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2014 Representation and the Modern Female Subject: The New Woman Painter in American Literature Jennifer Leigh Moffitt

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

REPRESENTATION AND THE MODERN FEMALE SUBJECT: THE NEW WOMAN

PAINTER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

By

JENNIFER LEIGH MOFFITT

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2014 Jennifer Leigh Moffitt defended this dissertation on October 27, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Leigh Edwards Professor Co-Directing Dissertation

Paul Outka Professor Co-Directing Dissertation

Karen Bearor University Representative

Andrew Epstein Committee Member

Dennis Moore Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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For Drew, who waited.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my committee, friends, and family. I would like to begin by thanking the members of my committee –

Dennis Moore, Andrew Epstein, and Karen Bearor – for their guidance and kindness throughout my graduate career. For my co-directors Paul Outka and Leigh Edwards, I am particularly grateful.

They offered much needed wisdom and humor, and were unflagging in their patience and encouragement. Their generous mentorship will never be forgotten.

Graduate school would have been a dismal experience without the dear friendships of

Catherine Altmaier and Rebecca Lehmann. I will forever be thankful that our paths crossed in

Tallahassee.

Lastly, I would like to express my enduring gratitude to my family: my fiancé, Drew Smith, my “sister,” Anne O’Brien, and my remarkable parents, Karen and Lee Moffitt. Thank you for your love and understanding, and for always believing in me, especially when I didn’t.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vi Abstract...... vii INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING THE PAINTER HEROINE...... 1 CHAPTER ONE: REFRAMING WOMEN: BLAKE, PHELPS, CHOPIN AND THE PAINTER HEROINE...... 21 CHAPTER TWO: HOWELLS, MAGRUDER, AND THE POPULAR NEW WOMAN OF THE MAGAZINES...... 64 CHAPTER THREE: THE NEW WOMAN PAINTER OF COLOR IN EATON’S MARION AND FAUSET’S PLUM BUN ...... 93 CHAPTER FOUR: SPECTACLES OF WOMANHOOD IN WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH AND LARSEN’S QUICKSAND ...... 130 CONCLUSION: THE PAINTER HEROINE AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY...... 149 APPENDIX A. FIGURES ...... 160 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 171 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 181

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LIST OF FIGURES

1 Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman, 1892-93, oil on canvas, 15 x 64½ ft. Mural, Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893...... 160

2 Alice Barber (Stephens), The Women’s Life Class. Illus. for William C. Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia.” Scribner’s Monthly 18.5 (Sept. 1879): 737-50...... 161

3 A “BLOOMER” (in Leap Year) and Strong-Minded “BLOOMER.” Cartoons from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 4.20 (Jan. 1852): 286...... 162

4 Engagement in High Life. Cartoon from Punchinello 2.32 (5 Nov. 1870): 87...... 163

5 The Two Mothers. Engraving. Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 86.515 (May 1873): 392...... 164

6 J.H.S. Mann, Hush! He Sleeps. Engraving by J. Franck. Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 78.464 (Feb. 1869): 110...... 165

7 Charles Dana Gibson, Social Nuisances: The Female Artist Who Has Ceased To Be Feminine. Cartoon from Life 16.397 (7 Aug. 1890): 64-65...... 166

8 Charles Dana Gibson, A Widow and Her Friends: She Goes Into Colors. Cartoon from Life 37.949 (10 Jan. 1901): 30-31...... 167

9 Frank O. Small, “My mother had Indian blood. See?” And she turned her profile. Illus. for The Coast of Bohemia by William Dean Howells. The Ladies’ Home Journal 10.4 (Mar. 1893): 5...... 168

10 Charles Dana Gibson, The Beautiful Young Woman…Had Stepped Back From Her Easel. Illus. for The Princess Sonia by Julia Magruder. The Century Illustrated Magazine 50.1 (May 1895): 5...... 169

11 Militant Suffragette. Cartoon from Life 70.1829 (15 Nov. 1917): 782...... 170

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ABSTRACT

“Representation and the Modern Female Subject” examines the socio-cultural work of the fictional woman painter in novels by women authors writing in or about the United States between the years 1870-1930. I focus on representations of women painters to explore the shift that occurs when women take control of their self-images. It is my contention that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women writers employ the self-reflexive figure of the painter heroine to promote an ideological and iconological awareness of the discursive and visual natures of gender construction. The second order act of gender- and self-making produced by the woman author writing the woman painter, who in turn produces ekphrastically rendered images, foregrounds the ways that gender is articulated in art, literature, and the popular media. These self-reflexive representations, therefore, anticipate questions raised by constructivists about how gender ideologies are produced, by whom, and to what effect. In this way, authors such as Lillie Devereux Blake,

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Julia Magruder, Winnifred Eaton, and Jessie Fauset deconstruct hegemonic representations of womanhood or femininity, from the True Woman to the

Gibson Girl, to enable a plurality of divergent, sometimes paradoxical, femininities. Implicitly, then, these authors suggest that gender is constructed and negotiated through language and image and, crucially, that women must take an active part in those processes if they are to obtain autonomy.

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INTRODUCTION

THEORIZING THE PAINTER HEROINE

In 1893, American expatriate painter Mary Cassatt unveiled her mural Modern Woman, a companion piece for Mary MacMonnies’s Primitive Woman, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in

Chicago (Figure 1). The two murals gracing opposing ends of the Hall of Honor in the Woman’s

Building were, according to Bertha Palmer, president of the Board of Lady Managers, intended to project “something symbolic showing the advancement of women” from her “primitive condition as a bearer of burdens and doing drudgery” to the “position she occupies today” (qtd. in Webster, 62).

Given free rein in her conception of “modern woman,” Cassatt produced a series of three allegorical paintings, appropriations of classical female imagery, separated by embellished borders but united by a vivid color scheme. Together the tableaux invoke education, achievement, and the professions, endeavors pivotal to the women’s movement, and operate as, in the words of Sarah Burns, “a symbolic manifesto of feminine autonomy, value, and self-worth” (par. 8). The mural’s central panel,

Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science, a reworking of the Biblical story of Eve, depicts a group of young women of various ages gathering apples from an orchard. On the left, Young Girls

Pursuing Fame continues the theme of self-fulfillment through an image of three animated girls chasing a personification of Fame. The final panel, Art, Music, Dancing, portrays three women in a grassy field, two of whom engage in the latest fads: the first performs a provocative “skirt dance” and the second picks a banjo. The third figure, representing Art yet pictured without the marks of her trade (brush, palette, or canvas), looks on.1

1 Webster points out that these three women – Art, Music, and Dancing – “are also the women who the three girls in the left-hand panel may aspire to be” (91). 1

Although critics have paid little attention to Art, Music, Dancing in comparison to its sister panels, and even less to the obscurely rendered personification of Art, it is through this scene that

Cassatt both asserts the modernity of the woman artist and hails the viewer as a modern subject within her counter-hegemonic construction of femininity.2 As Sally Webster explains in her important reading of the mural, the ambiguous figure of Art “sits sideways, looking to her right, observing the informal performances of her two companions, and may be Cassatt herself. Without sketchbook or palette she represents the moment of inspiration before creation. She slips the bounds of allegory and is a link between the mural and the observer” (96-97).3 Therefore, the personification of Art concurrently represents artist and subject, artist and viewer. This slippage between artist/subject/viewer implies that woman’s modernity resides in her full participation in processes of socio-cultural construction, a belief further reflected in the mission of the Woman’s

Building that housed the mural.

Cassatt’s conflation of the modern woman and the woman artist not only reveals her own self-image as a quintessential modern woman, but a common pattern of association during the nineteenth century that increasingly came to understand New Womanhood in terms of women’s abilities to remake themselves. Indeed, both Jennifer Fleissner and Martha Patterson have recently reframed the New Woman in relation to theories of self-making. Patterson opens her 2005 book

Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915, with the argument that the

2 Writing of her intent with the mural, Cassatt insisted that if she had not been “absolutely feminine” in her execution, she had failed (qtd. in Broude, 36). While Norma Broude reads this claim as evidence of a division felt by nineteenth-century women between a “widespread pattern of resistance on the one hand and simultaneous complicity on the other,” it might be possible to interpret Cassatt’s comment as further evidence of that “pattern of resistance” (36). Just as the mural subverts traditional female iconography and argues for women’s need for education, achievement, and self-expression, her use of “feminine” could similarly be read as a subversion of the term’s popular meanings. 3 It also seems plausible that Art could represent a moment of reflection or appraisal following creation (Cassatt looking back on or surveying her creation), which would further solidify the connection between Art/the mural and the observer. 2

New Woman “connot[es], even in its seemingly more socially conservative deployments, a distinctly modern ideal of self-refashioning” (2). And Fleissner’s essay “Women and Modernity,” which appeared in the 2008 collection A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900-1950, asserts that New

Womanhood, like the modern novel, involved a process of “ongoing development” (39). The “novel of women and modernity” depends upon “a narrative mode characterized by constant self- reimagining on the part of a restless female protagonist” (38-39). In agreeing with Fleissner and

Patterson, I want to suggest that women writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deployed the figure of the woman painter as a trope for the New Woman and modern ideologies of self-making. Moreover, I hope to show how the writers discussed in this dissertation propose a model of self-making that hinges upon the necessity for women’s cultural self-representation (rather than a Horatio Alger model of self-making based upon socio-economic success).

Thus, it is my contention that, like Cassatt, an array of women writers from the period turned to the woman artist, and more specifically to the woman painter, as a complex icon for the

New or Modern Woman and as an entry point into discourses of gender- and self-making. Building on the theories of scholars like Lyn Pykett, who remarks in the essay “Portraits of the Artist as a

Young Woman: Representations of the Female Artist in the New Woman Fiction of the 1890s” that

“by making writing women its subject New Woman fiction foregrounds the conditions of its own production” (136), I argue that by making women artists their subjects the writers I will discuss foreground not only artistic production, but gender production and the interrelationship between the two. In other words, the discursively constructed figure of the woman painter operates as a kind of self-reflexive “hypericon” that calls attention to the confluence of verbal and visual discourses that participate in the persistent making and remaking of gender ideologies. According to W.J.T.

Mitchell, “hypericon” is a term that “involves attention to the ways in which images (and ideas) double themselves: the way we depict the act of picturing, imagine the activity of imagination, figure

3 the practice of figuration” (5-6). Similar to a meta-icon, then, a hypericon stresses representational and conceptual processes, thereby pushing readers (or viewers) to confront the act of representation itself. The second-order act of gender- and self-making produced by the woman writer writing the woman painter, who in turn produces ekphrastically rendered images, therefore, calls attention to the ways that gender is articulated in art, literature, and the popular media.

The painter heroine thus serves to expose what Teresa de Lauretis terms the “technologies of gender,” those socio-cultural systems of discourse that constitute gendered subjects. Gender, de

Lauretis persuasively argues, “as representation and as self-representation, is the product of various social technologies, such as cinema, and of institutionalized discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as practices of daily life” (2). By emphasizing the principal technologies through which gender was produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (fiction, art, and theory/criticism), as well as the processes of that production, women writers intervene in and attempt to take control of those technologies in order to critique gender stereotypes and the “sex- gender system” and promote a practice of gender literacy, what de Lauretis terms “doubled vision,” that pushes readers to contemplate their constructions as gendered subjects.4 The (self-

)representation of the painter heroine, a character who openly grapples with her own position as a female subject, as well as with how to represent herself and other women in and through art and language, then, establishes a self-reflexive critical discourse or meta-commentary on the production of gender and its consequences for women.

By accentuating modes of gender construction, these novels radically destabilize essentialized notions of womanhood or femininity, especially in contradistinction to the rhetoric of True

4 Of “doubled vision,” de Lauretis writes, “unlike Althusser’s subject, who, being completely ‘in’ ideology, believes himself to be outside and free of it, the subject that I see emerging from current writings and debates within feminism is one that is at the same time inside and outside the ideology of gender, and conscious of being so, conscious of that twofold pull, that doubled vision” (10). 4

Womanhood, which reified and naturalized women as inherently domestic, nurturing, and spiritual.

Similarly, they also oppose the barrage of negative caricatures of women, including the ridiculous bloomer-wearing suffragist and the grotesque, unsexed woman artist or professional, intended to suggest the supposedly devastating consequences resulting from the overturn of traditional gender roles. In exposing the socio-cultural constructedness of gender, as well as its instability and malleability, women writers free “woman” from her moorings; they dislodge the idea or image of

“woman” from a particular way of speaking or seeing, which subsequently engenders a dialogue about her representational history and her future possibilities.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

My examination of the figure of the fictional woman painter continues a critical discussion of the artist novel that dates back to Maurice Beebe’s 1964 Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as

Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce. The first major study of literary representations of artists, Beebe’s book asserts that such an investigation is valuable because it yields both a greater understanding of the “artist in general” and a deeper knowledge of the particular novelist, since he views the portrait- of-the-artist novel primarily as a form of self-portrait (4-5). His analysis of the genre focuses on four authors – Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce – to consider descriptions of “artistic temperament, the creative process, and the relationship of the artist to society” (v). Central to his argument is the notion that the artist-hero is a divided self vacillating between a belief in art as experience, the “Sacred Fount,” and an elevated view of art as superior to life, something religious or divine, the “Ivory Tower” tradition (13). Moreover, the “Sacred Fount,” the sensual rather than the spiritual side of the divide, Beebe views as a tradition “expressed in terms of the artist’s relationship to women” (18). Within this tradition, the artist must be involved with

5 women romantically, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, in order to create: “Although he may be destroyed by the search for such fulfillment, he must go to Woman in order to create – just as a man can father children only through women – and his artistic power is dependent upon the Sacred

Fount” (18). Beebe thus consigns “Woman” to the role of muse – the source for the (heterosexual male) artist’s inspiration or the vessel through which he must pass in order to create.

In response to Beebe’s erasure of the woman-as-artist in his archetypal study of the artist- hero, feminist scholars have turned to representations of the artist-heroine in fiction. One of the earliest of these examinations is Grace Stewart’s 1979 book A New Mythos: The Novel of the Artist as

Heroine, 1877-1977. Reading sixteen different novels by American, Canadian, and British women authors in light of psychoanalytic theory and Western mythology, Stewart determines the “mythic pattern of the female artist differs significantly from the so-called universal pattern” (i).5 She examines each of the novels in relation to principal myths or quests, namely Faust,

Demeter/Persephone, and what she calls the “journey to the interior,” to show how women writers engaged – and often reworked – mythic images or legends in their narratives. Recognizing that the conflicts “between life and art and between the woman and the artist” are fundamental to the female

Künstlerroman, she insists that the “female writer must defy the cultural definition of artist or of woman if she is to remain artist and woman” (14-15). Yet, despite her acknowledgement that the

“artist-heroine is continually reminded of her war against social constructs” (179) and the admission that the artist-heroine needs to defy these cultural definitions, Stewart writes that the antithetical definitions of “woman” and “artist” result in a heroine who “remain[s] disintegrated, estranged, or unsuccessful – a failure as a woman or as an artist” (15). The rigid social constructs faced by the woman artist reek “havoc with her self-image” (179). According to Stewart, then, the artist heroine’s

5 Authors Stewart examines include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, May Sarton, Erica Jong, Natalie L.M. Petesch, and E.M. Broner. 6

“recognition of herself as female in a society that denigrates the serious artistry of women” ultimately “promotes a rejection of herself as woman, an acceptance of herself as monster, or a welcoming of death-in-life as preferable to the struggle” (180). Consequently, the female

Künstlerroman always ends in a kind of failure for Stewart, even if she feels the novel may simultaneously display hope for future generations of women. Although she argues for the varied and complex ways women writers established a “new mythos” in their artist novels, she does not fully explore the equally varied and complex ways that women writers worked to produce new definitions of women or of artists.

Four years after the publication of Stewart’s A New Mythos, Linda Huf released A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature (1983). Similar to Stewart, Huf seeks to chart the characteristics of the female artist novel in response to Beebe’s phallocentric assertions about “universal” traits of the genre. To this end, she examines novels by Fanny Fern,

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Carson McCullers, and Sylvia Plath, and concludes that the female artist novel differs from the male artist novel in five elemental ways. The first difference regards the artist-heroine herself who, unlike the “passive, sensitive, and shy” artist- hero, is “stalwart, spirited, and fearless” as well as “athletic in build, skilled in sports, unshrinking in fights, able in mathematics, plucky in love, and daring in sexual adventures,” traits not unlike those used to describe New Women (4). Secondly, she notices that the artist-heroine faces additional conflicts and divisions. Whereas, according to Beebe’s thesis, her male counterpart struggles with warring sensual and spiritual sides, the woman artist struggles with a dilemma between womanhood and work, between “her role as a woman, demanding selfless devotion to others, and her aspirations as an artist, requiring exclusive commitment to her work” (5). The third and fourth differences involve the inclusion of a “sexually conventional foil” for the artist-heroine and the lack of a (male)

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Muse (7-9).6 Lastly, Huf observes a greater degree of “radicalism” in the women’s artist novel, which she finds evident in its insistence on the necessity of “smashing the man-forged manacles on her sex” (10).

More recently, Roberta White published A Studio of One’s Own: Fictional Women Painters and the

Art of Fiction (2005), an ambitious examination of English language novels from the United States,

Canada, England, and Ireland by seventeen women writers from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century that follows in the critical footsteps of Stewart and Huf.7 Taking a “narrower definition of the Künstlerroman,” White focuses solely on heroines who are visual artists (13). At the outset, she states the “purpose of [her] study is, first, to interpret the implied dialogue of the writers with the artist figures they create so as to understand the writer’s view of creativity in both its aesthetic and political dimensions and, second, to explore certain remarkable continuities in the imagery depicting women artists in the novels” (15). Similar to her forebears, White’s study identifies and analyzes patterns involving characterization, plot, and imagery in order to distinguish the genre of the female Künstlerroman, again especially in comparison to Beebe’s work.8 What White recognizes in her sampling of texts are repeated treatments of the “artist as liminal and her work as unfinished,” terms she is quick to point out are not “negative” (15). Instead, she suggests, “the artist’s liminality

6 Beyond arguing that female artist novels do not turn men into muses, Huf asserts that artist heroines “do not idealize men as men idealize women” (9). While there is truth to her claims here, two of the novels she examines portray women painters who paint their love interests and subsequently problematize her claim: Phelps’s Avis Dobell produces a portrait – which is described, in more than one instance, as an idealization – of the man who will become her husband, Philip Ostrander; and Chopin’s Edna Pontellier paints her lover, Alcée Arobin. 7 White’s analysis covers novels by American authors Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Mary Gordon, Tracy Chevalier, and Kyoko Mori. 8 Oddly, none of these critics discuss the others and instead take Beebe as their starting point. Huf and White merely cite each other in relation to quotes lifted from close readings, and White fails to mention Stewart at all. Nor do Stewart, Huf, or White discuss Linda Susanne Pannill, whom I will introduce shortly, and whose dissertation may be the first extensive treatment of the artist heroine. Thus, all three of these books proceed as if without predecessors. 8 means that she is in a state of transition or emergence, and the unfinished nature of her work represents this state of becoming” (16).

A striking omission from these three studies, which together span nearly two hundred years and four countries, are discussions of race. For instance, although White concludes her examination with Kyoko Mori’s Stone Field, True Arrow (2002), a novel that relates the story of a Japanese

American heroine struggling with her history and cross-cultural identity, she never raises questions about race and aesthetics, nor does she consider if the trope of the woman painter signifies differently for writers of color. Huf does address the absence of women writers of color, or more specifically of black women novelists, in her study. In the introduction to her book, she claims that while there has been “a profusion of remarkable books by black women writers, [she has] found none that depict, in fictional form, their efforts to become artists” (13). Therefore, writing in 1983 of novels featuring women artists broadly conceived (as writers, visual artists, musicians, actresses), Huf declares, “the black woman artist is a missing character in fiction” (14). As de Lauretis explains in

Technologies of Gender, by focusing exclusively on differences between women and men, we not only reinforce gendered oppositions (essentialist paradigms that define women as not men, or “feminine” as not “masculine”), we make problematic generalizations about all women that fail to acknowledge differences between women. In other words, we cannot overlook the different ways gender is represented or experienced for different women based on race and ethnicity, class, and sexuality. In attempting to map the characteristics of the female Künstlerroman, then, we must be careful not to participate in the creation/reinscription of a heroine and a literary tradition that privileges (and fails to acknowledge) whiteness.9

9 Barbara DiBernard points out that while Stewart and Huf’s books do include novels that explore sexuality and sexual difference, these issues are ignored: “Huf quotes form May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing three times, but never addresses the main character’s lesbianism. Stewart deals with both Mrs. Stevens and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, but not as lesbian stories” (195). 9

Despite these blind spots, the important scholarship of Stewart, Huf, and White does establish that (white) women writers were actively challenging inherently male conceptions of the figure of the artist and that they were establishing and developing a rich and complex genre of their own. More influential to my research, however, is scholarship that examines how women writers used the figure of the woman artist, or more particularly (like White) the woman painter, to critique art history, theories of aesthetics, and conceptions of gender or “femininity.” For this reason,

Deborah Barker’s Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist (2000) and

Antonia Losano’s The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (2008) prove especially valuable to my work.10 While these two nuanced texts maintain notable differences, each essentially argues that nineteenth-century women writers utilized the painter heroine as a way to enter into debates about aesthetics and to equate their own writing with fine or “high” art.

Barker’s study of the female painter in American literature moves from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century in order to “articulate the aesthetic genealogy” between sentimentalism and modernism (9). She reads novels by Fanny Fern, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,

Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Edith Wharton, to argue that the

“female visual artist allowed women writers to signal the aesthetic seriousness of their own writing

10 For additional studies of the figure of the woman artist in literature, see Anne Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004), Hsin Ying Chi, Artist and Attic: A Study of Poetic Space in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1999), Nancy Gerber, Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), Deborah Heller, Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists (Montreal, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2005), Bo Jeffares, The Artist in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1979), Suzanne W. Jones, ed., Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991), Lee T. Lemon, Portraits of the Artist in Contemporary Fiction (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985), Linda Lewis, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2003), and Ursula R. Mahlendorf, The Wellsprings of Literary Creation: An Analysis of Male and Female “Artist Stories” from the German Romantics to American Writers of the Present (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1985).

10 and explore issues of creativity and sexuality that conflicted squarely with the limitations of feminine decorum that readers and critics often expected of the woman writer and her heroines” (11). Each of these writers, she contends, “recreates the ‘true’ artist in her own image, thus espousing a theory of art that validates and valorizes her own writing” (11, emphasis in the original). Therefore, for

Barker, the painter heroine operates as a kind of alter ego that makes it possible for the “literary domestic” to dispute her relegation to popular, mass, or low culture. In this way, her claim echoes

Beebe’s belief in the portrait-of-the-artist novel as a kind of self-portrait that we can read for insights about the authors themselves.

Integral to Barker’s work is an examination of how women writers countered debasing depictions of the female artist as a genteel amateur, copyist, or art teacher. Citing Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) and Henry James’s The American (1877) as examples of such regulating stereotypes, Barker shows that the “significance of the professional woman painter is that it depicted the woman artist as both a serious professional (particularly with regard to her training) and as an original creative force” (18, emphasis in the original). Women writers used the professional woman painter, then, to “renegotiate the boundaries between high and low culture” and to underscore their own interests in artistry and aesthetics (11). The woman painter’s professionalism made it possible for women writers to argue for their own professionalism.

Losano’s far-reaching book examines women painters in fiction by Victorian women writers, including Anne and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, and Mary Ward. Like Barker, she maintains “women novelists use the figure of the woman painter not only to engage with social and aesthetic debates about art in general, but also to consider the cultural position of their own medium” (3-4). However, she challenges Barker’s claim that we can read the painter heroine as a reflection of the writer herself: “it is an oversimplification to see the painter-heroine as a mere fictional double for the woman writer” (8). For Losano, these painter heroines are “composite

11 creatures, cobbled together out of known public figures, the author’s acquaintances, and her fantasy ideal of the woman painter” (8). Reading literary representations of women painters as masked autobiographies threatens to limit our theoretical approaches and to prevent us from exploring the larger significance or critical depth of these characters and their narratives.

In focusing her lens on what she calls “the scene of painting,” a term perhaps influenced by

Jennifer Phegley’s “scene of women’s reading,” Losano models a useful method of close reading that privileges the complex ways writers engage visual art and artistic production.11 As she explains,

“the scene of painting”

includes not just descriptions of fictional artwork but representations of the act and process

of painting and, equally often, of the reception and judgment of women’s artworks. I argue

that these scenes of painting offer fully formed and often radical aesthetic, literary, and social

critiques. These scenes function as sites from which women writers articulate a wide variety

of concerns: the fraught material and ideological conditions of women’s artistic production,

the changing social role of the woman artist, the gender bias of philosophical aesthetics, and

the persistent eroticization of women in art. (3)

Whereas scholarship on visual artists in fiction has tended to concentrate on ekphrastic passages and subsequently to neglect textual discussions of the art object’s production and reception, Losano rightly insists that we need to take the larger context into account because it is through these discussions that writers often grapple with aesthetic and political issues.

A primary concern of Losano’s investigation is the problem women artists face with

“becoming art objects themselves” (54). Roberta White similarly notes this dilemma: “Frequently in these nineteenth-century novels commodification of the female image in the service of the marriage

11 See Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004). 12 market subverts women’s art: the woman at her easel attracts the male gaze and in that moment is transformed from observer to observed, from subject to object” (17). Losano contends that this objectification is often an intentional act, a strategy used to contain or undercut the creative power or threat of the female painter: “by persistently re-eroticizing the woman painter, writers attempted to reinscribe the woman painter within the proper place in the aesthetic scenario” (Losano 44). In other words, the woman painter as aesthetic object supplants the work she creates so that “no aesthetic critique of [her] artwork seems possible” (Losano 48).

Linda Susanna Pannill’s illuminating 1975 dissertation, “The Artist-Heroine in American

Fiction, 1890-1920,” may be the first extensive scholarly work to take the artist-heroine as its subject. More akin to Barker and Losano in her critical approach and breadth than to Stewart and

Huf, Pannill examines discursive treatments of women artists during a period when “‘woman’ and

‘artist’ were mutually exclusive terms.” The inspiration for Pannill’s dissertation topic emerged from reading (what were then contemporary) novels by women from the 1960s and 1970s and her recognition that a large number of these novels featured female protagonists who were artists. This realization then led her to investigate a similar trend at the turn of the last century. Pannill arranges the bulk of her chapters thematically, discussing female genius, “feminized” culture, female experience, “evidence of conflict,” and “strategies of evasion,” in a wide variety of primary texts.

Her final three chapters focus on particular women writers: Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, and Mary

Austin.12 Comparing this period to the 1960s and 1970s, Pannill concludes, “In recent years a resurgence of feminism has produced fiction about artist-heroines, but with an important difference; whereas women writers in the period 1890-1920 used a feminine stereotype to achieve their artist status, in recent fiction there has been an attempt to break down feminine roles in order to achieve a

12 While the first five chapters contain discussions of novels representing women painters, the three authors to which she devotes entire chapters did not write painter heroines. 13 new definition of ‘womanhood’ by which the woman artist would not be anomalous.”13 According to Pannill, then, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers “used the conventional female role without violating it, as the feminist ideology of that period based its claims for equality on woman’s peculiar virtues without, by and large, attempting a redefinition of woman’s role” (200).

Contrary to Pannill’s argument, “Representation and the Modern Female Subject” contends

American women writers from this period, roughly 1870-1930, did attempt a redefinition of

“womanhood” and of women’s roles. In the chapters that follow, I argue that women writers used the figure of the woman painter to problematize essentialist ideologies of gender, to explore the complex relationship between representation and identity construction, and to posit alternative models of womanhood. So as to chart how women writers responded and contributed to changing ideas about women, I have organized the chapters chronologically. However, thematic or complementary groupings of primary texts within the chapters do result in some temporal discontinuities. Despite these minor overlaps, I have tried to show how female, and in one case male, writers utilized the trope of the woman painter to engage literary and visual debates involving the women’s movement and some of its more influential figurations – the New Woman, the Gibson

(or magazine) Girl, and the race woman – over the almost sixty year period covered by my study.

Scholars generally cite the 1894 exchange between British authors Sarah Grand and Ouida in

The North American Review as the New Woman’s moment of inception.14 However, while the articles penned by Grand and Ouida may have given her a name and announced her official coming out, the

New Woman was not necessarily a “new” figure. As Charlotte Rich makes clear in Transcending the

New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era, “though her name might indicate otherwise, the principles underlying this cultural phenomenon extend well back before the 1890s” (7). “[L]ess a

13 The two quotations from Pannill above are taken from the unpaginated abstract, which follows the title page in her dissertation. 14 See, for example, Ann Ardis, Ellen Jordan, Martha Patterson, Charlotte Rich, and Talia Schaffer. 14 monolithic and more a protean figure” (Rich 19), the New Woman was shaped and deployed by a variety of different writers and artists for a wide range of purposes. Indeed, Rich’s book, along with

Martha Patterson’s Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915, position the New Woman as a volatile and contested figure without a fixed or stable definition. If, however, we understand “New Woman” as a term for women who championed political enfranchisement, education, professional work, physical health, social mobility, and autonomy, then we can see the figure beginning to emerge in fiction from the United States as early as the 1850s and 1860s in novels such as Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855) and Rose Clark (1856), Elizabeth Stoddard’s The

Morgesons (1862), and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69). Each of these novels features a plucky, unconventional female character who struggles against traditional gender roles in a quest for greater independence and freedom. Not surprisingly, these exceptional characters are all aspiring or self-proclaimed artists (writers or painters).

In writing radical female characters who were artists, women writers contributed to the perception of artists as mavericks and exploited a growing public fascination with artists and celebrity. Sarah Burns’s Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America demonstrates that artists in the late nineteenth century were fast becoming “public, media-generated figure[s]”:

“Through frequent appearances in the new mass-marketed, heavily illustrated journals, books, and newspapers, the American artist gained a wider public than ever before” (2). This new “insistent emphasis on the personal, and on the personality” fueled and fed on the greater visibility and accessibility of the visual artist. Articles on art schools, gallery and museum exhibitions, artists’ studios, and, especially, on the lives and styles of the artists themselves contributed to the artist’s social status and significance. This obsession with the visual arts, Kirsten Swinth notes in Painting

Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930, made the

“adventurous, somewhat bohemian artist […] a popular image in journalistic and fictional tales, with

15 the exploits of the studio, the adventures of Parisian art study, and the oddities of the girl art student becoming stock figures” (2).

Because female painters were professionally trained, income-earning, public figures, they functioned as natural icons for New Womanhood and modern ideologies of gender. Indeed, women writers and activists alike looked to female visual artists as symbols of modern womanhood and as producers of an – immediate and powerful – visual discourse that promoted women’s issues. For example, Fanny Fern and Susan B. Anthony both celebrated the significance and immense achievements of Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonheur. After seeing Hosmer’s sculpture of Beatrice

Cenci (1857), Fern, writing in the New York Ledger, “thank[ed] the gods […] that the young sculptress has had the courage to assert herself – to be what nature intended her to be – a genius – even at the risk of being called unfeminine, eccentric, and unwomanly” (294). She then goes on to mock the concept of “unwomanliness,” a tactic that consequently calls into question conceptions of

“womanliness”:

‘Unwomanly?’ because crotchet-stitching and worsted foolery could not satisfy her soul!

Unwomanly? because she galloped over the country on horseback, in search of health and

pleasure, instead of drawing on her primrose kids, and making a layperson of herself, to

exhibit the fashions, by dawdling about the streets. Well, let her be unwomanly, then, I say; I

wish there were more women bitten with the same complaint. (294-95, emphasis in the

original)

Fern maintains this fever pitch in her response to Édouard Louis Dubufe’s portrait of Bonheur

(1857), which pictures the internationally renowned artist “with the short, dark hair pushed back, man-fashion” and “delicate white hand […] resting on the arm of a tremendous great bull” (Fern

295). The experience of seeing these two works makes Fern feel “glad that a new order of woman is arising like the Bonheurs and the Hosmers, who are evidently sufficient unto themselves, both as it

16 regards love and bread and butter” (295-96). Similarly, although far less publicly, Anthony wrote in her diary after twice visiting the National Academy of Design in 1862 to view works by Hosmer and

Bonheur of having “no power to express my hope, my joy, my renewed faith in womanhood” (219).

Hosmer, in particular, she believes “has done more to ennoble and elevate woman than she could possibly have done by mere words” (219).

Using theory from literary, visual culture, and gender studies, this dissertation investigates how the woman painter operates as a symbol for a “new order of woman.” Chapter Two reads Lillie

Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Story of Avis (1877), and Kate

Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) to explore the cultural work performed by the trope of the woman painter in the late nineteenth century. These three groundbreaking proto-feminist novels, I argue, deploy the painter heroine as a self-reflexive hypericon that enables a meta-commentary on representations of gender, the relationship between art and self-making, and the devastating essentialist beliefs propagated by the Cult of True Womanhood. Blake, Phelps, and Chopin portray heroines who actively defy and critique the dictates of True Womanhood while simultaneously challenging accusations that the women who violate its codes are unsexed or monstrous. Therefore, in writing sympathetic heroines who are educated, self-creating professional artists, they work to establish and sanction new identities and roles for women.

By the end of the century, the New or Modern Woman was a ubiquitous icon, made and remade daily in the magazines. She had become both a revolutionary figure signifying female strength and intelligence and a style icon preoccupied with sex and status. Chapter Three studies this phenomenon by analyzing the interplay between fiction and visual material in periodicals from the

1890s. In particular, I focus on how Charles Dana Gibson’s wildly popular “Gibson Girl,” as well as similar “Magazine Girls,” co-opted the New Woman, softening her edges, so to speak, and remade her into a fashionable, “feminine,” more openly sexual object for the heterosexual male gaze.

17

William Dean Howells’s The Coast of Bohemia (The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1892-93), the only novel by a male author that receives extensive analysis in this dissertation, and Julia Magruder’s The Princess

Sonia (The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 1895) use the painter heroine to challenge representations of turn-of-the-century New Women by Gibson and his contemporaries as consumers and objects of fashionable display by emphasizing women’s roles as professionals and producers. Although Howells was certainly not the only male writer during the nineteenth century to write a complex, progressive fictional woman painter, something he also did in A Hazard of New

Fortunes (1889), his novel stands out for its anxieties over gendered subjectivity.15 And Magruder’s almost entirely forgotten novel, although perhaps more conventional than Howells’s, raises difficult questions about how women can represent themselves and their desires. Significantly, The Princess

Sonia includes one of few self-portraits created by a fictional woman painter in nineteenth-century literature, and it is a portrait that contrasts sharply with Gibson’s accompanying illustrations.

