ, so well known in medieval art, who offers salve to the crippling wounds of childhood, like the milkman/maid who rescues a lost child. Bechdel explains that her mother experienced depression when a young woman on several occasions, most severely when her parents died (p. 99), and that her teenage grandmother’s year-long depression suddenly lifted when in church she laughed at a woman’s hat. She connects this to Winnicott’s mother’s depression, and his lifelong quest to heal her, captured in his worshipful Christ-centered poem devoted to her memory. Within this legacy, Bechdel reflects upon her own depression as a young woman, and the strange melancholia, as well as comfort, she finds in church, fueling her spiritual quest. It is, to be sure, the maternal Christ toward whom Winnicott directs his gaze; similarly, Bechdel’s mystical imaginings seem to seek solace for the sense of being “orphaned”—a feeling apparently incongruent in the context of a family narrative wherein her parents’ presence is ubiquitous, if not oppressive. But the point would

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surely be that these parents are felt in many, if not most ways to be absent in spirit, however present in the flesh they may be. From the standpoint of Andre Green’s (1986) theory of the “dead mother,” Alison is orphaned— robbed of the normal development of her nascent self, and deprived of the mother she longs for when she sighs, wishing that Winnicott had been her mother. His “fey” manner provides a comfortable countermand to the parents’ narcissism and conflicted identities: a pastoral home to the wandering self-in-progress she depicts in the panels of her “spiritual” autobiography, a psychoanalytic “pilgrim’s progress.” Reminiscent of the view of Bechdel’s work outlined in this essay, Dan Chiasson describes Louise Gluck’s intensely autobiographical poems as “mythical narratives” that convey a pervasive “first person” preoccupation, “one voice across contesting perspectives” (p. 87). Also relevant to the consideration of Bechdel is Chiasson’s discussion of Gluck’s use of her personal psychoanalysis—she spent seven years in treatment for the anorexia from which she almost died—to describe—or name—the condition that she could then explore in her work: Anorexia seems to have been a clumsy early form of writing poetry, focusing exclusively, and therefore, tragically on form; analysis, which replaced anorexia by describing it, would then be an improvement, except that it had no form—its truths were inert and abstract. Only in poetry could the formal manifestations of insight be explored. (Chiasson, 2012, p. 87) It is thus, I would suggest, that Bechdel, too, finds a “clumsy early form” of drawing in the by now rather famous “circumflex” with which she inscribes and obliterates her childhood diaries, in her potentially tragic, yet powerful insistence on truth, perfection, and integrity of identity in a house filled with falseness. Like Gluck, she finds in psychoanalysis—and also, it must be said, in the alternative literary tradition and feminist critique of gender and the body offered by figures from Virginia Woolf to Adrienne Rich—a description, an idea that might improve the situation of the self. It is to these “inert and abstract ideas” that Bechdel gives the form of the graphic narrative, in its animation of psychoanalytic abstractions within the odyssey of her treatment, and in its powerful personification of psychoanalytic figures. Her art aspires to and, in my estimation, achieves a

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mythic gravitas in the narrative journey-quest to find mother, and ultimately herself. From this narrow mining of the particular self, she becomes an “Everyman.” As she has remarked: “All I’ve ever written about is myself . . . I’m always striving to be a generic person” (p. 53). As such, she beckons the reader to imagine his or her own psychic rebirth through an encounter with Bechdel, analytic apologist. The child who is forgotten cannot readily re-member the variously dispersed fragments of self and the stuff of life without the mother’s containing memory and mindfulness. The grown child consolidates the aging parents’ capacity to remember, ascending to what Jacques Derrida (1995) calls the “archon,” the keeper of the “archive” of the parent’s mind (p. 36). Bechdel recognizes that in a parental or maternal dyad that has been good enough, this passing of the “archon” role reflects the reward for attuned parenting: that the meaning and dignity of mind conferred upon the child is now returned in kind to the parent who relinquishes this function to the child. It seems to me that this line of thought is a particularly

Figure 9.13 AYMM, pp. 288–289: “There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. But in its place, she has given me something else. ‘How’s that?’ Something, I would argue, far more valuable. ‘I think I can get up now.’ She has given me a way out.”

