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Being Madame X / p.3
The Mirror's Edge
Charges of vanity and ostentatious display were raised in 1884 and echoed today, reflecting social expectations that a woman bloody her feet trying to balance along the mirror's edge, an effort time itself guarantees will fail. A slip to either side and her reflection wavers and transforms.
Is she beautiful, talented, successful, or in any way attractive? She risks being seen as vain, flighty, extravagant, predatory, and will be suspected of sexual teasing or trading on her looks.
The other side of the mirror dims her reflection until she is seen, if seen at all, as slatternly, past it, unfeminine, inefficient, dull-witted, unreliable, and of suspect mental health.
Why would anyone lend their authority, in any field, to maintain these limits? I can think of two possibilities: a thoughtlessness triggered by strong emotion or a considered misogyny developed to contain such emotions. Each time such charges are raised they enforce conformity, amplify the carping chorus within, and serve to convince each woman that she is somehow and forever suspect by reason of her sex. As 7-of-9 would say, "unacceptable."
Unacceptable for my mother, myself, my daughter, my granddaughters, or for any woman, any time, anywhere.
Women's Words
Some woman find both portrait and subject beautiful. Some women find her independence, or arrogance, exhilarating. But ever since 1884 other women have expressed repulsion. Jealousy is too glib an explanation for women's role in enforcing conformity. Words are the first weapon used in the womanly task of defending home and hearth. When one woman says of another, "she looks like death warmed over," it's as likely to signal condemnaton as concern. Context is all.
Memory III
Mother walked up 20th Avenue from California Street each evening: high heels, short skirt, hair upswept beneath a small hat, hands gloved. I watched for her from Mrs. Funston's front window. Mrs. Funston, in charge of two granddaughters, said it was no trouble for her to care for me after school.
I was a quiet 6-year-old, an only child, who stood amazed as Beth and Mary Ellen fought with words and fists and hurtful tugs of hair. All three of us whispered, though, in the high-ceilinged rooms below, up the cavernous stairwell, past the lodger's front bedroom, and through their mother's room until we reached their room, the sunroom that ran along the back of the house. Here we were free to slide in stocking feet along the linoleum floor and fling ourselves on the piles of bedspreads and blankets that shared the floor with Beth and Mary Ellen's twin beds.
Their mother, Ellen Rogers, worked swing shift, so she slept late, rising silently and heavy limbed, leaving the house as quickly as she could. She did war work. During World War II this meant factory work. She wore slacks and bobby socks, and went out dancing after work even though she was married, her husband overseas but smiling from a framed photo, handsome in his uniform on her bedside table. One day I heard Mrs. Funston call her daughter a tramp, which puzzled me because clearly she lived in a house.
Sides had already been taken in this house. My silence usually bought neutrality. But one day Mary Ellen, a willful 5-year-old, who was seen and saw herself as her mother's daughter, hit out at me. "My mother says your mother is snobby - and she has thick legs!" Outgunned by Beth, two years older, and her grandmother, she had to fight or go under. Words that darkened the air above her head inevitably dropped within her reach, to be salvaged and reused in an ecology of blame. |
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"Madame X, however, seems corrupt and jaded, whereas Mrs. Wade appears prim and impeccably correct, and conveys a self-assurance remarkable for a young woman of 23." (11) |
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". . . magnificently bold and haughty portrait of 23-year-old Virginie Gautreau - an American whose behavior was already something of a scandal in Parisian society." (12)
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"... the raw sensuality of her dress and the way it emphasizes her breasts, the blue toned color of her porcelain like skin, the haughty air of her pouting profile, all combined to shock Parisians. If you look closely at her posture you can see that she is leaning back slightly, allowing her body to be thrust forward, her hands are both clutching, or clawing, something below the waist.