The fourth chapter looks at how women writers of color talked back to constructions of women painters and New Women as inherently white. Through their novels, Blake, Phelps, Chopin,

Magruder, and Howells all participated in a homogenizing construction of the woman painter, and consequently the New Woman, as white, middle to upper class, and heterosexual. Because fictional representations of women painters of color are uncommon during the nineteenth century, this chapter jumps forward to the second and third decades of the twentieth century to read Winnifred

Eaton’s Marion: The Story of An Artist’s Model (1917) and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel

15 For example, Henry Adams’s highly underrated Esther (1884), a novel inspired by his wife, photographer Clover Adams, portrays a multifaceted painter heroine who struggles against the church and patriarchy in her search for independence and an artistic voice. 18

Without a Moral (1929), two novels that depict painter heroines of color who challenge assumptions about women gender, race, and perception.16

Chapter Five turns to two canonical novels that provide counter or negative examples in that they do not contain women painters but women who instead find themselves contained by paintings. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), arguably the two most famous twentieth-century novels to tackle woman’s role as image, narrate the stories of women who possess artistic sensibilities, but who have accepted a Gibson Girl version of New

Womanhood. Lily Bart and Helga Crane believe they can control and exploit their objectification to their benefit. However, their internalization of the male and/or white gaze results in acts of self- subjugation. This chapter contends that The House of Mirth and Quicksand suggest their heroines are tragic because they cultivate their positions as images and allow themselves to be (mis)represented.

In the conclusion, I briefly survey turn-of-the-twenty-first-century American fiction to show that the painter heroine remains a radical, transgressive figure deployed by women writers to critique hegemonic constructions of gender and race and to assert female subjectivity. Additionally, I discuss what I call “art fiction mania,” a new obsession with historical women painters and models that has emerged in the twenty-first century in the wake of the immense popularity of writers Susan Vreeland and Tracy Chevalier that contributes to a revisionist art history.

Ultimately, “Representation and the Modern Female Subject” hopes to show that by deconstructing hegemonic representations of women through their portrayals of women painters, the authors examined in this dissertation create spaces for a plurality of divergent, sometimes paradoxical, femininities. Implicitly, these novels suggest both that gender is constructed and

16 We have work to do uncovering fictional representations of women visual artists of color published during the nineteenth century. Currently, I am aware of only two representations of non- white painter heroines in nineteenth-century American novels, and both are by white authors: Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic (1867) and Alice Ilgenfritz Jones’s Beatrice of Bayou Têche (1895). 19 negotiated through language and image and, crucially, that women must take an active part in those processes if they are to obtain autonomy.

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CHAPTER ONE

REFRAMING WOMEN:

BLAKE, PHELPS, CHOPIN, AND THE PAINTER HEROINE

When editor Carol Farley Kessler and Rutgers University Press published a critical edition of

The Story of Avis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s long out of print Künstlerroman, they chose a detail from

The Women’s Life Class by Alice Barber Stephens for the cover (Figure 2). Commissioned as an illustration for an 1879 Scribner’s Monthly article profiling “The Art Schools of Philadelphia” and the unorthodox instructional methods of professor Thomas Eakins (such as the practice of encouraging women to paint from the nude), The Women’s Life Class pictures a gender segregated life drawing classroom at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) crowded with female students. Left of center, atop a platform accentuated by a folding screen, stands a nude female model with her hair in a low bun and her back turned to the viewer. Encircling her are the art students, many of whom are actively in the process of rendering her figure, brushes in hand. Three of these canvases are plainly visible to the viewer so that, in all, the model appears four times, a multiplication that underscores her purpose as a study for the art students rather than a sight for the viewer. Moreover, by framing the figure of the model with an open easel and working art student, Stephens effectively draws the viewer’s attention away from the exposed body of the model and refocuses it on the subject of the illustration: the woman (as) artist and the practice of art.17 Not surprisingly, it is on this triangle – model, artist, painted canvas – that the cover detail focuses.

17 Ann Barton Brown’s monograph on Stephens identifies the student whose profile and canvas flank the model as artist Susan Hannah Macdowell, a classmate of Stephens’s who will later marry Thomas Eakins (11). 21

The Stephens painting captures a dynamic scene wherein women operate as active agents in the production of culture and identity and therefore functions as a valuable artifact that bears witness to the participation of women in the art world of the nineteenth century. Predictably,

William C. Brownell’s article for Scribner’s all but erases Stephens and her classmates from record. It

“mentions raw numbers of women students at the Pennsylvania Academy and points out the existence of men’s and women’s life classes (held at different times in the same room, ‘probably the largest room in the country devoted to such a purpose’), but otherwise renders the women students invisible” (Prieto 95). Only through Stephens’s illustration, historian Laura Prieto notes, do “women appear prominently as Philadelphia art students” (95).18 While women have always been visible in art, that visibility has often been limited to woman’s function as an image rather than to women’s roles as image-makers. When women artists, activists, and professionals were represented in the art and media of the nineteenth century, they were generally ridiculed and/or (re)sexualized. Although writing specifically about postmodern struggles with identity and representation, art historian Craig

Owens addresses the enduring problem of visibility and absence for women:

It is precisely at the legislative frontier between what can be represented and what cannot

that the postmodernist operation is being staged – not in order to transcend representation,

but in order to expose the system of power that authorizes certain representations while

blocking, prohibiting, and invalidating others. Among those prohibited from Western

representation, whose representations are denied all legitimacy, are women. Excluded from

representation by its very structure, they return within it as a figure for – a representation of

– the unrepresentable (Nature, Truth, the Sublime, etc.). This prohibition bears primarily on

18 In a recent essay on women and PAFA, Anna Havemann notes that the critical practice of glossing over women’s involvement in or contributions to the art world persists: “Unfortunately, the past achievements of women were often downplayed by later generations of art historians. This is also true for PAFA – only one of its major publications focuses on the progressive attitude of the institution toward women artists” (31). 22

the woman as the subject, and rarely as the object of representation, for there is certainly no

shortage of images of women. Yet in being represented by, women have been rendered an

absence within the dominant culture […]. (168, emphasis in the original)

The practice Owens identifies of using the female body to represent the unrepresentable was widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Turned into allegories or national symbols, women were made to signify abstract ideals and values like liberty or justice that were denied to them as second-class citizens. Marina Warner calls attention to this disjuncture in

Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, writing, “Often the recognition of a difference between the symbolic order, inhabited by ideal, allegorical figures, and the actual order, of judges, statesman, soldiers, philosophers, inventors, depends on the unlikelihood of women practicing the concepts they represent” (xx).

Through readings of three paradigmatic artist novels, I hope to show that, as early as the

1870s, women writers were striving to “expose the system[s] of power that authoriz[e] certain representations while blocking, prohibiting, and invalidating others” in their discussions of art and art making. All three novels I will discuss – Phelps’s The Story of Avis (1877), Lillie Devereux Blake’s

Fettered for Life (1874), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) – explore the ways that visual and verbal texts from both the fine arts and popular culture either render women invisible or seek to nullify their voices through caricature. The prejudices and obstacles the heroines face in their quests for education and training, in the exhibition, marketing, and sale of their work, and in the critical reception their work receives – the conditions Linda Nochlin pushes us to confront in “Why Have

Their Been No Great Women Artists?” – brings much needed attention to the prevalence of sexism and gender disparity within nineteenth-century American culture, and subsequently, to the systems of power that effect and maintain these acts.

23

In its preoccupation with the conflict between woman as object/image and woman as producer/artist, The Women’s Life Class works well as a visual correlative for an artist’s novel like The

Story of Avis. Both texts raise questions about women’s complex relationship with visual culture – with spectacle and spectatorship, objectivity and subjectivity, visibility and absence, representation and power. As art historian Rosemary Betterton explains, “because the relationship between woman artist and woman model transgresses the normative roles of male and female, artist and model, clothed and naked: the one who looks and the one who is looked at,” self-conscious paintings like

The Women’s Life Class destabilize the traditional viewer (or his expectations) and push us to consider how images “produce and […] define the feminine” (5).19 In other words, by foregrounding the process of image production, The Women’s Life Class – and artist novels like Fettered for Life, The Story of Avis, and The Awakening – raise questions about the role of art in identity making. How do these texts define – or redefine – the feminine? How can/will women represent their views and desires?

Moreover, does a woman’s representation of a woman artist subvert the aesthetic tradition John

Berger identifies wherein “men act and women appear?” (47). Does it successfully transform woman from object to subject? Will representations of women as artists and producers change our perceptions of them and of gender roles?

This chapter places into conversation three of the most overtly proto-feminist novels published after the Civil War to explore these questions and to show how women writers participated in and critiqued the increasingly immersive image culture of the late nineteenth century.

It is certainly not coincidental that some of the century’s most shocking and subversive novels concentrated on women painters. My reading of these novels proposes the painter heroine performs

19 This quote from Betterton refers specifically to Laura Knight’s Self-Portrait (1913), a painting that represents the artist in the process of painting a female nude. However, because the Knight painting similarly focuses on model, artist, and canvas, Betterton’s remarks, I feel, also apply well to the Stephens painting. 24 two significant theoretical functions. First, in her dual role as subject and artist, she operates as a reflexive tool that promotes an ideological and iconological awareness of the construction and function of gender in the media. The act of gender and identity construction produced by the woman author writing the woman painter (who in turn produces ekphrastically rendered works) effectively calls attention to the role that representation – both verbal and visual – plays in the creation and maintenance of gender ideologies. By underscoring the various discourses involved in the always active production of gender, these self-conscious novels intimate that gender is not stable, but in constant flux, negotiated and renegotiated through language and image. In this way, they push readers to question essentialist definitions of gender and, in a move anticipatory of the theories of social constructivists, to consider how gender, or more specifically “womanhood,” is being defined, by whom, and to what purposes. Therefore, while Fettered for Life, The Story of Avis, and The

Awakening present potentially paradoxical views on gender and the “woman question” in their examinations of marriage, motherhood, work, education, and the sexual double standard, they each implicitly insist that women’s futures depend upon wide-ranging and nuanced representations of women.20

Consequently, the painter heroine’s second pivotal role involves her operation as a model of

“liberatory” modern womanhood in contraposition to the regulatory model imposed by the Cult of

True Womanhood. As Lyn Pykett observes in her essay on New Woman fiction from the 1890s,

“whatever is her avowed position vis-à-vis the woman’s cause, the female artist is represented as a feminist or proto-feminist, since artistic expression and the life of the artist are seen as in themselves both liberated and liberatory activities” (138). In the nineteenth century, painting, more so than

20 Some of these differences will become apparent in the upcoming discussions of the individual novels. One obvious difference exists between Fettered for Life and The Story of Avis: Fettered, superficially at least, promotes companionate marriages, whereas Avis challenges the viability of marriage for the professional woman altogether. 25 writing, invited associations with bohemianism and a counter culture perceived to be at odds with normative ways of living or being.21 More importantly, “[p]rofessional women artists,” as Prieto demonstrates in her study, “contributed in two vital ways to the creation of this new ideal of womanhood: they acted as flesh-and-blood models of the New Woman, who had already embraced education, wage-earning, urban living, and professionalism; and they participated in the production of images that established the New Woman’s ideal attributes” (146). Like Ellen Day Hale, Margaret

Lesley Bush-Brown, Margaret Foster Richardson, and the other painters Prieto cites, Blake, Phelps, and Chopin operated as both models and makers of New Womanhood.

Surprisingly, Pykett also declares New Women writers used the artist heroine “as a way of exploring, from a woman’s perspective, the relationship of the aesthetic and the political, and the competing claims of the life of the artist and that of the activist” (138-9). What these authors, especially Blake, make clear, however, is that the aesthetic and political are inextricably intertwined and that the production of art is itself a form of activism. Not long after arriving in New York City in search of artistic and economic independence, Fettered for Life’s heroine Laura Stanley receives advice from an outspoken suffragist doctor, Cornelia D’Arcy, who tells her she can promote the

“civil and political equality of women” through her art: “You have your own favorite occupation in which you already show great promise and to which you can devote all your energies. This country has not yet produced a really great woman-painter, why should you not achieve a triumph for yourself and your sex in that art?” (64). By configuring artistic success as political success, D’Arcy equates the woman painter with the suffragist, implying they share a similar agenda. Indeed,

Deborah Cherry’s extensive study of the interrelations between the women’s movement and the art world during the latter half of the nineteenth century provides innumerable examples of how “the

21 For a discussion of the relationship between bohemia and the New Woman, see Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the New Century (New York: Metropolitan, 2000). 26 politics of feminism connected to the practice of art” through women who “claimed representation: in the world of work, in the profession of art, in civil society” (9). Cherry’s book focuses exclusively on Britain (except for an interlude on the internationally influential work of American sculptor

Harriet Hosmer), but the work of Kirsten Swinth and Laura Prieto on women artists in the United

States during the same period supports a similar connection on this side of the Atlantic.

Of course, the interconnection between art and (proto)feminism extends to women writers during the period, too. Blake was an influential and highly visible supporter of suffrage and women’s rights. In fact, she was (and probably still is) better known as a suffragist than a fiction writer. She wrote a number of articles advocating for women’s rights, and she belonged to and was active within the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), the National American Woman Suffrage

Association (NAWSA), and the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, where she served as president for over ten years (1881-1892).22 Blake even worked as a Civil War correspondent for a number of newspapers early in her career and helped to found Barnard College. Her 1883 collection of lectures given in response to the speeches of Reverend Morgan Dix promoting True

Womanhood, Woman’s Place To-Day, sold widely and solidified her place at the forefront of the women’s movement. Like Blake, Phelps devoted much of her literary career to promoting the advancement of women, despite her father’s public campaigning against suffrage.23 While she was not an active member of organized suffrage associations like Blake, she did explicitly champion suffrage and other women’s issues, such as work and dress reform, in both her fiction and non- fiction. Chopin was the least politically active of the three authors in that she did not voice support for women’s suffrage or other socially progressive movements of the era. However, she also

22 In 1900, Blake also ran for president of NAWSA against Carrie Chapman Catt, with the support of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, Blake eventually withdrew her name. See Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake, especially 169-171. 23 Austin Phelps published two anti-suffrage articles: “Woman-Suffrage as Judged by the Working of Negro Suffrage” (1878) and “Reform in the Political Status of Woman” (1881). 27 consistently dealt with women’s issues in her fiction, including marriage, motherhood, traditional gender roles, and the sexual double standard. Although Chopin did not consider herself a New

Woman, and even distanced herself from the movement, she “frequently engaged with the themes of New Woman fiction” (Heilmann 93) and lived a life reminiscent of the New Woman’s key attributes. She dared to smoke cigarettes and go out without a chaperone, “taking walks by herself, and in Switzerland she even drank a beer alone, in public” (Toth 59). Indeed, Blake, Phelps, and

Chopin all lived lives representative of modern or New Womanhood. Not only were they professional writers who supported themselves by their pens independent of husbands (Blake and

Chopin were both widowed, although Blake would eventually remarry. Phelps did not marry until age forty-four, to a man seventeen years younger.), they cultivated unconventional, very public personas.

Plagues of Painters and Professionals

In 1894, just one year after the completion of Mary Cassatt’s Modern Woman mural, French writer and bibliophile Octave Uzanne published La Femme à Paris, Nos Contemporaines: Notes Successives sur Les Parisiennes de ce Temps dans leurs divers Milieux, États et Conditions, a purported study of contemporary Parisian women in various professions and walks of life. Included within Uzanne’s highly subjective book is a chapter on “Artists and Bluestockings” that claims women are incapable of genius or originality.24 “We are at the dawn of a new era,” he believes, but one that threatens to weaken the strength of the high arts thanks to the greater freedoms allotted to women:

Women authors, painters, and musicians have multiplied during the last twenty years in

bourgeois circles, and even in the demi-monde. In painting especially they do not meet with the

24 All quotations from Uzanne are taken from the 1912 English translation, The Modern Parisienne. 28

violent opposition they endured in former times. One may even say they are too much in

favour, too much encouraged by the pride and ambition of their families, for they threaten

to become a veritable plague, a fearful confusion, and a terrifying stream of mediocrity. A

perfect army of women painters invades the studios and the Salons, and they have even

opened an exhibition of ‘women painters and sculptors’ where their works monopolize

whole galleries. The profession of a woman painter is now consecrated, enrolled, and

amiably regarded; the girl of a bygone age, who made her own dresses and hats, who cooked

jams, and attended to her devotions – the modest flower proposed to candidates for

matrimony; this young girl without fortune, educated by her mother in excellent principles of

order and economy, is now only to be found in distant provincial places where good

traditions still flourish. (129)

Although Uzanne claims that professional women painters in the 1890s have won acceptance and even achieved “amiable regard,” his concurrent description of them as “a veritable plague, a fearful confusion, and a terrifying stream of mediocrity” undermines the validity of this utterance. Women artists may have seemed ubiquitous at the end of the century, especially in the eyes of male artists, and inroads may have been made as far as more equal access to training, but they had certainly yet to be “consecrated.” Through the displacement of the “modest flower” of a “bygone age,” women artists proved dangerous not only for Parisian high culture, but for “femininity” itself. Paradoxically, a number of critics, in line with Uzanne, claimed that women artists threatened to “feminize” high culture at the same time as they threatened to undo the very basis of the concept of “femininity.”

In addition to reflecting widely held concerns about the “feminization” of culture, Uzanne’s

“veritable plague” of women painters, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “damned mob of scribbling women,” suggests a terrifying lack of containment or control. By likening women artists to plagues

29 and mobs, Uzanne and Hawthorne cast them as unruly and unpredictable. These are women who pose a threat to tradition and the balance of power.

The quotation from Uzanne shows that to be a professional artist was a subversive act for a woman in the nineteenth century (even in the 1890s), and that women artists were often portrayed as “masculine” and understood as “unnatural.” Uzanne cites research to this effect, quoting physiologists like M. Cesare Lombroso who contend that if women display genius, “it is by some trick of nature, in the sense that they are men” (128). “[T]he bee is queen,” Lombroso insists, “only in so far as she ceases to be female” (127). Echoing these outlandish sentiments, Uzanne then alleges, “literary work deforms the usual nature of a woman just as physical labor deforms the body”

(132). Similar beliefs pervaded the United States as well as Europe during the period. According to art historian Sarah Burns, popular opinion conceived of women artists here in terms similar to

Uzanne, as “masculine,” deformed, or just plain silly:

Whereas male artists could incorporate, control, and exploit the “feminine” without

compromising their masculinity, the female artist was patently unable to contain and

dominate the masculine, which took over and inexorably deformed her. In addition, artistic

activity taken too seriously only distracted a woman from her socially ordained domestic role

and visited havoc on the home. An “artistic” woman was often synonymous with a silly

woman. (182)

Supposedly scientific or medical discourse, like the research referenced by Uzanne, fueled a market for representations of unattractive, unsexed, or utterly ridiculous women artists and professionals.

Indeed, as Victorianist Dennis Denisoff argues, “professional women artists were perceived by many to be a challenge to male hegemony” (151). One way to counteract this threat was to compromise the woman artist’s authority through ridicule or caricature, a strategy that also worked to discourage women who might be considering picking up a brush or pen. “The notion that any form of

30 independence was masculinizing, that women were made to have purely domestic roles, and that efforts to achieve self-realization were selfish and unnatural,” Linda Nochlin explains, “had of course been successful weapons in the battle to keep women in line for many years” (ix).

The heroines of Fettered for Life, The Story of Avis, and The Awakening – Laura Stanley, Avis

Dobell, and Edna Pontellier – struggle against the kinds of stereotypes and criticisms Burns and

Nochlin identify. They each must overcome direct, and often hostile, forms of discouragement and derision in order to pursue their art, and each faces accusations of being unfeminine or unwomanly.

Blake combats charges of a horrific or unnatural masculinity for women activists and professionals directly through a conversation that occurs between her heroine Laura Stanley, and the dainty, upper crust Flora Livingston. After catching her first glimpse of the well-known suffragist and medical doctor, Cornelia D’Arcy, Flora discloses she was surprised to find D’Arcy a “splendid looking woman,” admitting to Laura, “I thought she would be old-maidish, and wear spectacles and a very short dress” (70). Laura, unlike her more naive friend, recognizes the effects of the anti-suffrage campaigns waged in the media that served to undercut the woman’s movement through grotesque caricatures and challenges Flora to reconsider her assumptions: “[B]ut Flora havn’t [sic] you yet found out that these dreadful creatures have no existence except in a comic paper? I have met several of the best-known advocates of woman suffrage in this city since I have been staying here, and I assure you they look just like any other ladies of equal wealth and position” (70).

Flora’s preconceived idea of the “strong-minded woman” reflects more than twenty years of indoctrination by newspapers, magazines, and other ephemera that pictured the suffragist – along with the professional, progressive, or modern woman – as shrewish, unfashionable, and unattractive.

Of course, these were not merely comedic figures. The “modern woman,” in all of her different manifestations, Denisoff and others have shown, embodied society’s fears about the potential overturn of “natural” gender roles. Two companion cartoons from the British periodical Punch,

31 reprinted in the January 1852 edition of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, clearly illustrate these concerns. Both cartoons picture women in the “very short dress” Flora associates with the suffragist, the “Bloomer” costume (or “rational dress”), which consisted of a truncated skirt over

Turkish trousers.25 In the first, a boyish-looking woman takes advantage of the leap year by bending a knee to propose to her sweetheart and receives the reply, “You must really ask Mama,” as the dumbfounded mother, similarly clad in bloomers and displaying a clownish expression of dismay, enters the room (Figure 3). The second image presents a more extreme rendition of the unsightly

“strong-minded woman.” Here the “bloomerite,” posturing like a peacock, berates her husband for wasting time reading, “Now, do, Alfred, put down that foolish Novel, and do something rational,” while the dandyish man lounges on a chaise (Figure 3). These two scenes testify to prevailing concerns about “natural” gender roles that the women’s movement and suffrage appeared, to many, to threaten. Although the cartoons are humorous on the surface, they expose society’s deeply entrenched fears about normative gender ideology. It may be funny for women to adopt men’s clothes, but a change in costume, the images insinuate, will precipitate an all-out inversion of gender positions.

Because of widely held anxieties within the American public regarding the destabilization of gender roles, the popular press was able to prey on these fears in their anti-suffrage attacks. As Laura

25 Named for Amelia Jenks Bloomer, who made the previously labeled “freedom dress” famous, the “Bloomer” costume attracted a bevy of negative attention to women’s rights activists. The outfit also quickly came to signify a particularly American version of the modern woman. One cartoon from Punch (7 Sept. 1851) pictures two outlandish women smoking and strutting down the street in their Turkish trousers and bears the title, Bloomerism – An American Custom. This same cartoon even formed the basis of a Currier & Ives lithograph: The Fe’He Males. Because “Bloomers” provided ammunition for the media against the woman’s movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others would abandon the outfit. For more on “bloomers” and dress reform, see Gayle V. Fischer, Pantaloons & Power: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States (Kent State UP, 2001), and Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent State UP, 2003). For a reproduction of the Currier & Ives lithograph, see Alice Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage (U of New Mexico P, 1994).

32 will complain to D’Arcy, a common rallying cry against suffrage was the argument that the “ballot will unsex us [women]” (258). While the cartoons discussed above present seemingly harmless fictitious scenes composed of nameless players, a November 1870 issue of Punchinello, a short-lived

American emulation of Punch, makes gender anxieties real in an assault on Susan B. Anthony, co- founder of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Titled Engagement in High Life, the cartoon imagines a scene from Anthony’s wedding, if the life-long “spinster” were ever to marry (Figure 4).

Here the groom, a disgruntled looking egg-shaped man, wears the veil and holds the bouquet while cowering beside a rigid Susan B. Anthony with wide-set legs, a tight bun, glasses, vest and tie.

Dubbed the marriage of “Antony and Cleopatrick,” the cartoon implies that Anthony’s bold, public persona and advocacy for women’s rights has unsexed her, erasing her “womanliness.” This

“unsexing” then transforms “Miss Anthony” into the “loud-voiced, hard-featured, coarse, and masculine” (Blake 258) figure of “Antony.”26 Such attacks not only effectively served to destabilize the authority of figures like Anthony, they also deterred women from joining a movement that might have made them equally “ridiculous.”

Blake herself fell victim to the stock anti-suffrage stereotypes circulating in the media and, therefore, recognizes the need to “feminize” her suffragist characters in order to make her polemic more palatable to readers. In Champion of Women, Blake’s daughter and biographer, Katherine

Devereux Blake, relates the story of when her mother first set eyes upon Susan B. Anthony at a temperance meeting about 1851 in Saratoga. The young, impressionable Blake, “escorted by two laughing gallants,” sees the great Susan B. Anthony wearing “a bloomer costume of pink dotted swiss!” and is unable to restrain her “restive” gentleman friends (73, emphasis in the original). All three soon

26 In addition to expressing common fears about gender ideology, the cartoon’s caption also reflects the racialized and nativist sentiments that Charlotte Rich shows would come to the forefront during the Progressive Era. Anthony’s potential groom, they speculate, must be either “one of our border aborigines or an ex-Fenian leader of noted gallantry.” For more on the Progressive movement’s racist and nativist elements, see Rich. 33 leave the meeting, a move which prompts Blake’s daughter to surmise, “I fancy her nice sense of beauty and fitness was outraged by that costume, by Miss Anthony’s plainness, angularity and aggressive manner” (73). This was a tale “not [told] outside her family” since it exposes Blake’s own susceptibility to appearances and her quick, petty judgment of a woman who would become an inspiration and friend (73). It is clear from Katherine’s account that Blake internalized this experience, as she did the libelous smears proliferating in the media, for when she does finally attend her first suffrage meeting as an adult, she reports to her husband that she was shocked to discover that the women present were, in fact, “ladies” (74):

Coming with trepidation, with every prejudice bristling, she was at once disarmed by the

setting and the dignified women she found there. She had been prepared by newspaper gibes

and coarse caricatures to meet ugly and grotesque persons, but the reality was in startling

contrast. Had her first experience been other than it was, her own course might have been

far different. (75)

Like Flora, Blake believed women activists would reflect popular stereotypes, and if they had, her daughter proposes, she might have been “doubtful of the advisability of her joining this abused and ridiculed movement” (76). Eventually coming to recognize the power of these negative images and their effects on women who may have considered joining the movement themselves, Blake sets out to abolish those fictions with the “very grand-looking lady,” Mrs. Cornelia D’Arcy, along with her equally beautiful young heroine, Laura Stanley (70). Mindful of her own prejudices and the influence they might have had in her involvement with suffrage, Blake realizes that the movement must be well marketed in order to attract a larger following, both female and male.27 Thus, decades before the movement would become fully commodified, Blake has already “tapped into commercial and

27 This balancing act did not go unnoticed by contemporary readers. In one review from The Aldine, the author writes that Blake had “a difficult task to perform, inasmuch as she attempted to tell a very commonplace story, and at the same time interest the public in an unpopular movement” (188). 34 psychological dictates about the malleability of modern identity in order to represent [suffragists] in appealing – yet carefully stage-managed – ways” (Finnegan 13).

The “most palpable obstacle”

In 2002, as part of a periodic series exploring “Women’s History in the New Millennium,”

The Journal of Women’s History published a “retrospective analysis” of Barbara Welter’s wildly influential essay “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860.” While each of the four analyses solicited for the special segment takes a different approach, they all applaud Welter’s pioneering use of source material and her unabashed critique of the patriarchal culture that constituted the now familiar nineteenth-century ideal for (primarily northeastern) middle-class, white women: the pious, pure, submissive, and domestic “True Woman.”28 Since the essay’s publication nearly fifty years ago, scholars across the humanities have debated its oversights in regards to class, race, and sexuality.

Indeed, although historian Mary Louise Roberts praises Welter in her contribution to the Journal’s retrospective, she also points out her fundamental “fail[ure] to understand the cult [of True

Womanhood] as an ideology that performed political and cultural ‘work’” (151). Despite the putative theoretical weaknesses of Welter’s essay, this reappraisal testifies both to the pervasive, though always contested, impact of the cult of True Womanhood during the nineteenth century and to the overwhelmingly positive influence Welter’s work has had on studies of women’s histories.

What requires further attention in the twenty-first century, then, are not questions involving the viability of the True Woman as a historical subject, but those involving the different ways that women engaged the ideologies she embodied. Like Joan Scott in her 1986 query on the “usefulness”

28 Welter’s use of a wide variety of print sources, including magazines, fiction, poetry, advice stories and manuals, diaries, and letters, makes her essay a template for modern cultural analysis. 35 of gender as an analytic category, Roberts stresses the need to investigate how change occurs. What we have yet to “understand” about the cult of True Womanhood, she argues, “is how individual women understood these regulatory norms of behavior, and more importantly, how they resisted them” (Roberts 152). Welter’s essay falters somewhat in this respect. She does not treat the True

Woman as a contentious figure and she shrouds the emergence of the New Woman in mystery.29

“Somehow,” Welter hypothesizes, through a “mixture of challenge and acceptance, or change and continuity” and a broad list of historical factors, including “movements for social reform, westward migration, missionary activity, utopian communities, industrialism, [and] the Civil War,” the True

Woman “evolved into the New Woman” (174). At the time of the Journal’s reassessment, Roberts believed we were “still only beginning to unravel the processes by which the true woman became the new woman” (153). Today, so many years later, the central questions remain. How did the New

Woman develop? How did “real women,” as Welter refers to them, “challeng[e] the standard” established by the cult of True Womanhood and expose the trope’s volatility? How did these real women participate in the “startling transformation” that turned the True Woman into a ridiculous relic of a bygone era and the New Woman into a symbol of fashionable modernity?

Although Welter treats the True Woman as a particularly discursive construction, the trope was established and maintained through both verbal and visual texts. A 1901 satirical short story by

Caroline Ticknor from The Atlantic Monthly even provides visual incarnations of True Womanhood with a distinct term – the “Steel-Engraving Lady,” a name which refers both to “the lithographic process by which she was created and […] the element of moral rectitude in her character” (Banner

45). Lois Banner explains in her study of the history of female beauty in the United States that the

29 While Welter is careful to remind readers that it was dangerous for a woman to “tamper” with the doctrine of True Womanhood, she only vaguely mentions a tide of resistance at the end of the essay: “But even while the women’s magazines and related literature encouraged this ideal of the perfect woman, forces were at work in the nineteenth century which impelled woman herself to change, to play a more creative role in society” (173-4). 36

Steel-Engraving Lady “personified the Victorian need for stability and security” (53). Within the pages of the magazines, this frail, passive figure of “alabaster whiteness” devoted her life to harmony, beauty, and the elevation of the home (Ticknor 105).

While a number of women’s periodicals, as well as the hugely popular lithographer Currier and Ives, published Steel-Engraving Ladies, Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine prevailed as the major disseminator of idealized images of domesticated women. Historian Isabelle Lehuu argues the fashion plates and “embellishments” published by the widely circulated periodical created an

“archetype of ladyhood,” which “provided women readers with lessons on manners, behavior, and dress, as well as entertainment” (73, 88). This moralizing didacticism is especially evident in the

“embellishments” Godey’s began to include in each issue beginning in the mid-1840s (Lehuu 86).

What Godey’s termed “embellishments” were in reality “tableaux vivants staging motionless women in domestic scenes” that promoted the publication’s conservative platform and boosted its readership and desirability. The charming, well-executed “embellishments” were so popular, in fact, that readers often “tore [the engravings] from the issues to enhance their homes and apartments”

(Lehuu 88).

Many of the images Godey’s printed in their pages celebrated motherhood as woman’s

“natural,” and most revered, role. Even though sentimental genre paintings of mothers and children diminished in the 1850s and 1860s, Godey’s continued to privilege images that extolled the sympathetic and self-sacrificing mother.30 Typically, these scenes portray women in or around the home as they look after their children or engage in various household chores. One such embellishment, published in 1873, conforms to this practice in its depiction of an attractive woman in a ruffled collar sewing demurely while seated on the patio of her home (Figure 5). Her daughter

30 For a discussion of gender and genre painting, see Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991), especially 137-175. 37 stands beside her, pulling up the hem of her jumper while raising a stick playfully above her head to attract the attention of a goose and her brood. The goose and goslings are gathered around a water dish, completing the harmonious domesticity of the pastoral scene. Titled The Two Mothers, the engraving works to naturalize motherhood (and by extension domesticity) by suggesting a parallel between a human and non-human animal family. Similar themes were not uncommon during the nineteenth century. For example, in 1889, Harper’s Bazaar reproduced Elizabeth Gardner’s painting of a mother and child juxtaposed with a hen and her hatchlings. According to the dictates of True

Womanhood, women were natural caregivers, a role many doctors and scientists believed to be biologically determined.

The glorification of motherhood reached its apotheosis in writings and images evocative of the Virgin Mary. Theologian Lyman Abbott, writing for the Christian Union in 1880, even defends

“Mariolatry” (Mary worship) from naysayers on the grounds that the Virgin represents “A Type of

True Womanhood.” Mary, he methodically shows, possesses all of the True Woman’s characteristics: purity, submission, unselfish thoughtfulness, courage, and piety (580). Above all,

Mary symbolizes the True Woman as eternal mother: “The true woman thinks for others, feels for others, lives for others. If she is not a mother, she mothers some one else’s child; if she has not a babe, she at least buys a poodle” (580).

Godey’s frequently published mother and child images that quoted Christian iconography to assert the holiness of the mother’s role. A steel-plate, which appeared in the February 1869 issue, portrays a mother protectively holding her left hand aloft to silence any prospective intruders who might disturb her sleeping son (Figure 6). Enthroned on an ornate chair with a wash of light across her face, the mother gazes down admiringly upon her plump baby cloaked, as if for a christening, in a long, white gown. The engraving was made from a painting by J.H.S. Mann and first appeared in

38 the August 1866 issue of The Art Journal. The text accompanying the engraving’s original printing in the Journal enhances the idealization of the all-consuming mother figure:

It is almost a universal belief, that of all the feelings common to a woman’s nature, not one

is so deeply rooted nor so unmindful of self as a mother’s love. What sacrifices will not she

make, what toil and anxieties will not she endure without a murmur for her child’s welfare

and happiness. (“Selected Pictures” 232)

These examples show it was not uncommon for comparisons to be made between the Virgin Mary and the True Woman. Indeed, like Abbott, many articles cited Mary as the preeminent model of

Victorian femininity. James Cardinal Gibbons, in an attack on “The Restless Woman” for The Ladies’

Home Journal, lauds Mary – in lieu of more dangerous models like the Amazon, the Spartan, and

Venus – as the archetypal woman: “She is the great pattern of virtue, and all that goes to make the perfect woman alike to maiden, wife and mother” (6).