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compelling way of understanding the intense work of Bechdel’s project, in which she negotiates the pressures of time and the control of meaning in her narrative: just as her mother previously wrote down her daughter’s dictated diary entries, she “composes” her aging mother by typing up her conversations. She can then literally re-member things differently from her mother, even though she eagerly interviews her and draws upon her version of things in both senses of the word: she draws what she can from her mother’s stories, and draws upon them with her cartoons and captions, making them her own. In many ways, her entire project is to wrest the archive from her mother as its keeper and interpreter, and foster her own chains of significance. In this sense, the archive functions both as a central pool of evidence and inspiration, and the narrative truth to which she aspires . . .

The Crippled Child Game: The Way Out Bechdel starts the narrative of her “pilgrim’s progress” with a dream of an imprisoning cellar from which she could not find a “way out.” She ends her narrative with a memory from what I have called the “watershed” period of her childhood, during which, under the sway of her fantasies of dismemberment and disability, she and her mother played what they called the “crippled child game.” In an ironic, unconscious recognition of her sense of being crippled, she would pretend as much, and her mother would play along. If she needed leg braces, her mother would pretend to supply them; if she could not get up, her mother would offer prosthetic support (Figure 9.13). Famously now, this panel concludes Bechdel’s allegory of the psychoanalytic soul, offering this childhood game as a moving, particular, profound example of sublimation. In play, Bechdel and her mother shared a secret self—wounded, but not irreparably. Later in life, Donald Winnicott, her mystic guide and psychoanalytic muse, gave her the theoretical framework and empathic stance she needed to recognize that it was her mother’s capacity to imagine and to create, to play along precisely with the shared illusion of being wounded—the “vulnus” of vulnerability, the fantasy of the gaping wound of the female genital—that gave her a way out. It was this attunement, this play, which fostered the powers of imagination that opened the door of her daughter’s prison. Creativity would be her cure.

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Notes 1 Unless otherwise noted, all citations are to Bechdel (2012). 2 Jonathan Safran Foer; Bechdel (2012, back matter). Of note, Bechdel has since been named a 2014 MacArthur awardee, also known as the “genius” grant. 3 Clifford here quotes from Frances Yates’ explication of Giordano Bruno in The Art of Memory (Yates, 1966, p. 248). 4 Comics “is a medium that builds and organizes the space of the page by assembling a series of moments—thus turning, as Spiegelman has often commented, time into space” (Chute and Jagoda, 2014, pp. 3–4). 5 Bechdel (2012, inside cover). 6 Bechdel remarked upon the dream structure of this narrative at the 2013 International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education in Philadelphia, where she was given the Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educators Award, and made a similar statement in New York at the 2014 meeting of The American Psychoanalytic Association. 7 See also Bechdel’s depiction of herself as a fetus in the web-like womb of her mother (p. 138). 8 In one recorded conversation, Helen Bechdel discusses how scared she is of spiders; Alison, as narrator, writes, “when I was little we couldn’t even say the word ‘spider’ ” (p. 275). Ellen Handler Spitz (2014) has recently offered insightful associations to the spider as both threatening “Maman” and industrious agent of creativity. She is one of the few recent readers of Are You My Mother? who feelingly foregrounds Bechdel’s creative bond with her mother. 9 See Gardner (2012) for the emergence of the superhero genre, which began what is often referred to as the “Golden Age” of comics in 1938 with Superman, and ended with the publication of Frederic Wertham’s 1954 diatribe against comics, Seduction of the Innocent (1954). This led many comic artists including Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Justin Green to begin what is now referred to as the “underground” comics movement, to which Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (2008) belongs; her more recent work is a direct descendant of this movement. 10 See Coogan (2006) for the history of the superhero narrative which follows the same monomyth structure that Joseph Campbell outlines—that of the “separation-initiation-return structure” (p. 122). This same tradition, that of the transformative odyssey, is evident in Bechdel’s narrative and is also the basic outline used in the 1955 comic book series Psychoanalysis, published by EC Comics (New York). Psychoanalysis in this series is purported as a kind of superpower transformation. Here, Bechdel seems to be playing up on the trope of the superhero narrative and the belief that one’s own power lies in a return to and understanding of the origin story. 11 Circumstances that prevent the individual’s “going on being” can be “so great that the individual has no chance (apart from rebirth in the course of analysis)

