Doubles and desire: Anatomies of masculinity in the later nineteenth century

Art History

Volumn 26, Issue 5, 2003, Pages 786-

  Callen, Anthea ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249178806     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2003.02605006_3.x     Document Type: Review

References (95)

1. Margaret Walters, The Male Nude. A new perspective, London, 1978, pp. 228ff.
2. For recent revisions to this view, see, for example, Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, London, 1998, and Exposed: The Victorian Nude, ed. Alison Smith, London, Tate Publishing, 2001.
3. The present article was written before the publication of Susan Waller's relevant work 'Professional Poseurs: The male model in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Popular Imagination', Oxford Art Journal, vol. 25, no. 2 (2002), pp. 41-64.
4. See Tamar Garb, 'The forbidden gaze: women artists and the male nude in late nineteenth-century France', in Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged: The human form and visual culture since the Renaissance, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 33-42.
5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York, 1985, pp. 1-5.
6. See also Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, London, 1997, chap. 2.
7. See especially Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume I: An Introduction, New York, 1978;
8. Jeffrey Weeks, 'Capitalism and the Organisation of Sex', in Homosexuality: Power and Politics, ed. Gay Left Collective, London, 1980, pp. 16-17,
9. J. Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities, London, 1985, p. 92.
10. On the fin-de-siècle split between the rational and the animal in masculine identity in France, see Annelise Maugue, L'Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle, Paris, 1987, esp. pp. 28-38.
11. On British masculinity, see John Tosh, A Man's Place, New Haven and London, 1999,
12. Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World, London, 1991, p. 65, in reference to the education of boys.
13. On definitions of sex, and gender and sexuality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 27-30.
14. See Léon Daudet's comments which are quoted by Charles Bernheimer in his major book on sexuality in the period, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1989, p. 315, n. 32,
15. see La Leçon de Charcot, esp. pp. 17-21, and pp. 38-40.
16. On Charcot and the arts, see Deborah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style, UCLA Press, 1989, chap. 5, and passim. Included in Brouillet's group portrait are three prominent writers, two of whom - Philippe Burty and Jules Clarétie - had also promoted avant-garde painting through their art criticism; (La Leçon de Charcot, pp. 39-40).
17. A diagram in La Leçon de Charcot, pp. 4-5, identifies all the sitters and on pp. 20-1, thumbnail biographies are given for many of Charcot's colleagues at La Salpêtrière.
18. Gérôme was a regular guest at Charcot's Tuesday 'soirées', see La Leçon de Charcot, p. 16, and Silverman, Art Nouveau, p. 161.
19. See Silverman, Art Nouveau, pp. 102-106, 119-20 and passim, and chap. 11 on Mme Charcot's role.
20. For the major historical anatomy classes, see Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace, Spectacular Bodies: Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now, London, 2000, esp. Introduction, pp. 11-20.
21. A recent critical case study is Julie V. Hansen's 'Resurrecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr Frederk Ruysch', Art Bulletin, vol. 78, no. 4 (December 1996), pp. 663-79.
22. See Jan Goldstein, Control and Classify: The French Psychiatric Pofession in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 1987, and her 'The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth Century France,' Journal of Modern History, vol. 54 (1982), pp. 209-39.
23. On the visual, see Anthea Callen, The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas, New Haven and London, 1995, pp. 55, 59;
24. G. Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hystérie. Charcot et l'iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, Paris, 1982.
25. See Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-century France, Manchester, 1990, esp. pp. 48-53.
26. 'Here is M Charcot before not an anaestheticised patient but an hysteric. What medicine, good God! Hypnotism, what a nightmare! Soon everything will be done by suggestion . except good paintings, of course.' M. Hamel in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, quoted in La Leçon de Charcot, p. 20.
27. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An archaeology of medical perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan, London and New York, 2003, p. 202.
28. The word used by Ch. Ponsonailhe in his review in L'Artiste, 1887, reprinted in Equivoques: peintures française du XIXe siècle, Paris, 1973, n.p. (entry on Gervex).
29. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 210.
30. L. Daudet, Les Morticoles, Paris, 1894, cited by Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, p. 315;