While it would be anachronous to suggest that Blake, Phelps, or Chopin were themselves social constructivists or that they could conceive of a theory of gender so bold as to challenge the prediscursive existence of the female sex, their writings do examine “woman” as a culturally determined subject. In a passionate article Phelps published six years before The Story of Avis, she identifies the True Woman as a normalizing rhetorical device. Phelps’s “The True Woman” was the culmination of a series of articles she produced for The Independent from July 13 to October 12, 1871, on a variety of women’s issues, including “suffrage, clothes, health, and work” (Bennett 110). Many scholars, following Welter, treat the True Woman as an antebellum ideal. However, Phelps argues in the 1870s that the True Woman still operates as “the most palpable obstacle” to what she terms “the

‘New Departure’ in the history of woman.” Although she is but a “scarecrow” who has been

“patched up by men, and by those women who have no sense of character but such as they reflect

39 from men,” this “manufactured model of womanly excellence” works to “regulat[e] the position of women by conformity to an established ideal of womanly character” (1).

In using the verbs “patched” and “manufactured,” Phelps destabilizes the cult’s fundamental assertion: that the True Woman represents the natural – the essential or inherent –

“womanly character.” Instead, “patched” and “manufactured” imply the True Woman has been socially constructed. Phelps even goes so far as to question the knowability of women’s “nature”:

But, beyond and above this, it is to be understood that nobody knows as yet what the

womanly character is. Our ideals of it are, par excellence, fictitious and contingent. The traits

which we attribute to it we have just as much reason to consider inherent in it as we have to

consider duplicity and dishonesty inseparable from the negro character; no more. It will not

be in this generation that we can presume to any acquaintance with the character of the

American freedmen. It will not be in this generation, nor in the next, that we can justifiably

assert that we have any acquaintance with what it is in the “nature” of woman to do or to be.

(1)

In Phelps’s estimation, it is not possible that “woman’s true nature could ever be known in the face of all the institutional limits placed on it” (Barker 92). Only after the achievement of full equality in all aspects of politics, business, art, medicine, religion, and family – to name merely a few of the long list of demands she cites, will the veil drop “from the brows of the TRUE WOMAN” (1). While this paragraph suggests it might be possible to uncover an intrinsic female character in a feminist utopic future, I am inclined to agree with Deborah Barker’s claim that “[t]he list is so long and the changes are so fundamental that Phelps makes it clear that the true nature of woman can never be known”

(93, emphasis in the original). What’s more, the use Phelps makes of quotation marks to set off

“nature” seems not simply to emphasize the term, but to suggest its instability.

40

That the True Woman posed a “palpable obstacle” to women and maintained her power as a feminine ideal after the Civil War is evident in the writings of Blake and Chopin, as well as Phelps.

The heroines of Fettered for Life, The Story of Avis, and The Awakening all meet with criticism predicated upon the dictates of True Womanhood, which serves to remind them of their transgressions. When she advocates on behalf of her students at Mr. Glitter’s school for girls, Laura Stanley’s employer hotly declaims that “[w]omen as public speakers are unsexed” (107). “It is wrong; it is unwomanly; I may even say it is demoralizing,” the headmaster vociferates in response to Laura’s request that the valedictorian give a speech at commencement (107). The embodiment of the “ever-womanly” in The

Story of Avis, Aunt Chloe, checks the title heroine by proclaiming “she would never grow gentle and womanly like other girls” since she preferred painting to sewing, eschewed housework, and engaged in tomboyish behaviors like tree climbing (26, 31). And Edna Pontellier, perhaps the most scandalous heroine to appear before the close of the century, receives reproofs from her own husband for her “inattention” and “habitual neglect of the children” (24). When Edna begins to paint seriously and to spend more time in her atelier working, Léonce, “shocked” and “angered” by her “absolute disregard for her duties as a wife” (76), compares her to Mme Ratignolle, the quintessential “mother-woman,” and insists she not “let the family go to the devil” (77).

So far in this chapter I have argued that the Cult of True Womanhood retained its power long after the Civil War and that women writers deployed the trope of the woman painter to contest the True Woman and to imagine alternative, liberatory identities for women that contributed to the development and appeal of the New Woman. In the readings that follow, I hope to show how

Fettered for Life, The Story of Avis, and The Awakening worked to unsettle essentializing and regulatory rhetoric through the images their heroines create. Whereas Blake takes a pragmatic approach intended to motivate readers to join the women’s movement, Phelps and Chopin are more theoretical and deconstructive, exploring the limitations of the available cultural symbols and codes.

41

Fettered for Life

Blake’s fifth novel Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master: A Story of To-Day, published in 1874, is an early example of the kinds of working girl or girl art student fiction that would become popular in the 1890s. It relates the story of Laura Stanley, a college graduate and aspiring painter, from her arrival in New York City in search of employment and independence up to her engagement to the avowedly supportive “New Man” Guy Bradford. Through Laura, the novel’s anchor – a model every-(new)woman, Blake introduces readers to a large cast of eccentric female characters that provides a panoramic view of (northeastern white) women of the period. Especially sensitive to class divisions, Blake includes women from different socio-economic stations in order to stress the need for female unity within the women’s movement.31 The narrative thus strives to link the struggles of its heroine with all of the women she encounters in the city: Cornelia D’Arcy, a widowed doctor and active suffragist; Flora Livingston, a wealthy socialite and hopeful poetess whose literary ambitions are suppressed by an overbearing husband; Agnes Moulder, an intelligent, somewhat ambitious woman reduced to the position of selfless wife (and mother) to a tyrannical husband; Rhoda

Dayton, a ruined dance-hall girl with a heart of gold; Molly Bludgett, the fearful wife of an abusive working-class husband; Maggie Bertrand, a consumptive angel spoiled by the society gent who will marry Flora; and Frank Heywood, a woman masquerading as a man in order to move freely and unmolested as a journalist. Overt and unapologetic in its political agenda, Fettered for Life argues that

“all” women must come together over pressing issues such as suffrage, the right to work and acquire

31 At the same time that Fettered for Life demonstrates an acute awareness of how socio-economic stratifications divide women (and thereby prohibits women from organizing as a collective political block), the novel fails to see race or ethnicity within the same light. For more on race in the novel, see Chapter 3. 42 an education, economic independence, marriage and motherhood, temperance, and the sexual double-standard.

Surprisingly, there has been little critical assessment of Fettered for Life, a novel hailed by

David Reynolds as “the most comprehensive women’s rights novel written in nineteenth-century

America” (401), and most of what has been published undervalues both the central character and the art she creates. Diana Postlethwaite, writing for The Women’s Review of Books, finds Laura Stanley

“less interesting than the varied women who cross her urban path” (15). And Lynn M. Alexander, following Grace Farrell, whose important work on Blake and her fiction has saved the author from relative oblivion, reads Laura’s narrative thread as “a nonthreatening, seemingly innocuous story that shades her text’s more radical nature” (601).32 Instead, scholarship tends to privilege the cross- dressing journalist Frank Heywood. Farrell even likens Blake herself to Frank Heywood proposing that Laura’s story merely functions as a form of literary cross-dressing, a way to “camouflage opinions that contradicted the status quo” (“Afterword” 384). In her estimation, Blake “crossdresses her fiction, outfitting it with traditional plot elements and a conventional ending palatable to that readership, giving it the acceptable patina of the patriarchal script” (384). Blake certainly deploys the genre of romance to attract female readers and to suggest her heroine’s “femininity” is untarnished by her art and her unconventional views and lifestyle. However, in Laura she also creates a complex character who subtly calls attention to those very patriarchal scripts.

Indeed, Blake’s painter protagonist enables a pointed critique of gender, art, and politics.

Having earned a degree from Essex College, Laura flees her domineering father, a wealthy farmer, for an urban lifestyle and economic independence. The spirited heroine, determined to “earn [her]

32 It is telling that Alexander uses “seemingly” here since a story involving a character who defies her father by running away from home to seek independence and pursue her dream to become a successful artist through academic study in New York City could hardly be considered “innocuous” in 1874. 43 own living” (20), plans to find work in education or bookkeeping until she “can paint sufficiently well to give all [her] time to that art” (36). Over the course of the year the novel chronicles, Laura will acquire a teaching post in art at Mr. Glitter’s school for girls (then lose her job for alleged insubordination), gain admittance to the “Academy of Design” (the novel’s moniker for the

National Academy of Design), receive the class award at the Academy, and achieve enough financial success as a contract painter for a print shop “to see her way clear to earning a respectable income by her pictures, and to hope that she would never again be obliged to teach” (360). As an outspoken, educated, professional, independent “embodiment of healthy handsome womanhood” (204) able to remake herself in an urban environment and succeed in a capitalist society, Laura operates as a model for the emerging New Woman.

Laura may be “less interesting” to today’s reader than D’Arcy, Frank Heywood, and Rhoda

Dayton, but she is the character with whom contemporary readers would likely have identified.

Beautiful, clever, and resourceful, Laura reassures Blake’s readers that education and professionalism will not unsex women. We might even consider Frank Heywood as a kind of cover for Laura, in that his/her more outlandish story helps to normalize Laura, to make her seem tame – harmless and

“feminine” – by contrast. That Blake desires to present her protagonist as respectable is evident from the opening pages of the novel. Laura Stanley first appears in a courtroom, under suspicion for wandering the streets of New York unchaperoned after sundown. Her propriety in question, she must defend her innocence to the judge, as well as to the policemen and reporters in attendance.

This scene, Farrell astutely explains, “foregrounds the issue of female containment within the legal space of patriarchy” (“Afterword” 401) and ultimately “implicates society as a whole in a broad range of actions that seek to control women” (402).

The courtroom scene also works to establish Laura as a proper “lady.” Juxtaposed with

Laura, “a girl neatly, but very plainly dressed,” are two women “gaudily habited, with haggard faces

44 yet streaked with the paint assumed last night” (7). Compared to these painted women, Laura – despite her college education, decision to disobey her father and flee home for the city, determination to achieve self-sufficiency, and desire to become a celebrated artist – does not seem improper or unladylike. “Women painters (like many other professional women),” Antonia Losano shows, “faced intense ideological disapproval because of their participation in the public realm,” and were sometimes (along with actresses and dancers) even likened to prostitutes (33). Laura encounters criticism predicated on these very beliefs from the headmaster at the school where she teaches who tells her that “a lady of proper instincts never wishes to appear in public” (Blake 251).

However, through her opening scene, Blake shows that all women who appear in the public sphere are not indecent by contrasting her heroine with two women “streaked with the paint assumed last night.” In other words, Blake cunningly tricks her readers – even the most conservative of readers – into agreeing that it is absurd for Laura Stanley to be on trial. Indeed, from the moment the corrupt judge (who will pursue our heroine relentlessly throughout the novel, even kidnapping her at one point) releases Laura to the guardianship of the malicious, drunken Mr. Bludgett, the reader is on her side, championing her and hoping for her success. Laura Stanley thus works to convince female readers that involvement in the public sphere – as artists, professionals, or activists – is not unseemly.

In addition to undervaluing Laura’s radicalism, critics tend to overlook her work and successes as an artist, and the ways in which her prizewinning drawing reflects the competing desires that trouble the woman as artist. None of the examinations of Fettered for Life discuss the artwork that

Laura produces and, like Farrell, even read Laura as a disappointing heroine:

In fact, despite all Laura Stanley’s assertions concerning the importance of self-fulfillment, of

financial independence for women, and of equality in marriage, in the end, her promising art

career is reduced to flower painting on commission, her earning power is domesticated (rather

45

than earning a living, she can “settle her small debts…and [buy] a new dress”), and she

becomes engaged to marry a man who has difficulty filling the role of the new man Elizabeth

Stuart Phelps would call for. (“Afterword” 398)

The wording of this evaluation situates Laura as a passive figure (one who has been “reduced” and

“domesticated”), which strips her of her agency and even suggests that she has failed as an artist and/or New Woman. While Laura may be naïve in her hopefulness for an equal marriage, a triumphant art career, and the realization of suffrage, she does marry for love (even if what she believes to be a companionate marriage may not turn out to be, as Farrell predicts), win first prize for her drawing at the Academy of Design, and achieve relative financial success as an artist, albeit as a producer of “flower paintings on commission.” Furthermore, Laura purchases the new dress mentioned above to wear to the ceremony at the Academy where she will be awarded her prize. As

Caroline Field Levander points out, “because [Laura] refuses to rely on others for clothing money, the condition of her garments indicates her financial status” (136-37). When Laura arrives at the

Academy exhibition in a stylish new dress, then, she “appears not only as an attractive but as a financially independent young artist” (137). The dress Laura wears that night, rather than signaling her (re)domesticization, instead signals her coming out as a powerful “new woman.”

Although Farrell, Levander, and others discuss the scene involving the culmination of Laura’s artistic success and the actions that surround that event, the drawing that wins Laura this award has been entirely ignored. Farrell reads the chapter as further evidence of Blake’s use of “cover plots” to conceal her more radical proto-feminist agenda since the moment of Laura’s success precedes an intensification of the love plot between Laura and Guy Bradford. After the President of the

Academy of Design announces the school’s prizewinners, and after the “crowd of friends offering their congratulations” dissipates, Laura discovers Guy standing beside her: “Of course he insisted she must take him to see her drawing, which they found with a group of admirers before it; of

46 course he quite exhausted himself in complimenting the beauty of that fine head of Clytie which she had rendered with so much feeling” (280). But, when they “turned away at last” from her prizewinning picture, Guy shifts the conversation to a discussion of their relationship. He flirts and makes vague professions of love, and Laura finds herself “trembling, in conscious happiness, under his gaze” (282). According to Farrell, Blake veils Laura’s achievement: “her story of success – a threat to the patriarchal marriage script for women – is immediately recast into a more socially acceptable, gender appropriate romance, which leads Laura to see that life’s best prize is a happy marriage” (“Afterword” 399).

While I agree that the love story overtakes the scene of Laura’s professional success here, I think it is significant that Guy precipitates this shift. Moreover, Laura returns the conversation to a discussion of her art and artistic goals after they are disrupted by crowds, confessing to Guy that she

“hopes” to have a painting accepted in the Academy’s annual exhibition next year (281). Rather than reading this scene as Blake softening the edges of her powerful heroine, we might read it as a commentary on the persistent sexualization or objectification of women. When Guy first encounters

Laura that night, he tells her his sister “Bessie is quite wild over the victory her teacher has achieved,” but the narrator tells us that Guy displays “a glow of admiration” merely because he believes her “one of the handsomest women in the room” (279). His response to her drawing further testifies to his disinterest in her as an artist. Guy “of course insisted she must take him to see her drawing” and “of course he quite exhausted himself in complimenting the beauty” of her drawing.

The repetition of the phrase “of course,” as Paul Sorrentino argues in a similar usage of the expression in a novel by Stephen Crane, marks Guy’s commendation as “formulaic” and “clichéd”

(271-72). Guys does and says what he should in this situation, without ever really looking at Laura’s painting – or at her – on the night when “the reward of [her] industry had come at last in tangible form” (278).

47

Fettered for Life includes innumerable cases wherein the male gaze seeks to control or objectify

Laura. However, with her prize-winning Academy drawing, Laura finds her voice and transforms herself from desired object to desiring subject. Given the freedom to choose her theme for the competition, Laura decides upon “a study of the head of Clytie,” a drawing she “execut[es] with great pains in the hope of winning the prize” (232).33 It is not insignificant that Laura selects such a fraught symbol from among the Academy’s collection of casts, a collection we are told includes

Apollo, the Laocoön, and the Venus de Milo (232). In Mythology and Misogyny, Joseph Kestner groups

Clytie with other “mythological prototypes,” such as Penelope, Echo, and Cassandra, who exemplify the belief that a woman “should be passive, loving, serviceable, self-effacing, sacrificing, compassionate, unintellectual, accessible, sweet, compliant, and above all submissive and subordinate” (38). Her tale is a tale of unbridled desire:

Clytie was a water nymph who was so enamored of Apollo that she followed his course

constantly from sunrise to sunset, her love unrequited. According to Ovid, she sat naked on

the bare ground, gazing at the face of her god as he went on his way. After nine days her limbs

grew fast to the soil, and she was changed into a plant, which in England popular fable

identified as a sunflower. (Haight 65)

Clytie’s unwavering devotion to the sun god made her a symbol of constancy and, according to

Kestner, the “epitome of female self-abasement” (40).

Laura’s decision to draw Clytie, I believe, complicates, and even subverts, her traditional signification. In her obsession with Apollo, Clytie embodies female sexual desire. However, because

Apollo represents both man and sun, Clytie’s need for his attentions hints not just at her physical

33 Before 1874, at least two busts of the mythological figure were garnering attention: George Frederic Watts’s Clytie, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868, and collector Charles Townley’s “Marble Bust of ‘Clytie,’” believed to be Roman, now in the British Museum. Laura is likely working from a cast of Townley’s bust.

48 cravings, but also a yearning for recognition. As a subject for Laura, then, Clytie takes on a double meaning: she suggests both Laura’s desire for Guy and her artistic/intellectual/professional desires.

Blake makes Laura’s ambition and determination to succeed as an artist clear. “Every spare moment” Laura dedicates to “practicing her art” (133). When the competition at the Academy presents itself, she resolves to win the prize, which she perceives as a measure of her potential: “She was struggling hard for the annual prize given at the academy, to the best drawing; and was devoting her energies to a study from a cast which she designed to be her competitive picture” (133-34).

Moreover, we see Laura “executing [her drawing of Clytie] with great pains in the hope of winning the prize” (232). The drawing of Clytie, then, becomes a symbol of her tireless ambition and pursuit of fame. Within the hands of a male artist, Clytie might work to “reinforce male superiority”

(Kestner 75), but Laura’s representation subtly suggests subversion. In her hands, Clytie seems instead to signify her desires, as a woman and as an artist.

Blake’s discussion of unrealistic caricatures of suffragists and her many references to the rhetoric of the Cult of True Womanhood show that she recognized the socio-cultural work of visual and verbal discourses. Indeed, Fettered for Life argues that popular representations of women must change before women’s positions will change. While all three novels discussed in this chapter implicitly argue that a variety of discourses interact to negotiate or mediate ideas about the nature and role of women, Blake’s makes this claim explicit. Not only does she consciously (and sometimes stumblingly) include political-legal, medical, journalistic, literary, and aesthetic discourses in her dialogues about women’s rights, she forthrightly asserts that women will not achieve equality

(suffrage, enfranchisement) until these discourses desist in proclaiming women’s inferiority. As

Cornelia D’Arcy, who clips and collects articles discussing women from a variety of newspapers and magazines, tells Laura, “Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are

49 inferior, so long will our sex be held in low estimate” (254). In this way, Blake calls attention both to the political role of art and to the important role her own novel plays in the women’s movement.

The Story of Avis

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps published her incendiary 1877 novel The Story of Avis just a few years after Fettered for Life. While critics have written far more about Phelps than Blake, she has certainly not garnered the critical attention she deserves (nor anything approaching the interest inspired by

Chopin’s fiction). Lisa Long persuasively argues that Phelps, along with Rebecca Harding Davis, may have been neglected because “critics have sought a particular kind of feminism” in women’s writings, one that “privileges ‘women’s ways’ of knowing and doing, champions activism, and ultimately promotes female community as human salvation” (265). Subsequently, she states that

Phelps’s “work has apparently foundered because it denies the possibility of community and frames its gender analysis in broader, more theoretical terms” (265). Indeed, whereas Blake’s fiction conforms to the “particular kinds of feminism” Long identifies, The Story of Avis does not. Critics often debate Avis’s exceptionalism and whether or not she considers herself a member of a female community. More often, however, analyses criticize its author and/or heroine for deploying the contested figure of the sphinx as a symbol for the “mystery of womanhood.” In agreeing with Long who contends that Phelps works to “dismantle gender identity” (266) in her writings, I want to propose that The Story of Avis, especially through its depiction of the sphinx, strives to problematize

“woman” as a signifier and to push readers to reevaluate “woman’s” historical meanings.

Avis’s story, though seemingly old today, was a radical one in the literary world of the 1870s.

It is a “narrative about a woman who fails to live up to her creative promise when she succumbs to the compromises of marriage, motherhood, and the repair of masculine wounds” (Travis 393).

50

Raised by her widowed father, Hegel Dobell, “Professor of Ethics and Intellectual Philosophy” at

Harmouth University (20), and her conservative Aunt Chloe, Avis turns to Elizabeth Barrett

Browning’s Aurora Leigh, “that girls’ gospel,” for inspiration, finding an idol in its poet heroine (31).

After a morning reading the poem while perched in an apple tree, Avis announces to her father, “I have decided this morning that I want to be an artist. I want to be educated as an artist, and paint pictures all my life” (33). Like Louisa May Alcott’s beloved “little woman” Josephine March, Avis abhors domestic work and insists she would “rather not be a lady” if being a lady means conforming to the definition preached by her Aunt Chloe, a definition shaped by the Cult of True Womanhood.

“There are other people in the world than ladies,” Avis decides. “And I hate to make my bed; and I hate, hate, hate to sew chemises; and I hate, hate, hate to go cooking round the kitchen” (27). Not surprisingly, Hegel cannot accept his daughter’s resolution to become an artist, telling her to “fret no more about ‘being’ this or that. Your business is to ‘be’ a studious and womanly girl” (34).

Just as Laura Stanley resists her father to escape to New York City, Avis defies Hegel by refusing to return home following a tour of Europe so that she can pursue her education as an artist.

For two years Avis hones her craft, studying first with the Italian painter Francesco Saverio

Altamura in Florence and then with the famous French painter and art teacher Thomas Couture in

Paris. However, soon after her return to Harmouth, the talented young artist who had “got into the newspapers” (8), is introduced to the new geology professor at the university: Philip Ostrander, a man she first encountered during a moment of vulnerability at a Catholic church in Paris. Philip courts Avis unrelentedly, but she rejects his overtures, arguing, “[m]arriage […] is a profession to a woman. And I have my work; I have my work!” (71). Having watched her late mother, who dreamed of performing on the stage, suffer under the duties and limitations of marriage, Avis is wary of the institution. When an injured, supplicant Philip returns from the Civil War, Avis can no longer withstand his appeals and, trusting that he does not expect her to sacrifice herself in marriage, that

51 he does “not want [her] work, or [her] individuality” (107), agrees to wed. Of course, marriage and motherhood will consume Avis’s time and energies, making it impossible for her to paint. Even after the passing of Philip (and her son, Van), Avis will not be able to resume her work as an artist. She discovers that she has lost her style and originality as an artist and must instead pursue teaching. The only hope for the future lies in her daughter, the symbolically named “Wait.”

That Phelps wants her readers to confront assumptions about gender and identity making, and to explore alternative ways of describing or defining women, is clear from the novel’s opening line: “What was it about her?” As do Blake and Chopin, Phelps initially presents her heroine through a scene that underscores women’s traditional position as a sight or spectacle. In Fettered for Life, this scene occurs in the court where Laura finds herself subject to the gazes of the male judge, police, and reporters. In The Awakening, Edna’s introduction infamously comes about through the gaze of her husband, who “look[s] at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage,” before remarking, “You are burnt beyond recognition” (21).

Conversely, Phelps begins not with an objectifying heterosexual male gaze but with the gaze of Coy

Bishop, a character Linda Huf identifies as Avis’s “ultrafeminine foil” (54). Coy, struggling to make sense of this unconventional woman, adopts a scientific gaze, inspecting Avis physically as matter rather than as aesthetic object (It is the narrator who will describe Avis’s appearance and dress a couple of pages later.). Ultimately, she hypothesizes that “[c]ertain metals enter into the composition of certain temperaments” and determine that person’s character (4). Avis, Coy concludes, “was, without alloy, loadstone” (5).

Coy’s attempt to comprehend and define Avis anticipates the novel’s central concern: how

(or, indeed, if it is even possible) to represent women outside of patriarchal structures. This is the riddle with which Avis grapples in her art and her rendering of the sphinx. The idea to paint the sphinx comes to Avis through a liqueur-induced vision, which appears as a “panorama extending

52 from floor to ceiling” (80). During this bazaar hallucination that unfolds over five pages in the novel,

Avis witnesses “a huge earthen vase,” a “medley of still-life,” scenes of nature in a “world of ferns” and a “Titanic wave,” “forms and faces grown gaunt with toil,” and the face of Jesus, among other images (80-82). Just when she believes the vision to have ended without revealing to her the artistic subject she hopes to discover, “the room seemed to become full of women”:

Cleopatra was there, and Godiva, Aphrodite and St. Elizabeth, Ariadne and Esther, Helen and

Jeanne d’Arc, and the Magdalene, Sappho, and Cornelia, – a motley company. These moved

on solemnly, and gave way to a silent army of the unknown. They swept before her in file, in

procession, in groups. They blushed at altars; they knelt in convents; they leered in the streets;

they sang to their babes; they stooped and stitched in black attics; they trembled beneath

summer moons; they starved in cellars; they fell by the blow of a man’s hand; they sold their

souls for bread; they dashed their lives out in swift streams; they wrung their hands in prayer.

(82-83)

As with the other images that appear on Avis’s wall that night, the procession of women passes.

Finally, the vision she has been waiting for materializes:

She saw a low, unclouded Eastern sky; fire to the horizon’s rim; sand and sun; the infinite

desert; a caravan departing, faint as a forgotten hope; mid-way, what might be a camel perished

of thirst. In the foreground the sphinx, the great sphinx, restored. The mutilated face patiently

took on the forms and hues of life; the wide eyes met her own; the dumb lips parted; the

solemn brow unbent. The riddle of ages whispered to her. The mystery of womanhood stood

before her, and said, “Speak for me.” (83)

This image, too, will pass, revealing in its absence a nightmarish whirl of Civil War battle scenes that recall to her heart Philip Ostrander, whom she will soon discover fell ill while serving the Union

Army. Although Avis commences work on the sphinx immediately, she will not complete it before

53 her marriage to Philip, which means the painting will remain unfinished for years while she tends to her house, husband, and children. Then, in a moment of economic desperation brought about by her husband’s irresponsibility, Avis “hastily” finishes the painting, adding an “Arab child looking at the sphinx with his finger on his lips, swearing her to silence” (205), sends it off, sells it, and eventually allows it to be photographed for additional money to care for a dying Philip.

The many varied interpretations of Avis’s painting of the sphinx in scholarship on the novel support Barker and Malini Johar Schueller’s claim that the sphinx is an “overdetermined symbol”

(84, 100). For example, Linda Huf concludes that the “meaning [of the sphinx] continues to escape”

Avis and that the child she superimposes onto the painting ultimately operates “as an emblem of children everywhere – of both toddlers and tutors – who prevent women from realizing their potential” (47). Roberta White similarly reads the painting as a commentary on patriarchal suppression, writing that the sphinx “symbolize[s] the silence of women and their latent power”

(61). This unrealized potential and latent power Carol Farley Kessler then connects directly to Avis, whom she argues functions as “Phelps’s Sphinx” (89). Avis, in other words, embodies what she believes to be Phelps’s riddle: “how to be both woman and artist” (Kessler 89).

Deborah Barker and Jeffrey Cass proffer more complex readings of the sphinx that use postcolonial theory to examine its associations with “otherness.” For Barker, the sphinx reveals the disassociation Avis feels between herself and other women (84). “As an artist,” she argues, Avis defines herself in opposition to ‘ordinary’ women; they become the Other, the riddle to be solved”

(76-77). Alternatively, Cass suggests that the sphinx functions “less as an external Other than a projection of an internal geography” (59). Thus, he reads the painting of the sphinx as a self-portrait of the artist that exposes “Avis’s Orientalized version of herself” (59).34

34 While I find Cass’s analysis of The Story of Avis rich and compelling, I am confused by his claim that Avis’s “original model for her sphinx painting is merely a decorative ‘little Egyptian clock […]’, 54

I agree with Barker and Schueller that the sphinx is an “overdetermined” symbol. In fact, it is the sphinx’s overdetermination that makes it work well as a representation for “woman.” The sphinx, like the figure of woman, has been appropriated and reappropriated by artists, philosophers, scientists and anthropologists, journalists, and any number of academics as a sign for x. They are both fraught symbols that have always been spoken for, but have themselves historically remained voiceless. The problem Avis faces is how to represent (all) women from a woman’s point of view.

However, as Rita Felski explains in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, the concept of a

“universal woman” is problematic for feminists (or proto-feminists)

not only because of the many empirical differences of race, class, sexuality, and age that render

notions of shared experience untenable. It is also because all such visions of woman are

contaminated by male-defined notions of the truth of femininity. This is true not only of the

negative cultural images of women (prostitute, demon, medusa, bluestocking, vagina dentate)

but also of positive ones (woman as nature, woman as nurturing mother, or innocent virgin, or

heroic amazon…). Woman is always a metaphor, dense with sedimented meanings. (182)

Despite her effort to “speak for” the sphinx/women, Avis realizes she cannot escape a “male- defined notion of the truth of femininity,” which is why she eventually adds a determining masculine figure to the painting.

In her painting of the sphinx, then, Avis invokes rather than solves the riddle of womanhood, a riddle the novel connects to the as yet unknown or unknowable “TRUE

WOMAN/WOMAN.” Just as Phelps differentiates between the “True Woman” and her “TRUE

WOMAN,” the being who will emerge if and only if women achieve full equality, in The Story of Avis she makes a distinction between the familiar “woman” – the signifier “dense with sedimented

and not some imaginative, realist, or photographic version of the Great Sphinx at Giza” (60). The single reference to this clock appears long after Avis has begun her painting of the sphinx, and the novel never suggests it inspired her work. 55 meanings” – and the as yet unknown “WOMAN.” Phelps addresses the problem of self-identity for women that Felski elucidates in her essay “The True Woman.” “We manufactured a model of womanly excellence,” she writes, “and that means the model most to man’s convenience,” so that

“we really know next to nothing of what we are about” (1). Even still, Phelps wonders if it might be possible to “draw the veil from the brows of the TRUE WOMAN” to reveal “this sad Sphinx – who lost her crown and received her curse for the love of knowledge” (1). The problem, a problem

Avis fails to solve, remains how to divorce “woman” from patriarchal inscription.

As in “The True Woman,” Phelps proposes a solution in the creation of a new signifier:

“WOMAN.” At the end of the novel when a defeated Avis finds renewed hope in her daughter, the narrator muses, “We have been told that it takes three generations to make a gentleman: we may believe that it will take as much, or more, to make A WOMAN” (246). We know what “woman” is or has been, but who is “WOMAN”? This is the riddle Phelps poses to her readers. The new signifier creates a symbolic space for (re)invention. It frees the reader from prior associations and makes it possible for her to imagine anew.

The Awakening

The Awakening first appeared in 1899, five years after the exchange between Sarah Grand and

Ouida in The North American Review that brought the “New Woman” international attention. In the two decades since Blake and Phelps penned their artist novels, the once nebulous modern or coming woman had been given a name, but she was still a hotly contested figure. The term “New Woman,”

Martha Patterson explains, could be applied to the suffragette, the artist, the college student, or even the Gibson Girl (27-28). Yet, whereas the Gibson Girl embodied a more traditionally “feminine” conception of New Womanhood, the woman artist “might be found wanton and a traitor to the

56 delicacies of her sex, or subject to the same criticism as the suffragette” (Patterson 28). As this chapter has already shown, women artists and suffragists were both popularly depicted as mannish, deformed, or ridiculous – the antithesis of natural or True Womanhood. While the rhetoric of True

Womanhood was less pervasive by the time of The Awakening, the True Woman remained a highly influential figure. Indeed, Martha Cutter contends that while “some historians claim that True

Womanhood had disappeared by the 1890s,” speeches given at the 1893 World’s Congress of

Representative Women in Chicago do “not substantiate this argument” (10).35 Of course, we can also find evidence of the persistent power of the Cult of True Womanhood in Chopin’s rendering of

Adèle Ratignolle, as well as in the reviews attacking the novel and its heroine.36

According to Ann Heilmann, in The Awakening Edna Pontellier “experiments with two contrasting female roles exemplified by Madame Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz – the passionate mother and the artist – but ultimately rejects both” (96). While I broadly agree with Heilmann’s claim here, I would like to emphasize that Edna specifically rejects the models of womanhood and artist embodied by these two characters, models informed by popular representations of True

Womanhood and New Womanhood. In her characterization of Edna, a woman caught between two dominant nineteenth-century stereotypes, Chopin works to denaturalize the mother-woman and to naturalize the woman artist. Early in the novel, Edna rebels against the model of womanhood personified by Adèle and begins to explore a new identity, that of artist.

Mme Ratignolle does not quite represent the antebellum ideal of True Womanhood Welter identifies. Indeed, Adèle almost seems modern. She inhabits a space somewhere between the pious, pure, domestic, and submissive True Woman and the sexy, flirtatious, and freewheeling Gibson Girl.

35 Cutter cites Collins Porter’s “The Power of Womanliness in Dealing with Stern Problems” and J. Ellen Foster’s “Woman as a Political Leader” as examples (10). 36 For a history of the novel’s critical reception, see Bernard Koloski, “The Awakening: The First 100 Years” in The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 161-73. 57

With her “spun-gold hair that comb nor confining pin could restrain” and “two lips that pouted, that were so red one could only think of cherries or some other delicious crimson fruit in looking at them,” Adèle recalls physical depictions of the Gibson Girl. In addition, she enjoys salacious novels, openly expresses her thoughts, and demonstrates an “absence of prudery” Edna finds characteristic of Creole women (28). At the same time, and making her a more perfect embodiment of turn-of- the-century male desire, Adèle is also the quintessential “mother-woman.” Mother-women, like True

Women, Chopin explains, “idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (26). A perfect idealization of “womanly grace and charm,” Adèle is reminiscent of the “bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams” (26).

When Edna defames her painting of the “sensuous” Madonna, she refutes the modernized version of True Womanhood epitomized by Adèle. At first, Edna is taken in by Adèle, finding that she “liked to sit and gaze at her fair companion as she might look upon a faultless Madonna” (29).

One afternoon at the beach, attracted by the “gleam of the fading day enriching [Adèle’s] splendid color,” Edna determines to “try herself” on the “tempting subject […] seated there like some sensuous Madonna” by painting her portrait (29). Edna finds the finished image unsatisfying, however, and expresses her dissatisfaction through its destruction:

The picture completed bore no resemblance to Madame Ratignolle. She was greatly

disappointed to find that it did not look like her. But it was a fair enough piece of work, and in

many respects satisfying.

Mrs. Pontellier evidently did not think so. After surveying the sketch critically she drew a

broad smudge of paint across its surface, and crumpled the paper between her hands. (29-30)

When Edna cancels out her painting of Adèle/Mary with a slash of her paintbrush, she makes a gesture far more radical than has been discussed in scholarship on the novel. Edna’s reasons for

58 destroying the image are unclear, which leaves the reader to confront the image of the face of

Adèle/Mary besmeared with a “broad smudge of paint,” and then crumpled, and to conjecture as to why she reacts so violently. The narrator – similarly positioned outside of the scene – hypothesizes that Edna does not think the painting is “a fair enough piece of work” or “satisfying.”37 Critical analyses of this scene usually contend that Edna experiences dissatisfaction because she feels the painting fails technically. I would like to suggest instead that Edna is revolted by her idealization of

Adèle. Following this censorious reaction to her painting of Adèle/Mary, Edna methodically contests all of the major facets of True Womanhood. She disobeys her husband, moves out of her

(husband’s) home and ignores domestic and social duties, walks out of church, and engages in an adulterous affair. As an artist, she turns away from allegory and idealizations in her art, and she will not again choose Adèle as a subject. Rather, Edna focuses her gaze on the servants, her children, her father, and her lover. “Perhaps I shall be able to paint your picture some day,” Edna later tells Adèle,

“with a smile” (75).

