Sexual morality in the late 19th century, the femme fatale
We are still heirs to a distorted moral perspective in which a politician or captain of industry can cause death, suffering or environmental destruction without opprobrium, but can have his career ended for a sexual indiscretion.
Neoclassicism, as we saw, was deeply if ambivalently implicated in the social and political events of its time. Other movements, like impressionism, are less obviously responsive to the history unfolding around them. Monet and the other members of the group began to discover their particular artistic vision in the 1860s, and had their first exhibition in 1874, and yet that exhibition showed scarcely a trace of the nationally traumatic events of the intervening years.
In 1870, France was tricked by Bismarck into declaring war on Prussia; in the first modern war since railways had radically transformed troop movements and military logistics, the better-organised Prussians rapidly defeated the French army, leading to the abdication of Napoleon III and the institution of the Third Republic, which would limp on until World War II. The Prussians besieged Paris, whose citizens endured terrible hardship over the winter of 1870-71; at the end of January the city fell, the Germans marched through the city and then left, not wanting to compound the humiliation.
A left-wing uprising in Paris led to the formation of the Commune (March 18), but an urban revolt had little chance of success when the national government, based outside the capital, still had control of the army, and that army was unlikely to countenance a second humiliation by a revolutionary rabble. Predictably, the government retook the city during the so-called semaine sanglante, the bloody week, from May 21-28, 1871, summarily executing anyone who resisted.
These events were deeply shocking and disturbing to all sides of politics, but the longer-term effects were even worse. The shame the army felt at its ignominious defeat, at a time when France still considered herself the continental superpower, led to a climate of paranoia that later expressed itself in the Dreyfus Affair, and even more disastrously to a militaristic eagerness to confront Germany again in 1914.
None of this appears in the art of the impressionists except, obliquely, in their interest in trains and railway stations, in which they were anticipated by Manet in The Railway (1873). It is a striking example of the disconnection of art from historical events, but also represents a shift in focus from the large-scale political scene to the more intimate experience of the bourgeoisie and petite-bourgeoisie in the modern city.
Because the impressionists were mostly concerned with landscape, they have little to say about erotic themes either. The exception of course is with the one member of the group who was not a true impressionist, or at least shared none of the main concerns of the others. Edgar Degas has more in common with Manet and the realist movement, with its close observation of modern life, while at the same time he was both a classically trained draughtsman, and highly original, even experimental in his later work. Degas was born into a wealthy Franco-Neapolitan family with a branch in New Orleans, and on several occasions takes them as subjects, as in the early masterpiece La Famille Bellelli (1858-67), which represents his Florentine cousins. The classic frontality of this picture poignantly emphasises the dissonance between the group of his aunt on the left with her daughters and his uncle by marriage on the right. On the wall behind his aunt is a red chalk drawing by the artist of his recently deceased grandfather, the patriarch of the family.
Modern audiences know Degas above all for his ballet pictures, but as I have observed before, the general reaction to these works demonstrates how carelessly people look at paintings. Most viewers think the girls are pretty and charming, and the pictures are inevitably reproduced in suburban dance schools. What they really show us, however, is poor working class girls who have no education and little inherent grace, but who can be transformed by the artifice of choreography and by relentless and almost tyrannical discipline into embodiments of beauty.
When they are not dancing, Degas will show them scratching themselves, awkwardly adjusting a strap, or in some other spontaneous, artless and unselfconscious action, like those he sought to capture in his pastels of bathers. In the painting that was recently in Brisbane in the Metropolitan exhibition, he also hinted at the other side of their lives as the playthings of rich men: the bulky silhouette of a boulevardier in a top hat is seen waiting in the wings. Degas was fascinated by the world of theatre and entertainment, as well as that of Parisian brothels, which he evoked in an extraordinary late suite of monoprints. He was followed in these interests by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who came from an ancient noble family of southwestern France but had grown up with legs stunted by a childhood riding accident. Lautrec became the great painter of the entertainment district of Montmartre, and particularly the new Moulin Rouge nightclub, for which he designed a famous poster with La Goulue dancing, framed by the profile of the very tall and thin amateur performer know as Valentin le Desosse – the boneless – from the fluidity of his movements.