[Not so. One hand rests on a table. The other holds a fan. -CS] Originally the left strap to the dress was down over her arm as though she could care [less?] what she wore. Oh, yes - Madam Gautreau was a babe that all men desired and all wives feared." (14) |
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"Lisa was an extraordinary singer, dancer, songwriter and actress. She was also the most flamboyant and controversial TLC bandmember, engaging in outlandish antics, both on and offstage. She is comparable to the legendary Josephine Baker, Edith Wharton's Ellen Olenska, and Madame Pierre Gautreau(Madame X) Their unconventional lifestyles were at odds with the prescribed roles of their day, which tells women to stay in their place, preferably the role of submissive wife and mother and don't make waves." (16) |
"All the women jeer. 'Ah voila "la belle": Oh, quel horreur!'" (17)
". . . chalky paint gives to the shoulders the tone of a corpse." (18)
"Gautreau herself possessed, indeed flaunted, a sensuality that was undermined by death and decay." (19) | |
I was indignant! My mother's legs were not thick. Mother had never said a word against Ellen Rogers - or in her favor. Their lives were parallel but ran on separate tracks. Our rented earthquake cottage, tucked away in the back yard of a three-story flat across the street from Mrs. Funston's house, was neat and well-furnished, its garden paved with marble stepping-stones from the company my mother worked for as a drafter and estimator.
Did Mrs. Funston watch each morning as we walked to the streetcar? Did the sight of my mother carrying out the routines of her day rankle? My mother, drafted into that war unknowingly, had been hurled at Ellen Rogers. Mrs. Funston would have had no trouble justifying this; she was fighting for virtue and for her family.
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Blurring Distinctions
Trevor Fairbrother, in a lecture, (20) used slides to make his point that this portrait was a radical departure from those presented at the Academy before. There was no ready-made category it fit within, hence the furor. Other images of women accepted by the Salon in those years fall into three groups: proper ladies displaying their husbands' wealth, women of the people in genre paintings, and nudes, declassed and offering their bodies to connoisseurs of art. These were the safe options, and although Sargent had offered somewhat daring genre pieces before he'd never blurred distinctions. What was Sargent thinking?
Fairbrother's lecture showed how Sargent unsettled by breaking boundaries. But his lecture didn't speculate on how the mixture of aloof sexuality and respectability might have maddened critics.
No Offer Is Implied
Yet look at this portrait. No offer is implied. The subject's pose, her smoothly coiled hair, her tightly laced waist and elegant black dress, all combine to establish her as she who chooses, not she who is chosen.
Her display is to all, yet all are dismissed. She is not sister, mother, lover, or companion - not in this moment. Nor is she painted as valued possession draped with rich fabric, decorated with jewels, backed by hothouse flowers or fine upholstery. The portrait shocked not because she was portrayed as a sexual woman, but because she was a respectable woman displaying sexuality, displaying but not offering. Not a compliant sexuality. Assumptions about compliance, like desire itself, arise within the beholder.
Painting the Painted
Even her use of powder disturbs late 20th-century critics as much as it did those of 1884. Not one considers the artistry with which Virginie Gautreau constructed her own image. Yet Fairbrother, in his commentary on an oil sketch of a Javanese dancer, drew our attention to the way the Sargent's "application of paint uncannily mimics the make-up that the dancer paints on her face." Fairbrother could say, of one painting of a painted woman, "... it's one artist paying homage to another," (22) yet fail to acknowledge that this same element of homage is part of the mix Sargent brought to his Portrait of Madame X.
Sargent's irritation with Virginie Gautreau was not at her display; he was a partner in that effort. When he wrote that she was lazy, he wanted her to pose. It was a complaint by one professional about another.
Sargent had adult, professional issues ...
Page<< 1 2 3 4 Notes >>
© 2001-2002 Cecilie Scott
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"Or perhaps it is the
vision of her partially revealed bosom, exposed by a
low-cut velvet evening dress. It may be the bluish tone of her
skin and her upturned arm that suggests something cool and
pleasurable amid the fiery sensations of nascent lust. |
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| Then there is her hand, pressed lightly against her abdomen, which conjures up certain desires that remain unspoken in public." (21) |
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