This aggressive act thus marks the beginning of Edna’s transgressions and foreshadows her refutation of all the characteristics of True Womanhood. Her destruction of the image of

Adèle/Mary precipitates the shift in perception that enables her to begin “seeing with different eyes”

(59). As Barker points out, “Edna’s moment of awakening, in which she begins to ‘realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her,’ is directly preceded by the painting scene” (122). Thus, while most discussions of the novel cite Mlle Reisz’s music or Edna’s daring swim in the Gulf of Mexico as the catalysts for her “awakening,” it is actually after this scene – after she “survey[s] the sketch [of

Adèle/Mary] critically” – that a “certain light [begins] to dawn dimly within her” (31). The production of art is a self-reflective act for Edna. It promotes a critical gaze that awakens her to her

37 For a discussion of the ambiguous nature of this scene, see Barker (130). 59 position as an ideological subject within the patriarchy. Edna unconsciously perceives Adèle as a feminine ideal, holy in her selflessness, because she has been culturally conditioned to esteem mother-women. However, once she obtains a critical gaze and begins to question her position, she sees Adèle differently, even feeling “pity” for her “blind contentment” (76).

If the role of True Woman or “mother-woman” loses its appeal for Edna, so too will the role of woman artist she meets in Mademoiselle Reisz. Through her depiction of the spinster-pianist, that

“disagreeable little woman” (44), Chopin (like Blake, though far more subtly) draws attention to popular caricatures of New Women and women artists. Mlle Reisz is a humorous composite of the most common stereotypes associated with the supposedly silly and/or mannish New Woman artist.

Chopin describes her as a “homely woman, with a small weazened face and body and eyes that glowed. She had absolutely no taste in dress, and wore a batch of rusty black lace with a bunch of artificial violets pinned to the side of her hair” (44). Her cantankerous temperament and aloofness make her, according to the local grocer, “the most disagreeable and unpopular woman who ever lived in Bienville Street” (78). Yet, despite her seeming monstrousness, Mlle Reisz is in fact

“exceedingly diminutive,” so much so that at Edna’s dinner she must be “elevated upon cushions, as small children are sometimes hoisted at table upon bulky volumes” (108). Many critics have commented upon Mlle Reisz’s characterization, noting, like Doris Davis, the she embodies the

“nineteenth-century conceptualization of the female concert pianist as ‘unnatural,’” or “suspiciously

‘masculine’ or in some other way peculiar” (90). Of course, as this dissertation shows, such beliefs were not restricted to perceptions of female musicians. These stereotypes extended to any woman who defied traditional gender roles, and certainly to all women artists, including painters and writers.

Even though Mlle Reisz conforms to negative stereotypes involving women artists during the period, the critical tendency has been to accept her as a representation of the true artist, and even as Chopin’s artistic ideal. Davis, for example, concludes that Mlle Reisz “voices Chopin’s own

60 attitudes towards art” (103). Joyce Dyer positions her as the “center of wisdom” and the “center of beauty in the novel” (95) and sees her, along with Paula Von Stoltz in the story “Wiser Than God,” as “Chopin’s true artist” (93). Of course, in privileging the model of the woman artist represented by

Mlle Reisz, and her romantic belief that the “artist must possess the courageous soul” that “dares and defies” (Chopin 83), critics come to the conclusion that Edna is not a real or true artist and that she fails, as an artist and even as a woman, because of weakness. Thus, Elizabeth Ammons insists

Edna “lacks the talent and discipline of Mademoiselle Reisz” and will therefore “never be more than a dabbler, despite the fact the she sells her drawings and sketches” (72). “Truly to create art in The

Awakening is to suffer great loneliness and pain,” Ammons asserts, “it is to cross over into a realm not defined by or for women” (73).

However, descriptions of Edna’s work and development as a painter in the novel do not corroborate readings of her as a failed artist (or a mere dabbler).38 Before moving into the pigeon house, Edna tells Mlle Reisz that she is “beginning to sell my sketches” and that her art instructor,

Laidpore, believes her work “grows in force and individuality” (100). She is also visited by a picture dealer, “who asked her if it were true that she was going abroad to study in Paris” and then

“negotiated with her for some Parisian studies” (125). As K.J. Weatherford states, for Edna to become “a painter whom dealers want to commission all within less than a year’s time indicates she has both ability and drive” (104). These details also challenge Mlle Reisz’s comments about Edna’s

“pretensions” in claiming that she is “becoming an artist” (83). In fact, Weatherford notes, “Reisz never once in the course of the novel sees any of Edna’s art work” (106), a detail that marks her criticisms of Edna as wholly unfounded. Unfortunately, although the role of artist enables greater

38 While much of the scholarship on The Awakening tends to ignore or denigrate Edna’s art and role as an artist, a handful of critics have emphasized Edna’s painting and made claims to her seriousness as an artist. See, for example, Deborah Barker, Kathryn Lee Seidel, K.J. Weatherford, and Roberta White.

61 awareness, it also opens Edna up to censure. No one takes her seriously, not even the one person who should empathize with her, Mlle Reisz.

Although art makes it possible for Edna to see differently and to awaken to her desires (sexual, artistic, intellectual, and individualistic), she “can find no one who understands the new sexual and social identity she is attempting to articulate” (Cutter 87). The identity Edna wants to adopt – that of a sexual, self-aware, independent New Woman artist – is deemed socially unacceptable by nineteenth-century codes of womanhood. No available discourses or categorical systems provide the vocabulary she requires to comprehend her desires:

“One of these days,” she said [to Alcée Arobin], “I’m going to pull myself together for a

while and think – try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I do not

know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the

sex. But some way I can’t convince myself that I am. I must think about it.” (103)

The different “codes” which converge to define “womanly character,” including those Chopin alludes to in the novel – moral/religious, socio-political, medical/scientific, render Edna a

“devilishly wicked specimen of the sex.” Refusing to accept “anything but [her] own way” (133), and finding no sympathetic models of womanhood with which she can identify, Edna swims “on and on” into the Gulf (136).

Fettered for Life, The Story of Avis, and The Awakening make possible identities previously unimaginable for women, producing new female archetypes. Through their heroines and the art they create, Blake, Phelps, and Chopin delegitimize the True Woman as the “feminine” cultural ideal and create a space for the development of the New Woman. In these novels, art enables a critical liberation that their authors hope will pave the way for socio-political change. However, the liberatory promise of the New Woman will face cooption with the increasing popularity of the

Gibson Girl at the turn into the twentieth century, an assimilation that will threaten to remake her as

62 a consumer rather than a producer and that will subsequently undermine women’s struggle for agency.

63

CHAPTER TWO

HOWELLS, MAGRUDER, AND THE POPULAR NEW WOMAN OF THE

MAGAZINES

In the late nineteenth century, Charles Dana Gibson’s image of the “American Girl” became one of the most influential, and paradoxical, symbols of New Womanhood in the United States.

Unlike the grotesquely drawn caricatures of the suffragist or professional woman intended to suggest a devastating, and dangerous, dissolution of traditional gender roles, here was a vision of the New

Woman as youth, beauty, style, and health. In her role as a fashion icon, the Gibson Girl helped to counter pejorative connotations of the term “New Woman,” but at the expense of the self-reliance, agency, and productivity that supporters of New Womanhood intended the character to signify.

Thus, at the same time that the Gibson Girl helped to “feminize” and “normalize” a figure many

Americans found threatening, she also reestablished woman’s position as object and limited her power to her status as a consumer. Through his drawings of what Martha Patterson describes as a

“desiring/desirable subject” (45), then, Gibson usurped the figure of the New Woman and transformed her into an appealing commodity that substantiated William Dean Howells’s claim New

Womanhood was merely a “pose,” a performance attainable by any keen novel or magazine reader

(“Life” 417).

Because she was a product of the rapidly expanding periodical industry, which carefully marketed and maintained her brand, the Gibson Girl reached previously unparalleled levels of fame and became, in the words of Carolyn Kitch, “the first visual stereotype of women in American mass

64 media” (37).39 However, while the prevalence of the Gibson Girl and similar girl types within the pages (or on the covers) of the nation’s leading magazines appeared to naturalize a homogenous view of women and to sideline salient issues central to the women’s movement, the intertextual format of the periodical actually facilitated a space for play and dialogue by enabling comparative modes of reading. One form of contestation occurred through magazine fiction, a genre that, through sheer proximity, was poised for an especially effective destabilization of the problematic gender ideologies propagated by the Gibson Girl and the periodicals dependent upon the sale of the look and lifestyle she advertised. In other words, despite the seeming conventionality of magazine fiction focused on the figure of the woman painter in comparison to the overtly radical, proto- feminist perspectives advanced by Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s

The Story of Avis, or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, its direct juxtaposition with illustrations of Gibson

Girl types and articles denouncing women’s rights or encouraging a retreat to the private sphere produced a disjuncture that called attention to the machinations of gender construction in the media.

William Dean Howells’s The Coast of Bohemia (The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1892-93) and Julia

Magruder’s The Princess Sonia (The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 1895), two serialized romances published concurrently with Gibson Girl drawings and other equally reductive images of women, testify to the ways that the hypericonic figure of the woman painter serves to dislodge the authority of the gendered visual stereotypes perpetuated by a magazine industry whose massive circulation in the 1890s made it one of the most formidable cultural determinants and a critical locus of gender debate. Both novels, I will argue, critique the renewed objectification and aestheticization of women symbolized by the rise of the Gibson Girl that detracted from the socio-political platform of the

39 Kitch further argues that the Gibson Girl’s “rapid rise to fame created a blueprint for the commercial uses of such a stereotype,” an influence she charts throughout her study (37). 65

New Woman and women’s movement. By privileging production rather than play and subjectivity rather than sameness, Howells and Magruder push against the Gibson Girl stereotypes that were symptomatic of a wider cultural repression of female agency. Since the Gibson Girl’s identity relied entirely upon her look and the use of her body/beauty as spectacle and product, by positioning

Gibsonesque characters as women painters Howells and Magruder renew the New Woman’s professional, intellectual, and political identity while simultaneously promoting an awareness of gender construction.40 More importantly, Bohemia and Sonia implicitly stress the perilous ramifications of women’s lack of representational power, which serves to expose the problem of striving to be a modern or New Woman in the Gibson Girl sense. When women cannot or do not participate in their own self-construction or self-representation, they must capitulate to dominant

(male generated) stereotypes and ideologies which work to maintain women’s subordinate positions.

Imaging the New Woman

With her long neck, tall hourglass figure, loosely gathered hair, chiseled profile, and white skin, the lovely Gibson Girl represented a far more palatable and normative version of the modern woman for a country unsettled by changing gender roles. Since she promoted a vigorous, confident vision of women that aligned with some of the principals of the women’s movement, she gained a supportive audience (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman) and helped to inaugurate a new era.41 Yet,

40 Gibson underscored his girl’s function as an aesthetic object within an illustration he created for Life in 1900. Titled Picturesque America: Anywhere Along the Coast, the drawing depicts an array of Gibson Girl’s sunbathing at the beach. Clearly, the illustration means to suggest an equivalence between the Gibson Girl and the sublimity of the American landscape. See Life 2 Aug 1900: 90. 41 In Women and Economics, Gilman celebrates the Gibson Girl as a model of health and evolution: “Have we not all observed the change even in the size of the modern woman, with its accompanying strength and agility? The Gibson Girl and the Duchess of Towers, - these are the new women; and they represent a noble type, indeed” (148). 66 although she might engage in supposedly gender bending activities (such as golfing, bicycling, or smoking), the Gibson Girl certainly did not campaign for suffrage, seek a professional career, or eschew marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. If the fin de siècle woman was restless, the Gibson

Girl suggested that restlessness stemmed from a yearning for increased material gain and romantic involvement. In this way, Gibson recast the civic-minded, professionally active, and potentially revolutionary figure of the New Woman as a young, middle to upper-class lady of leisure, who, when no longer a girl, would marry and settle into a traditional domestic lifestyle.42

Moreover, as a white, middle- to upper-class, conventionally “feminine” figure, the Gibson

Girl concretized a vision of modern womanhood that effectively marginalized those who differed from the ideal she celebrated.43 The widespread proliferation of Gibson Girl images, and subsequent

Gibson Girl mania (she would inspire plays, songs, and poems, and her likeness would be reproduced on calendars, plates, jewelry and other memorabilia),44 prompted a reviewer of Gibson’s first book of collected drawings in 1894 to remark that the artist had “a great responsibility on his shoulders” since “thousands of American girls, from Oshkosh to Key West, […] are trying to live up to the standard of his girls” (Bridges 312). Gibson was not, of course, the sole producer of such pretty girl types. In the coming years, Howard Chandler Christy, James Montgomery Flagg, Harrison

Fisher, Henry Hutt, Penrhyn Stanlaws, and a bevy of lesser-known artists would each develop their

42 For readings of the Gibson Girl in terms of courtship and youth, see Amanda Glesmann, “Reforming the Lady: Charles Dana Gibson and the ‘New Girl,’” Women on the Verge: The Culture of Neurasthenia in Nineteenth-Century America (Stanford, CA: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford U, 2004) 53-67; and Jane H. Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002). 43 While Gibson’s illustrations marked her as white, discussions over the genesis of the Gibson Girl image actually destabilized the “purity” of her racial background. For examinations of the Gibson Girl in terms of race, see Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago U of Chicago P, 1984) 154-74; Jennifer A. Greenhill, “Troubled Abstraction: Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier,” Art History 34.4 (2011): 732-53; and Martha Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2005). 44 For brief discussions of Gibson Girl memorabilia and popular culture, see Patterson 33 and Kitch 41. 67 own variation of Gibson’s flirtatious and fashionable American Girl. Consequently, the major periodicals became saturated with copy after copy of similar girl types, which Kirsten Swinth explains, “naturaliz[ed] female types by setting boundaries of what’s thinkable about how women look, act, and behave” (610). The result of the repetition of images of the Gibson Girl and her many doppelgangers, in other words, was a normalization of a definition of “femininity” by which all

American women came to be measured.

To further bolster his particular vision of women, and counter subversive figures or practices that threatened to destabilize or deconstruct normative gender roles, Gibson marked non-traditional or non-dominant practices as “unnatural” or monstrous. Thus, if the Gibson Girl type represented an idealized, “feminine” version of the New Woman, the woman painter, as a producer of the national culture rather than merely a reflection of the country’s current tastes and desires, formed her contrast. In a Gibson illustration from an 1890 issue of Life magazine titled The Female Artist Who

Has Ceased To Be Feminine, Gibson employs the grotesque iconography associated with the suffragist and the spinster to ridicule the professional woman artist’s unconventional role (Figure 7). Here the gangly woman painter, encased in her smock and spectacles, gapes at her patrons while poking a paintbrush at an image of Little Bo Peep. Even worse, the interior of her studio reveals she has

“leaped beyond china painting and household decorating to tackle large-scale paintings,” and that she studies from the nude (Burns 181-2). Her adoption of “masculine” forms of art and training deemed improper, or outright indecent, for a woman clearly signals her deviancy. By transgressing

“natural” gender roles, she has unsexed herself, a point Gibson emphasizes by concealing her body beneath the oversized frock. Woman, the caricature implies, should not be a maker of images, but an image herself, an implication further elucidated in a later piece by Gibson. In this drawing, part of a twenty-seven scene series titled A Widow and Her Friends that appeared in Life in 1900 and 1901, the

Gibson Girl styled widow paints en plein air surrounded by a flock of admiring gentleman (Figure 8).

68

Since for the attention-seeking widow painting indicates an accomplishment or amusement rather than a livelihood, and because she, and not her work, forms the object of interest, her position as

Gibson Girl remains secure.45

Although the reflexive critical temptation is to dismiss the Gibson Girl as an embodiment of heterosexual male erotic and domestic fantasies, she did prove a valuable tool in the debates over

New Womanhood. Part of the task, Patterson contends, was for women to appropriate and redeploy the Gibson Girl so that they could “argue for Gibson Girl privileges while also challenging Gibson

Girl ideology” (47). Because of her highly favorable reception as a model of female beauty and desirability, writers and artists could exploit the Gibson Girl to promote new levels of independence for women without alienating a culture fearing woman’s “masculinization.” The difficulty, then, was how to contest the Gibson Girl’s limitations without wholly renouncing the “femininity” traditionalists feared greater emancipation would erase, especially since Gibson’s oeuvre implied that the Gibson Girl was, first and foremost, a woman of leisure. Howells and Magruder, by working within the romance tradition, successfully maintain the “femininity” of their professional artist- heroines through marriages that reconfirm their “natural” and “womanly” qualities.

Gibson’s illustrations, regardless of their use of satire, ultimately repress and contain the

New Woman’s agency by redirecting it into sexual and consumerist outlets. In making this claim, I do not mean to imply that sexuality or consumerism do not necessarily involve choice or power, but rather that by focusing exclusively on these two arenas, Gibson Girl imagery negates the broader political, social, and cultural authority suggested by the New Woman. For example, by emphasizing modern woman’s role as a consumer and aesthetic/sexual object, Gibson suppresses her potential as an artist, producer, or spectator. I also do not mean to vilify Gibson or to suggest that his Gibson

45 Gibson further underscores this opposition in other scenes within the series by counterposing the lovely widow with the recurring character Miss Babbles, a published author. Plump, squat, and, of course, unwed, the middle-aged Miss Babbles, in body and in name, is meant to suggest absurdity. 69

Girl illustrations were solely responsible for a late nineteenth-century backlash against the New

Woman (itself a nascent and unstable signifier) or the women’s movement. Instead, I intend to show how the prototypical image of the Gibson Girl, despite her seeming independence and freedom, actually served to inhibit the women’s movement, and to show how writers, through the deployment of the painter heroine, countered her effect.

Therefore, by repositioning the Gibson Girl as an artist/producer, Howells and Magruder challenge such static, debilitating perceptions of women and, subsequently, move women closer to opportunities for full emancipation by enabling her to articulate her subjectivity while simultaneously teaching the American public how to see with an artist’s eye, and thus to critically read the images of women sold to them through the expansive periodical and commercial markets. Readers, especially female readers, needed to be armed with the skepticism and analytical acuity necessary to deconstruct those images since the “critical spectator is one less likely to be victimized by the text”

(Devereaux 345). Because Howells and Magruder initially published their novels within popular periodicals rather than as discretely bound books likely devoid of illustration and divorced from the visual and discursive constructions of women that served to uphold the Gibson Girl ideal, they encourage readers to confront how the narratives interact with those constructions.

The Coast of Bohemia

Serialized in The Ladies’ Home Journal from December 1892 to October 1893 with fourteen original illustrations by Frank Otis Small, The Coast of Bohemia has received scant critical attention, too often overlooked as a trite romance churned out for a commercial market and one of Howells’s weaker novels. When it does garner a mention, critics tend to dwell on the novel’s parodic representation of “bohemian” lifestyles and to overlook its more serious treatment of the

70 problematic relationship between art and gender.46 An offhand comment by George Bennett hints that Bohemia’s lack of recognition may be due, in part, to its initial appearance in The Ladies’ Home

Journal rather than a highbrow “literary” publication (106). Conversely, I am proposing that

Howells’s examination of female stereotypes and the gendered gaze proves especially effective precisely because it was published by and written expressly for the Journal. Since the Journal targeted female readers and privileged just the kinds of representations of women with which the novel takes issue, Bohemia achieves a traction it would not have gained through a vehicle like the Atlantic Monthly.

Furthermore, as I will discuss later, Howells likely wrote the novel in response to a handful of articles by women readers, such as one that appeared in the Christian Union in 1891, denouncing him for not including “one noble, self-contained, clear-headed woman” amongst his heroines (Clark

676).47 The Journal, therefore, offered him a platform through which to address their criticisms and attempt to redress his oversights.

A second reason for The Coast of Bohemia’s lack of scholarly attention probably stems from its genre. Because of Howells’s adamant avocation of realism and his lampooning of the romance genre in, for instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham (coupled with a broader cultural tendency to denigrate the genre as formulaic and pedestrian), critics, then and now, fail to comprehend why Howells may have chosen to deviate from his artistic philosophy, other than for financial reasons.48 However, by working within the romance tradition, Howells freed himself to self-consciously explore his own

46 Readings of the novel in terms of its representation of “bohemia” include Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858-1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010); 47 Clark does single out Alma Leighton, the painter heroine depicted in A Hazard of New Fortunes, as “best of them all” (677). 48 Critics often cite a conversation from The Rise of Silas Lapham concerning a sentimental romance novel titled Tears, Idle Tears, which Penelope Lapham renames “Slop, Silly Slop,” to support claims about Howells’s distaste for the genre. In addition, such readings usually align Howells with the minister, Sewell, who complains, “[t]he whole business of love, and love-making and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life.” See The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Penguin, 1986): 197-98. 71 limitations as an author and even to question the objectivity of art. In effect, the romance genre allowed Howells to self-reflexively confront the problem of gendered subjectivity, a maneuver that realism, by its very nature and definition, prohibited.49 If, according to Mary Devereaux’s explanation, “[t]he notion that all seeing is a ‘way of seeing’ contrasts sharply with the traditional realist assumption that observation can be cleanly separated from interpretation,” Howells finds freedom by turning away from realism to the more flexible genre of romance (337). According to contemporary reviews, Howells may have struggled to compose an affecting love story, but he did compel the genre to carry the weight of the social and aesthetic questions with which he had been struggling in his earlier novels, especially A Hazard of New Fortunes, published three years before by

Harper’s Weekly.

Beneath the cover of a banal girl meets and marries boy narrative, then, The Coast of Bohemia strives to expose the superficiality of representations of women wrought by male artists and authors, and subsequently to empower female artists, authors, and readers. The novel opens with the pretentious Paris-trained impressionistic painter Walter Ludlow, who has traveled to small-town

Ohio in search of “American material” (10.1:3). At first, Ludlow believes the Pymantoning

Agricultural Society’s trotting-match will prove the perfect theme for his American masterpiece, but it soon becomes clear (to the reader) that the girl he meets at the fair’s Fine Arts Department, and who reminded him of a “hollyhock, by the tilt of her tall, slim, young figure,” would eventually become his overriding aesthetic, and romantic, focus (10.1: 3). Despite her Gibsonesque physique,

Cornelia Saunders does not fit the stereotype. Irregardless of Ludlow’s assertion that “[n]othing is commoner than the talent and beauty of American girls” and she would be smart to “trust to [her] beauty,” Cornelia saves enough money teaching to leave home for New York City, acquire a room

49 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard define “gendered subjectivity” as “the idea that every artist or writer responds to the world and represents it in artistic constructions, consciously or unconsciously, from the position of gendered experience” (3). 72 in a boarding house, and enroll as a student at the “Synthesis of Art Studies,” a fictional school inspired by the Art Students League of New York (10.1: 4). Howells, therefore, borrows “positive attributes” from both the New Woman and the Gibson Girl to “create an attractive heroine who was thoroughly modern and topical” (Willis 64). Yet, rather than suggesting the “folly of her desire for independence,” which Chris Willis argues was a common intention of male authors’ depictions of New Women, the novel instead insists upon her need to pursue a profession and artistic voice

(53).

As a model of independence and professionalism, the character of Cornelia challenges both the conservative doctrine preached by the Journal and the genteel images of women it venerated.

During the time span of The Coast of Bohemia’s run, the magazine published articles that unabashedly deterred women from professionalization and a life beyond the domestic sphere. In a four part series titled “The Girl Who Goes To College,” for example, author Anna Robertson Brown marks the public sphere as unnatural for women by insisting her “most natural duty is at home” (10.11: 24).

The article does briefly discuss the girl graduate’s potential to teach, volunteer with the church, or become involved in other philanthropic endeavors, three avenues which would not endanger the overriding need “to attain a glorious, noble and helpful womanhood”; however, Brown concludes by stressing that the girl graduate’s primary concern must still be to “prepare for marriage” (10.11:

24). Similarly, regular contributor Ruth Ashmore’s piece, “Girl Life In New York City,” an essay actually intended to curb young women’s desires to move to the city or set out on their own, includes a cautionary tale of a girl unable to sustain herself as an artist. In desperation, the pitiful heroine relinquishes her brushes for the bridal altar, but because her failed aspirations in the city left her “broken in spirit, weak and impoverished in body,” dies following childbirth (10.2: 14). The moral of the tale, then, is to stay home and “thank the good God who made you for the privilege of

73 working at home, and of being out of the great world where there is no time for anything but work, where the sick and the helpless fall by the wayside unnoticed” (10.2: 14).

A similar reinforcement of traditional domestic ideology occurred through the full-page cover illustrations commissioned by editor Edward Bok to commemorate the Journal’s tenth anniversary or “Jubilee Year” and status as the “foremost woman’s periodical in America” with the

“largest circulation of any monthly periodical in the world” (10.1: 1).50 Taken as a group, the cover illustrations, which depict genteel, classically “feminine” women in domestic or pastoral settings, reinscribe what Griselda Pollock terms the “spaces of femininity” during a time when women were increasingly entering the public sphere (as consumers, professionals, artists, students, humanitarians, and activists) and shedding traditional roles (66).51 Drawn by well-known artists, including Frank O.

Small (The Coast of Bohemia’s illustrator), Alice Barber Stephens, William St. John Harper, A.B.

Wenzell, and, of course, Charles Dana Gibson, the covers represent women in private/domestic spaces (parlors and gardens) or engaged in acts of “bourgeois recreation” (feeding birds, luncheoning, and driving along the coast).52 All of the covers, then, emphasize propriety, domesticity, and leisure. Notably absent are urban settings, images of women as students, professionals, or philanthropists, and depictions of women engaged in any form of work (including domestic labor).

50 To advertise the “Jubilee Year,” Bok created a two-page spread for the Christmas issue promoting the “striking features” to be found in the Journal in the coming months. See The Ladies’ Home Journal 10.1 (Dec. 1892) 1-2. 51 The two exceptions include a painting of a large rose bush (the only cover not to feature a woman) and A.B. Wenzell’s “Jubilee” cover of two classically draped angels. 52 I am borrowing the term “bourgeois recreation” from Pollock who writes, “paintings located in the public domain, scenes for instance of promenading, driving in the park, being at the theatre, [and] boating” operate as “spaces of bourgeois recreation, display and those social rituals which constituted polite society” and which, therefore, are safely contained within the acceptable “spaces of femininity” (56). 74

With Cornelia Saunders whose “desire to paint,” Bennett notes, reveals an underlying determination to “assert her independence and individual worth” and the wealthy, eccentric

Charmian Maybough, a fellow art student striving to cultivate a liberated, bohemian lifestyle and persona, Howells counters the “no place like home” rhetoric of the Journal (110). Unlike the neat, conventionally comfortable images of women on the magazine’s covers, Howells’s novel presents two complicated heroines seeking personal and professional autonomy. Even though The Coast of

Bohemia wraps with a marriage, which Susan Fraiman identifies as an “effective way” for authors “to clean house – to put people and things in their places” before the 1880s, it does not suggest that marriage operates as the pinnacle of a woman’s life, nor does it imply an unambiguous marriage for

Cornelia and Ludlow (483). On the contrary, the novel actively challenges the notion that a young woman should privilege marriage above all else, especially a profession. Mrs. Burton, a family friend of Cornelia professes, “I believe as much in the holy estate of matrimony as anybody, but I don’t believe it’s the begin-all or end-all for a woman, any more than it is for a man” (10.1: 4).

Additionally, Cornelia complains that when a girl “wants to do something” everybody only encourages her because they believe she will make a “magnificent match” by her “painting or singing or acting” (10.2: 4).

Instead of functioning as the center or focus, the marriage plot operates as an agent for a self-conscious exploration of difficult questions involving gender, art, and truth. Indeed, the novel exhibits a preoccupation with the problem of the gendered gaze and the ways in which it inhibits

“realistic” representations of women. This issue comes to the forefront when Mrs. Maybough commissions Ludlow to paint a portrait of her stepdaughter. Anticipating his inability to read

Charmian, Ludlow asks Cornelia to paint alongside him, hoping she will “show [him] how to look at

Miss Maybough” (10.7: 3). Ludlow believes that, as a woman, Cornelia innately possesses the ability to understand and interpret other women, an ability that eludes him as a man. She can paint

75

Charmian with “one woman’s unclouded perception of another,” whereas his images will be perverted by a male gaze (10.8: 8).53 In a conversation with his artistic colleague, Wetmore, a character recycled from A Hazard of New Fortunes, Ludlow admits,

She [Cornelia] could have a career; she could be a painter of women’s portraits. A man’s idea

of a woman, it’s interesting, of course, but it’s never quite just; it’s never quite true; it can’t

be. Every woman knows that, but you go on accepting men’s notions of women, in literature

and in art, as if they were essentially, or anything but superficially like women. I couldn’t get

a picture of Miss Maybough because I was always making more or less than there really was

of her. (10.8: 8)

Ludlow’s evocation of the gendered gaze crystallizes one of the novel’s central concerns: the problem of how to depict women “justly” or “truthfully." Despite his attempts to “learn” from

Cornelia how to see Charmian, he cannot penetrate her façade and eventually paints her as

“Mystery,” a choice that underscores his inability to comprehend modern women. Of course,

Charmian, the chameleon, enjoys playing a part and initially requests that Cornelia and Ludlow

“paint [her] in character” as “something allegorical or mythical” (10.7: 4). Alternatively, at the first sitting she decides instead to be painted as an artist: “She wished to stand before her easel, in her

Synthesis working-dress, with her palette on her thumb, and a brush in her other hand” (10.7: 4).

For Charmian, the role of artist and the Synthesis life style (which she views through the lens of a romanticized “bohemianism”) equals freedom and choice. After all, it is only within her mock-up studio that she can unlace her corset, “breathe freely,” and escape the rigid gender and class roles

53 The premise that one woman can perceive another with an “unclouded perception” ignores the intersections of race, class, and sexuality that would complicate notions of an “equal” gaze. Although the novel does not acknowledge any effect upon Cornelia’s series of portraits of Charmian, the two are in fact separated by class and, perhaps, race. While Cornelia is decidedly middle-class (and rural), Charmian is the product of a wealthy family. In addition, soon after their first meeting, Charmian confesses to Cornelia that she was born in New Mexico rather than New York and that her great-grandmother, according to family lore, was a Zuñi princess” (10.4: 5). 76 dictated by her mother and society (10.3: 6). Yet, rather than honoring her vision of herself (or desire to remake herself) as an artist and free spirit, Ludlow turns her into an allegory that reflects his perception of women rather than her character. While Wetmore attributes the failure of his friend’s portrait to his attempts to “interpret” Charmian and “come the prophet,” Ludlow’s exclamation reveals an acute awareness on the part of the artist (and author) that, in Devereaux’s words, “seeing never escapes a way of seeing” (340). Ludlow’s gendered position determines how he

“sees” Charmian – as a mystery, a conundrum, an enigma.

Similarly, when Ludlow completes what he hopes to be his masterpiece, he “reifies his wife and fellow artist as a domestic subject in a pseudo-impressionist painting” (Diller 382). In memory of their first meeting, Ludlow merges Cornelia’s form with that of a hollyhock. According to the narrator, “As far as it could be made out with the naked eye, it represented a clump of hollyhocks, with a slim, shadowy and uncertain young girl among them, and the painter had apparently wished to suggest a family resemblance among them all” (10.11: 4). As with his painting of Charmian as

“Mystery,” Ludlow again forces his female subject into a model of “femininity” he finds appealing.

This final painting of Cornelia by her new husband is more than just a redomestication, however. Indeed, the narrator tells us, “The piece was called ‘Hollyhocks,’” but “it might equally well be called ‘Girls’” (10.11: 4). There is a violence involved in equating her, and women generally, with the hollyhock. By suggesting a resemblance between Cornelia and the hollyhocks, Ludlow successfully reduces her to an aesthetic object: he compels her to signify nature, and thus to reinforce the gendered culture/nature binary often deployed to thwart women’s participation in the arts. It is also a move that serves to erase or negate her individuality and autonomy, lost as she is within a mass of indefinite flowers. Although Ludlow insists Cornelia should not “lapse from her ideal and purpose” or “cease to be an artist in becoming a wife,” his painting symbolically hints at his need to subsume Cornelia’s identity and art with his own (10.11: 4). After their marriage, he

77 regularly “painted passages and incidents in her pictures, sometimes illustratively, and sometimes for the pleasure of having their lives blended in their work” (10.11: 4). While his idea was “to see how nearly he could lose his work in hers,” the act of marking her paintings, of intruding upon her vision with his, foretells her future as an artist and a wife (10.11: 4). Despite the seemingly neat, romantic ending, then, this last studio scene complicates any easy, straightforward reading of their union. As a wife, Cornelia will suffer the stamp of her husband in name, body, and work.

Given the overt condemnation of representations of women by male artists and authors, how are we to read The Coast of Bohemia? In one sense, Howells sets himself apart from Ludlow’s failed attempts to “produce images of women without exaggeration, obscurity, or both” by juxtaposing his own depictions of Cornelia and Charmian with Ludlow’s paintings (Diller 328).

Howells certainly creates far more dynamic, nuanced representations of Cornelia and Charmian by articulating the struggles they encounter in their quests for professional and personal autonomy. Yet,

Howells may be admitting his representations are also the result of a limited male gaze, while simultaneously providing himself with an out (through the cover of romance) for any potential misgivings his (female) readers may have had about his characters since he is not aspiring to realism.

A series of attacks by women regarding Howells’s heroines, especially those published by the Art

Interchange in 1885, likely compelled the author to attempt to write more independent, outspoken female characters and to nod to those reviews by mocking (through Ludlow) his own biases.

But Howells also eventually redomesticates Cornelia through her marriage to Ludlow, a point the rebellious poser Charmian – who had hoped to establish a “Boston marriage” with

Cornelia – emphasizes through the novel’s final line: “And now – now, I’m afraid she’s going to be perfectly respectable” (10.11: 32). Even though Cornelia at one point “found herself turning into a romantic heroine,” and struggled against it, she is not a particularly radical character (10.11: 32).

Unlike Alma Leighton, the gutsy artist heroine of A Hazard of New Fortunes who refuses the hand of

78 another artist and instead privileges her work, Cornelia succumbs to a typical female plot – the same kind of plot utilized by Gibson to contain the Gibson Girl, which Amanda Glesmann argues diffused her threat: “By focusing on courtship and relationships between the Gibson Girl and the men around her, Gibson linked the uncertain – and potentially dangerous – figure of the American

Girl to a more familiar – and less threatening – pattern of life for women” (56). Like Gibson,

Howells limits the danger posed by the professional woman artist by “taming” her in marriage, a containment accentuated by Small’s final illustration of the wedding.

