Imagendering II

26      Sargent's assimilation into high society as an American prodigy who gave people the glossy effigies they demanded should not detract from his more modern achievements. He managed to capture visually the undercurrents of anxiety that affected London society at the end of the century. One of the main anxieties was the break-up of the social fabric through destabilization of gender roles. To express these prevalent insecurities in his fashionable portraits, he employed three main strategies: Obscure and unstable spatial organization, theatricality of pose, and a response-provoking structure of gazes.

27     Let us consider briefly his group portrait "The three Misses Vickers" (1884), a painting which was faulted by critics for its failure to do justice to the social rank of the Misses Vickers, The Athenaeum called the painting an "insult to their evident high culture" (Hills 98). What made most viewers uncomfortable was again the unconventional approach to composition, the oddly angled perspective and spatial ambiguity in the mysterious darkness which fill the background. The three sisters are highlighted against the dark interior, which seems to throw the figures forward. The impression of looking at them from an unrealistically high angle is increased by the sharply cropped foreground. The resulting compression of the figures creates a tension which can be read into the mood of the sitters. There is an emphasized lack of communication among the young women in the different directions of their gazes which seems to suggest that the siblings are not at ease with each other. They seem to exemplify three types of looking: the demure submissive downcast eyes of the middle sister, on the left an abstracted inward look of dreamy abstractedness and on the right, turned away from the others, a startling uncompromising directness of gaze at the viewer. Sargent renders three different versions of femininity as potentialities within the spectrum of respectability, but the bold outward gaze is clearly privileged in the pictorial structure. The outward gaze of the sister conveys an exciting sense of nervous expectancy. She seems intent on the conversation of an unseen companion, who must be supplied by the spectator himself (Kilmurray/ Ormond 107). A visual response is forced, the viewer is drawn into the picture via a triangle of gazes, to supply a missing mediator and make up for a lack of interior coherence. Sargent thus dissolved the boundary between viewer and viewed or at least called it into question. A suggestion of problematized relationships is here projected outside the picture frame.

28     Theatricality is the key to Sargent's representations of women. He encourages heightened attention by transforming an everyday domestic space into a performative area of display. The poignant crisis in the concept and representation of womanhood mentioned above is captured in Sargent's redefinition of the relation of spectators to images of women. The uncanny interior spaces encroaching upon the portrayed produce a specific bond between spectator and bodies represented. The theatrical poses in decidedly obscure and indefinite territory prevent a psychological or narrative reading. Instead, the spectator is condemned to regard a surface, marked as a superficial appearance on display and perhaps provoked to reflect on the female role in these conspicuous exchanges. Perhaps one may even read these pictures as demanding a compassionate response; they transform aesthetic experience into empathetic attention.[3]The ideas summarized here are presented at length in Brosch 2003.

29     According to Showalter, the cultural crisis perceived as attack on patriarchy was generated not only from an external feminism but also from within, by men responding to stresses and tensions in the rigid constructions of masculine roles (11). Parallel to the battle between the sexes, there was also "a battle within the sexes," an instability and change of concepts of femininity and masculinity, that produced what Showalter calls "sexual anarchy." This anarchy posed a threat to the cherished belief in the polarised spheres of the two sexes (Showalter 9). Gender blurring in aestheticist design and art by Aubrey Beardsley and the Yellow Book circle and in symbolist poetry and fiction represented and provoked anxieties concerning the vanishing of sexual difference. Sargent did not, like Oscar Wilde, launch an explicit attack on mainstream gender relations, but, like the French impressionists, he was concerned to redefine the relationship between viewer, space and body. He invested in the problematizing of gendered spaces that impressionist women painters had initiated. Working in a society where observation had become a vital activity for pleasure and for self-protection, Sargent succeeded in making the spectator contemplate his (or her) scrutiny of the figures and in renegotiating the power structures of the gaze.

30     The painterly reorganization of the power relations between picture and beholder works through an implied observer who structures the process of viewing. The implied observer of these portraits ties in with a subjective personal focus emerging in literary fictions of the late nineteenth century, which must clearly be seen in the larger context of the cultural re-conceptualisation of visuality. Nineteenth century novels were still able to combine or compromise between individual perspective and collective/consensus vision. An idealistic faith in ulterior purposes still informed most narratives, producing a common spiritual horizon of universal truths. But the more narratives moved inward, the less this collective function could be fulfilled. The fin de siècle represents a unique transition in the history of narrative perspective. With the full development of internal focalization the transindividual validity of narrative is lost. At the turn of the century a fundamental uncertainty concerning observable reality produced proliferating relativist viewpoints in fiction.