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Femininity, Subjectivity and the Visual Discourse of Ecstasy

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Paradoxical Bodies: Femininity, subjectivity and the visual discourse of ecstasy Victoria Elizabeth Turvey Sauron Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies September 2007 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. 2 Acknowledgements I would like to gratefully acknowledge the five years spent by my supervisor Griselda Pollock accompanying my gradual development of this thesis. I have valued her encouragement, brilliance, subtle and knowing guidance, and unspoken understanding of my growing up process. I would like to thank the following people who provided very kind and thoughtful advice, suggestions, information, images, and in some cases copies of forthcoming or unpublished articles, in the course of the writing of this thesis: Johnnie Gratton, Penny Jolly, Naomi Segal, Imogen Tyler, Roberto Pipemo, Joanne Heath, Vanessa Corby, Nigel Saint, Claus Gronne. I have felt privileged to have received the AHRC Doctoral Research grant which has made it possible for me to carry out this study. I want to thank my family for their enthusiasm, encouragement, and sympathy, and my husband Alain for his love, patience, understanding and unconditional support. Finally I would like to dedicate my thesis to my son Daniel, bom in 2005, without whom not only the thesis itself but every other aspect of life would be empty. I am grateful for his love, inspiration, comfort, and patience, and perhaps above all for his infectious joie de vivre. 3 Abstract The aim of this research is to explore the possibility of the articulation of an embodied feminine subjectivity within visual culture. Tracing the tropes and discourses of visuality operating around the female body in representation via Warburg’s notion of the pathos formula, I examine the extent to which specific images acquiesce or resist dominant narratives of femininity within patriarchal visuality. The search for an embodied subjectivity leads to encounters with paradoxical bodies whose apparent passivity and ecstatic submission mask potential articulations of subjecthood through networks of visual and bodily memory. When the female body is represented in extreme states, where it can be both subject and object, desiring and desired, it becomes engaged in discourses of concealment and revelation, veiling and penetration, interiority and exteriority, which are played out in terms of drapery, skin and the body’s boundaries. These visual articulations of femininity are at the heart of Western visual culture, traversing the boundaries of context, period and genre, yet bodily representation often remains problematically linked to phallic and fetishistic modes of viewing which perpetuate the alienation of a feminine subjectivity. Beginning with The Ecstasy o f St. Teresa by Bernini, the first chapter presents the impasse met by traditional art history and begins to propose, around the figure of Mary Magdalene, the notion of the ‘Caravaggesque’ body. The second chapter traces the phallic structure of viewing through representations of Venus and sculptural drapery, finishing by interrogating the engagements of Cindy Sherman and Orlan within these discourses. Chapter Three articulates potential areas within visual culture, from Caravaggio to Artemisia Gentileschi to Hildegard of Bingen, where depicted subjectivity begins to emerge beyond a dualist structure of the body and mind. Finally, a theorisation of the visuality of pregnancy leads to the possibility in Chapter Four of a feminist articulation of subjectivity based on a body marked by a pre- and post-maternal temporality. 4 Table of contents Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................................... 2 A bstract.............................................................................................................................................. 3 Table of contents..............................................................................................................................4 Table of illustrations....................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction.....................................................................................................................................11 C hapter O n e ................................................................................................................................... 14 The intention to represent the unrepresentable................................................................. 16 The desire to know................................................................................................................ 19 Knowing Teresa.................................................................................................................... 25 Deliberate mistakes - Bernini’s intention......................................................................... 28 Explaining the image: Steinberg, Careri and B arasch.....................................................33 Its own story: the limits of iconography, and the subjective analyst............................37 Disturbing elem ents..............................................................................................................40 The carnality of marble........................................................................................................ 42 Mirror and concept................................................................................................................44 Mary Magdalene and ‘truth’ ............................................................................................... 45 ‘Caravaggesque’.................................................................................................................... 49 ‘Exteriorising’ identification................................................................................................51 Excessive empathy, bodily ecstasy.....................................................................................53 Active passivity......................................................................................................................57 ‘Those who have not seen’...................................................................................................58 The air of truth: the Marquis de Sade............................................................................... 60 Histories of art........................................................................................................................62 The Warburgian Magdalene and the Pathosformel......................................................... 64 Chapter Two: the female body and fetishistic modes of viewing.......................................73 Interacting images: Mieke Bal and a methodology of framing..................................... 73 ThcKnidian Venus................................................................................................................76 Impenetrable beauty, internal horror: fetishism and the female nude........................... 80 Venus and absence................................................................................................................ 83 Pudeur and intersubjectivity................................................................................................85 A process of opening.............................................................................................................86 Inside-out: drapery and subjectivity................................................................................... 87 Corradini and sculptural drapery.........................................................................................90 The Fold: architecturality and surface................................................................................ 95 Donna Velata and the hair of the Magdalene.................................................................... 97 Forms of fetishistic visuality: Anish Kapoor.................................................................. 101 Cindy Sherman and the discourse of fetishistic viewing.............................................. 103 Orlan and the emptiness of the object.............................................................................. 106 Proposing an alternative..................................................................................................... 110 C hapter T h ree ............................................................................................................................... The hands of the Magdalene..............................................................................................112 Intertwined fingers.............................................................................................................. 118 Demosthenes and the visuality of paradoxical absorption............................................ 122 Appropriating the chair: hysteria and contradiction....................................................... 124 5 The physical and the spiritual body................................................................................
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