Small’s decision to conclude with the wedding, a wedding Howells glosses over within a single sentence (“Cornelia and Ludlow were married at Pymantoning in the latter part of June,”

10.11: 4), implies that their marriage functions as the narrative’s happy conclusion.54 He does not, for example, picture the novel’s subsequent scenes, which insinuate the troubled dynamic of Cornelia and Ludlow working together in their studio or the “bohemian” dinner party hosted by Charmian that actually concludes the narrative. In fact, all of Small’s illustrations highlight the more conventional or traditional aspects of Cornelia’s story and in this way harmonize with the kinds of images usually published by the Journal. Not one of his drawings pictures Cornelia as an artist or in a setting that accentuates her ambition and drive for independence. When he does picture Cornelia and Charmian at a classroom in the Synthesis or with Ludlow in Charmian’s attic studio, for example, he chooses to represent moments of repose rather than production (Figure 9). We never actually “see” either Cornelia or Charmian as artists, an omission that recalls Ludlow’s choice not to paint Charmian in her Synthesis gown outfitted with her paintbrush and palette. By emphasizing the domesticity of the two girls, Small obscures their identities as artists.

54 Not surprisingly, the book version of the novel, published by Harper in 1893, uses Small’s wedding illustration as the frontispiece, a maneuver that further obscures Cornelia’s artistic identity and promotes instead a reading of the novel as a romance in the traditional sense. 79

Read against Small’s illustrations and the frame of the Journal, The Coast of Bohemia accomplishes a problematization of popular images of women that pushes readers to consider how these representations are made to signify male fantasies of desire or domesticity. In this way, the novel unsettles the homogenized vision of the American Girl perpetuated by artists like Gibson that threatened to depoliticize constructions of the New Woman. In its sympathetic portrait of Cornelia,

Bohemia also helps to challenge negative caricatures of the woman artist. The respectability that proves disappointing for Charmian actually serves to reassure readers that Cornelia has retained her

“femininity.” Her marriage to Ludlow disproves allegations that the woman artist unsexes herself, even as it insinuates the loss of her individuality and serves to contain her within a more familiar, normative gender role.

Most importantly, however, The Coast of Bohemia implicitly insists, as Diller points out,

“women must become artists themselves if they are to obtain accurate aesthetic representation”

(382). In order to resist unjust, untrue, or superficial portrayals, it was up to women artists and writers to produce alternative representations that would counter or complicate the dominant stereotypes circulating in the media. Beyond empowering female artists and writers, Howells also empowers and educates the readers of the Journal by aligning them with Cornelia. While the third person omniscient novel opens with the perspective of Ludlow, it gradually begins to privilege the viewpoint of Cornelia by using her dialogue or inner thoughts to critique his. The primarily female readership of the Journal would have identified with the novel’s heroine, and Howells encourages this identification by enabling his heroine to emphasize Ludlow’s inadequacies as an artist. When Ludlow solicits Cornelia’s opinion of his portrait of Charmian, for example, she laughs. “I tried to see her as you do; to do her justice, and if it is overdone, or flattered, or idealized, it is because I’ve been working toward your notion,” protests Ludlow. “At first, when I wanted to do her as Humbug, you wouldn’t stand it, and now, when I’ve done her as Mystery, you laugh” (10.9: 8). Cornelia’s laughter

80 becomes so uproarious following Ludlow’s blustering defense that she buries her face in her handkerchief and replies, “That is because she isn’t either. Can’t you understand?” (10.9: 8). And, when Cornelia finally sees the “Hollyhocks” and realizes that everyone “who knew her and knew him” would recognize that “she was the girl and she was the hollyhocks,” Howells describes her as experiencing “a measure of justice in the censure that condemned it for obscurity” (10.11: 4). Like

Cornelia, the novel’s readers are meant to laugh at Ludlow’s misapprehensions of women. Her responses to Ludlow’s paintings of “Mystery” and the “Hollyhocks” as ridiculous both invites readers to agree with her and teaches them how to see through similarly condescending or denigrating images of women.

The Princess Sonia

Like Howells, Julia Magruder manipulates the romance to challenge popular representations of women and domesticity. Moreover, with nineteen original illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson,

Magruder’s The Princess Sonia, one of sixteen novels by the almost entirely forgotten Virginia born author, also explicitly contests the Gibson Girl (and, concurrently, Gibson’s “unfeminine” artist) by recasting the figure as an ambitious painter.55 The novel originally appeared in five installments from

May to September 1895 in the highly regarded Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.56 According to

55 Jane Turner Censer’s discussion of Magruder’s Across the Chasm (1885) in her study of post Civil War reconstruction fiction is the only sustained critical examination of Magruder to date. See The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2003). 56 In spite of its title, The Century was less visually oriented than The Ladies’ Home Journal. Where the Journal’s pages were congested, mixing advertisements and copy, The Century was streamlined, with its monthly correspondence and advertisements pushed to the back pages. A “self-proclaimed democratic periodical,” The Century cultivated an appearance of bipartisanship, often printing opinions on either side of the political fence, such as two pieces supporting and denouncing women’s suffrage published in 1894 (Noonan ix). Richard Watson Gilder, the magazine’s editor from 1881-1909, was not always so moderate, however, and personally held a conservative view of 81

Mark Noonan, under its first editor and original moniker Scribner’s Monthly, the periodical did support the careers of a host of women writers in the 1870s, but a turn toward realist fiction and a desire to boost male readership greatly reduced the number of female contributors in the 1890s.

Given these changes, it might seem surprising that The Century chose to print Magruder’s sentimental romance. However, current editor Richard Watson Gilder probably published the novel, as Willa

Cather surmised in an early review, to capitalize on the success of Richard Harding Davis’s The

Princess Aline, which concluded just two months prior in the pages of Harper’s Monthly. For Cather, who wrote of Davis’s semi-autobiographical novel, “[n]o matter how sweet and irresistible a man’s personality is, the public wearies of his always talking about it,” The Princess Aline “pall[ed] upon the human soul” (152). General readers found the novel far more appealing, making it popular enough for The Ladies’ Home Journal to rework it six years later as a two-act play intended for parlor productions.57

Also illustrated by Gibson, who would famously use Davis as the inspiration for his Gibson

Man (and for the novel’s protagonist), The Princess Aline follows society portrait painter and self- proclaimed womanizer Morton Carlton from New York to Europe in pursuit of a captivating

German princess whose photograph he came across in a newspaper. At the end of the novel,

Carlton, unaware he has successfully turned the head of Aline, abandons his quest for Edith Morris, an American girl with whom his travels intersected. Magruder’s novel, conversely, substitutes the painter hero for a painter heroine and subverts the trajectory of the romance to call into question such saccharine, unambiguous idealizations of women, love, and marriage. Focusing instead on how

women, which influenced his management of the “genteel” magazine. Refusing to violate his “virginibus maxim,” a rule that reminded him to “print nothing to offend a virgin,” Gilder often censored his contributors, sending them notes about what revisions he required to uphold the magazine’s refined reputation (Noonan 86). 57 See S. Decatur Smith Jr., “’The Princess Aline’ A Play,” The Ladies’ Home Journal 18.5 (1901): 3-4, 40-1. 82 women perceive themselves and each other, The Princess Sonia centers on two female art students studying at an atelier in the Latin Quarter of Paris: Martha Keene, a homely American whose mother permits her to study art since she has no prospect of marriage, and Sonia Mannernorff, a woman

Martha believes to be a Russian princess working incognito at the studio, but whom we eventually learn is Sophia Rutledge, the daughter of an English father and Russian mother who had married and promptly disavowed Martha’s brother, Harold Keene.

In a subversion of the typical romance plot, then, The Princess Sonia commences not with a young girl in search of love, but with a heroine who has fled a disappointing marriage and, following the reappearance of her husband, must now come to terms with its reality. By reversing the romance formula, Magruder exposes the genre’s artificiality and its consequences for young women enchanted by uncomplicated, “happily ever after” conclusions. Indeed, Sonia views herself as a victim of domestic fantasies and unrealistic representations of women, which tricked her into

“expect[ing] so much” (50.1: 12). Although the novel never shows or makes plain the circumstances that led her to abandon Harold, Sonia cites the influence of books for promoting

“false ideas of life” and leading her to believe that “all the happiness [she] imagined was quite possible” (50.1: 12).

A desire to counter portrayals of women in art emerges more forcefully during a visit the two heroines make to the Louvre where they pause to “pay their homage” to one of the supreme icons of female beauty, the Venus de Milo. After initially circling the statue in silence because “words seemed out of place,” Sonia breaks their reverence, exclaiming, “I have a fancy to try an experiment. Let’s name her! What I mean is, if that were a real woman, what would you think the name best suited to her?” (50.2: 250). Once they have exchanged names, Gloriana and Georgiana,

Sonia and Martha retry the experiment with the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which they simultaneously name Ruth. Since titles, in part, determine how the spectator will read or interact

83 with a work of art, Sonia and Martha effectively reframe and recontextualize the statues, transforming them from idealized allegories of “love” and “victory” into “real women.” If we look at the figures not as imaginings of the goddesses Venus and Nike, but as portraits of actual, properly named women, they become human and relatable.

Magruder’s interest in transformations from ideal to real resurfaces in a scene she reworks from The Princess Aline wherein Carlton discusses his plans to paint Edith. Watching Edith walking the Acropolis during a stop in Athens “with the wind blowing [her] skirts about,” Carlton recalls the

Winged Victory and determines to capture the impression: “I’d like to paint you just as you are standing now, only I would put you in a Greek dress; and you could stand a Greek dress better than almost any one I know. I would paint you with your head up and one hand shielding your eyes, and the other pressed against your breast. It would be stunning” (128). Carlton’s determination to paint

Edith as an allusion to the Winged Victory reveals a desire to frame and control her, or, in the language of Lynda Nead, to “perform a kind of magical regulation of the female body” through “the classical forms of art” (7). It also evidences a need to remake Edith, the average American girl, into his definition of a true heroine – a queen or princess – rather than base or pedestrian subjects like

“lady lawyers and girl politicians and type-writers” (Davis 140).

Contemporary readers of the novel may also have read the scene in relation to one of Annie

H. Ryder’s popular conduct books, Go Right On, Girls! Develop Your Bodies, Your Minds, Your Characters.

The second chapter, titled “What the Goddess Gave Us To Talk About,” imagines the narrator escorting her young readers to view a replica of the Venus de Milo at the “Boston art museum” while she asks them to consider what makes her a “perfect woman” (13).58 The realization Ryder expects involves a recognition of the statue’s symmetry and harmony, which supports her thesis on the

58 An excerpt of this chapter appeared in The Chautauquan, which suggests it may also have been reprinted elsewhere. See The Chautauquan: A Weekly Newsmagazine 14.2 (Nov. 1891): 246. 84 importance of wholeness and good health free from the degeneracy of excess and excitement.

Forebodingly, she warns her eager listeners of the “American fiend” who goads young girls to dance, study, exercise, play tennis, and practice music and painting, but without the necessary balance (19). For Ryder, then, the Venus de Milo operates as a symbol of restraint that women, especially young women, would be wise to emulate.

The choice of art works also proves symbolic since both are representations of ruin and decay; they are in effect wounded and “incomplete.” Outside of the bounds of marriage, Sonia becomes a “miserable woman” evidencing symptoms of hysteria. She repeatedly retreats to her darkened bedroom, weakened by crying fits, depression, and exhaustion. Unlike Martha who dubs her the “Happy Princess,” Sonia self-identifies as a “miserable woman.” It is only after her reunion with Harold that she finally accepts the epithet from Martha. In redomesticating her troubled heroine through a reunion with her husband at the novel’s end, Magruder safely contains the excesses of her heroine and transforms her into the “Happy Princess” Martha believed her to be.

The novel therefore evidences a conflict on the part of the heroine between a repudiation of marriage and domesticity and a conscience that believes such a repudiation is selfish and vain for women.

This conflict between competing models of femininity resurfaces in a short piece Magruder published in 1900 for Harper’s Bazaar, “The Typical Woman of the New South.” The article tows the line between celebrating the (slow) progressivism of the contemporary southern woman (in relationships, education, politics, and labor) and a desire to reinscribe her genteel heritage. Although she acknowledges, perhaps sarcastically, the loss of “some of the finer delicacy that belonged to the lady,” Magruder concludes by describing the contemporary Southern woman as “an evolution of the past – an upward growth, a higher development” who “has learned, or is fast learning, that to grow is the noblest thing in life, while her ancestresses, in the past, too often acted on the theory that they

85 could do no better than to be what their mothers and grandmothers had been before them” (1685).

An illustration of a tightly corseted woman in a high-necked gown replete with bustle, lace, and ruffles by Gibson imitator Howard Chandler Christy accompanies the piece (Figure 10). For

Patterson, the inclusion of the image suggests Magruder “imagined ‘The Typical Woman of the New

South’ as a Christy Girl” (32). It is highly unlikely, however, that Magruder developed her concept of the new Southern woman based upon Christy’s image. Instead, the overdressed Christy Girl appears incompatible with a figure described as “industrious” and “self-supporting,” as well as great in politics and intellectual.

In contrast to the Christy Girl who bears no apparent relation to Magruder’s construction of the “Southern woman of to-day,” the Gibson Girl accurately reflects descriptions of Sonia. In fact,

Sonia’s physique resembles the traits of the Gibson Girl so distinctly that, in this case, it does seem the author modeled the character directly after the work of the artist. Not only is she “very tall – so tall that when Martha walked at her side she had to turn her face upward to speak to her” (50.1: 10), she also has “large, dark, brilliant, and fervidly suggestive eyes,” hair that is a “brilliant, waving brown, arranged in a loose mass that was still firm and lovely in its outline,” and a “firm, short nose” that “pointed, and titled upward, slightly lifting with it the short upper lip” (50.2: 249). Physically and stylistically Sonia suggests the quintessential Gibson Girl, but her profession challenges her role as a

Gibson Girl. In this way, Magruder deconstructs the binary Gibson creates between the Gibson Girl and the “woman artist who has ceased to be feminine.” Not only does Sonia (after abandoning her husband) attend art school and exhibit, she studies from the male nude and paints with an intensity that alarms Martha, who describes Sonia’s “frightening” use of color as “broad and daring” (50.1: 6) and her self-portrait as “one of the most deadly things I ever looked at” (50.5: 778).

Although the majority of the Gibson illustrations for the novel stress Sonia’s beauty and style or her erratic temperament, he did create a startling full-length rendering of Sonia during a

86 moment of reflection at the atelier (Figure 10). Her clothes, which mostly conform to the description provided by the narrative, reflect the typical Gibson Girl costume – balloon sleeve shirtwaist, ankle length skirt, and upswept hair. However, since Sonia never wears a smock or apron, her clothes are “more or less streaked with paint,” a detail Gibson omits from his crisply attired and posed figure (50.1: 4). This omission, while seemingly inconsequential, obscures the labor involved in artistic production. In removing the mark of labor, Gibson positions Sonia more as dabbler or dilettante than hard-working, skilled professional, as well as cleaning her up for the male gaze.

At the same time, however, the image does correspond to the iconography of professionalism female artists from the period employed to underscore their positions as working artists. In her right hand she holds aloft a paintbrush while the left cradles a large, curved palette.

Unlike Small who chose not to picture a moment of production, Gibson does emphasize Sonia’s identity as an artist, especially since this is the first illustration of the title heroine and because it occupies such a prominent position within the text (as a full page image that physically disrupts the flow of the narrative).59 Yet, even as the drawing celebrates Sonia’s artistic identity, it also obfuscates her gaze through a diverted face and closed eyes that recall a comment made by a contemporary reviewer of the novel for the Overland Monthly who complained of Gibson’s “sightless clothes- horses” (485). Whereas Martha describes Sonia pausing to examine her canvas with lips “pursed critically” and her “whole attitude and expression” demonstrating “absorption in her work,”

Gibson’s rendering negates her gaze (50.1: 3-4). If, according to Laura Prieto, the direct gaze implied a “sitter’s depth and intellect,” the closed eyes conversely imply a dreamlike reverie or distraction

(111). Moreover, if women artists deployed the direct gaze “to suggest their own keen powers of observation and analysis, their artistic skill – in effect, their professionalism,” Gibson undermines

59 When published in book form by The Century in 1895, this illustration became the novel’s frontispiece, which contrasts the marketing of the novel in comparison to Howells’s. 87 the professional iconography signaled by the brush and palette (112). Ultimately, then, the illustration serves to reaestheticize Sonia, to present her as an object for display.

Sonia’s self-portrait, which merits exhibition on the line at the Salon under a pseudonym and is titled simply “A Study,” forms a strong contrast to Gibson’s rendition of her. Although the self- portrait offers the author a powerful tool for the construction of female subjectivity and an opportunity to critically engage representations of women, relatively few self-portraits appear in artist novels by women writers from the nineteenth century.60 The most well known self-portrait produced by a nineteenth-century painter heroine is undoubtedly the self-deprecating “Portrait of a

Governess” from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). So as to remind herself that she is an unlikely romantic match for her employer Mr. Rochester after becoming smitten with him, Jane Eyre gives herself a harsh punishment: “Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: to-morrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully; without softening one defect: omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, ‘Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain’” (161). To this cruel representation she is then to compare a second portrait rendered on ivory with the “most delicate camel-hair pencils” of her perceived rival Blanche

Ingram, “an accomplished lady of rank,” whom Jane has never seen but imagines to be of rare and exquisite beauty (160). As Roberta White remarks, “Jane’s assertion of her own poverty, orphanhood, and low social standing in the caption of her portrait is a clear indication that the two portraits represent Jane’s perception of the relative marriageability of the two women” (48). In painting her self-portrait, then, Jane explores the value of her image and determines that her plainness and class make her an unsuitable wife for Rochester. The question becomes, will

Rochester be able to see past this exterior and judge her for her true self?

60 In fact, none of the other artist novels I analyze in this dissertation include self-portraits, excepting some of the contemporary novels discussed in the conclusion. 88

Like Jane, Sonia uses the self-portrait as a mode of self-exploration, but her portrait operates as a “picture of her soul” rather than a likeness (50.5: 779). In fact, Sonia deliberately tries to eliminate “trace[s] of her feature and coloring” so as to conceal the painting’s authorship (50.5: 779).

This “study,” which she intends to reflect her deepest feelings and conflicts, is surprisingly stark and troubled:

The picture before which they had paused was a rather small canvas on which was painted a

woman leaning with her elbows on a table, and her chin resting in her hands, which met at

the wrists, and then closed upon the cheeks at either side. The little table before her was

perfectly bare. There was a striking absence of detail. The one thing which was accentuated

by careful and distinct painting was a plain gold ring on the third finger of the left hand. The

loose drapery which wrapped the shoulders, leaving bare the throat and arms, was simply

blocked in with creamy white paint and heavy shadows. The hair was gathered in a thick coil

at the top of the head. There was beauty in its coloring, and merit also in the flesh-tints of

the face and throat; but the power of the picture was in the eyes, which looked directly at

one. The brows above them were smooth, definite, and uncontracted. All the expression was

left to the eyes, which, large, honest, courageous, and truthful, met those of the gazer, and

gave their message – the message of despair. (50.5: 777)

A comparison of this portrait with Gibson’s illustration reveals substantial differences. Sonia’s hair,

“gathered in a thick coil at the top of her head,” recalls Gibson Girl styling; however, she is far from one of his “sightless clotheshorses.” Unlike Gibson, who emphasizes dress, body, and pose in his illustration of Sonia at work in the atelier, the artist pictures herself in a simple drapery with a bare throat and arms – and a general “striking absence of detail” – that works to accentuate her face and expression (rather than her body or “femininity”). Sonia’s intense self-portrait concentrates on her eyes, which meet directly “those of the gazer” to communicate a message of “despair.” As Prieto

89 writes, “The artist who sat for a portrait and turned her gaze back out to the viewer transformed herself from an object to a subject” (112). Moreover, in its focus on her despairing gaze, Sonia’s study operates as an examination of her conflicted self-identity, suggesting both her subjectivity and her subjugation.

Despite Sonia’s belated glossing of the painting as representative of her mistake in renouncing “a vision of what the love of a man and woman could be in wedded life,” the self- portrait inspires a vastly different reading from all of its viewers, including Harold and Martha (50.5:

780). Indeed, viewers interpret it as a condemnation of marriage, as does one nameless female spectator at the exhibition: “I believe that it is only through marriage that despair comes to a woman. If one painted that look in a man’s eyes, one would have to invent some better explanation of it than a wedding-ring” (50.5: 778). Magruder further contributes to the slipperiness of the painting’s intention and signification through a remark by Sonia that seems to contradict her claim that it represents her regret for leaving Harold. In explanation for her decision to exhibit pseudonymously a painting she initially intended to remain private, Sonia states she realized it would allow her to give “her message to the world impersonally” and to say, “Look in my face, and see.

This is marriage!” (50.5: 779).

Harold, who instantly recognizes the painting as a picture of his runaway wife, believes the painting to be an expression of the artist’s abhorrence of marriage. When he confronts Sonia with his interpretation of the painting, she finds herself unable to tell him that she loves him and that she can no longer remember “the reasons that had seemed so powerful and sufficient for the course which she had taken” in leaving him (50.5: 780). Following some additional miscommunications that defer the happy ending for added suspense, Sonia and Harold reunite.

90

How are we to read Sonia’s self-portrait and the formulaic ending that uneasily returns the restless title heroine to her “right place, [her] home, [her] husband” (50.5: 784)?61 Superficially, the novel seems to suggest that turn-of-the-century women have gained the power to choose their destinies – to choose between marriage and remaining single – and that the best choice is marriage.

After all, Sonia becomes miserable and despondent after leaving Harold; it is only when she accepts her prince and the traditional fairytale ending that she can become the “Happy Princess.” And yet,

Sonia’s “deadly” self-portrait and her initial repudiation of marriage force the reader to question the

“happily ever after” ending with which we are presented. Perhaps we are to believe that Sonia can now find happiness in marriage because she has found herself – a self she discovered and asserted through renouncing marriage, journeying to Paris, studying art, and establishing a professional career as an artist. If so, even in its redomesticization of the title heroine, The Princess Sonia challenges the

Gibson Girl script.

Undoing the New Woman

In Women, Feminism, and Media, Sue Thornham briefly discusses what many feminist critics since the 1990s have termed “popular,” “power,” or, most recently, “post-feminism.” This new brand of feminism is “grounded in consumption as play, it is ‘knowing and ironic,’ and it celebrates individuality not collective action, pleasure not politics” (15). What differentiates the “post-feminist woman of popular culture” from her predecessors is an emphasis on “individualism, sophistication,

61 Magruder herself never married, living instead a life described in a biographical sketch from Harper’s Bazaar in 1900 as “somewhat nomadic” (Lomax 232). She spent part of her time living with her married sister in North Carolina, and the rest traveling between the homes of friends, especially her closet friend, the scandalous author Amélie Rives, Princess Troubetzkoy, who may have inspired The Princess Sonia in some way.

91 and choice” (16). I am summarizing representations of post-feminism here in order to suggest that a similar movement occurred at the end of the nineteenth century with the New Woman. This early

“(proto)feminist” subject was remade – or relegated to the past – with the rise of the Gibson Girl.

The New or Modern Woman, as conceived by writers like Blake, Phelps, and Chopin, represents a woman who is interested in political and social equality, work, education, independence, and self- making. As a kind of post New Woman, the Gibson Girl enjoys the greater liberties granted to her by her foremothers, but throws off the socio-political activism (or consciousness) required to achieve those liberties. Like the post-feminist, the Gibson Girl might be found referencing “feminist issues, but in an ironic, playful, style-conscious and ambivalent way” (Thornham 16). Indeed, as

Patterson, Kitch, Glesmann, and other critics have shown, the Gibson Girl’s primary concerns involved leisure and play, sexuality and image, sociability, and consumption. The Gibson Girl, then, ultimately works to contain or regulate the New Woman, undoing her more radical signification.

Of course, both the New Woman and the Gibson Girl are exclusionary symbols. While they may have been liberatory vehicles for white, middle- to upper-class women, both figures ignored or rejected the struggles of women of color. Representations of women artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were equally restrictive. Women artists were almost always pictured – in word and image – as white. When non-white women were depicted as artists, they were generally classed as folk or primitive artists. In the first and second chapters, I have tried to show how women writers turned to the trope of the woman painter to challenge the True Woman and to imagine alternative, emancipatory identities for women such as the New Woman, as well as to show how the painter heroine worked to contest and overturn the cooption of the New Woman at the turn of the century. The following chapter will examine how women writers of color used the painter heroine to challenge representations of women artists and New Women as white.

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CHAPTER THREE

THE NEW WOMAN PAINTER OF COLOR IN EATON’S MARION

AND FAUSET’S PLUM BUN

In 1945, painter Laura Wheeler Waring produced a portrait of her longtime friend and Crisis collaborator Jessie Redmon Fauset for the exhibition “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro

Origin.”62 Sponsored by the Harmon Foundation, a non-profit established in 1922 by philanthropist

William E. Harmon “with the stated purpose of encouraging and stimulating individuals to self- help,” the “Portraits” exhibition opened at the Smithsonian in 1944 and then traveled to more than thirty cities before concluding in 1954 with hopes for racial equality following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (Reynolds and Wright 27).63 Influenced by Alain Locke and the belief that art could effect socio-political change, the Harmon foundation promoted African

American artists through patronage, exhibitions, and high profile awards. The particular mission of the “Portraits” showcase was to “combat stereotypical portrayals of blacks commonly found in U.S. museums” through a series of realistically rendered images of accomplished African Americans

(Leininger-Miller 21). Waring, along with white artist Betsy Graves Reyneau – “two races and two women banded together to fight social injustice” (Fleming 15) - created twenty-four portraits for the exhibition, including depictions of authors and artists W.E.B.

62 There has been surprisingly little scholarship published on Waring. Theresa Leininger-Miller’s article from 2005 remains the only focused study of the artist. 63 After Harmon passed away in 1928, Mary Beattie Brady took over the foundation and was the one who oversaw the development of the “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin” exhibition. For more on Brady, see Fleming. 93

Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Marian Anderson, Aaron Douglas, and Richmond Barthé.64

Fauset’s portrait, painted the following year, joined the traveling exhibition.65

Waring’s portrait of Fauset as a dignified, introspective professional challenges representations of black women as “mammies” or “Jezebels” that were still prevalent in 1940s

America. The painting adheres to popular conventions for author portraits in its positioning and presentation of the subject: Fauset appears seated in a chair in half-profile; she is conservatively, even formally, attired in a long green dress; and she gazes into the distance, seemingly engrossed in thought. The subdued color palette privileges greens, blues, and browns, and the visible brushstrokes create a soft, impressionistic feel. Unusual, however, are the two paintings in the background, which serve to specify the setting as an artist’s studio. The first painting, a still life of a vase of brightly colored flowers, hangs in a frame on the wall just below Waring’s signature. The second, which we see only partially (it appears to be part of the back of a frame), rests on the floor.

Thus, rather than the usual props deployed for an author portrait – a desk, a bookcase, pens and papers, we have props more commonly found in portraits of visual artists. The presence of these paintings in Fauset’s portrait serve both to position the sitter as an artist (indeed, an uninformed viewer could easily mistake the painting for a self-portrait of a painter) and to imply an affinity between the subject and the artist. Like the sitter, the self-reflexive image suggests, the artist is also an “outstanding (female) American of negro origin.”

64 The subjects for the exhibition were painstakingly selected and presented so as to promote integration; they had to “represent the values and mores of the dominant race” (Fleming 20). For this reason, Tuliza K. Fleming explains, “Personalities who highlighted racial differences or traditionally black professions – such as jazz musicians, rhythmic dancers, or vaudeville comics and performers – were carefully avoided” (20). 65 Fleming suggests it was the close friendship between Waring and Fauset that “influenced the Harmon Foundation to include Fauset in its portrait collection, as her celebrity, which had reached its apex during the Harlem Renaissance, had significantly declined by the mid-1940s” (62). 94

The “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin” exhibition raises a number of complicated questions about the socio-political power of art. What role do images play in the construction of identity? Can “positive” images of non-whites or women successfully disrupt or intervene in a dense history of visual and textual subjugation? How do these “positive” images differ from or challenge traditional representations of African Americans in the fine arts and in popular culture? More specifically, Waring’s portrait of Fauset encourages us to think about historical representations of the woman artist of color – or of the absence of such representations. Do ideologies of race and gender shift when we see women of color as artists? Does the woman artist of color subvert the male/patriarchal gaze and the white/colonial gaze? How can women artists of color reclaim their bodies and representations from a visual history wherein they have been rendered invisible, grotesque and asexual, or as exoticized/fetishized objects of display?

While The Awakening, The Story of Avis, and Fettered for Life deploy the figure of the woman painter to explore constructions of gender and to contest rigid definitions of womanhood, all three novels are largely blind to the ways in which gender and race intersect. Edna Pontellier has the luxury to explore her desires – artistic, intellectual, physical, social – thanks to her privileged position as an upper-class white woman and the supportive domestic work of Celestine and the other nameless servants who tend to her home and children. Avis Dobell may strive to speak for all women through her painting of the sphinx, especially if, like Deborah Barker, we read the sphinx as the “perfect symbol of the alien Other in all its diverse manifestations” (65), but images of slavery or racial subjugation are noticeably absent from her liqueur induced visions of toil and horror. And, although Phelps challenges negative stereotypes of the “negro character” in her essay on ‘The True

Woman,” she neglects to mention anything specific about racial or ethnic equality in her laundry list of emancipatory dreams. Even Blake, who actively strove for inclusivity in Fettered for Life, failed to feel solidarity with non-white women. Instead, she writes an African American character who

95 conforms to racist stereotypes, and without the sympathy she expresses for her abused and downtrodden white characters. Aunt Phoebe appears during a sojourn in North Carolina when the ruined Maggie Bertram – a girl who suffered that “fate worse than death,” the sexual attentions of a man outside of wedlock – returns to the southern plantation where she was raised, dying of consumption. “Ole mammy,” as Aunt Phoebe refers to herself, wears a “dark calico, faded to dinginess with many washings” and a “turban of bright cloth” (224). Following emancipation,

Phoebe stays with the widowed Mrs. Bertram, ever “faithful to her former mistress” (268). Only after Mrs. Bertram (and Maggie) dies does the “poor black mama” finally leave the plantation “to spend the remnant of her days with a son who lived in Richmond” (271).

The Coast of Bohemia and The Princess Sonia are also focused on gender and female subjectivity to the exclusion of race, especially in their uncritical, idealized presentations of whiteness.

Magruder’s novel unconsciously supports white ideals and privilege in its presentation of the title heroine as a Gibsonesque beauty, as well as through its accompanying illustrations by Gibson himself. Moreover, The Princess Sonia, Fettered for Life, The Story of Avis, and The Awakening, work to construct and maintain the woman artist as white. Even in classroom settings, such as the Parisian atelier in The Princess Sonia and the “Academy of Design” in Fettered for Life, only white women appear as art students.66 Howells, on the other hand, does create a racially ambiguous character in Charmian

Maybough. Soon after meeting Cornelia at the Synthesis of Art Studies, Charmian confesses that her late mother “had Indian blood” before presenting her profile for inspection, suggesting, “[s]ome people think it’s Egyptian” (10.4: 5). According to family “legend,” she tells Cornelia, her great- grandmother was a “Zuñi Princess” (10.4: 5). Charmian revels in her alleged mixed-race history, as

66 While I am uncertain about numbers of women students of color at the National Academy of Design in the 1870s, African American students were admitted to the school as early as 1869, as evidenced by the biography of the African American painter Charles Ethan Porter. For more on Porter, see Hildegard Cummings, Charles Ethan Porter: African American Master of Still Life (New Britain, CT: New Britain Museum of American Art, 2007). 96 she badly desires to be “unconventional,” and she believes her royal Indian blood helps to make her so. Cornelia’s reaction to this information is less enthusiastic. She finds it odd that Charmian reveals her family history “in the same way in which she had said her name was Charmian” (10.4: 5).

Predictably, the novel sets Charmian apart from the unquestioningly white Cornelia, the talented artist. Charmian, on the other hand, represents the poseur. She is the character who dwells on the

“coast of bohemia.”

This chapter, therefore, investigates how women writers of color engaged in debates about representation, gender, and race through their portrayals of mixed-race painter heroines. Reading

Winnifred Eaton’s Marion: The Story of An Artist’s Model (1916) and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun:

A Novel Without A Moral (1929), I argue that women writers of color use the trope of the mixed-race woman painter to critique representations of women artists and New Women as white. Moreover, in their presentations of heroines who “pass,” Eaton and Fauset suggest that race, like gender, is subject to social construction. Beyond exposing the mutability or fluidity of identity, however, these two novels deploy the painter heroine of color to intervene in verbal and visual discourses that either render the woman of color invisible or picture her in derogatory and contemptuous ways. Art enables the heroines of Marion and Plum Bun to claim subjectivity and to take control of their identities and representations, just as it enables the authors to reconstruct the woman artist and the

New Woman in their own images. Significantly, both Marion Ascough and Angela Murray, the painter heroines of Marion and Plum Bun, take up residence on Fourteenth Street in New York City, which Ellen Wiley Todd explains, was a location viewed by some as “the center and symbol of

American radicalism” and a hotspot for socio-political and artistic debates involving gender and the

New Woman (85). By situating their heroines within this aesthetically and politically charged space,

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Eaton and Fauset suggest their heroines participated in the changing definitions of New

Womanhood in the twentieth century.67

Marion and Plum Bun are historically and critically significant as the two earliest known novels featuring non-white painter heroines created by North American women writers of color. Deborah

Barker cites Plum Bun as “the first use of the female visual artist in a novel by an African-American woman” (162). Likewise, Eaton’s Marion is, to my knowledge, the first novel to represent a non- white woman painter by an Asian North American woman writer. Recovery work on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women artists of color (writers and visual artists) continues. However, as the two novels I discuss here demonstrate, that research remains difficult as women artists of color did not always want to identify themselves as such because of widespread racism and hostility.68

Marion and Plum Bun also offer clues as to why painter heroines of color did not appear in novels by

American women writers of color until the second and third decades of the twentieth century. If women painters, professionals, and New Women were attacked as deformed, ridiculous, improper, and unsexed, it was especially dangerous or disadvantageous for women of color to claim these subject positions. Moreover, both the popular women’s movement and white women artists actively excluded, or defined themselves in opposition to, women of color in order to promote their own political, socio-cultural, or aesthetic agendas.