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12 13

14

15

16 17

18 19

20

21

22

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of making natural progress in emotional development” (Winnicott, 1949, p. 189, emphasis added). As cited in Hoffman (2011, p. 145). Bechdel remarked upon the origin of this narrative emerging out of the finding of these pictures at the 2013 International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education in Philadelphia. Additionally, she made a similar statement at the January 2014 meeting of The American Psychoanalytic Association in New York. Spiegelman is very open with his father about the transcription of his story, narrating the conversation he has with him when he buys a tape recorder (1986, p. 73). He also states that he will visit his father to obtain his story. Spiegelman the narrator writes, “for the next few months I went back to visit my father quite regularly, to hear his story” (p. 26). Bechdel (2012) tells us that she did not obtain her mother’s permission for recording the spoken memories of her family trauma, convinced as she was that her mother would not approve: “I confess that I have taken to transcribing what she says. I don’t think she knows I’m doing it, which makes it a bit unethical” (p. 11). Bechdel (2006) remarks that in fact it had been the mailman who had rescued her father from the quicksand-like mud: but she prefers the image of the milky, maternal savior, all in white (p. 41). This is also the “upshot” of the story Bechdel repeats from Winnicott’s case of the woman on the beach (p. 201). For a child psychoanalyst’s notions of the infant’s “birthright,” see Fraiberg (1977); see also Camden (2007). Bechdel portrays her father’s interruption of mirroring and breast-feeding in the earliest months of her infancy: this is distinct from Oedipal triangulation, or the “normal” separation of the father as a Lacanian third term. See also Fulmer (2006), who understands Paradise Lost as a family drama. In Fun Home, Bechdel is seen with a stack of feminist and queer counter tradition books, on the phone with her father. He says to her, “What are you reading? Anything good?” Her response “Uh . . . not really” (2006, p. 76), suggesting again that these are narratives that do not fit into his tradition— they are stories he has repudiated. Freud formulates his thoughts on penis envy in the 1908 essay “On the Sexual Theories of Children.” Winnicott responds to Freud’s essay in the lecture that Bechdel cites in her book. See Lacan (2007). Bechdel states in an interview that she “started with text . . . but at a certain point, I started hitting a dead end with that.” She then switched from a Word processor to Illustrator because as she states “it was a way for me to think visually” (Chute, 2014, p. 161). Bechdel has frequently stated this in interviews and lectures, such as those given at the 2013 International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education in Philadelphia and the January 2014 meeting of The American Psychoanalytic Association in New York.

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23 This popular love poem adapted the conventions of courtly love for a bourgeois lady, bringing the entire weight of this tradition and its mystical analogies of romantic love with transcendent desire for the divine into the daily, the mundane world.

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Chute, H. (2014). Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chute, H., & Jagoda, P. (2014). Comics & Media. Crit. Inquiry, 40, 3–4. Clifford, G. (1974). The transformations of allegory. London: Routledge. Coogan, P. (2006). Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Austin, TX: MonkeyBrain. Cvetkovich, A. (2008). Drawing the archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Women’s Studies Quart., 36, 111–128. Derrida, J. (1995). Archive Fever. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eastman, P. D. (1960). Are You My Mother? New York: Random House. Eigen, M. (1998). The Psychoanalytic Mystic. Binghamton, NY: Free Association. Fraiberg, S. (1977). Every Child’s Birthright. New York: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1908). On the Sexual Theories of Children. Standard ed., 9. London: Hogarth Press, 1959. Fulmer, R. H. (2006). From law to love: Young adulthood in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Am. Imago, 63, 25–56. Gardner, J. (2012). Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Garner, D. (2012). Artist, draw thyself (and your mother and therapist). The New York Times, May 2, p. C1. Goldman, D. (1993). The Search of the Real: The Origins and Originality of D. W. Winnicott. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Green, A. (1986). The dead mother. In On Private Madness (pp. 142–173). London: Hogarth Press. Hoffman, M. (2011). Toward Mutual Recognition: Relational Psychoanalysis and the Christian Narrative. London: Routledge. Konstantinou, L. (2014). Relatable transitional objects. The New Inquiry (blog). Retrieved September 3, 2014, from http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/relatabletransitional-objects. Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (B. Fink trans.). New York: Norton. Lewis, C. S. (1936). The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1958. McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. Miller, A. (1979). The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books. O’Connor, F. (1969). Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Quilligan, M. (1979). The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rose, J. (1986). Sexuality in the Field of Vision. New York: Verso. Spiegelman, A. (2009). Foreword. In J. Green, Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary. San Francisco: McSweeney’s. Spiegelman, A. (1986). Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon.