31. A. Corbin, 'Cries and Whispers', in M. Perrot (ed.), A History of Private Life, vol. 4, trans. A. Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, p. 631, note 32.
32. Deborah Bershad, 'Looking, Power and Sexuality: Degas's Woman with a Lorgnette', in R. Kendall and G. Pollock (eds), Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, London, 1992, p. 99.
33. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 160.
34. In a psychoanalytic reading, Kaja Silverman (Male Subjectivity at the Margins, New York and London, 1992, pp. 45-6) differentiates two forms of 'méconnaissance' or failure to recognize, which, depending upon its object, can pertain either to the self or to the Other: 'The subject classically refuses to recognize an unwanted feature of the self by projecting it onto the other, i.e. by relocating it. He or she refuses to recognize an unpleasurable or anxiety-inducing aspect of the Other by disavowing it, a process which sometimes requires the support of a fetish.' (her emphasis).
35. Arthur Conan Doyle, cited in Tosh, A Man's Place, p. 74
36. see his discussion of the rise of the modern masculine novel. Joseph Conrad's novella The Heart of Darkness (1899), is discussed by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 'Photography at the Heart of Darkness. Envisaging the Congo', in his Bodyscape: art, modernity and the Ideal Figure, London and New York, 1995, pp. 141-57.
37. See chapter on men's 'Flight from Domesticity' in late nineteenth-century Britain in Tosh, A Man's Place.
38. On Quest Romance, see also Elaine Showalter, in Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London, 1991, chap. 5. The Spanish painter E. Simonet y Lombardo (1864-1927) exhibited at the Paris Salon.
39. Michael Hatt, 'The Male Body in Another Frame', in Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts; 'The Body', ed. A. Benjamin, 1993, pp. 12, 13.
40. Hatt, 'The Male Body', p. 13.
41. Noted in respect of the British context by Martin Postle (Martin Postle and William Vaughan, The Artist's Model from Etty to Spencer, London, 1999, p. 55), this is also relevant to France.
42. On models at the Ecole, see Philippe Grunchec, Le Grand Prix de Peinture: Les concours des prix de Rome de 1797-1863, Paris, 1983
43. The Grand Prix de Rome: Paintings from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts 1797-1863, Washington DC, 1984.
44. For the anatomy classs, see Anthea Callen, 'The Body and Difference: Anatomy training at the Ecole des Beaux-Art in Paris in the later nineteenth century', Art History, vol. 20, no. 1, March 1997, pp. 23-60; Duval's curriculum is reprinted as an Appendix.
45. Cf. Edward Carpenter's advocacy of 'homogenic love' across class boundaries as a means of social renewal, cited in Tosh, A Man Place, p. 190.
46. See my discussion of Caillebotte's male nude Man at his Bath, Drying Himself, in Callen, The Spectacular Body, pp. 145-7,
47. Alex Potts's analysis of masculinity and dancing in 'Dance, Politics and Sculpture', Art History, vol. 10, no. 1, March 1987, pp. 91-109.
48. On Caillebotte's male figures, see Garb, Bodies of Modernity, chap. 1.
49. Victorine Meurend is very recognizable in Manet's figure painting in the 1860s and had her own strong identity in art circles of the period. On the reception of Manet's Olympia, see T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, London, 1985, chap. 2. The anxieties provoked by Olympia remained into the 1890s, when Monet began his campaign to persuade the State to buy it for the Luxembourg.
50. For a gendered reading of touch and the medical gaze, see Lynne Walker and Deborah Cherry, 'Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: Image, Identity and Space in the Modernisation of Nineteenth-Century Medicine', in Journal of British Visual Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, 2002, pp. 38-46.
51. A. Souques and H. Meige, 'Les Biographies Médicales: Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893). Notes pour server à l'histoire de la medicine et des grands médecins', Revue médicale illustrée, 13e année, 1939, part. 1, p. 333.
52. see H. Meige, Charcot artiste, Paris, 1925.
53. '. the origin of all Charcot's discoveries: the artist who, in him, is paired with the physician, has not been a stranger to these discoveries.' (My trans., my emphasis). Souques and Meige, 'Les Biographies Médicales: Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893)', p. 333.
54. The 1880s and 1890s have been called 'the golden age of literary and sexual doubles'. See Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, pp. 106ff, and p. 222, n. 14;
55. Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History, London, 1987, esp. chapter 11, 'Queer Fellows', which examines the concept of doubles in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 209-16.
56. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, chap. 6, pp. 105ff
57. W. Veeder and G. Hirsch (eds), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after One Hundred Years, Chicago, 1988, especially Veeder's essay, 'Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy'.
