Imagendering II

11      Many female authors also achieved a disruption of received notions by rewriting descriptions of art works from a different point of view. Charlotte Bronte used a painting of an Orientalized nude of Cleopatra in Villette (1853) as an occasion for a deliberate misapprehension.[2]The painting has been identified as Eduard de Biefve, "Une Almée," which Bronte had seen at the triennial Salon de Bruxelles 1843. Cf. Onslow 450-473. The confrontation of her heroine Lucy is staged as an encounter which gives its viewer qualms about her female identity. It results in her comment: "If I am not she, Cleopatra, who is this 'I' which I believe to be?" This is not just part of a psychological maturing process, the scene in the museum where Lucy looks at the painting is carefully dramatized to produce a conflicting encounter with aesthetic, ethical and gendered aspects of the gaze in the protagonist and by extension in a female reader. Lucy is facing the nude in the painting but also herself as the object of a male gaze (by Monsieur Paul) and aware of the spectacle of the painted female nude for all the others looking at it (Ender 89). Significantly, there are no women in Bronte's imaginary museum except for those framed on the walls but there is a crowd of male spectators with eyeglasses "exceedingly taken with this dusk and portly Venus of the Nile" (Bronte 209). Lucy who has chosen to look at this picture is told by Monsieur Paul that it is not proper for her. He tries to take her away and make her understand that she should be looking at other paintings "more like her" and he positions her in front of genre sequence showing the stages of ideal womanhood entitled "La vie d'une femme." Lucy dislikes the "vapid," "bloodless," "brainless" representations of decorous femininity and resists his interdiction of the nude, but she also resists the traditional reading of the nude in favour of a personal ironical misreading:

She was indeed, extremely well fed: very much butcher's meat - to say nothing of bread, vegetables and liquids - must she have consumed to attain that [...] wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half-reclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to say; broad daylight blazed round her; she appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments [...] out of the abundance of material - seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery - she managed to make insufficient raiment. (Bronte 203)

12       The female protagonist here lays claim to the "innocent eye" later called for by the art critic John Ruskin, pretending to be unable to explain the disarray of the exotic boudoir, the reclining pose and the near-nakedness of the figure. She directs naive exhortations at the subject of the painting to get up and tidy up the mess. Interpreting the exotic nude determinedly within categories of European domestic genre painting as a household mismanaged by an indolent woman, she ridicules the current taste for Orientalist nudes, which showed slave-markets or harems and gratified male voyeurism while at the same time exploiting sentiments of imperial superiority. The satirical passage pointedly lays bare the sexist commodifications in academy painting and in the politics of official exhibitions. The passage makes clear that the unstable borderline between the naked and the nude is a distinction in ways of seeing, where nakedness is the experience of a real and vulnerably exposed body and nudity is a prerequisite of art and therefore an aesthetic experience (Clark 4). The scene of Lucy's misreading is contemporary with Manet's analogous experiment in translation the nude into nakedness in his "Olympia." Both unsettle the established male-centred conventions of viewing the female form (Ender 96). Both contribute to the contemporary negotiations of female representation and female spectatorship, while Bronte specifically empowers a female act of spectatorship to draw attention to ways of seeing and their ideologies.

13      At the end of the century, when anxieties about gender became omnipresent, a host of different images was produced. As female submission was called into question by emancipist discourses and practices, domestic scenes in painting (Johnson 256, 83, 86) and in literature tended to depict more problematic relationships. At the end of the century, gender concepts were in flux in intellectual and artistic discourses. Abandoning moralising didacticism, fiction concentrated increasingly on observable phenomena. Images of containment of women were not the only reaction to the changing state of affairs, unconventional female behaviour came to be seen in a more sympathetic light. Behaviour patterns constructed as feminine could take on exaggerated forms which endangered normative assumptions about woman's roles in society. Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray, George Meredith's Lord Ormond and his Aminta, to say nothing of Oscar Wilde's and G. B. Shaw's plays showed non-conforming women as victims of the hypocrisy of respectable society. In texts by Robert Browning, Meredith, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and others who took part in the creation of the New Woman-ideal males were guilty of egoism and insensitivity and indirectly responsible for the ruin of female fates. Patriarchal authority was increasingly represented as a stifling and often blighting influence on the lives of its dependent wives and children. Thus the development of fiction and drama from moral tale to psychological realism contained an increasing scepticism towards the value of the imposed system of gender difference.

14      Not surprisingly, the period of gender crisis was also one of redefinition of urban spaces. On the upper end of the social scale public spaces previously reserved for men, whose aggressive, competitive abilities fitted them for public life, were opened up for women as consumers. Women "in the street" had been an anomaly, not in terms of numbers but in terms of categories of respectable womanhood. Ladies were not supposed to be seen walking the streets, so as not to be confused with those professionals who were considered criminal offenders and a danger to the moral fabric of society. However, as the topography of cities altered, women increasingly conquered public territory (Wolff 71). The establishment of large department stores for instance turned shopping into a leisure-time activity for women and redefined the gender constructions of public activity (Friedberg 61). By the 1870s an active consuming public, increasingly and deliberately addressed as female by the advertising world, thronged through boulevards, department stores and exhibitions. The resulting uncertainties in social structure are depicted in cartoon of ladies being mistaken for "non-ladies" while waiting for the bus. This increased presence of women in the city boulevards created new options for female gazes within the developing consumer society and gradually led to a shift in the distribution of spectatorial roles.

15      Even within the home the private individual was not free from consistent exposure to a cross-class gaze, a gaze that often produced irritation if not downright antagonism. Robert Kerr contended in his 1864 book The Gentleman's House, or how to plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace that the most essential division in the design of a residence was to preclude observation by the servants (Beard 240). The provision of back-stairs ensured that the wealthy house consisted of one structure for the family, horizontal and open in its plan, and one for the servants, vertical and confined from attic to basement (Tristram 38). Kerr's remarks point to the considerable anxiety felt by the well to do about cross-class surveillance. In a mass society, freedom from observation had become a class as well as a gender privilege.