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Spitz, E. H. (2014). Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs on page and stage: “I Wanna Know What’s True.” Contemp. Psychoanal., 50, 459–483. The Book of Common Prayer. (1979). New York: Seabury Press. Thurman, J. (2012). Drawn from life: The world of Alison Bechdel. The New Yorker, April 23. Available at: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/ drawn-from-life. Watson, J. (2008). Autographic disclosures and genealogies of desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Biography, 31, 27–58. Wertham, F. (1954). Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart. Whitehead, A. (2004). Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Whitlock, G. (2006). Autographics: The seeing “I” of the comics. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 52, 965–979. Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Birth memories, birth trauma and anxiety. In (1992) Collected Papers: Through Pediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 174–193). London: Karnac. Winnicott, D. W. (1954). Mind and its relation to psyche-soma. In (1992) Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 243-254). London: Karnac. Winnicott, D. W. (1959–1964). Classification: Is there a psychoanalytic contribution to psychiatric classification? In (1965) The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp. 124–139). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In (1965) The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp. 140–152). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Winnicott, D. W. (1963). Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of certain opposites. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (pp. 179–192). London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-analysis. Yates, F. (1966). The Art of Memory. London: Penguin.

Index

Note: italicized page numbers refer to the image on the page Abraham, Karl 218 Alexis, Paul 48 allegory 12, 27, 32, 43, 46, 211–214, 215–216, 221, 223, 229, 246 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 121n2 Andre, Carl 130 Antonioni, Michelangelo 234; Blow Up 234 Anzieu, Didier 7 après-coup 244 Atlas, James 171 auto-da-fé 119–120 Bain, Alexander 57 Balsam, Rosemary 167n11 Balzac, Honoré de 33, 36; The Unknown Masterpiece 33, 34, 35–36 Barnet, Will 126 Barry, Robert 134 Bechdel, Alison 9, 211–212, 214–216, 218, 221, 223, 226–229, 233–235, 237–242, 244–246, 248–251; allegorical autographics 9, 211–212, 215–216, 218, 221, 223, 229, 233, 246, 248, 251; arachnophobia 218; Bruce (father) 229, 233, 237–242, 244–245, 248, 253n15,17; “circumflex” 244, 249; “crippled child game” 251; dreamer and dream analyst 216, 218, 226, 237, 251, 252n6; Helen (mother) 211, 215, 218, 227, 229, 233–235, 237–240, 242, 245–246, 248, 251, 252n8; interpreter of Winnicott 215,

221, 223, 227, 229, 234–235, 238–239, 240, 246, 248–249, 251; mirroring and its failures 229, 230–232, 234–235, 238, 253n17; use of montage 229, 230–232, 233–234, 238, 245; mysticism 226–229, 235, 241, 245, 248, 251; obsessionality 241, 244; trauma and self-fashioning repair 240–242, 244–246, 248–251; see also Bechdel, Alison, works of art Bechdel, Alison, works of art: Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 9, 211, 214–216, 217, 218, 219–220, 221, 222, 223, 224–225, 226, 227–229, 230–232, 235, 237–242, 243, 245–246, 247, 250, 251; Dykes to Watch Out For 252n9; Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 211, 214, 218, 233, 236, 237–239, 241, 253n19; see also Bechdel, Alison Bellow, Saul 9, 170–176, 178–179; as “Chick” 170–174, 176, childhood peritonitis 174; ciguatoxin poisoning 173; morbid preoccupation 173–175; Naomi Rose (daughter) 171; Ravelstein 9, 170; see also Bloom, Allan Benglis, Linda 127 Benjamin, Jessica 167n4, 167n9 Béraud, Jean 54 Berger, Harry 60 Bernard, Émile 40–41, 49, 56, 62, 76, 80, 90