58. (p. 105, and notes 1 and 2, p. 221) that, according to Stevenson's wife, he knew of this case from its write-up in the Archives de Neurologie, before it appeared in English translation, in January 1886, in the Journal of Mental Science.
59. Stephen Heath, 'Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson's Strange Case', Critical Quarterly, vol. 28 (1986), pp. 100-101 and note 22;
60. Veeder and Hirsch, Jekyll and Hyde, p. 3.
61. Heath, 'Psychopathia Sexualis', pp. 99, 100.
62. Maugue, L'Identité masculine, pp. 28ff, identifes the brain as the organ of French nineteenth-century male dominance.
63. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 43.
64. Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde, p. 34. On p. 50, it is referred to as a 'surgical theatre'.
65. See Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, chap. 8.
66. Sigmund, Freud, The Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey, Harmondsworth, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 133-43;
67. see also Freud's translation of Charcot's Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, in Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 1, pp. 21-2,
68. See Goldstein, Control and Classify: France took the lead in the professionalization of psychiatry.
69. Augustin Berjon, La grande hystérie chez l'homme, d'après les travaux de Bourru et Burol, Paris, J.B. Baillière, 1886, 80pp.
70. Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, in relation to Anthropology, Jurisprudence and Psychiatry, London edition, 1876.
71. Stevenson, 'Psychopathia Sexualis', p. 73, and his reference, p. 15, to Enfield's repeated naming of Hyde as 'deformed' in appearance.
72. Stevenson, 'Psychopathia Sexualis', pp. 72 and 73.
73. J.G. Kiernan, 'Sexual perversion and the Whitechapel murders' (1888), in F.J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 1979, p. 292,
74. Miller, Doubles, p. 216.
75. Postle, in Postle and Vaughan, The Artist's Model, p. 55.
76. In Dr Lanyon's words, in Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde, p. 65.
77. Ch. Laurent, 'Le Salon de 1888, Paris, 1 May 1888, translated and quoted by Alan Krell, 'Fearful Desires: "Embodiments" in Late Nineteenth-Century Painting', in Body, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997, p. 126. Krell also gives a classed and homoerotic reading of the Sallé, and notes that he has found no further reviews of the painting.
78. Richard Dyer, White, London and New York, 1997, p. 57 and chap. 4.
79. Dyer, White, p. 57;
80. on 1848, see T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois, London, 1973, esp. chap. 1.
81. cf. Keith R. Dutton, The Perfectible Body, London, 1995
82. Emmanuel Cooper, Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography, London, 1996.
83. discussing the theories of psychoanalyst and historian of costume J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes, London, 1930, p. 105.
84. Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex had first been published in 1871.
85. The skeleton relates closely to Jan Wandelaar's 'Skeleton with putto' drawing (1726), for a plate (reversing the pose) in B.S. Albinus, Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani, 1747;
86. the muscleman is an as-yet unidentified example in an athletic or fighting posture typical of the écorché genre since the Renaissance, which simultaneously exposes maximum muscle structure (for prints and sculpted examples, see Kemp and Warner, Spectacular Bodies, pp. 48-9, 54-5, 78-9, 81-3 and passim, and for the Wandelaar, p. 37).
87. Foucault, Clinic, p. 202 and passim;
88. see also Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Hemel Hempstead, 1989, chap. 5 - Nature unveiling before science.
89. Alan Krell, in 'Fearful Desires: "Embodiments" in Late Nineteenth-Century Painting', p. 126, aptly stresses the theme of homoerotic desire in his identification of the glove fingers as standing for male genitalia.
90. According to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Helen Toussaint tentatively identified this figure as the young Léon Bonnat (see Callen 'The Body and Difference', note 70, p. 59). In 1888 however, Bonnat (1833-1922) would have been fifty-five, and as this is a modern subject (Duval, Richer and Cuyer are shown the correct age), this identification is unconvincing. The écorché is by Jacque-Eugène Caudron (1818-65).
91. 'You see . they have understood that this is a woman who takes her clothes off.' Edgar Degas, cited by Ambroise Vollard, Degas, Paris, 1924
92. quoted in "Equivoques": Peintures françaises di XIXe siècle, Paris, 1973, n.p. (entry for Gervex).
93. See Hollis Clayson's extensive analysis of this painting in Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, New Haven and London, 1991, pp. 79-93.
94. French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of pictorial unity to which Sallé's treatment of light and shade principally conforms are discussed in T. Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art, London, 1985, esp. chap. 4 and pp. 131-3.
95. Krell, 'Fearful Desires', p. 126.