The critical reception of Eaton and Fauset testifies to some of the difficulties faced by women artists of color. Both authors have been criticized (during their lifetimes and even to this day) for being too conventional, too commercial, too middle-class, not Chinese enough, not black

67 As Sherrard-Johnson contends, Fauset’s “genius resides in her referential engagement of the aesthetics and subjects of the Fourteenth Street School (the urban vein of American scene painting) and her development of her protagonist’s psyche within that locale” (49). 68 Laura Prieto makes a similar point, see 138-39. 98 enough, or not radical enough.69 Although renewed attention has been given to Winnifred Eaton, thanks in large part to the scholarship of Dominika Ferens and Karen Skinazi, scholars have historically viewed her unfavorably, especially in comparison to her sister Edith Eaton. Unlike Edith, who adopted the Chinese-sounding penname Sui Sin Far and actively advocated for Chinese North

Americans in her writings, Winnifred assumed the Japanese-sounding penname Onoto Watanna and masqueraded as a woman of Japanese ancestry, even though the Canadian raised Eaton girls were the daughters of an English father and a Chinese mother.70 Rather than publishing stories and articles that dealt explicitly with racism against the Chinese, Winnifred’s oeuvre primarily consists of

Japanese romances that have only recently begun to receive critical attention for grappling with issues of race and gender in complicated and interesting ways. Fauset, on the other hand, was overt

(for some critics too overt or heavy-handed) in her treatments of racism. “The canonical word” on

Fauset, Deborah McDowell succinctly summarizes, is that she “wrote traditional novels of the black middle class, the refined intelligentsia, to prove one thesis and one thesis only: except for the biological accident of color, blacks are not different from whites and should therefore enjoy all the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship that whites enjoy” (61). Reappraisals of her work by

McDowell, Martin Japtok, and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, among others, challenge this notion through readings sensitive to her uses of irony and parody. And feminist analyses of Fauset, in particular, strive to divorce her from the debilitating tag attached to her by Langston Hughes, who

69 Laura Wheeler Waring endured similar accusations. A 1948 obituary from The Journal of Negro History calls her “conservative,” a label which seems to suggest she clung to outdated methods: “She was not influenced by certain popular ideas in art circles and did not participate in the cubist movement or the imitation of African art in vogue a generation ago. She adhered to classical standards.” (“Laura” 385-86). Locke even considered Waring (along with Allan Randall Freelon, William E. Scott, William Farrow, and Edwin A. Harleston) a “Traditionalist” who “emphasized painting technique over ‘an art of social interpretation and criticism’” (Reynolds and Wright 188). 70 Yuko Matsukawa, picking up on the work of Amy Ling, shows that the name Onoto Watanna only seems Japanese and that Eaton’s, mostly illegible, signature as Onoto Watanna played with Chinese and Japanese ideograms in a way that suggests a term for crossing (107). 99 famously wrote in his autobiography that Fauset (along with Locke and Charles Johnson) “midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being” (218).71 Both authors, in other words, have suffered the “double bind” of gender and race, encountering marginalization from the women’s movement on account of race and from early civil rights movements on account of gender.

Non-white painter heroines did appear in at least two novels by white American women authors published during the nineteenth century. However, while both novels turn to the trope of the “tragic mulatta artist” to combat racism, they ultimately set their heroines apart from the African

American race. Lydia Maria Child’s “tragic mulatta” Floracita from A Romance of the Republic (1867) may be the first known example. Flora has a particular talent for drawing, but Child presents her artistic skill more as an “accomplishment” befitting a “lady” than as a mark of genius, especially in comparison to her sister Rosa who achieves success on the stage as an opera singer. Alternatively,

Alice Ilgenfritz Jones’s Beatrice of Bayou Têche (1895) presents a “tragic mulatta” character who possesses rare genius as both a painter and a singer. Beatrice La Scalla, born a slave but eventually freed by a progressive relative out of consideration for her history (her mother was a slave, her father the master), although always adept at painting (Eugène Delacroix even remarks on her talent, telling her she has the “sure stroke,” 226), does not turn to the medium seriously until after she is publically rebuked when her racial history becomes generally known following a charity performance of selections from the opera. This public humiliation convinces Beatrice not to exhibit or sell her paintings once she begins to paint in earnest. “Pictures do not lose in value,” Beatrice remarks, and then adds sarcastically, “and if mine are worth anything the world may have them after I am gone, as a reward for its hospitality to me!” (375). Yet, while Jones uses Beatrice to argue for greater race equality and to remind us of the horrors of slavery, she also distances her heroine from the “dusky

71 Hughes also details her physical features, admitting he “found Jessie Fauset charming – a gracious, tan-brown lady, a little plump, with a fine smile and gentle eyes” (94). 100 faces” of the other slaves on the plantation, which ultimately reinscribes racial hierarchies. (345). As

Thomas H. Fick and Eva Gold write in the introduction to the novel’s republication by Bowling

Green State University, “Neither the mulatto nor the artist plot leads to any resolution of identity for

Beatrice; both plots lead to exile, near isolation (except for her nurturing mentors), and relinquishing the full practice of her arts” (xii). Although Jones is radical in her depiction of a mixed-race heroine who possesses artistic genius, she also seems to suggest there is no public platform for such a figure in the nineteenth century.

Whiteness, Art, and the Women’s Movement

In the late nineteenth century, whiteness was so integral to conceptions of the visual artist in the United States that art historian Sarah Burns does not even discuss non-white artists – except for the African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner – in Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in

Gilded Age America.72 Defending this omission, she avers that “whiteness and high culture were interchangeable as values” during the period and that “[t]he absence of race in [her] study should not be inferred as an evasion but rather as a reflection of its nonexistence in cultural discussions of the

Gilded Age, when there was little or no question that only whiteness counted in building, defending, and advancing civilization” (3). Indeed, the only American woman artist of color to achieve fame and critical renown in the nineteenth century was the sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis, born of a

Chippewa mother and African American father. Lewis first attracted attention for her portraits of

John Brown and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, but it is her neoclassical sculpture Born Free (1867-68)

72 Burns writes that Tanner has a “walk-on role” in the study (3). His walk-on involves a brief mention in comparison to Cecilia Beaux. Both artists, Burns points out, “remained privileged Others painting to considerable acclaim in styles defended and validated by the white male mainstream” (184). 101 that remains her most famous and beloved work. Believing the United States “had no room for a colored sculptor,” Lewis moved to Rome (qtd. in Farrington, 55). Before leaving for Italy, the sculptor endured horrific violence on account of her race. She faced accusations of theft and poisoning and suffered gruesome physical attacks from an angry mob while a student at Oberlin in the 1860s. Yet, even in Rome, Lewis found herself needing to provide evidence of her skill as an artist to those “[d]oubtful that a woman of African descent was capable of creating monumental stone sculptures” by inviting visitors to her studio to witness her “carve directly into marble”

(Farrington 58).

Women artists of color in the nineteenth century were generally associated with “crafts” and utilitarian objects rather than with the “fine” arts. The denigrating practice of labeling artworks by non-white women as “primitive,” and the division between white and non-white artists, is evident in the organization of the Woman’s Art Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in

Chicago where Mary Cassatt exhibited her Modern Woman mural. As Prieto explains,

In order to protect women painters and sculptors from the trivialization and feminization

that would likely result from their presence “in the same room as bed-quilts, needle-work,

and other rubbish,” the organizers of the Woman’s Building resorted to a racial model of

progress that enshrined white women’s artistic production as “civilization,” while the simpler

work of other women represented the “savage” or “primitive” state from which white

women had risen. (135)

Even as white women artists railed against institutionalized sexism, they were often utterly ignorant of institutionalized racism and the barriers artists of color faced to achieve training, patronage, sales, and exhibitions. Instead of bonding together as a group, women artists “worked racially segregated from one another” (Prieto 185). Ultimately, “it would require a larger, more geographically concentrated number of women (as later during the Native American crafts revival and the Harlem

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Renaissance) for [women artists of color] to develop their own identity and challenge the definition of the woman artist as white” (Prieto 140).

For these reasons, women artists of color continued to endure discrimination and second- class status well into the twentieth century. Laura Wheeler Waring, who won acclaim as a painter and illustrator, led an exceptional life for the period. From about 1907 to 1915, she attended the

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), where in 1914, she was the first African American woman to receive the prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which enabled her to tour England and France until the outbreak of World War I.73 Waring would eventually return to Europe in 1924, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. During that trip, she often took short weekend excursions with Fauset, including a trip to Algiers where she wrote in her diary, “We do not belong here either as still the people stare” (Leininger-Miller 17). After her return to the states,

“she served as an official in charge of the Negro Art section at the Sesquicentennial International

Exposition in Philadelphia, and she was the only African-American chosen for the judges’ panel of the Harmon Foundation, the first year the foundation gave awards” (Leininger-Miller 17). The following year, 1926, she would be the first and only woman to receive a gold medal from the

Harmon Foundation for her painting Anna Washington Derry (Leininger-Miller 17-18). Despite her successes, her diary reveals that, like many African American women, Waring struggled to find a sense of belonging.

While Waring’s life does suggest positive changes were occurring in the art world, her experiences were not common for women of color during the period. Three noted African

American female artists suffered hostile treatment similar to that portrayed in Plum Bun, and may

73 Angela Murray studies at PAFA in Plum Bun before moving to New York City. 103 even have informed Fauset’s narrative.74 Painter and portrait artist Annie E. Anderson Walker, after gaining admittance to the Corcoran Gallery’s art classes in 1890, arrived only to be rebuffed. As Lisa

Farrington notes, Walker “was informed by an admissions officer that ‘the trustees have directed me not to admit colored people. If we had known you were colored, the committee would not have examined your work’” (52). Even after Frederick Douglass advocated in support of Walker, the

Corcoran maintained their decision. However, five years later, and “without incident,” Walker commenced coursework at Cooper Union in New York City (Farrington 52).75 Sculptor Meta

Warrick Fuller traveled to France in 1899 where she studied at both the Académie Colarissi and the

École des Beaux Arts. Yet, she was humiliatingly barred from the room she reserved at the

American Girls’ Club because they “did not allow artists of color and had assumed [she] was white when they took her reservation” (Farrington 65). Another graduate of Cooper Union, sculptor

Augusta Savage, in a turn of events very similar to those depicted in Plum Bun, was denied a travel scholarship in 1923 to study at the Fountainebleau School of Fine Arts because of her race. “[W]hen two other scholarship recipients from Alabama (with whom the artist would have shared summer accommodations) refused to travel with a ‘colored girl,’ Savage’s award was rescinded” (Farrington

100-101). Savage, as Annie E. Anderson Walker had done, protested her treatment. “Appeals were made to the French government” and W.E.B. Du Bois got involved, but nothing would sway the decision of the awards committee (Farrington 101).

Although African American women artists dealt with unspeakable acts of hatred, they were gaining visibility and force. Alternatively, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Asian American women artists remained largely invisible. Prieto suggests that “there were simply not enough Latina

74 Sherrard-Johnson identifies Augusta Savage as the figure who “inspired Fauset’s dramatization of Miss Powell’s dilemma” in Plum Bun (74). 75 Angela, as well as her openly African American classmate Rachel Powell, are students at Cooper Union. 104 and Asian American women artists to create their own group identity (whether that be race within gender, or gender within race) until later in the twentieth century” (140). Furthermore, the establishment of an “Asian American” identity or collective did not occur, as Karin Higa notes in her important essay “What Is An Asian American Woman Artist?”, until the 1960s and 1970s,

“[i]nspired by the Civil Rights, Black Power, anti-Vietnam War, and women’s movements” (82).

Thus, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the development of a “pan-Asian sensibility” (Higa 82), women from Asia were likely divided by their countries of origin, as well as by the differences that complicate any essentializing identity, including class, education, and religion.

Recent scholarship on Asian American women visual artists has begun to revise the narrative that there were no Asian American women artists working professionally or attending art schools in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Valerie Matsumoto’s article

“Pioneers, Renegades, and Visionaries: Asian American Women Artists in California, 1880s-1960s” for the invaluable book Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1950, discusses twenty four women of

Korean, Chinese, and Japanese descent who were producing art in the state before 1965. Included within this study are painter and photographer Mary Tape, quilter Chio Tominaga, and painter Michi

Hashimoto, some of the earliest known Chinese and Japanese American artists. While all three artists exhibited and sold work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they endured racism and ridicule not dissimilar to African American artists. The short biography on Tape from

Asian American Art notes that a reporter who visited her home “expressed his surprise at the refined nature of the family, the beauty of their home, and the abilities of Mary Tape” (431). Tape actively fought American sinophobia in 1885, when her daughter was denied admittance to public school, sending a letter to the school board that was published on the front page of the Daily Alta California newspaper:

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I see you are going to make all sorts of excuses to keep my child out off the Public schools.

Will you please to tell me! Is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!!

What right! have you to bar my children out of the school because she is a chinese Descend.

[…] It seems no matter how a Chinese may live and dress so long as you know they Chinese,

Then they are hated as one. There is not any right or justice for them. (“Board” 1)

Tape tries to argue for her daughter’s right to attend the school as an American, insisting that her children, who “don’t dress like the other Chinese,” have assimilated. “[E]xcept in features,” she contends, my family is the “same as other Caucasians” (“Board” 1).

The particular kinds of racism leveled against African and Chinese Americans in the period undermined their pursuance of artistic careers. Julia H. Lee demonstrates in her significant study

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937, that

African Americans faced exclusion on the basis of biology and that Asian Americans faced exclusion on the basis of culture. “[S]cientific discourses eager to imagine racial difference as progressive or hierarchical,” Lee observes, “targeted African Americans by imagining their racial difference in terms of ‘blood’” (32). Blacks were believed to be inferior beings with “no inherent culture of history of civilization” (34). Conversely, Asian Americans, particularly Chinese Americans, were believed to be

“incapable of becoming part of a modern, thriving, Western nation” (35). Therefore, “[w]hereas the exclusionary tactics for blacks tended to rely on the argument that their primitive natures made them incapable of controlling their animalistic instincts, the arguments used against the Chinese tended to focus on the allegedly ancient and premodern quality of Chinese culture and bodies” (35). These ideologies barred both African and Asian Americans from full participation in the arts and influenced the reception of their work. Neither African nor Asian Americans were perceived as being capable of making substantive cultural contributions within the United States.

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Of course, similar beliefs and rhetoric pervaded the women’s movement. As Charlotte Rich argues in Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era, “In many ways an emblem of Progressive philosophies, the figure of the New Woman, championing women’s empowerment yet often blind to the privilege that allowed her to pursue that goal without first surmounting racial and economic oppression, epitomizes the contradictory nature of Progressive

Era feminism” (4). While the New Woman was always a highly contested figure, literary and visual representations of her in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generally constructed her as white and middle to upper class. When non-white women, particularly African American women, were represented as New Women or Gibson Girls, they were satirized as incapable of fulfilling the role.76 A 1917 cartoon published in Life magazine suggests the gender and race divide within the women’s movement (Figure 11). The image depicts a white “militant suffragette” asking a well- dressed white man, “Is it right for me to be classed with children, idiots, Chinese and felons?” While the “joke” is that suffrage campaigns were interfering with or detracting from U.S. involvement in

World War I, it also speaks to the racism and nativism present in the women’s movement that Rich examines in her study. In invoking “children, idiots, Chinese, and felons,” the suffragist implies that she – unlike those other intellectually unqualified or morally corrupt groups – deserves the vote.77

Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model

Winnifred Eaton published Marion: The Story of An Artist’s Model serially in Hearst’s magazine from April to November 1916. For Marion, as with its sister publication, Me: A Book of Remembrance,

76 For a discussion of images parodying African American women as Gibson Girls, see Patterson (45-49). 77 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants, a law that was not repealed until 1943. 107

Eaton used neither her real name nor her penname, Onoto Watanna. Instead, Me, which originally appeared in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine from April to August 1915, was published anonymously along with an authenticating document by Eaton’s friend Jean Webster, author of

Daddy Long Legs and great niece to Mark Twain. Introducing Me, Webster writes, “I myself, reading it in the light of the knowledge I possess of the life of the author, look upon it not only as an intensely interesting human document, but as a suggestive sociological study. It is an illuminative picture of what may befall a working-girl who, at the age of seventeen, gaily ventures forth to conquer life with ten dollars in her pocket.” (801). Although Webster, like the text of the “autobiography” itself, never reveals the author’s identity or what Karen Skinazi refers to as her “race secret,” she does admit the author “was unique in many respects – in her peculiar heredity, her extreme ability, her uncanny charm, and her total unacquaintedness with the world” (801, emphasis mine). So as to capitalize on the success of Me, Heart’s explicitly linked the two tales, attributing Marion to “the author of Me.” The

“author of Me” then deferred credit to “Marion” herself, writing in a brief preface, “I present my sister Marion’s story in practically her own simple language, as I have taken it from her notes and journals that she kept over the years” (28: 254).

In October 1915, just two months after Me concluded its run in The Century, Onoto Watanna was outed as the author in an article for the New York Times Book Review. The sensational

“autobiography” had garnered a good deal of publicity and attention and most of it focused on the mysterious identity of its anonymous author. Diana Birchall, Eaton’s granddaughter, notes that

“New York billboards as well as subway ads tantalized the public with such captions as “Who is the author of Me?” (116). The New York Times piece, written as an example of sleuth-like deduction, declares that the author of Me can only be the Japanese romance author, Onoto Watanna. “As to her race,” writes the anonymous reviewer, “its secret is loudly revealed in almost every chapter, for she cannot conceal the glow of pride she feels in being half Japanese” (“Is” 74). To support this

108 argument, the author points to what s/he identifies as evidence of Japanese culture or customs in the “autobiography.” While the author relies on “amazingly sexist, Orientalist reasoning,” Skinazi explains, s/he also recognizes that “Eaton is clearly racializing her Canadian character” (“As to Her

Race,” 43). Yet, since “Onoto Watanna” was itself a mask, “[e]ven though her identity was revealed, her Japanese façade remained intact” (Birchall 117).

Whereas Me tells Eaton’s own story through the character of Nora Ascough, Marion novelizes the life of her sister, the artist Sara Eaton Bosse. Despite important work by Skinazi, Marion remains a largely undervalued novel that, like its author, resists easy categorization. Neither wholly biography nor fiction, Marion relates the trials of a beautiful young girl of indistinct origin who crosses literal and metaphorical borders in her development as a woman and as an artist. Marion Ascough, a mixed-race transnational character who models for popular illustrators and advertisers in the United

States, destabilizes the racial and national “purity” advanced by images of the American Girl, including the ones by Penrhyn Stanlaws that graced the covers of Heart’s each month Marion appeared, as well as the illustrations Henry Hutt produced to accompany the text of Marion. As

Skinazi writes in her introduction to the work’s recent republication by McGill-Queen’s University

Press, “Marion offers itself to readers not merely as a story to be read but also as an experience that requires participation” (viii). Focusing on the model trope, Skinazi argues, “If we understand modeling to be a metaphor for being racially different or ambiguous, we can see that by giving us

Marion, who is scrutinized, examined, deconstructed, fragmented, and characterized in different ways for different purposes, Eaton creates a character who embodies the muddledness of categorization.” (viii). However, it is Marion’s role as a painter that ultimately makes it possible for her to challenge race and gender roles and to overcome her objectification. Indeed, Marion is a text that dramatizes a woman’s struggle between object and subject positions, a struggle enacted in her determination to become a painter rather than a model.

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Marion reveals the story of Marion Ascough, a girl with an ambiguous racial history and rare artistic talent, who leaves behind her family in Canada to seek training and work as a painter in the

United States after being thwarted in love by a wealthy, white suitor, Reginald Bertie. She first travels to Boston, having remembered the praise of an artist friend of her father’s from that city who admired her work. Soon after her arrival, Marion learns that she cannot support herself by painting alone and is forced to take up modeling. Dissatisfied with her prospects in Boston, and traumatized after modeling nude for an art class, Marion heads for New York City. After a stint posing in a series of living pictures, Marion returns to painting and modeling. However, it is not until she meets the high-minded Paul Bonnat, an artist who believes in art for truth’s sake, that Marion finds herself as an individual and as an artist.78 The novel closes just before Marion and Paul are set to wed, but without ever revealing Marion’s “race secret” to the reader.

Critical analyses of Marion – and of Eaton’s other biographical novel, Me – generally focus on this “race secret” and on the myriad ways in which Eaton confirms and denies her racial heritage through her writing. Since Marion begins with the Ascough women (in particular, Marion, Sara

Bosse; Nora, Winnifred Eaton; and Ada, Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far) as children in Canada, describing their treatment as outsiders and inferior beings, Jean Lee Cole writes that, unlike Me, it “gave literary scholars what they were looking for: anguished depictions of cultural difference, incidents of both accommodation and resistance, and experiences of discrimination” (80). Whereas in Me, Nora

(transparently) claims she “had literally never even heard the expression ‘race prejudice’ before” traveling to Jamaica, insisting, “in Canada we do not encounter the problem of race,” Marion

78 Although white and blond, the narrative is unclear about Bonnat’s nationality. To Marion he looks like a “young Viking” (261). Other characters identify him alternatively as of French and German descent, and his United States citizenship is unconfirmed (255-56). 110 conversely demonstrates that “[o]ne color” in Canada was not “as good as another,” and that the

Eaton girls and their “foreign mother” were treated differently (41).79

Although Marion focuses on its heroine’s struggles to negotiate and renegotiate her identity as a transnational woman of color and to claim the right of self-representation, Hearst’s contextualization of the novel ignores the character’s vague racial background and repositions her as a woman of European descent, perhaps in response to speculation that Onoto Watanna authored

Me. Thus, at the same time that they goaded readers into questioning the identity of the unidentified author of a text they marketed as a scandalous confessional (in much the same way as The Century had with Me), Heart’s also normalizes the author’s mysterious origin by falsely naming the unidentified nationality of Marion’s mother in the plot summaries that accompanied each installment:

Last month this novel began; it is the life-story of Marion, sister of “Me,” a girl who will go far

– Montreal, Boston, New York, “Bohemia,” – clinging to her ideals, as artist, model, friend of

men, wife of one. She was born in the queer little village of Hochelaga, a suburb of Montreal;

her father an English painter, mother a French- woman. (29: 345)

While this synopsis, which preceded the novel’s second installment, identifies Marion’s mother as

French, the narrative does not support such a reading. In fact, Marion and the rest of the Ascough family are introduced to the reader in the opening lines of the novel via a French grocer who describes the mother as “foreign,” a description that makes Marion feel “conspicuous and freaky”:

“It was horrid that the size of our family and my mother’s nationality should be told to everyone by that corner grocer” (2). The novel never reveals Mrs. Ascough’s Chinese heritage, but as Ferens and

Skinazi note, Marion faces discrimination precisely because she is a non-white woman. This non-

79 Nora exhibits horrendous racial prejudice toward blacks in Me, which make her pronouncements here all the more ridiculous. For more on race in Me, see Lee. 111 white background subtly emerges each time Marion encounters new people. For example, when she accepts a job as an assistant for a local painter in her hometown of Montreal, the artist remarks that her father’s face is “northern” and “typical,” but that Marion looks like “a little Indian girl” (73). An

Italian admirer in Boston, Benevenuto, admits to liking Marion because she “look[s] like my countrywomen” (189). Marion, too, hints at her non-white background, commenting that a model she meets “didn’t look unlike our family, being dark and foreign-looking” (146).

Additionally, the Ascough children repeatedly face prejudice and ridicule in their hometown where their mother’s unmistakable foreignness marks them as different. One of their neighbors refers to the Ascough family as “unkempt and wild and ‘heathenish,’” a sentiment Marion internalizes, even as she “stuck out [her] tongue” at the neighbor in refutation of the offensive label

(8). Thus, when Reggie visits her home, Marion feels “ashamed” for him to meet her little brothers and sisters, “all those dirty, noisy children” (58). “My face was burning,” she confesses to the reader,

“and I felt that I never could live down our family” (59). The pinnacle of her humiliation occurs when her mother and Ada appear, “and feeling awfully embarrassed and confused, [she] had to introduce” Reggie to them (59). Mrs. Ascough stays only a moment, but Reggie later tells Marion,

“Your mother is a joke, there’s not a mistake about that” (109). While the text of Marion never discloses its heroine’s racial background to the reader – a disclosure that would, of course, also make known the race of the author, undoing Eaton/Watanna’s Japanese pretentions, it does imply that she is different and that she endures mistreatment because of it. To the townspeople of Hochelaga,

Marion, her siblings, and her mother represent foreignness and strangeness. They know what we do not: they are Chinese.

These episodes conflict not only with the synopses and promotional materials Hearst’s generated, but also with Henry Hutt’s illustrations of Marion, images that disrupt and reshape the text. Hutt produced twenty-three original black and white drawings for Marion, almost all of which

112 play up the novel’s more salacious scenes: her relations with men and her experiences as a model and with other models. Rather than appearing on opposing pages or neatly cordoned off in clearly defined boxes, Hutt’s illustrations actually compete with the text for space on the page. In fact, so that the images fit, Hearst’s carves into the text of Marion, creating curving, almost sculptural, patterns of words. These illustrations, then, literally intrude upon the narrative, forcing readers to acknowledge Hutt’s dominant interpretation of the story and of Marion herself. His “whitewashed” renderings of Marion, as Skinazi calls them (xlvix), conform to the turn-of-the-century ideals of beauty established by Charles Dana Gibson. The figure is tall and thin, with white skin, large eyes, pouty lips, round cheeks, and dark, softly waving hair pinned up off her neck. Indeed, her look is not unlike those of the girls painted by Stanlaws for the covers of Heart’s that year: lushly colored pictures of sensuous and flirtatious “American Girls” posing as lovely types, from a bathing beauty to a huntress. Although illustrations like those produced by Hutt and Stanlaws for the country’s major magazines promoted whiteness and nativism, Marion, as a racially mixed immigrant, exposes both “whiteness” and “Americanness” as unstable constructs. Marion secures a number of jobs modeling for advertisers and magazine illustrators who used her image to “show off a certain brand of stockings as a girl playing golf” (166) or to pose as the “cover for a popular magazine” (175).

However, we learn from the artist Mr. Sands, who recommends Marion pursue modeling to support herself after arriving in Boston, that artists often cobbled together images of women from different models: “A perfect nude is not so easy as some people think [….] So we are forced to use one model for the figure, another for the legs, another for the bust – and so on, before we get a perfect figure” (151). Because the novel makes the reader aware of the processes behind image making and the practice of patching together the “perfect figure,” Skinazi rightly argues it is “impossible for readers to take Hutt’s Marion at face value” (lxxv).80

80 Skinazi discusses how many of the women who posed for American Girl images would not have 113

In fact, it may be Marion’s “foreignness” that makes it difficult for her to find work as an artist and that contributes to her objectification and desirability as a model. Describing a surprise encounter between Marion and Nora in Me, Eaton writes that an artist in Boston “wanted to use

[Marion] in ‘Oriental Studies’” (68). Nora then admits that her sister “had all the qualities desirable in a model,” explaining she “was an unusually pretty girl of about twenty-two, with an almost perfect figure, large, luminous eyes, which, though fringed with black lashes, were a golden-yellow in color; hair, black, long, and glossy; small and charmingly shaped hands and feet; and a perfectly radiant complexion” (68). The text of Marion omits any reference to Marion posing for “Oriental studies,” but Mr. Sands, the artist-friend of her father’s she seeks out in Boston does ask her to model a

“Spanish scarf,” telling her she is “just the type [I] need” (152). She also dons a “gypsy costume” for three amateur women painters, who treated her as if she were “a little poodle” (199). While Marion would already be objectified and dismissed as an artist because of her gender, her race furthers these perceptions.81 If it was absurd for a white woman to become a professional painter, it was especially absurd for a Chinese woman to become a professional painter.

Her Chinese ancestry would also prevent her from claiming the subject position of New

Woman. As Lee compellingly argues, in the United States in the early twentieth century, to be modern is not to be Chinese. “As an ancient but stagnant culture,” Americans popularly believed,

“the Chinese simply could not understand, much less participate in, the culture and politics of a nation that was so modern and so radically different from its predecessors in the civilized world”

(Lee 36). This perception explains, in part, why Eaton chose to adopt a Japanese identity: the fit that designation themselves because of their racial backgrounds. See her introduction to Marion, especially xliv-l. For more on the Gibson Girl and race, see Ch. 3, fn. 5. 81 It is not insignificant that the only female painters Marion encounters are the three amateurs, one of whom Marion later identifies as the “wife of the President” (200). During all her tours of artists’ studios in Boston and New York, she never meets another professional woman artist, which may suggest either the scarcity of working women artists in the area or that she has been isolated from other women artists on account of her race. 114

Japanese “were thought to be more modern than their Chinese neighbors” and “more refined and cultured than any other nationality in Asia” (86). Whereas a Chinese ancestry would definitively exclude Eaton from identifying as either a contemporary artist or a New Woman, assuming a

Japanese lineage would make her seem slightly more modern and advanced. Chinese women, conversely, were seen as antithetical to the American New Woman. Stereotypes conceived of

Chinese women as happily submissive, traditional, quiet, and domestic, traits American New

Women were fighting to throw off.

Marion, who naively believes that there is greater gender equity in the United States, hopes that by crossing the border she will have more freedom. In her youth, she fantasizes about leading the life of a modern woman, a life she associates with the theatre. “I would love to be a great actress,” Marion tells her sister Ellen, “and break everybody’s heart. It must be perfectly thrilling to be notorious, and we certainly are miserable girls!” (22-23). More than fame or money, acting represents to Marion an “unconventional” life and actresses those who “can do lots of things other people get shocked about” (53). She sees actresses as radical figures who subvert gender roles and the sexual double standard. However, her conception of modern womanhood shifts when she turns her focus to painting. After she lands a job as a painter’s assistant, Reggie complains he cannot marry a “working girl,” telling Marion, “A girl can work at home without losing her dignity, but when she goes out – well, she’s just a working girl, that’s all. Nice girls at home don’t do it.” (76).

Marion responds to Reggie’s charge that “it’s not proper” for a woman to work with the rebuttal,

“In the states women think nothing of working. They are proud to do it, women of the best families” (78-79). When she finally crosses the border she thinks to herself, “What did this big

United States mean to me? I felt suddenly light and happy and free! Free! That was a beautiful word that every one used in this ‘Land of the Free.’” (136).

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Of course, Marion will discover that the United States does not offer the gender freedom she hopes to find. She cannot find work, except as a model or showgirl, and she endures multiple unwanted sexual advances from men. Prejudices against her as an artist also compel her to “pass” as a man by selling a painting by her own hand that she claims to have been produced by her mentor,

Mr. Menna. Jacobs, the art dealer Marion dupes, owns a gallery that exploits “Orientalist” fervor to create a bohemian atmosphere: “The place was softly lighted, and the paintings were shown off to the best advantage by the arrangement of the lights. There were a number of Oriental rugs about, helping to make the place look luxurious, and adding somehow to the value of the paintings” (252).

Jacobs needs an artist to copy two “old master” paintings for a couple who are “furnishing their new home on Riverside Drive,” but he scoffs when Marion volunteers:

“A woman! No, sir! I would not have a woman do any work for me,” said the dealer. “I have

had all I want to do with women artists. They do much inferior work to the men, take twice as

long, and get swelled heads about it. They whine if they don’t make a fortune out of their

daubs. No – nothing doing with the women. Now I like Menna’s work. Take them to him.

(253)

Marion determines to secretly complete the copies herself and returns with them to Jacobs within four days, who remarks, “They will do. It takes a man to do a piece of work right” (258, emphasis in the original).

Marion’s posturing as a male artist pushes the reader to consider how knowledge of the identity of the artist affects how we receive a work of art, particularly in terms of gender and race.

Had Jacobs known that the paintings were by the hand of a woman – and a Chinese woman at that, he likely would have found them unacceptable. Believing them to have been painted by Menna validates them. Menna’s identity as a white male authenticates the paintings. What makes this scene especially interesting, of course, is how it reflects on the novel itself, a novel with an anonymous

116 author. How might we read this novel differently, Eaton seems to wonder, if we knew the author was a Chinese woman?

Although Marion never reveals her “race secret” to the reader, she does confess her history to

Paul Bonnat, the artist who helps her to “see something else in art than the ‘picture business’” (254).

The very first day they meet, after she comes to him seeking work as a model, they share a lunch during which Marion, much to her own surprise, “told him all about [her] father and mother and brothers and sisters and the work I had done in Montreal. Then I told him of the hard times I had in

Boston.” (263). Bonnat, who has a Harvard PhD, belongs to the “new school of painting” founded in individualism and refuses to “prostitute” his art (254). According to Menna, such ideals are “all very well if one can afford to do it,” but Bonnat, he insists, cannot: he often forgoes food and even

“went without his winter overcoat all last winter, because he gave it to that little consumptive Jew,

Shubert” (255). Learning of Bonnat’s principles and humanity causes Marion to question her dishonest actions with Jacobs the art dealer: “I could not get my mind off that man who would not for money be untrue to himself. I felt something stirring within me that I had never stopped to think of before” (256-57).82 It is not possible to read Marion’s musings on anti-commercialism and truth in art without thinking of Eaton, who cultivated a Japanese identity to sell her writing and make herself more acceptable during a period of intense sinophobia in both Canada and the United States.

Although Marion details her sister’s life and development as an artist rather than her own, these passages feel particularly personal and revealing. “I began to despise myself for the work I was doing,” Marion thinks to herself, “I realized there were times when we literally had to do the very things we hated. […] Art then was only for the few and the rare and the fortunate” (257).

Art becomes for Marion what it does not (or perhaps cannot) for Eaton, transformative.

82 It should be noted that Marion’s questionings here refer not simply to her posturing as a man, but to the art and she Menna produce for Jacobs: copies sold as originals. 117

When she begins to conceive of art as a form of “self-expression” (273), Marion also begins to conceive of herself differently:

It seems to me one does not regret passing through scorching fires. It’s the only way one can

get the big vision of life. I used to feel bitter, when I contemplated the easy life of other girls,

and compared it with my own hard battle. Now I know that, had I to go through it all again, I

would not exchange my hard experiences for the luxury that is the lot of others. (269)

Marion learns to value her “hard experiences” in realizing that those experiences have given her “the big vision of life.” Bonnat not only allows her to be herself – a half English, half Chinese painter from Canada –, he helps her to see herself through new eyes. It is this new self, the one who believes in the transformative power of art, that takes up residence on Fourteenth Street.

Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral

Originally published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company of New York in 1929, Plum Bun,

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s second novel, explicitly contests constructions of women artists and New

Women as white in its portrayal of an African American woman as a socio-politically conscious, self- making professional artist. As a child, light-skinned Angela Murray accompanies her mother on

Saturday “social adventures,” passing for white in the fashionable hotels and department stores of

Philadelphia (16). Ultimately, Angela learns from these escapades that “the great rewards of life – riches, glamour, pleasure, – are for white-skinned people only” (17). Unlike her sister,

Virginia/Jinny, whose darker skin tone precludes any kind of racial fluidity, Angela’s experience of race is mutable. Essentially given the option to choose between “blackness” and “whiteness” – a choice she sees between powerlessness and power, Angela chooses “whiteness,” leaving behind her sister in the wake of their parents’ death and moving to New York City to pursue an advantageous

118 marriage and a career as a painter.83 At first, her dream of freedom and pleasure comes to fruition.