258

Index

Bizet, Georges 94, 176; Carmen 176; see also Bizet, Georges, works of art Bizet, Georges, works of art: L’Arlésienne (opera, after Daudet) 94; see also Bizet, Georges Bloom, Allan 9, 170, 171–172, 175–176; as “Ravelstein” 171–174, 176; death from HIV/AIDS 171; The Closing of the American Mind 172; see also Bellow, Saul Bourgeois, Louise 218 Bronfen, Elisabeth 61 Brunner-Orne, Martha 184; see also Martin Orne; Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey Bunyan, John 211, 216, 218, 245; The Pilgrim’s Progress 216 Cahn, Isabelle 63 Campbell, Joseph 252n10 Carrier, David 12, 24, 31, 37n3, 4 Carroll, Lewis 121n2 Cézanne, Hortense Fiquet 8, 40–42, 45–46, 48–49, 56, 57–58, 61–66; critical hostility toward 48–49; historical resistance to her importance 40–41, 45, 48–49; nickname, “La Boule” 48, 61–2; see also Cézanne, Paul Cézanne, Paul 8, 40–43, 45–49, 51, 53, 56–66; concern with boundaries 41, 56; difficult temperament 41–42, 49, 62–63; “l’écorché” 56; “sensation” in painting 64; unconventional marriage 45–46, 62–63; see also Cézanne, Paul, works of art Cézanne, Paul, works of art (portraits of Hortense Fiquet): agelessness of their subject 60; inaccessibility of their subject 42, 45, 57–58; irrelevance of costume 51, 53; irrelevance of pose 60–61; Madame Cézanne (Berlin) 57–59; Madame Cézanne (Detroit) 51, 52, 53, 61; Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (New York) 50, 51, 61; Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (São Paulo) 50, 51; Madame Cézanne in a Yellow

Chair (Basel) 50, 51; Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair (Chicago) 50, 51; Madame Cézanne in Blue (Houston) 51, 52, 53; Portrait of Madame Cézanne (Paris) 51, 52, 53; Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (Zürich) 44, 45; Seated Woman (Madame Cézanne) 65–66; unstable representation of their subject 42, 46, 51–53, 57–59; Woman with Green Hat (Madame Cézanne) 47, 61; vexed reception history 42–43, 45–46; see also Cézanne, Paul Cézanne, Paul (son) 45, 62 Chamberlain, John 127, 136 Chantelou, Paul Fréart de 11, 27, 30; see also Poussin, Nicholas Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 144 Chiasson, Dan 249 Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff) 128, 131 Chute, Hillary 213–215, 241, 252n4, 253n21 Clifford, Gay 212, 221, 252n3 Close, Chuck 127, 129–131 Cone, Claribel and Etta, collector-muses of Matisse 139 Courbet, Auguste 46, 53 Crary, Jonathan 57–59 Crumb, R. (Robert) 252n9 Dahl, Hartvig 164, 168n13 Dalí, Gala 8, 98–101, 103–106, 107, 108–109, 112–117, 121n2; as Dalí’s revived maternal imago 99–101, 104, 106, 108, 112–113, 116; role in constructing Dalí’s persona 104, 106, 111–115 Dalí, Salvador 8, 98–101, 103–106, 107, 108, 110–120, 121n2; annihilative, cannibalistic maternal imago 104–106, 108, 109, 112, 116, 118–121; The Secret Life (La Vie Secrète de Salvador Dalí) 98–101, 104, 111, 113, 116, 122n8, 10; as “Gala-Dalí” 98, 115; fictive companion “Galuchka” 108–110, 113, 120; Gala as hard carapace for 103; identification with soft maternal