He captures the boredom of women waiting for clients in In the Salon of the rue des Moulins (c. 1894), and the solace they find in lesbian relationships in The Kiss (1892); his perspective on the women in these houses is always warmer than the sometimes almost cruel detachment of Degas. In a series of colour lithographs – a new medium at the end of the century – titled Elles (1896), he reflected on the many moments that made up daily life in a brothel, in which, however, he sees less the exotic lives of an underclass than a glimpse of universal human experience.
A very different approach to erotic experience appears in the roughly contemporary symbolist artists, who can be considered as neo-romantics although they were also influenced by the neoclassical painters, and who were later claimed by the surrealists as predecessors. The most important of these was Gustave Moreau, whose wild and exotic imagination arose out of a monotonous life spent living with his parents in the house which since his death has been the Gustave Moreau museum, the first artist house museum in France.
Moreau’s debt to Ingres can be seen in the picture with which he first made his mark, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), but he imagines the Sphinx in a much more sexualised manner, as though she were a seductress. In Orpheus, painted the following year, Moreau pictures the sequel to the mythical poet’s gruesome death and decapitation by the Maenads of Thessaly. They nailed his head to his lyre and threw it into the sea, where it floated, still singing, over the Aegean to Lesbos; here we see it being carried with veneration and tenderness by a girl of the island, which ever since, as the poet Phanocles wrote, has been the most musical of islands.
Many of Moreau’s other paintings revisit mythological themes that had not been painted with such spontaneity and imagination since Titian or Rubens, such as Andromeda chained to the rock, or Europa and the bull, but he also pondered the femme fatale theme in a series of works devoted to the story of Salome, who danced before Herod and demanded the head of John the Baptist as payment. The story was later the subject of a play that Oscar Wilde wrote in French (1891), and which became the libretto of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome in 1905.
The theme of the femme fatale – woman as dangerous sexual temptress – was originally a romantic one that flourished and proliferated in the moralistic world of the later 19th century. The Victorian idea of sexual respectability was essentially a way for the newly rich, in an age of social mobility, to justify their wealth. A nobleman doesn’t have to prove that he is morally superior to his valet, since their different conditions have nothing to do with morality. For similar reasons intellectuals and artists have been less prone to the obsession with respectability.
But many members of the new bourgeoisie knew all too well that their grandfathers had been of the same class as their own servants; the disparities of fortune could only be explained by superior moral character: self-discipline, endurance and hard work and particularly a capacity for sexual continence. The result was that sexual morality assumed an extraordinarily exaggerated importance compared with other areas of behaviour. We are still heirs to a distorted moral perspective in which a politician or captain of industry can cause death, suffering or environmental destruction without opprobrium, but can have his career ended for a sexual indiscretion.
Naturally this ideology of sexual respectability produced the corresponding underworld of hypocrisy and double lives so typical of Victorian culture and the subject of such books as Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91). But repressed sexuality erupted in a number of overheated late Victorian paintings, of which some of the most impressive are by J.W. Waterhouse, an accomplished painter who began in the Academic tradition and became a late pre-Raphaelite.
One of these is Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), in the National Gallery of Victoria. The myth of the Sirens is very ancient; they had already appeared, long before Homer, in the story of the Argonauts as sexual temptresses who lured sailors to their deaths. Homer had the genius to imagine that their temptations were especially tailored to each of our desires, and so to Odysseus – who is so curious to hear their famed song that he has himself lashed to the mast of his ship, while his men’s ears are blocked with wax – they promise what he most longs for, knowledge.
Waterhouse’s image is vivid and memorable, and the winged Sirens are true to ancient iconographical sources; and sensational as he is, Waterhouse remains closer to the spirit of Homer than H.J. Draper, in whose later version (1909) of the same subject the Sirens are slim girlish mermaids sliding up the side of the ship and driving the hero mad with lust.
Another picture by Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs (1896), also dates back to the myth of the Argo; Hylas was a youth beloved of Heracles who went to fetch water but was lured to his death by the nymphs of the spring. Such tales recur in many cultures and even in Aboriginal legends, but a few years ago zealots of the new puritanism briefly removed it from display in Manchester before it was reinstated after a fierce controversy they clearly did not anticipate.
This painting, like all art, speaks to us of other times and other assumptions, but it is essential for us to be able to reflect freely upon the past if we are to understand the present to which it has given birth.
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