She meets a wealthy, freewheeling blonde named Roger Fielding and, after some hemming and hawing, enters into a whirlwind yearlong affair with him since, in spite of her presumed whiteness, he still cannot marry a girl below his socio-economic station. Of course, Roger finally casts her aside and Angela, especially in comparison to Jinny who blossoms after moving to Harlem, suffers from loneliness and guilt. Finally, in a triumphant unveiling, Angela confesses her “blackness” to a group of reporters interrogating an African American female art student whose scholarship to study art in

France has been rescinded because of her race. This unveiling then precipitates the novel’s fairy tale ending, which sees Angela reuniting her with her sister and receiving love of the heroic artist

Anthony Cross, whom we discover has also been passing.84

Historically, critics have tended to read Plum Bun as a novel of passing and/or as a sentimental romance and subsequently to overlook its handling of visual politics. However, more recent analyses of the novel have begun to discuss Fauset’s treatment of art and aesthetics and to take up the questions it poses about race and representation. Deborah McDowell initiated this shift in arguing for Plum Bun as an “inherently self-reflexive novel” that ultimately “‘passes’ for just another novel of passing and for the age-old fairy tale and romance” (76). She reads the novel instead as a bildungsroman, showing how it exposes the “commodification of artistic production” and the “commodification of blackness, which could not be detached from the construction of sexuality” (74). Since then, Martin Japtok, reading Plum Bun alongside Edna Ferber’s Fanny Herself, has argued that “art is the medium of ethnicity” in both novels, “connect[ing] the protagonists to their ethnicity and ultimately to their ethnic group” (95). And Deborah Barker and Cherene

83 Fauset writes that Angela chooses to pass for white “because for the present they had power and the badge of that power was whiteness” (73). 84 Martha Cutter points out that Plum Bun “is the only one of Jessie Fauset’s four novels that ends with its heroine unmarried” (171). Although Anthony’s arrival in France certainly implies a future wedding, the “novel ends before they marry” (171). 119

Sherrard-Johnson have both reframed the novel as a complex Künstlerroman, privileging Angela’s characterization as an artist. Still, we have yet only begun to decipher the nuanced critique of art, race, and gender that Fauset articulates in Plum Bun.

Plum Bun, written almost thirty-five years after Beatrice of Bayou Têche, shows that African

American women were still struggling for the right to claim the role of artist. Over the course of the novel, Angela attends two prominent art academies and witnesses at both the persistent marginalization and denial of the black woman artist. Ironically, Cooper Union, the art school where

Angela studies in New York under the guise of whiteness, was one of the more progressive art institutions in the country. Founded by Peter Cooper in 1859, the Cooper Union for the

Advancement of Science and Art admitted students of all races, genders, classes, and religions. Its

Great Hall was the site for speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and in 1909, it hosted the inaugural meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

(NAACP). Many important black female artists would attend Cooper Union, including, as mentioned previously, Annie E. Anderson Walker and Augusta Savage. Unfortunately, as Plum Bun demonstrates, institutional bylaws could neither protect African American students from discrimination in the classroom nor promote social mixing. Therefore, Rachel Powell, the one

(openly) African American student in Angela’s class at Cooper Union, keeps to herself.

A little beyond sat a coloured girl of medium height and build, very dark, very clean, very

reserved. Angela, studying her with inner secret knowledge, could feel her constantly

withdrawn from her companions. Her refinement was conspicuous but her reserve more so;

when asked she passed and received erasers and other articles but she herself did no

borrowing nor did she initiate any conversation. (94)

“Miss Powell,” as Angela always refers to her, is guarded in her interactions with her white classmates. She does not draw attention to herself and is careful not to offend. Given that sculptor

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Edmonia Lewis twice faced accusations for allegedly stealing art supplies while a student at Oberlin, it is not surprising that Miss Powell would keep to herself and do “no borrowing.” She clearly recognizes her precarious position within the classroom as an African American. “You don’t know the prizes within my grasp that have been snatched away from me again because of colour,” Miss

Powell later tells Angela (348).

By the time Angela meets Miss Powell at Cooper Union she has already learned hard lessons about her status as an African American artist. Before moving to New York, Angela studies at the

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. Although she has not yet made the decision to “pass,” Angela does not announce her “Negro strain” when she enrolls at the academy, naively believing it would not have mattered since “[a]rtists were noted for their broad-mindedness”

(63). Yet, even as she tries to convince herself that knowledge of her race would not elicit a “change in attitude,” Angela observes that Miss Henderson, a student of “undeniable colour,” remains on the outskirts of the class (63). The white majority do not treat her with the “same cordiality and attention” as the seemingly white Angela (63). Enjoying the “camaraderie” that she experiences,

Angela wonders if Miss Henderson’s “wary, almost offensively stand-offish” attitude “precluded an approach to friendship” (63). Whereas Angela is unaware of (or attempting to repress recognition of) the racial power dynamic at the academy, Miss Henderson’s behavior demonstrates a clear consciousness of her second-class position. She “never spoke unless spoken to” and “had been known to spend a whole session without even glancing at a fellow student” (63). Miss Henderson’s averted gaze and ghost-like movements at PAFA call attention to a problem Angela has yet to realize: looking involves power.

Angela learns that blacks are denied the gaze during a life drawing class at PAFA when a white model refuses to pose for her. Esther Bayliss, a girl from Angela’s childhood who is aware of her family history, announces she will not “lower [her]self to pose for a coloured girl” after

121 recognizing Angela among the artists in the drawing class (71). The startled instructor, remembering that Miss Henderson “never came to this class,” tells the angry model, “there’s no coloured girl here” (71). Pointing at Angela, Esther then cries out, “Well, she’s coloured though she wouldn’t let you know. But I know. […] And I tell you I wouldn’t stay to pose for her not if you were to pay me ten times what I’m getting. Sitting there drawing from me just as though she were as good as a white girl” (71-72). The power dynamic implied by a black artist and white model, which disrupts the traditional binary of white gaze and black body, infuriates Esther. Historically, whites, in their violent control of the various technologies that take part in the production and definition of racial categories and identities (art, literature, popular culture, theory), have attempted to control representations of black identity, denying black subjectivity. Thus, for Angela to openly gaze at the body of Esther – to analyze, measure, and deconstruct it – and then to represent that body according to her vision, involves a subversion of traditional power structures.

At this point in the novel, Angela has yet to develop what bell hooks calls “the oppositional gaze,” a defiant, critical look that would enable her to contest and disidentify with Esther and the other members of her art class. Instead, Angela has internalized the white gaze. This trauma, coupled with the snubbing she receives from her teacher and his wife, both of whom had previously embraced her (believing her to be white), convinces Angela to “break away” (77). Desiring the privileged subject position of the white woman, Angela leaves Philadelphia and remakes herself as a white woman artist in New York. Under her new guise, Angela finds that she can move through the streets of the city, and especially through the bustling crowds of Fourteenth Street, openly scanning the faces she passes.85 Her thoughts here echo those of her mother, Mattie Murray, when passing on

Saturdays in Philadelphia. Mattie enjoyed passing because she “liked to look on,” to take part in the

“whirling, humming, palpitating gaiety” of grand hotels, theatres, shops, and restaurants, pleasures

85 For readings of Angela in terms of the flâneur, see Barker (185-88). 122 only available to her as a white woman (15-16). Similarly, Angela feels that as a white woman she is finally “seeing the world” and “getting acquainted with life in her own way without restraint” (87-

88). The freedom and exhilaration she experiences strolling down Fourteenth Street recalls to her mind a line she read once from a magazine, “free, white and twenty-one.” So “this was what it meant then,” Angela thinks to herself, “this sense of owning the world, this realization that other things being equal, all things were possible” (88).

In order to take pleasure in her assumed subject position as a white woman, Angela has to suspend critical looking practices. Soon after moving to New York, she takes to going to the movies where she passes “many happy, irresponsible, amused hours” (92). She enjoys watching these films because she has been “herself transformed, turned into the white woman portrayed on the screen

(hooks 111). As bell hooks explains in her foundational essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black

Female Spectators,” for black women to “experience fully the pleasure of [Hollywood] cinema they had to close down critique, analysis; they had to forget racism” (110). Fauset suggests Angela’s desire to “close down critique” and “forget racism” in her description of her frequent trips to the theatre.

Embracing passivity, Angela marvels at her loss of the “slight patronizing skepticism which had once been hers with regard to the adventures of these shadowy heroes and heroines” (91-91). In order to identify with the white characters on the screen and to believe in their idyllic romanticized lives (the kind of life she now hopes to claim), Angela must repress a questioning black gaze. She cannot allow herself to wonder, for example, how her fellow moviegoers would react if they knew she was black (92).

Yet, despite Angela’s desire to lead a “leisurely and irresponsible existence” (112) ruptures occur that force her back to race consciousness.86 The most violent rupture involves her sister, Jinny,

86 For more on the concept of “rupture,” see hooks’s discussion of Manthia Diawara’s theories in “The Oppositional Gaze” (108). 123 whom Angela must ignore so as not to reveal herself to her racist white beau, Roger. After Angela

“cuts” Jinny in the train station, she begins to question her choices: “For the first time in the pursuit of her chosen ends she began to waver. Surely no ambition, no pinnacle of safety was supposed to call for the sacrifice of a sister” (159). Not realizing that art could offer her a path of resistance,

Angela again tempers her guilt with the notion that she can best help Jinny and promote her race as the wife of a wealthy white man (an excuse she repeatedly uses to stave off feelings of guilt). As

Kathleen Pfeiffer writes, Angela “fails to recognize that her own love of art (and the company of others who share that love) is the means through which she can independently establish herself,” and, I would add, advocate for Jinny and the larger African American community (89).

These ruptures – these moments of race consciousness and flashes of sympathetic identification with other African Americans – occur more frequently as she grows as an artist.

Despair, loneliness, and the realization that her dream of marrying Roger will remain unfulfilled, push Angela, “without any conscious planning on her part,” toward her art, which she begins to practice with “growing vigor and interest” (208). Indeed, Angela discovers she “was gaining in assurance; her technique showed an increased mastery; above all she had gained in the power to compose a certain sympathy, a breadth of comprehension, the manifestation of that ability to interpret which she had long suspected lay within her, lent themselves to her hand” (208). Thus,

Fauset suggests that it is the growth of Angela’s critical, interpretive gaze as an artist that alters her way of seeing (herself and the world around her) and that subsequently leads to the acquisition of the “oppositional gaze” that will make it possible for her to claim the role of African American woman artist. As McDowell notes, “work leads Angela to a new understanding of the nature of power” (69). It is as an artist, and more specifically as a woman artist of color, that Angela will embark on a “process of autonomy” (McDowell 69). What Fauset ultimately dramatizes, then, is a heroine “in the process of discovering a more subversive and self-defined identity” (Cutter 173).

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When Miss Powell’s scholarship is revoked on account of her race Angela finally locates the

“oppositional gaze” that enables her to assert her identity as an African American woman artist.

Visiting Miss Powell in her home following the news, Angela discovers a group of reporters come to

“wring their half column out of Miss Powell’s disappointment and embarrassment” (341). For the first time, Angela allows herself to identify (or as Pfeiffer argues, to sympathize with) with Miss

Powell, finding her in that moment beautiful, and to recognize as grotesque the white reporters attempting to bait her, “as a small boy keeps on tormenting a lonely and dispirited animal at the

Zoo” (342). Whereas whiteness had previously signified power and freedom and pleasure, it now looked “contemptible.” Thus, when a white reporter, shocked by her confession, tells her to “take it back,” Angela responds, “Do you really think that being coloured is as awful as all that? Can’t you see that to my way of thinking it’s a great deal better to be coloured and to miss – oh – scholarships and honours and preferments, than to be the contemptible things which you’ve all shown yourselves to be this morning?” (347). No longer able to shut down criticism, Angela refuses to participate further in the negation of black female identity and representation, through either the negation of her own “blackness” or the negation of Miss Powell as an artist and individual.

However, at the same time that Fauset challenges the negation of the black woman artist, she is ambiguous in articulating a “set role” for her “in terms of style of subject matter” (Barker

196). Thus, whereas Eaton challenges our desire to categorize and classify by refusing to name the race of her heroine, Fauset, somewhat surprisingly, writes a character obsessed with “types.” Angela, who possesses an innate talent for “interpret[ing] life,” translates the faces she sees wandering the city into her painting Fourteenth Street Types, which, like Miss Powell’s painting A Street In Harlem, wins her a travel scholarship to France (112). There are those grouped by emotion, faces “with their showings of grief, pride, gaiety, greed, joy, ambition, content,” and those grouped by profession and class, like “the silken inanity of a society girl” and the “smiling despair of a harlot” (87, 111). She

125 even catalogs the African American audience gathered at a lecture in Harlem by the great Van Meier, a character inspired by Du Bois. “[R]evelling in types,” Angela singles out the “most advanced coloured Americans, beautifully dressed, beautifully trained, whimsical, humorous, bitter, impatiently responsible, yet still responsible” and the “West Indians” with their “dark, eager faces” and a physiognomy “so markedly different from that of the ordinary American as to give them a wild, slightly feral aspect” (216-17). Just as she sorts African Americans, she sorts women, dividing them into four groups: “the happy, the indifferent, the preoccupied, the lonely” (239). This proclivity for

“typing” commences soon after Angela shares a portrait she painted of Hetty Daniels –

“housekeeper, companion, and chaperone” to the Murray family (65) – with a classmate at PAFA who remarks, “What an interesting type,” and then inquires if the subject is “not American” (70).

When Angela confirms that Hetty is indeed American, the classmate scoffs, “Well, of course I suppose you would call her an American though I never think of darkies as Americans” (70).

Martha Banta’s exhaustive study Imaging American Women shows that “typing” was a common practice in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially when it came to women. “By the mid-nineteenth century,” she notes, “botany, zoology, anthropology, and medicine were among the disciplines devoted to marking the formal boundaries that separate one organism from another” (111). Banta’s far-reaching analysis of the proliferation of images of women during the period shows that art, like science, fueled our need to create order. More recent studies by

Shawn Michelle Smith and Laura Wexler testify to the role images play, and particularly to the role played by photographic images, in the construction of a wide variety of “types” and of the impact of these practices on ideologies of gender, race, class, and sexuality.87 An article on the portrait painter

Hubert Vos from The Century Illustrated Magazine in 1900 explains his belief that “a likeness should

87 See Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), and Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000). 126 express ancestry and race and the soul of the individual” (De Kay 163). Yet, at the same time as he hopes to capture the “soul of the individual” in his portraits, Vos produces “composite portraits,” images that enable him to “select the salient features and characteristics of a tribe, a nation, or even a race, and embody them in one synthesis, expressing what is best and worthiest of note in the whole”

(De Kay 163).

Fauset calls attention to these practices through Angela, a character who both rebels against and participates in typing. Barker points out this paradox, writing, “While Angela wants desperately not to be ‘typed’ as a black woman and uses her artistic talents as a means of escaping such typing, she also uses her talents to type other people, including African Americans” (181). Because of her light skin color, Angela is persistently misread as “white” and then condemned when her race is made known with the repeated refrain, “you never told me you were coloured” (38, 72). To make her race known, Angela would need to “placard” herself, to continually pronounce her blackness

(244, 373). That Angela – a person who hates the idea of wearing a label – enjoys labeling others, and even prides herself on having an especial talent for it as an artist, exposes the unresolved conflicts inherent in practices of categorization.

Critical responses to Angela’s Fourteenth Street Types point to the unresolved, contradictory nature of her work as an artist. Those who do discuss the painting in their analyses of Plum Bun tend to find themselves arguing for it as either a positive or negative representation of Angela’s perspective on race, gender, or class. For example, Susan Tomlinson argues that by situating Angela as a member of the Fourteenth Street School of painting, Fauset insists that “the black woman offers unique and essential perspectives on the changing roles of women” (94). Similarly, Sharon

Lynette Jones writes, “Angela’s Fourteenth Street Types suggests a vitality, a richness, and beauty in the experience of what might be termed the lower classes in American society” and compares it favorably to Miss Powell’s painting A Street in Harlem, believing they both “elevate the ordinary and

127 common” (42). Alternatively, Michael Germana proclaims Fourteenth Street Types “essentializes difference” and makes clear that Angela “continues to think in essentialist ways” (109). Deborah

Barker’s more complex treatment of the painting, and of Angela’s positioning within the neighborhood, concludes that “[w]hile Fauset does not condemn Angela for her choice of subject matter, she aligns her own word painting of Harlem” with the work of Miss Powell (191), and that she “sets in opposition the visual arts movements in Harlem and Fourteenth Street” (184).

Rather than trying to come to terms with Angela’s painting Fourteenth Street Types and to make a claim for it as either a positive or negative image, which Michele Wallace has shown can be reductionist, I want to propose that Fauset challenges us to think critically about representation, about how we both picture and perceive others and ourselves, through her transgressive artist heroine and the unsettled nature of her art.88 Angela, as a mulatta or hybrid figure, Teresa Zackdonik argues, “transgresses racial distinctions and racialized notions of womanhood in order to challenge dominant cultural understandings of identity categories” (xii). Plum Bun, then, in its portrayal of

Angela, exposes the constructedness of race and gender, even as it highlights the social realities of raced and gendered bodies. And yet, while the novel performs a powerful critique of racism in the

United States, it does not simply invert racial or gendered binaries. Instead, Fauset problematizes the practice of typing or categorizing and pushes her readers to question the cultural work of literary and visual representation.

In writing professional painter heroines who ultimately embrace their mixed-race identities and a theory of art based on socio-political consciousness, Eaton and Fauset contribute to a reconstruction of the New Woman that includes women of color. Through their representations of the painters Marion Ascough and Angela Murray, they not only insist that women of color

88 In her introduction to Invisibility Blues, Wallace writes that the “binary opposition of ‘negative’ versus ‘positive’ images too often sets the limits of Afro-American cultural criticism” (1). 128 participate in the production of ideologies of gender and race, they also self-reflexively call attention to their own participation in these negotiations.

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CHAPTER FOUR

SPECTACLES OF WOMANHOOD IN WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF

MIRTH AND LARSEN’S QUICKSAND

Although Lily Bart and Helga Crane, the restless heroines of Edith Wharton’s The House of

Mirth (1905) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), are not painters, their characterizations associate them with the visual arts in that they both possess a remarkable “plastic” or “aesthetic sense” and they both inhabit paintings at pivotal moments in their narratives.89 In fact, scholars often read Lily and Helga as artists who use their bodies as mediums for self-expression.90 Lawrence Selden, whose gaze first introduces the reader to Lily Bart, corroborates readings of Wharton’s heroine as an artist.

He recognizes Lily’s ability to manipulate herself and her surroundings (including other people) to her best advantage, stating, “your taking a walk with me is only another way of making use of your material. You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today” (79). Helga never receives such clear-cut recognition, but she too persistently seeks the “proper setting” (69),

“love[s] color with a passion” (70), and is ever conscious of the “highly important matter of clothes”

(58). As Linda Dittmar explains, Lily and Helga’s art is “ornamental and performing” (141). By

“encoding themselves through dress, motion, prose and set, they turn life itself into a heightened aesthetic production,” productions which seemingly register them as artist figures (141). Yet, by using their bodies as their canvases, Lily and Helga end up reifying the conflation between woman and image that defined women as sights or objects of display. Thus, they are not “active participants

89 Wharton describes Lily as having a “vivid plastic sense” (136) and an “artistic sensibility” (117). Similarly, Larsen notes Helga’s awareness of her own “aesthetic sense” (47). 90 See Leslie Backer, Deborah Barker, Linda Dittmar, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, and Jason Williams for discussions of Lily Bart as an artist figure. For treatments of Helga Crane as an artist, see Dittmar, Pamela Barnett, Thadious Davis, and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. 130 in the production of cultural scripts,” as Dittmar contends (141), but active participants in the reproduction of cultural scripts. Lily and Helga operate as examples of women who have internalized hegemonic constructions of gender and race. Their carefully designed everyday performances – and, in particular, Lily’s portrayal of Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd in the tableaux vivants and Helga’s posturing for the portrait Axel Olsen paints of her in Copenhagen – perpetuate the problematic ideologies that turn women and people of color into spectacles. In other words, they ultimately take part in the maintenance of the very systems of subjugation they struggle against.

For many critics, Lily and Helga can also be read as figures who are the result of a sexist and/or racist society that thwarts women’s participation in the arts. For example, Thadious Davis writes that Helga represents “a portrait of the failed artist as a young woman of color” (274).

Similarly, Dittmar, reading The House of Mirth and Quicksand within the Künstlerroman tradition, sees both novels as “narratives of thoroughly failed emergence” (137). These analyses imply that Lily and

Helga might have become professional artists if they existed within worlds supportive of the involvement of women and African Americans in the arts. Of course, it was certainly difficult for any woman, and especially for non-white women, to pursue painting as a profession in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Still, despite these difficulties, as the historical work of

Kirsten Swinth and Laura Prieto demonstrates, women swarmed the art schools and eagerly sought careers as artists. Thus, in an 1897 article on “Art Education for Women” appearing in Outlook, artist and designer Candace Wheeler remarks, “Girls are being educated for much arduous and responsible work in life, and for many varieties of it; but most of all, perhaps, they are studying art.

There are to-day thousands upon thousands of girl art students and women artists, where only a few years ago there was scarcely one” (82). At the end of the last century when Wheeler was writing, it was increasingly common for women “to become not only doctors and lawyers and preachers, but, above all and more than all, artists” (84). Yet, just twenty years before, Wheeler points out, “it was a

131 fixed idea in the general mind that it was the duty of a ‘lady’ to live in self-denying poverty, rather than to practice any industry or occupation for profit” (81). The fiction of the day similarly testified to women’s emergence as artists in the United States and in Britain. In addition to the novels discussed in this dissertation, women painters appeared in works by Henry Adams, Louisa May

Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Fanny Fern, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, E.D.E.N.

Southworth, and Virginia Woolf, among others.

That Lily and Helga are reminiscent of artists only serves to underscore their patent helplessness. As Deborah Barker explains, Lily’s – and I would add Helga’s – “latent artistic sensibility seems to suggest that if only she could fully embody the role of artist, rather than artistic object, she might be able to reverse her downward trajectory” (143). Even though both characters exhibit a critical awareness of the socio-cultural constructedness of gender and race and recognize the subsequent instability of these categories, other than (almost childlike) flashes of rebellion, neither strives to challenge or destabilize their cultural definitions. Therefore, although Lily and

Helga may possess agency as performers or models, they are tacitly unwilling or unable to disrupt or intervene in the ideologies that confine them. More than simply complicit in their objectification, both heroines actively participate in the construction of women and/or African Americans as spectacles.

An analysis of The House of Mirth and Quicksand proves valuable within a larger examination of painter heroines within the period both because these two novels speak to the enduring problem of woman as image and because they underscore the radicalism of the woman painter trope. While both novels operate as indictments of the sexism and/or racism of the early-twentieth-century

United States and Europe, neither heroine gestures toward new subjectivities for women or women of color. Indeed, although Lily and Helga may oppose their positions and regulatory definitions of women and women of color – Lily in comments scattered throughout the novel and in her ultimate

132 refusal to engage in the transaction of marriage and Helga in her rejection of the figure of the New

Negro Woman and her condemnation of Axel Olsen’s portrait – they are unable to remake themselves or to articulate alternative or liberatory subjectivities.

Significantly, the heroines of The House of Mirth and Quicksand do not recognize art as a form of resistance or as a vehicle for female independence and autonomy, as did so many of their fictional

– and real life – predecessors. Lily even expresses outright disdain for painting as a viable or attractive profession. During a conversation with Gerty Farish, the novel’s example of a self- sustaining New Woman, Lily learns that the Miss Silvertons (two sisters who, like Lily, have yet to marry) are in need of a means of financial support. Apparently one of the sisters, Annie, “paints a little” (249). Upon hearing this, and “starting up with a vehemence of movement that threatened destruction to Miss Farish’s fragile tea-table,” Lily replies, “Oh, I know – apple-blossoms on blotting-paper; just the kind of thing I shall be doing myself before long!” (249). Having lost her social position as a result of Bertha Dorset’s scandalous accusations and without sufficient income until her legacy from her aunt is paid, Lily begins to worry about how she will survive and if she has the skill necessary to stave off utter destitution: “I see myself reduced to the fate of that poor

Silverton woman – slinking about to employment agencies, and trying to sell painted blotting-pads to Women’s Exchanges! And there are thousands and thousands of women trying to do the same thing already, and not one of the number who has less idea how to earn a dollar than I have!” (251).

Lily’s use of the phrase “thousands and thousands” here recalls the “thousands upon thousands of girl art students and women artists” Wheeler’s article identified and suggests Lily fears there is nothing original about her, as a woman, or as a potential artist, of the period.

Lily’s comments about Annie Silverton can be read two ways. First they might imply that society so little values women painters that they are restricted to painting traditionally “feminine” subjects (flowers) on everyday, utilitarian objects (blotting pads) and that Women’s Exchanges are

133 the only market open to them. However, Lily’s comments may also be read as a revelation of her own views of the woman artist as nothing more than a silly dabbler. Lily does express conservative views on women and their roles, especially in her descriptions of Gerty Farish. While her observations regarding the often limited roles of women artists are not unfounded – for example,

Laura Stanley, the painter heroine of Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life, must support herself producing flower paintings and nature scenes on commission, women were breaking down barriers, exhibiting in an increasingly wide array of genres and mediums, and achieving greater critical and commercial successes. And, though the idea of entering into business with a Woman’s Exchange horrifies Lily, it was a lifesaving occupation for many women who found themselves facing poverty.

In fact, it was Candace Wheeler, along with the wealthy socialite Mary Atwater Choate, who founded

The New York Exchange for Woman’s Work, more commonly called simply the “Woman’s

Exchange,” in 1878 with the intent of establishing a space where “a woman of brains, industry, and opportunity might make and sell whatever she could do best, and yet not lose her place” (Yesterdays

227).91

In its determination to assist the downtrodden, the Woman’s Exchange was less discerning in its selection of goods. The primary mission of Women’s Exchanges (by the end of the century there were over seventy exchanges across the United States) was to help women avoid financial ruin.

The first Exchange, the Philadelphia Ladies’ Depository Association, appeared in 1832 as a means to

“discreetly help gentlewomen avoid public disapproval” (Sander 1). As Wheeler observes in her article on art education for Outlook quoted above, it was considered improper for a “lady” to work, even in the face of poverty. What the Ladies’ Depository offered, then, was a way for refined women of the middle and upper classes to avoid destitution without sullying their hands. The consigners could create crafts and other decorative or domestic items, including baked goods, at

91 The New York Exchange for Woman’s Work remained in business until 2003. 134 home and then sell their products under the cover of the Depository/Exchange. Women who, like

Lily, were “brought up to be ornamental” too often found themselves in particularly difficult situations when their fathers and husbands could not provide for them, or when they found themselves without fathers and husbands (Wharton 278). Acutely aware of the need for a change,

Wheeler writes in her autobiography: “Women of all classes had always been dependent upon the wage-earning capacity of men, and although the strict observance of the custom had become inconvenient and did not fit the times, the sentiment of it remained. But the time was ripe for a change. It was still unwritten law that women should not be wage-earners or salary beneficiaries, but necessity was stronger than the law.” (210).

The repulsion Lily feels at the idea of needing to sell painted blotting pads at the Woman’s

Exchange reveals she holds on to outdated notions of “femininity.” She believes such a vocation would mark her as “unmarriageable” like Gerty Farish (29). Of course, women’s exchanges and the women who worked for them were stigmatized in the press, as in a 1910 cartoon for Harper’s

Bazaar.92 Playing on the association’s name, the cartoon depicts a slumped man with a cane and bushy goatee inquiring of a prim looking middle-aged woman if she is the “woman” of the

“Woman’s Exchange.” When she answers “yes,” he exclaims, “H’m! Then I guess I’ll keep my Sal.”

The joke is both that this man has misinterpreted the business of the exchange and that the woman working the exchange (a tight-laced New Woman) is not attractive enough to be traded for poor Sal.

For Lily, doing business with the exchange is tantamount to becoming a New Woman or charity clubwoman and subsequently to unsex herself.

In their representations of women who refute New Womanhood, The House of Mirth and

Quicksand illustrate the dangers of internalizing the heterosexual male gaze and accepting an object position. The tragic endings faced by Lily Bart and Helga Crane, Wharton and Larsen imply, are the

92 See Bensom, Be This the Woman’s Exchange? Cartoon from Harper’s Bazaar 44 (Jul. 1910): 457. 135 result of their inability to define themselves outside of patriarchal parameters – and in the case of

Helga Crane, outside of hegemonic ideologies of gender and race. Even as their lives are unraveling, neither possesses the “aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake [their lives] on new lines”

(Wharton 281). In other words, what makes the conclusions of these novels tragic is not the inevitable death or decline of their heroines, but the fact that neither character is ever actually seen despite being persistently looked at and admired. The “real” Lily and the “true” Helga remain unknown to those around them.93 Even though Lily Bart, like Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The

Awakening, meets with a tragic – and ambiguous – death at the novel’s conclusion, scholars never contend her death is triumphant, as they often do with Edna. What makes possible a heroic reading of Edna’s final swim into the ocean is the fact that she successfully challenges her object position. In the estimations of many feminist critics, Patricia Yaeger writes, Edna ultimately “transcends her circumscribed status as sensual entity – as the object of others’ desires – and stands before us as her own subject” (197). Through her art, Edna undergoes an awakening, achieves relative independence, and transforms herself from an object to a subject. Not only do her radical actions alter how she is perceived by those around her, she also uses her painting to subvert traditional gender roles in her rejection of the image of the Madonna and in her creation of portraits of her father and lover.

Alternatively, when Selden stands over Lily’s deathbed looking at her corpse, he believes he is again witnessing the “real Lily Bart,” a feeling he initially experiences during her tableau vivant. For Selden,

Lily never gains substance; she remains a silent image (and one that can be made to signify his desires).

Of course, my dissertation is not the first study to pair The House of Mirth and Quicksand or to note their resemblance. In her essay for the 1991 collection Writing the Woman Artist, Dittmar maps out some of the similarities between the two novels and explains the critical value of their

93 A notable exception in the case of Lily Bart might be Simon Rosedale. 136 juxtaposition. Analyzing the novels as Künstlerromane and Lily and Helga as artist figures, she notes how “both novels concern gifted young women who head for inexorable destruction despite considerable privilege each enjoys by birth and rearing” (139). More importantly, reading Quicksand alongside The House of Mirth pushes us to consider the ways in which racial constructions and stereotypes complicate analyses of gender. “Attention to this fact,” Dittmar explains, “reminds us that women, through united by gender, differ in myriad ways” (134). Three years later, Meredith

Goldsmith, writing for the Edith Wharton Review, examines parallels between the two novels to prove that Larsen’s novel is indebted to Wharton. She shows how Quicksand “draws heavily” on the plot of The House of Mirth, “that of a heroine struggling with conventions of class and gender to arrive at individual and artistic agency, exploring the possibilities and limitations of marriage, sexuality, and motherhood” (3). Ultimately, Goldsmith believes Larsen “exaggerates and literalizes what Wharton leaves largely unsaid” (4) namely the “horrors” Lily would face if she were to live and “slide even deeper into poverty” (15).

“Her peacock’s life”

Not long after her arrival in Denmark, Helga Crane begins to experience a vague

“dissatisfaction with her peacock’s life” (83) and the “admiration and attention” she had initially taken to like the “proverbial duck to water” (69). Her aunt, Katrina Dahl, with whom she has come to stay after fleeing a teaching position at a conservative African American school in the south, directs Helga on how to enhance her “difference” and “foreignness” through the application of clothes and jewelry in hopes of improving the family’s social capital by parading her before their friends as an exotic spectacle (70). At the same time that Helga feels “like nothing so much as some new and strange species of pet dog being proudly exhibited” (71), she cannot help but enjoy her

137

“prominence” and the “small murmur of wonder and admiration” she effects upon entering a room

(72). As a woman, and particularly as an African American woman, Helga’s “status” (75) within the upper-class world of Copenhagen society depends upon her role as a “curiosity, a stunt, at which people came and gazed” (73). Waves of revulsion pass over her in recognition of her position, but they eventually give way to feelings of intoxication: “She was incited to make an impression, a voluptuous impression. She was incited to inflame attention and admiration. She was dressed for it, subtly schooled for it. And after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired.” (76). In Denmark, where she has come in an attempt to escape rigid racial categories and discrimination, Helga finds that she is still defined by her appearance, albeit in different ways. In the United States her blackness was a liability; here it has value, if properly exploited. Dressed up as an overly sexualized, primitivized example of black womanhood reminiscent of Josephine Baker, Helga is expected to trade on her beauty and sexuality in order to succeed socially and claim the ultimate prize, a husband.

Of course, Lily Bart also occupies an ornamental position within the monied classes of New

York and similarly revels in her status as an object of visual pleasure. Her mother, Mrs. Hudson

Bart, instilled in her a fear of “dinginess” and a desire for luxury and beauty. Like Helga, Lily must be well presented, and she learns early from her mother that this is a woman’s most important occupation. Women, as Charles Baudelaire characterizes them in “The Painter of Modern Life,” are

“idols,” inseparable from their clothes: “Everything that adorns woman, everything that serves to show off her beauty, is part of herself” (501). Thus, they are both one of the greatest subjects of art and works of art themselves. Woman is then, “a general harmony, not only in her bearing and the way she moves and walks, but also in the muslins, the gauzes, the vast, iridescent clouds of stuff in which she envelops herself, and which are as it were the attributes and the pedestal of her divinity”

138

(501). Lily recognizes – and accepts – the conception of woman Baudelaire describes. As she tells

Selden,

Your coat’s a little shabby – but who cares? It does n’t keep people from asking you to dine.

If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as

for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success,

but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-

dressed until we drop – and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership. (33)

Lily’s speech treats women as works of art that are meant to be admired, gazed upon, and contemplated like paintings on the wall, neatly packaged in gilded frames. While she may lament that women’s social construction inhibits their freedom, proclaiming it “a miserable thing […] to be a woman” (28), she cannot imagine alternative definitions of womanhood. To her, independent girls like Gerty Farish are not “marriageable” and thus not really women at all (29). What it means to be a woman, for Lily, is inextricably tied to beauty and desirability. Therefore, she sees no escape from her “hateful fate”: “What choice had she? To be herself, or a Gerty Farish.” (44). And, as her comments throughout the novel show, to become a Gerty Farish would mean unsexing herself, something she refuses to do.

Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, images of women – in magazines and newspapers, advertisements and shop windows, bus stations, movie houses, and museums – were so pervasive as to precipitate a total collapse between woman and image, a collapse portrayed through the characters of Lily and Helga. In her extensive study of women and visual culture in the United

States at the turn of the last century, Martha Banta opens with the premise that “the woman as image was one of the era’s dominant cultural tics” (xxviii). Larsen exposes, and effectively parodies, this conflation when the painter Axel Olsen confuses Helga’s portrait for Helga herself, “speaking seemingly to the pictured face” (86). It is these fusions that lead Olsen and Selden to believe that

139 they see the “true Helga” and the “real Lily” when they inhabit paintings (Lily during the tableaux vivants scene and Helga when Olsen paints her portrait).

By highlighting the ways in which Lily and Helga function as sights, Wharton and Larsen call attention to women’s active involvement in the construction and maintenance of sexual difference.

Through the seemingly innocuous acts of their everyday lives, The House of Mirth and Quicksand suggest, Lily and Helga reinforce the relegation of woman to the status of image or spectacle. As

Laura Mulvey explains, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (436). Lily and Helga not only accept their roles as objects, they actively cultivate those roles.

John Berger argues in Ways of Seeing that the result of women’s persistent objectification has been a kind of gendered double-consciousness. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, who observed that African

Americans experience a double-consciousness, a “sense of always looking at one’s self though the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (11), Berger claims women look at themselves through the eyes of men, or more specifically heterosexual men. Woman, then, has come to be “split into two” (46). Since her appearance determines her value, woman “must continually watch herself” (46). In other words, women must always be conscious of how they look, in every setting and circumstance:

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to

others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally

thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a

sense of being appreciated as herself by another. (46)

Berger’s theory asserts that women are both “surveyor” and “surveyed” and that these are gendered positions: “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself

140 into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” (47). Furthermore, if a woman’s appearance, or her successful performance of “femininity,” establishes her worth, the ability to critically survey herself – and to make any necessary adjustments – is essential for her survival.

Wharton makes it clear that Lily has internalized the male gaze through her interactions with mirrors and her carefully staged presentations of her body. Lily studies herself before a mirror at eight different points within the novel. In these scenes, the mirror enables her to survey her appearance and to “fix” herself for display. But the mirror also reveals Lily’s anxieties about her fading beauty and her consciousness that her value is decreasing. As her social status becomes increasingly unstable, Lily stands “gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly-lit mirror” and discovers the “lines on her face came out terribly – she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people?” (177). Since Lily’s value – her marriageability – depends upon her beauty, signs of age are devastating.

Lawrence Selden first exposes Lily’s “artificiality” to the reader in the opening pages of the novel (34). After running into her at Grand Central Station in New York, he muses she “must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her” (27). At the same time that he revels in watching her, and expects her to uphold her role as the object of his gaze, he judges her for her seeming superficiality, thinking to himself, “somewhat cruelly, that even her weeping was an art” (85). Lily’s two-ness is most evident, however, when she is alone (or, rather, in the fact that she is never alone, as she is, in the words of Berger, “continually accompanied by her own image of herself,” 46). For instance, on the train to the Trenors’ house, she “arrange[s] herself in her corner with the instinctive feeling for effect which never forsook her” and then looks about her “in the hope of seeing some other member of the Trenors’ party” who might admire her attractive presentation (37). Ever conscious of her look and its potential effect on an observer, Lily postures to her best advantage. Thus, while

141 taking a walk at the Trenors’ home, Lily happens upon a picturesque location, determines it flatters her, or that she flatters it, and then sits waiting in anticipation that a passerby (namely Seldon) will observe the scene:

The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the charm, or to the fact that her

presence enhanced it; but she was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in

company, and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck her as too

good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit by the opportunity; and after half

an hour of fruitless waiting she rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as

she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She

hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light

from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper

than the loneliness about her. (75)

Without a witness, Lily finds life “stale” and experiences a deep sense of “inner isolation.” It is as if she ceases to exist when unobserved. Her identity is absolutely determined by her role as an aesthetic object.

Helga Crane, as a woman of mixed race, is even more self-conscious than Lily. She has internalized a gaze complicated by race. Like Lily, she too contemplates and carefully designs her appearance, and can be found sitting “effectively posed on a red satin sofa, the center of an admiring group” (72). However, both male and female, white and black gazes affect Helga’s self-definition and presentation. While teaching at Naxos, she struggles “not to offend” in her dress, to mimic the

“irreproachably conventional garments” worn by the administration and other teachers (21). Within this environment, bright colors are “queer,” trimmings “odd,” and “small plain hats […] positively indecent” (21). Here the gaze of her black colleagues reflects the ideology of the dominant white culture and serves the task of “ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern” (8). Similar

142 acts of surveillance occur in Harlem where Helga ends up after a brief stint as a companion for a lecturer. The woman with whom she boards, Anne Grey, “hated white people with a deep and burning hatred,” which means that Helga must conceal her mixed identity (51). Helga recognizes in

Anne the deep psychological trauma caused by the white gaze, for despite her abhorrence of whites,

“she aped their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living” (51).

Denmark presents to Helga a topsy-turvy world of race consciousness. Where in the United

States her love of colorful, extravagant clothes invites criticism, in Copenhagen it inspires admiration. Here her “lovely brown skin,” according to her aunt, “must have bright things” to “set

[it] off” (70). Whereas in Naxos she was expected to desexualize herself and blend in, here she is expected to enhance her sexuality and to make herself conspicuous. As Catherine Rottenberg explains, in Denmark Helga “is appreciated for her difference, not as an individual but as a representative of a strange and foreign species” (105).

Larsen implicates the reader in these complex practices of looking, forcing us to consider our own collusion with hegemonic ideologies of gender and race. In a compelling article on

“Portraiture and Identity” in the novel, Pamela Barnett contends,

Larsen challenges the reader to separate Helga from her image (images created both by the

narrator and the painter characterized in the novel) as well as from stereotypical assignations

of the novel’s many observers. In fact, I would argue that the challenge Larsen sets for her

protagonist, her narrator, and her reader is to move beyond the surfaces of Helga’s character.

Helga is elaborately preoccupied with her clothing and physical appearance; Larsen’s narrator

is correspondingly mired in sensual descriptions of that appearance. Finally, the reader is

challenged to focus attention on Helga as an individual rather than as a spectacle. The

difficulty of this task, and finally the impossibility of this task, is Larsen’s point. (578)

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In contrast to The House of Mirth, which opens with a specified gaze – the white heterosexual male gaze of Lawrence Selden, Larsen veils the gaze that first espies Helga. The novel opens with the narrator describing the room wherein Helga sits, including its bohemian décor – a “blue Chinese carpet,” a “shining brass bowl crowded with many-colored nasturtiums,” and an “oriental silk” draped over a foot stool, and then states, “An observer would have thought her well fitted to that framing of light and shade” (5). Thus, Larsen and her narrator, Barnett shows, force us into an awareness of our own act of looking that requires us to (re)consider our estimation of the beautiful young girl wearing a "vivid green and gold negligee and glistening brocaded mules” (5).

Portraits of Gender and Race

Scholars who argue in favor of reading Lily Bart as an artist figure generally focus on her self-fashioning during the tableaux vivants scene. Because Lily selects which painting she will portray

– Joshua Reynolds’s 1775-76 portrait of Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd Inscribing a Tree – and because that painting represents a woman in the act of creation, many analyses of this production feel that Lily not only operates as an artist (in exhibiting choice over her subject and in the control she exercises over the tableau’s execution) but also that she strives to position herself as an artist in choosing to represent Mrs. Lloyd. For example, Jason Williams claims Lily’s use of the Reynolds portrait

demonstrates that she is more than simply an object to be looked at and admired, rather she

is herself an artist and a creator. Reynold’s [sic] portrait, after all, is of a woman doing

something: “Mrs. Lloyd Carving Her Husband’s Name on the Trunk of a Tree.” The title of

the painting indicates an active rather than a static subject. Furthermore, her choice of action

makes it clear that she wishes others to see her not just as an object, but as a writer. (3)

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Similar to Williams, Leslie Backer insists that by “exercising her choice of subject and retaining creative control over the artistic elements of her tableau, Lily reveals her power” (35). She believes that in this moment Lily “transcends” the “constraints and frustrations of her existence” and

“challeng[es] the socioeconomic and gender biases of her audience” (34).

While I agree that Lily has agency within this scene, she wields it to reinforce her object position. Moreover, the choice of subject, rather than supporting conceptions of her as an artist, instead serves to ridicule that conception. When Joanna Leigh inscribes the name “Lloyd” on the tree, she effectively erases her identity, transforming herself from “Joanna Leigh” to “Mrs. Richard

Bennett Lloyd.” Thus the portrait captures not a scene of self-creation, but a scene of self- annihilation. Indeed, as Barker notes, “by commissioning Reynolds to paint a portrait of his new wife, Lloyd is, in a sense, authenticating her position as his bride, as a possession of his estate, for he now owns both the subject of the painting and the painting itself” (149). The portrait, then, serves to establish Lloyd’s ownership of Joanna and thus her transformation into an object. And, of course, this is precisely Lily’s goal: to imply her value as a possession, a bride. What Lily clearly hopes to accomplish with this scene is her transformation into a wife. She does not want her audience to see her as an artist (and thus potentially independent or self-supporting, a “surplus” woman), but as a prospective wife, as a marriageable woman.

We see Lily’s tableau through the eyes of Selden, who believes he “see[s] before him the real

Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part” (139). Interestingly, Selden omits any description of Mrs. Lloyd as a subject actively engaged in the process of writing. Emily Orlando asserts this omission pushes readers to acknowledge the trustworthiness of Selden’s account of the scene:

Although we cannot be sure Lily holds the instrument, we also cannot be sure she does not.

What matters is that Selden’s gaze fails to record it. […] As she would later do in The Custom

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of the Country and The Age of Innocence, Wharton compels us to mind the gap between the

female subject and the male narrative gaze through which she is presented. (73)

While I agree that this scene calls attention to Selden’s unreliable perspective and subsequently to the problematics of the male gaze, I believe there is another “gap” Wharton hopes we will mind: the one between herself and her heroine. Lily’s portrayal of a woman in the act of writing during a scene

“guided” by the “distinguished portrait painter” Paul Morpeth (136), reminds us that the real writer, the real artist, is Wharton.

Moreover, the responses Lily receives to her tableau reveal that she has not been able to

“challenge the socioeconomic and gender biases of her audience,” as Backer claims (34), but that she has reinscribed her position as an aesthetic object or spectacle. Ned Van Alstyne remarks he “never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has,” an outline that negates the need for adornment: “what’s a woman want with jewels when she’s got herself to show?” (142). Van Alstyne’s comments, besides demonstrating the continued conception of Lily herself as a work of art (which is how she can “step into” the canvas without “ceasing to be herself,” 138; she is always already a piece of art), expose

Lily’s paradoxical position: she does need “jewels,” desperately. Without a wedding ring, Lily cannot survive. Unfortunately, she has bought into a Gibson Girl ideology of New Womanhood without realizing that the period of play – of seduction, socialization, and attention – cannot last (certainly not beyond the age of 29) and that to solidify her Gibson Girl status, she has to marry.

Whereas critics usually locate Lily’s agency in her selection of the Mrs. Lloyd portrait, they alternatively locate Helga’s agency in her disidentification with and repudiation of the portrait Axel

Olsen paints of her. During her time in Denmark, that “great man,” the portrait painter Axel Olsen, a flamboyant individual in a cape evocative of Whistler, declares Helga “amazing” and “marvelous” and agrees to paint her. Like Morpeth, who arranges the ladies performing in the tableaux vivants,

Olsen arranges Helga, “accompany[ing] her and her aunt on their shopping trips” (75). The clothes

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Olsen selects primitivize Helga: “batik dresses in which mingled indigo, orange, green vermilion, and black,” a “leopard-skin coat,” “turban-like hats of metallic silks,” “feathers and furs,” and a

“nauseous Eastern perfume” (76). The clothes and accessories Olsen selects reflect his conception of what it means to look like or to be “Negro,” and raise questions about Helga’s own definition of race. She finds this “new existence intensely pleasant to her,” primarily because it “augmented her sense of self-importance” (76). However, she also believes it “suits her” and feels aggravated at the

“American Negroes” who “didn’t want to be like themselves” (76).

However, Helga’s ideas about race shift again when she witnesses a minstrel performance at a Danish circus featuring two “cavorting Negroes” (85). As Sherrard-Johnson explains, “The shock of recognition Helga experiences while watching the performers reminds her that she, too, has been performing” (33). Just as the performers don a metaphorical blackface, she has willingly, even enthusiastically, masqueraded as a “veritable savage” (71). This shock enables her to see herself how

Olsen sees her, and to gain critical distance from his portrait. Although “collectors, artists, and critics had been unanimous in their praise and it had been hung on the line at an annual exhibition, where it had attracted much flattering attention and many tempting offers,” Helga rejects the image

(91). She insists that the painting is not “herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features” (91).

In the essay “The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity” from Yearning: Race, Gender, and

Cultural Politics, bell hooks contends, “Opposition is not enough. In that vacant space after one has resisted there is still the necessity to become – to make oneself anew” (15). Thus, Helga’s rejection of the image of herself as a “disgusting sensual creature” does not make it possible for her to transcend her subjugation. She does not “invent new, alternative habits of being” (hooks 15). Like

Lily, Helga cannot imagine an alternative version of herself - one different from or outside of hegemonic constructions of black womanhood, which is why she feels compelled to marry the

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Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green. In fact, both heroines, unable to resist their positions, literally pass unconsciously into their fates: Lily in her use of the chloroform that enables the “soft approach of passiveness” (299) and Helga when she faints at Reverend Green’s revival. Ultimately, then, Lily and

Helga leave in tact essentialist conceptions of race and gender in their inability to imagine liberatory models of womanhood.

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CONCLUSION

THE PAINTER HEROINE AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST

CENTURY

In the preceding chapters, I have tried to show how American women authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the woman painter as a critical device to examine gender as a socio-cultural construct and to renegotiate gender identities and roles. I have argued that within these novels the painter heroine operates as a radical, liberatory figure who enables women writers to challenge hegemonic definitions of womanhood by calling attention to the ways that verbal and visual discourses produce and maintain ideologies of gender. Women’s historically troubled relationship with images (or as image) makes the analysis of visuality and visual culture crucial for any study of gender. By contesting the rigid cultural symbols deployed to control conceptions of womanhood or “femininity,” and by taking part in the creation of alternative, emancipatory symbols like the New Woman, women writers and their painter heroines have modeled ways for women to claim subjectivity and agency. Ultimately, the novels I have discussed contend that it is imperative for women to represent themselves and that these acts of self- representation are made visible, that we see women as artists and producers.

A survey of contemporary American fiction reveals that women writers continue to use the painter heroine as an oppositional or counter-hegemonic figure and that they are still grappling with many of the same issues and ideas. Within the past twenty-five years a number of revolutionary fictional women painters have appeared who push gender boundaries and engage emerging feminist theories through their art or discussions of artistic production. Women writers of color have also increasingly turned to the figure of the woman painter to explore the visual history of racial subjugation and to gesture toward alternative futures. Novels featuring fictional painter heroines 149 published since 1990 include Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Ntozake Shange’s Liliane:

Resurrection of the Daughter (1994), Rosa Guy’s The Sun, The Sea, A Touch of the Wind (1995), Mary

Gordon’s Spending (1998), Heather Neff’s Blackgammon (2000), Dana Johnson’s Elsewhere, California

(2012), Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs (2013), and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014). Two of the primary concerns common to this otherwise diverse selection of texts are the enduring need for self-representation and the necessity of raising awareness about ways of seeing and reading.

In García’s Dreaming in Cuban, the painter Pilar Puente “is the new woman, the Cuban exile who comes to the United States as a child and cultivates a radical, more independent philosophy of life as a woman than the one brought to the United States by her own mother and other Cuban women immigrants” (Gómez-Vega 74). As a teenager in the 1970s, Pilar identifies as “punk” and idolizes Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and the Ramones, music she describes as an “artistic form of assault,” which she then attempts to “translate […] into colors and volumes and lines that confront people, that say, ‘Hey, we’re here too and what we think matters!’ or more often just ‘Fuck you!’” (135). To

Lourdes, her mother, Pilar seems “scornful and impudent” (132) and “impossible to punish” since she “placed no value on normal things” (128). Interestingly, she believes her daughter’s radicalism is inseparable from her role as an artist. The odor of turpentine on Pilar’s “paint-splattered flannel shirts,” for Lourdes, reeks of defiance, the “smell of defiance that is Pilar” (23).

Pilar, who paints a punk Statue of Liberty tagged with the slogan “I’M A MESS” for the bicentennial on the wall of her mother’s Yankee Doodle Bakery in New York City (141), believes “a paintbrush is better than a gun” (59) and that “art […] is the ultimate revolution” (235), something she fantasizes about telling Fidel Castro. Through her paintings and a diary in which she “records everything” (7), Pilar bears witness to the lives of her mother, aunt, and grandmother. Painting and writing also enable Pilar to make sense of her own identity, as a Cuban American and as a woman.

Pilar’s meticulous records contest the stories traditionally privileged by history, narratives that

150 revolve around wars and elections and subsequently marginalize women and minorities. “If it were up to me,” Pilar determines, “I’d record other things. Like the time there was a freak hailstorm in the Congo and the women took it as a sign they should rule. Or the life stories of the prostitutes in

Bombay. Why don’t I know anything about them? Who chooses what we should know or what’s important? I know I have to decide these things for myself.” (28). As Andrea O’Reilly Herrera explains, “Virtually denied entrance to the public domain – the space, almost exclusively reserved for males, where History is made – women have essentially been rendered ahistorical” (70). By writing her own history, Pilar challenges the “politicians and generals who force events on us that structure our lives, that dictate the memories we’ll have when we’re old” (138).

Questions involving representation and absence have preoccupied contemporary African

American women writers as well. As artist and critic Lorraine O’Grady explains in “Olympia’s Maid:

Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Laura Mulvey’s assertion that women “connote to-be- looked-at-ness” (436) does not hold true for all women. Unlike white women, O’Grady argues, “not- white women [are] not-to-be-seen” (212). Therefore, the “black female’s body needs less to be rescued from the masculine ‘gaze’ than to be sprung from a historic script surrounding her with signification while at the same time, and not paradoxically, it erases her completely” (O’Grady 212).

Neff addresses this invisibility – the kind of invisibility that led Linda Huf to declare the black woman artist a “missing character in fiction” (14) – in her first novel. Blackgammon interweaves the stories of two African American female expatriates living in Europe: Chloe Emmanuel, the

“Preeminent Black Artist in Europe” (4), and Michael Davies Northcross, a Professor of African

American literature at an English college. Not long after Chloe moves to Paris hoping to “find freedom” (79), Jacques Colombe, a gallery owner from the Caribbean, cuts her down with the myth that black women are not artists: “Let me explain something to you, Madame Picasso. Black women can sing and dance. Sometimes, when they’re extremely lucky, they can walk the runway. But they do

151 not get into this scene. They do not paint.” (134).94 When Chloe begins to speak in protest, Jacques

“rais[es] a hand to silence [her]” (134).

Like Laura Stanley hopes to do in Fettered for Life, Chloe achieves a “triumph” for herself, her sex, and her race in becoming, at 58, “the artist whose self-portrait was recently purchased by the

National Gallery in Washington for the highest price ever paid for an African American work of art”

(342). As an artist, Chloe aims to represent the lives of the unrepresented, to make visible those who are not supposed to be seen. Neff underscores this objective during a visit Chloe and Michael make to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. While “staring at an Impressionist sunrise,” a young

Michael complains to Chloe, “Why don’t painters ever show the world the way it really is?”

“Some paintings are metaphors for reality. The artists just use a glimpse of life to tell us

something about the universe.”

“But nothing in this entire museum looks like my universe. The only black people in those

paintings are slaves!”

“I know, Michael. I intend to do something about that.”

“Then you won’t spend your time in Paris painting pictures of the Eiffel Tower?”

“Not a chance, baby. My work is going to tell some kind of truth about who we are.” (16)

This conversation, which occurs early in the novel, emphasizes the significance of the National

Gallery’s acquisition of Chloe’s self-portrait. The problem for African Americans, and especially for

African American women, is not simply one of misrepresentation – of the need to dismantle the

94 Instead of “find[ing] freedom” in Europe, Chloe “discover[s] poverty, racism, and loneliness” (79). Racism in France, a friend explains to her, differs from in the United States where “if you’re not white, you’re black. Here, we have an entire hierarchy of social privilege based on skin color” (33). 152 stereotypes that have been deployed to establish and maintain racial privilege in this country, but of lack of representation.95

If Neff’s painter heroine aspires to change what we see, Johnson’s painter heroine in

Elsewhere, California aspires to change how we see. Avery Arlington uses her portraits and collages to

“tell a story,” which she then challenges the viewer to interpret: “And so my goal is to show something that will make people think about different worlds, to look at the same old thing they’ve been looking at in a new way. Maybe they will say, I never saw it that way before.” (16, emphasis in the original). At age twenty, Avery has her first show at a local coffee shop, a show that enrages a white female viewer who charges the artist with possessing “some kind of hysteria about white people”

(20). Thinking back, Avery admits feeling surprised by the woman’s reaction and a “mention in the

Sentinel” that described her paintings as “unsettled in their critique of iconic negrobilia images” (19).

According to Avery, the paintings “weren’t that complicated or that incendiary”; they weren’t

“original” and “audacious” like Kara Walker’s silhouettes (21). She “simply painted portraits of

Shirley Temple’s cherubic face, Elizabeth Taylor circa her thinnest, most luminous days, June

Cleaver in her crispest dress and most elegant pearls, and Sandra Dee during her sweetest, just- learning-how-to-surf phase. All of them in blackface.” (21). The blackface portrait exhibition recalls

John Berger’s gender reversal challenge in Ways of Seeing. To substantiate his premise – that “women are depicted in a quite different way from men” (64) – Berger asks his readers to switch the genders in a painting of a female nude, to imagine the nude female subject as a man, and then to “notice the violence which that transformation does” (64). Avery makes a similar transformation, but with race rather than gender:

95 The website for the National Gallery of Art currently boasts a collection of “nearly 400 works by African-American artists,” this out of tens of thousands of total works. See https://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggafamer/ggafamer-main1.html#overview. 153

My intent was not to infuriate anybody. I was hoping simply to arouse thought, discussion,

and consideration. I didn’t realize how someone could get furious just by seeing Sandra Dee

with big, doughy tits, a rag on her head. Shirley Temple’s face, not altered in the least, a

replica of an original photo of her in blackface, except I painted her sitting on the steps of a

dilapidated apartment building, broken wine bottles all around her.

There were more portraits. Reagan eating a big piece of watermelon. Leif Garrett, one of my

several girlhood crushes, eyes popping out of charcoal face, fishing off a riverbank in

tattered trousers. George H.W. Bush stealing across a burning field with two chickens under

his arms. (21-22)

Avery’s series forces the viewer to consider the representational history of African Americans and to recognize that white bodies signify differently than black bodies. While Avery might have experienced surprise at the angry reaction of the white female viewer, Berger probably would not.

The “violence” he argues such a transformation enacts does not assault the image, but the

“assumptions of a likely viewer” (64).

Our, often unconscious, assumptions as viewers are the subject of a novel published earlier this year, Hustvedt’s The Blazing World. A fictional scholarly study of the late artist Harriet/Harry

Burden edited and compiled by Professor I.V. Hess, the multi-vocal “collection” includes interviews and testimonials from friends, family, and members of the art community, as well as some of

Burden’s own diary entries. All of these texts come together to shed light on Burden’s artistic masterpiece, Maskings. For this project, Burden presented her work pseudonymously using three attractive young men as “masks” (at three individual shows that occurred over a period of five years in New York City) in an attempt “not only to expose the antifemale bias of the art world, but to uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race,

154 and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art” (1-2).96 Before these three seemingly disparate shows believed by everyone to have been created by three different men, the work of the enormous Harriet Burden, who feels “her womanliness, her body, her size had somehow interfered with her life” (23) and identifies with Frankenstein’s monster, received very little attention from the art world. Except as the wife of a wealthy, highly successful art dealer and collector, Burden has been essentially ignored. Not surprisingly, the mixed-media pieces and installations Burden exhibits under the cover of her male masks are deemed genius, and the artists who front for them turned into instant celebrities. As Phineas Q. Eldridge, an interracial gay man sympathetic to Burden and her second “mask,” writes, “To be really seen, Harry had to be invisible”

(130).97

At its surface, Hustvedt’s novel seems to be about the enduring sexism of the art world.

However, underneath this critique lies a complicated exploration of the mutability of gender. What

Harriet discovers through her experiment is that her art changes when she “wears” the three men who operate as her beards, that the identities of each piece’s “artist” affects her conception and execution of the piece. For this reason, art critic Rosemary Lerner’s claim that Burden’s story

“cannot simply be told as a feminist parable, even though it seems obvious that sexual bias played a determining role in the perception of Burden’s work” (69) gains credence. If, according to Hess,

Burden “wanted everyone to understand how complicated perception is, that there is no objective way of seeing anything,” it is a lesson Burden herself ultimately must (re)learn (259).

At the same time that contemporary fictional painter heroines are continuing a legacy of cultural-political radicalism, a popular craze for art historical fiction has emerged. Indeed, the

96 Significantly, Hustvedt never reveals the gender of The Blazing World’s author, Professor I.V. Hess, the scholar who complies, annotates, and edits the “collection.” 97 Predictably, Phineas and his show attract the least amount of attention. It is the first and third masks, the two heterosexual white males, who receive the most press and praise. 155 twenty-first century has witnessed what we might call “art fiction mania.” The critical and commercial successes of authors Tracy Chevalier and Susan Vreeland have precipitated an obsession with literature about the visual arts, and especially with fiction that explores women’s historical roles as muses and artists. While some of these novels may be less narratively and theoretically complex, particularly in comparison to recent novels featuring fictional painter heroines, they have brought widespread critical attention to the history of institutionalized sexism and have contributed to a feminist-revisionist approach to our cultural history.

Chevalier’s Girl With A Pearl Earring (1999) and Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999) animate women from real and imagined paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter

Johannes Vermeer to provide what Roberta White calls a “feminine perspective on his world” (222).

In giving voice to women previously relegated to the status of image, these novels challenge women’s historical position as the passive object of a heterosexual male gaze.98

Ultimately, both novels position their heroines as could-be painters. The subject of Girl With

A Pearl Earring, the daughter of a tile painter who comes to work as a housemaid for the Vermeer family when her own falls upon hard times, possesses – like Lily Bart and Helga Crane – a keen aesthetic sense. Chevalier makes this capability apparent early in the novel when Vermeer first meets

Griet in the home of her parents and notices she has arranged the chopped vegetables she is preparing for dinner into a color wheel. Later, when Griet has been secretly promoted to act as a kind of personal assistant to Vermeer, mixing colors for his paintings, she asserts her artistic vision by messing the blue tablecloth reproduced in the painting A Lady Writing (c. 1665). Griet determines the “scene was too neat” and that there needed to be “some disorder on the table, something to

98 Since 1999, a number of novels inspired by paintings have appeared. Those featuring female subjects include Gioia Diliberto’s I Am Madame X (2003), Jeanne Kalogridis’s I, Mona Lisa (2006), Karen Essex’s Leonardo’s Swans (2006), Elizabeth Hickey’s The Painted Kiss (2005) and The Wayward Muse (2007), Kathryn Wagner’s Dancing for Degas (2010), and Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Painted Girls (2013), to name a few. 156 snag the eye” (132). Of course, it is not insignificant that Griet makes her mark on a painting representing a woman in the act of writing whose gaze addresses the artist, which H. Perry Chapman tells us “is a pose he does not often paint” because “[p]ainting extroversion is against Vermeer’s nature” (790). Griet, like the Lady Writing, assumes authorship and makes her particular perspective known. When Vermeer accepts her change, commenting, “I had not thought I would learn something from a maid” (136), Griet, according to Chapman, “fall[s] victim to the muse’s fantasy that she can be a painter too” (791). Although Griet never expresses outright a desire to paint, the novel implies as much in the great pleasure she takes in her role in the studio and in grinding the colors, which she declares “magical” (108). However, as White rightly explains, “Griet loses something – a slim chance, at least, to have become an artist – when she becomes his model” (219).

Once she has been chosen to pose for Girl With A Pearl Earring, any agency Griet has acquired evaporates.

Vreeland makes her heroine’s desire to paint and the socio-cultural conditions of the period that would prevent her from doing so explicit in Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The fictional painting depicts

“a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust colored skirt [sitting] in profile at a table by an open window” (4). The bulk of the novel focuses on the painting’s provenance, its history of ownership from inception to the present day, in a series of narrative sketches that reveals the painting’s role in the lives of its various owners. Although the painting represents something different to each owner, they all find themselves questioning the thoughts of the girl looking so intently out of the window. Hannah, the young Jewish girl whose father purchases the painting in the 1940s, feels an especial kinship with the Girl in Hyacinth Blue:

Now it became clear to her what made her love the girl in the painting. It was her quietness.

A painting, after all, can’t speak. Yet she felt this girl, sitting inside a room but looking out,

was probably quiet by nature, like she was. But that didn’t mean that the girl didn’t want

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anything, like Mother said about her. Her face told her she probably wanted something so

deep or so remote that she never dared breath it but was thinking about it there by the

window. Any not only wanted. She was capable of doing some great wild loving thing. Yes,

oh yes. (51)

In the last chapter, “Magdalena Looking,” Vermeer’s daughter Magdalena, the subject of the painting tells her story and divulges her passionate desire to paint. Not surprisingly, when she shares her ambitions with her parents, her father “only smiled queerly” at her and her mother “thrust into her hands the basket of mending to do” (229). This is what occupies her mind that day as she poses before the window for her father following an outburst during which she professes she “hate[s] to mend” because “it’s not making anything” (231). Even still, Magdalena daydreams about painting, and her daydreams reveal how her perspective differs from her father: “She wouldn’t just paint pictures of women inside cramped little rooms. She’d paint them out in marketplaces, bending in the potato fields, talking in doorways in the sunlight, in boats on the Schie, or praying in the Oude

Kerk.” (230). Whereas Vermeer’s paintings relegate women to the private sphere, Magdalena problematizes this dynamic. She sees women in public spaces, as consumers and workers.

Counterbalancing the “woman as muse” phenomenon in contemporary fiction, are a host of novels featuring historical women painters.99 If Griet and Magdalena call attention to the material conditions that prevented women from becoming artists (making accessible Linda Nochlin’s paradigm-shifting essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”), the novelizations of the lives of women painters takes a revisionist approach by popularizing the lives and works of real women artists. The precursors for this trend are likely the three novels about the seventeenth-

99 In conducting my research for this chapter, I was surprised to learn that very little scholarly attention has been paid to the twenty-first-century art fiction phenomenon. While a few articles and dissertations/theses do discuss novels by Chevalier and Vreeland, there has been no effort to theorize this trend, to examine the effects – particularly in terms of gender studies – of the mass of art-historical fiction involving women as models and artists that has appeared in recent years. 158 century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi: Italian author Anna Banti’s highly regarded Artemisia

(1947), French author Alexandra Lapierre’s Artemisia: A Novel (1998), and Vreeland’s The Passion of

Artemisia (2002). Other recent novels in this genre include Kate Braverman’s The Incantation of Frida

K. (2002), Carole Maso’s Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo (2002), Harriet Scott

Chessman’s Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper (2002), Vreeland’s The Forest Lover (2004), Alma H.

Bond’s Camille Claudel: A Novel (2005), and Elizabeth Robards With Violets (2008). Cortney Lois

Cronberg Barko, in a dissertation examining many of these novels, argues that “fictionalized biographies of women painters invite readers to contemplate women’s artistic creativity and place in the world of art” and that it “allows feminist authors to engage in a form of art criticism countering traditional art historical interpretations” (2). In other words, fiction provides an alternative critical space from which to critique the persistent negation of the woman artist and to experiment with feminist art histories.

This brief discussion of contemporary art fiction shows that the trope of the woman painter continues to operate as a critical liberatory tool. Just as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women authors turned to the woman painter to contest essentialist constructions of womanhood and to imagine alternative identities for women, contemporary women authors turn to the woman painter to explore changing ideas about identity and to engage with feminist theory. Most significantly, these authors argue that women must take part in representational practices – through fiction, the visual arts, and theory – and that it is through this participation that women can articulate and actualize radical alternative subjectivities.

159

APPENDIX A

FIGURES

Figure 1. Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman, 1892-93, oil on canvas, 15 x 64½ ft. Mural, Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. PD.

160

Figure 2. Alice Barber (Stephens), The Women’s Life Class. Illus. for William C. Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia.” Scribner’s Monthly 18.5 (Sept. 1879): 737-50. PD.

161

Figure 3. A “BLOOMER” (in Leap Year) and Strong-Minded “BLOOMER.” Cartoons. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 4.20 (Jan. 1852): 286. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Making of America Digital Collection.

162

Figure 4. Engagement in High Life. Cartoon. Punchinello 2.32 (5 Nov. 1870): 87. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Making of America Digital Collection.

163

Figure 5. The Two Mothers. Engraving. Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 86.515 (May 1873): 392. PD.

164

Figure 6. J.H.S. Mann, Hush! He Sleeps. Engraving by J. Franck. Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 78.464 (Feb. 1869): 110. PD.

165

Figure 7. Charles Dana Gibson, Social Nuisances: The Female Artist Who Has Ceased To Be Feminine. Cartoon from Life 16.397 (7 Aug. 1890): 64-65. PD.

166

Figure 8. Charles Dana Gibson, A Widow and Her Friends: She Goes Into Colors. Cartoon from Life 37.949 (10 Jan. 1901): 30-31. PD.

167

Figure 9. Frank O. Small, “My mother had Indian blood. See?” And she turned her profile. Illus. for The Coast of Bohemia by William Dean Howells. The Ladies’ Home Journal 10.4 (Mar. 1893): 5. PD.

168

Figure 10. Charles Dana Gibson, The Beautiful Young Woman…Had Stepped Back From Her Easel. Illus. for The Princess Sonia by Julia Magruder. The Century Illustrated Magazine 50.1 (May 1895): 5. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Making of America Digital Collection.

169

Figure 11. Militant Suffragette. Cartoon from Life 70.1829 (15 Nov. 1917): 782. PD.

170

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jennifer Leigh Moffitt was born and raised in Tampa, Florida. Before commencing her PhD in literature at Florida State University, she received a Bachelor’s degree in English with a double- minor in art history and women’s studies from Appalachian State University and a Master’s degree in literature from Humboldt State University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century American literature, women’s literature, gender studies, and visual culture.

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