Index

liquid 103, 111, 116–119, 121; mandated perfection 100–101, 105–109, 111, 116, 120; mother 101, 104–106, 108, 110–113, 116; see also Dalí, Salvador, works of art Dalí, Salvador, works of art: Madonna of Port Lligat 101, 102; Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder 106, 107, 108, 111; see also Dalí, Salvador Daudet, Alphonse 86; L’Arlésienne 94; Tartarin in the Alps 86; see also Georges Bizet Degas, Edgar 46, 53–56, 61; see also Degas, Edgar, works of art Degas, Edgar, works of art: Bust Portrait of a Woman 53–55; Woman with Umbrella (Berthe Jeantaud) 54, 55; see also Degas, Edgar Delacroix, Eugène 40, 46 Denis, Maurice 62, 67n12 Desjardins, Paul 25, 37n8 Dickens, Charles 93; Christmas Stories, 93 Dingley, “Nana” 185; see also Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey Dorival, Bernard 40 Dughet, Jacques 17, 25, 37n6; Gaspard 32; see also Nicholas Poussin Du Maurier, Daphne 8–9, 144, 155, 157; Rebecca 8–9, 144, 150–152, 155, 157, 163–166; Amazon reviews of 148–163 Eastman, P. D. (Philip Dey) 215; Are You My Mother 215 Éluard, Paul 109 Fenichel, Otto 29 Ficino, Marsilio 27; see also Plato Fliess, Wilhelm 164–165 Freedman, Janis 171, 175; as “Rosamund,” 172–173, 176; see also Saul Bellow Freud, Sigmund 13, 98–100, 133–134, 144–149, 160, 162, 164–166, 167n3, 6, 168n15, 178, 227, 248, 253n20; Martin (son) 164 Fry, Roger 48, 66n5

259

Gardner, Isabella Stewart 44 Gascoyne, David 122n7 Gasquet, Joachim 42, 64, 66n4, 66n8 Gauguin, Paul 8, 46, 70–77, 79–80, 82–96, 134; see also Gauguin, Paul, works of art Gauguin, Paul, works of art: Blue Trees 77, 79–80, 96n3; Madame Ginoux 73–74, 91; Madame Roulin 77, 78, 79–80, 96n3; The Night Café 74–76, 93; see also Vincent Van Gogh; Gauguin, Paul Géricault, Théodore 46 Gide, André 33, 37n8, 62, 67n12 Ginoux, Marie 70, 72–74, 76, 93–96; Joseph-Michel (husband) 72 Glimcher, Arnie 134 Gluck, Louise 249 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 25, 33; Faust 25, 33 Greenson, Ralph 178 Grenier, Catherine 98, 122n9 Grimm, the Brothers 233; “Hansel and Gretel” 233 Heine, Heinrich 205–205; “The Ocean Spectre” 205 Hitchcock, Alfred 9, 148, 168n14; Rebecca 8–9, 141, 144, 158, 161; Amazon reviews of 148–163 Hoornik, Sien 70 identification 74, 92–93, 95, 132, 143–148, 159, 161–162, 164–165, 167n9, 168n13, 168n15; as erotic form 144, 161, 165 “inhibiting angel” 9, 143–144, 162, 166 “interworld” 8, 41, 56; see also mirroring James, William 46, 57 Jeanne-Claude (Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon) 128, 131; see also Christo Jensen, William 98–99; Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy 98–100 Joseph-Lowery, Frédérique 104, 116, 118–119, 122n5, 8, 123n15 Joyce, James 243; Ulysses 243, 245

260

Index

Judd, Donald 127, 130 Juno 19, 27, 33; iconographic diadem 27–29, 32–33 Klein, Melanie 133–134, 208, 229 Konstantinou, Lee 215 Koons, Jeff 136 Kubie, Lawrence 178 Kumin, Maxine 186; see also Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey Langland, William 212 Laplanche, Jean 4 l’enveloppe sonore 7 Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples) 212 Lewitt, Sol 130, 134 Liberi, Marco 4; see also Liberi, Marco, works of art Liberi, Marco, works of art: Jupiter and Mnemosyne 4, 5, 6; see also Liberi, Marco Lindsay, Jack 48–49 Littré, Émile 63 Loewald, Hans 133–135, 167n2 Longhi, Alberto 134 Lubar, Robert 63 McCloud, Scott, 213–214 Mahler, Gustav 178 Manet, Édouard 46, 53, 57; Suzanne Leenhoff (wife) 46, 49, 56 Mangold, Robert 128–129, 131 Mangold, Sylvia Plimack 128, 131 Marin, Louis 32 Matisse, Henri 127–128, 130, 133–134, 139; Amelie (wife) 127–128, 134, 137; see also Cone, Claribel and Etta; Schukin, Serge Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 41, 63 Miller, Alice 221, 237; The Drama of the Gifted Child 221 Milton, John 4, 239; Paradise Lost 239, 253n18 mirroring 2, 8, 41, 105, 128, 133, 143, 177, 179–180, 229, 230–232, 235, 238, 253n17 Mnemosyne 1–4, 5, 6, 8–10, 27, 132, 135, 137–138; waters conferring memory 2, 3, 27

Modell, Arnold 4, 6 Monet, Claude 66n7; Camille Doncieux (wife) 46, 49, 56 Morandi, Giorgio 134 Muse, annihilative maternal imago as 104–106, 109, 110, 113, 116, 118–121; analyst as 9, 139, 177–180, 186–190, 192–193, 196–203, 209, 215–216, 221, 223, 227–229, 234–235, 237, 239–240, 248, 251; as containers of memories 8, 25, 83, 86, 89, 96; as “eternal feminine” 7, 12, 25, 31, 33, 35–36; as perfection embodied 33, 100–101, 105–111, 116, 120, 161, 163, 166; as tolerant other 8, 40–42, 56, 61, 65–66; “badenough” 166; collector and patron as 8, 125–126, 129, 138–139; commoditizing 103–104, 114–115, 134; comparison to internal good object 6; consuming 6, 111, 115; critic as 134; cultural 9; dealer as 134; idealized 33, 71, 76, 80, 92, 172, 177; in classical mythology 1–2, 4, 144; internalization of 29–30; maternal 7, 24–25, 27, 33, 80, 83, 86–87, 100–101, 104–106, 108–118, 120–121, 133–134, 215, 248, 250; mitigating aggression and destruction 6–7, 9, 143–144; mitigating anxiety and depression 103, 132, 144; mystic 9, 227–228, 248, 251; non-idealized 43–44, 53–56, 65, 96; parental 128–134, 139, 250; paternal 131, 134; popular Renaissance subject 2; predecessors as 26, 35; rescuer as 19–20, 22–23, 170–173, 175–178; traditional conceptualization 4, 6–7, 43, 70, 96, 114, 134; see also Mnemosyne Nevelson, Louise 134 Nochlin, Linda 46 object choice 134, 145, 147, 167n3 Oedipal dynamics 6, 132, 142, 145–149, 153, 158–163, 165–166, 167–168n12, 178, 253n17 oral tradition 2, 4, 10, 134

Index

Orne, Martin 9, 181, 183, 184, 186–189, 192–195, 197–206, 208–209; see also Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey Parker, Rozsika 6, 9, 142–144, 160, 165, 167n2 Picasso, Pablo 6, 33, 35–36, 45, 46, 63–64, 70; see also Picasso, Pablo, works of art Picasso, Pablo, works of art: An Unknown Masterpiece, illustrations for 33, 34, 35–36; Seated Woman (Portrait of Marie Thérèse) 36; see also Walter, Marie-Thérèse; Picasso, Pablo Plath, Sylvia 204, 233 Plato 4, 27, 38n1; see also Ficino, Marsilio Pointel, Jean 12, 31 Poussin, Nicholas 7–8, 11–13, 15, 17, 19–33, 36; Anna Marie Dughet (wife) 7, 12, 19, 25; impersonal reputation 12, 15, 32; premier peintre du roi, reluctant 13, 15; Reneé (sister) 25; syphilis 15, 17, 19, 32, 37n6; theme of salvation 19, 22–24; see also Poussin, Nicholas, works of art Poussin, Nicholas, works of art: Apollo and Daphne 19, 20; Apollo and the Muses (Parnassus) 25–27; Continence of Scipio 13, 14, 15; Esther before Ahasuerus 22–23; Et in Arcadia Ego (Louvre) 34, 35–36; iconic profiled woman from 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27–28, 29, 31–33, 36; Moses Saved from the Water 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 24; Saint Peter and Saint John Curing the Lame Man 17, 18, 19, 24; SelfPortrait (Louvre) 11–12, 24, 28, 29–31; see also Dughet, Jacques; Poussin, Nicholas Pozzi, Lucio 127, 131 Prose, Francine 98, 114, 121n2 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 1; Parnassus 1–4 Rebecca See Alfred Hitchcock; Daphne Du Maurier

261

Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn) 46, 53, 60, 70; Hendrickje Stoffels 47, 49, 70; Saskia van Uylenburgh (wife) 46, 49 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 49; Aline Charigot (wife) 46, 49, 66n7 Rewald, John 45, 49, 67n11, 96n2 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 43, 53, 60 Rich, Adrienne 249 Richards, I. A. (Ivor Armstrong) 148–149, 186 Rilke, Rainer Maria 121n2 Rishel, Joseph 40, 42, 45, 61 Rojas, Carlos 101, 122n6 Rosenfeld, Herbert 6 Roulin, Augustine 70, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82–84, 86–87, 89–90, 96; Joseph 76–77, 80, 89 Rubens, Peter Paul 43, 47, 53, 61, 66n4, 70; Hélène Fourment (wife) 47, 51, 61, 66n4, 70; Isabella Brandt (wife) 47, 49–51; Portrait of Suzanne Fourment (The Straw Hat) 47; Suzanne Fourment 47 Sargent, John Singer 44 Sasaki, Megumi 125–126, 128, 135–136, 138; Herb and Dorothy 125–132, 134–139; Herb and Dorothy 50x50 138; see also Vogel, Herb and Dorothy Schukin, Serge, collector-muse to Matisse 139 Scipio Africanus 13, 14, 15; see also Poussin, Nicolas Segal, Hannah 133 Segatori, Agostina 94 Selznick, David O. 144; see also Rebecca Semrad, Elvin 184 Seurat, Georges 46 Sexton, Alfred Muller, II “Kayo” 185; see also Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey 9, 181, 182; Ralph Harvey (father) 184–185, 196; Mary Gray Staples Harvey (mother) 184; “Flee on Your Donkey” 192–193, 195–198; To Bedlam and

262

Index

Part Way Back 189; “The Wedding Night” 203, 205–210; “You, Dr. Martin” 189–191; see also Orne, Martin Shaddock, David 6 Shiff, Richard 41, 43 Siena, James 128–129, 137 Spiegelman, Art 245, 252n4, 252n9, 253n14 Spitz, Ellen Handler 252n8 Stein, Gertrude 45, 63–64 Steir, Pat 134 Stevens, Alfred 54 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 93; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 93, 95 Sudek, Josef 133 Tachacbasov, Alexandra 172; see also Bellow, Saul Thurman, Judith 241 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) 4, 60 Toklas, Alice B. 63–64 Tutter, Adele 121n3, 123n14, 133 Tuttle, Richard 129 Van Gogh, Theo 71–72, 80, 82–84, 88–94, 97n6 Van Gogh, Vincent 8, 70–77, 80, 82–96, 97n6; conflictual relationship with Gauguin 8, 71–72, 75–76, 83, 86–89, 93–94, 96; dreams for the Yellow House (Arles) 71–72, 88–89; illness and breakdown 80, 83, 86–91, 93–95; preoccupation with Marie Ginoux 94–95; “replacement child” 84–85; see also Van Gogh, Vincent, works of art Van Gogh, Vincent, works of art: Augustine Roulin 77, 78; La

Berceuse (The Lullaby) 77, 80, 81, 82–84, 86–87, 89–90; L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) (Paris) 73, 74, 77; L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) (New York) 74, 76–77; L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) (private collection) 91–95; L’Arlésienne (after Gauguin) 91, 95–96; The Potato Eaters 85–86; see also Gauguin, Paul; Ginoux, Marie and Joseph-Michel; Roulin, Augustine and Joseph; Van Gogh, Theo; Van Gogh, Vincent Veronese, Paolo 60 Vigée-Lebrun, Elizabeth 60 Vogel, Herbert and Dorothy 8, 125–132, 134–138; as Zeus and Mnemosyne 135–137; see also Sasaki, Megumi Wagner, Richard 82, 167n4, 176 Walter, Marie-Thérèse 70; see also Picasso, Pablo Winnicott, Clare 223, 224 Winnicott, D. W. (Donald Woods) 6, 9, 134, 215–216, 221, 223, 224–225, 227–229, 234–235, 237–240, 246, 248–249, 251, 252n11, 251n16, 251n20; as psychoanalytic mystic 215–216, 221, 223, 227–229, 235, 251; “True Self” and “False Self” 240, 246; see also Bechdel, Alison Wölfli, Adolf 90 Woolf, Virginia 141–144, 149, 215, 240, 249; “Professions for Women” 141; To The Lighthouse 240 Zola, Émile 41, 48–49, 62, 67n11; L’Œuvre 49