Are Women's Bodies “the territory across which male artists claim their modernity"?

This essay will look at the way that women’s bodies were used in order to justify and play out a masculine colonial ideology. In order to analyse this, this essay will look at the ‘harem fantasy’ within 19th century Orientalist paintings which demonstrated the way in which male artists both claimed their “modernity” as well as their “leadership of the avant-garde” through the proliferation of masculine fantasies and facilitation of the male gaze.[1] This was extremely important during 19th century France, as the country embarked on a rebuilding of Empire in places like North Africa and the South Pacific. Through the representation of the native woman as backwards, erotic and ‘dangerous’ male artists were able to serve the countries imperial myth to audiences in France which was that the West superior to the East.[2] This essay will look at how the female body was used as a way to facilitate the male gaze. Moreover, the use of racial ambiguity within depictions of the female body allowed for the French colonials to justify their colonial expansion as well as their desire for the ‘native woman’. The representation of female bodies in line with that of the prevailing male gaze allowed for male artists to “compete for leadership of the avant-garde” due to the fact that the audience was predominantly male, and the works ultimately reiterated their superiority and allowed for escapism through sexual fantasy. Such ideas will be explored through the work of Eugene Delacroix, Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres and Jean-Jules-Antione Lecomte de Nouy.

The male gaze in the harem: the trespassing gaze

This part of the essay will explore the way in which French male artists facilitated the male imperial gaze through the depiction of ‘native’ women as non-threatening sexual fantasies. The female body was as Gen Doy argues a place in which notions of colonial progress could be explored due to the already inferior position of women in hierarchies of gender.[3] This meant that the female body could become an allegory of the Orient as it could be feminised as well as their land, in order to justify colonial expansion.[4] The use of depictions of the harem to facilitate the male gaze was deliberate, because the native woman is confined within a space that is not influenced by any sense of masculine power such as the ‘native man’. Additionally, the fact that the harem was a veiled place as argued by Isra Ali, where men were not allowed to go, meant that the depiction and experience of the ‘native women’ was up to the male artist, allowing them to create the woman as an inferior, overly sexual creature.[5] Whilst, also maintaining a moral distance as argued by Linda Nochlin, from the “ancient time” and practices at play in the ‘land of the Oriental’, in this case North Africa and Algeria.[6] Thus, as argued by Ali, the male French artists’ created a stark “binarization of the Oriental and the Occidental” in order to ensure that the Western culture remains dominant.[7] This can be seen in Eugene Delacroix’s 1834 painting Women of Algiers in their Apartment (figure 1).

Figure 1: Eugene Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834, oil on canvas, 180 x 229 cm, Musee du Louvre, Paris.

In this painting it becomes clear that Delacroix rendered the female as a subject to the male Imperial gaze (both moralising and sexual) in order to demonstrate the progress of modern France as opposed to the ‘ancient’ reality of Algeria. The women are created by Delacroix as subjects of the male sexual gaze through the use of the partial state of undress of the woman on the front left and the woman in the middle, as well as the bareness of their feet and legs. The facial expression of the figures are not threatening, but demure and inviting, especially the woman on the left who looks out directly at the male audiences. This demonstrates as Pollock describes “she is denied the picturing of her desire; what she looks at is blank for the spectator.”[8]

Whilst Delacroix depicts the women’s inherent sexuality, the women are maintained within a rigid and contained structure, the harem, that is rendered with realistic detail through the technique of realism. This is argued by Julie Codell as she states that the depictions of the harem were not realistic depictions from actual experience but rather represented “sexual fantasies.”[9] So the realistic depiction was a way in which male artists were able to convince their audience and themselves of their masculine superiority. This can be seen through the patterns on the walls of the room, as well as the detailed depiction of the luxuriously patterned carpet beneath them. The women are confined within a space which allows the male gaze to look in but they themselves cannot get out of. This excess of fabrics allows Delacroix, as argued by Emer O’Beirne to immobilize the women “in precious fabrics and jewels”.[10] Therefore, creating an excess of difference to modern life in France, which renders the figures and their surroundings as stuck in a sort of ancient time as argued by Ali.[11] The use of realistic detail by Delacroix additionally allowed him to represent the scene as truthful as if an intimate insight in the life of the Orient, allowing him great success and for a time “leadership of the avant-garde” in Orientalist paintings.[12] This was due to the fact, as this essay argues, that he did not threaten the social order of French society but rather facilitated the voyeuristic gaze and ultimately justified the ‘backwardness’ of the Orient’s culture and the domination of their land by France. Or as explored by Linda Nochlin, allowed the creation of an ‘imaginary Orient’ “destined for the male consumption of the absent western colonial.”[13]

Figure 3: Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 130.5 cm x 190 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The use of nudity to facilitate the male gaze was prevalent during the 19th century French society such as in Manet’s 1863, Olympia (figure 3), and Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1861, Phryne before the Areopagus (figure 4). In contrast, the use of nudity in this case broke away from just the suggestion of sexuality in Delacroix’s painting, to the explicit depiction of sexuality and eroticism. This can be explicitly explored in Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ 1852-59 painting, the Turkish bath or Le Bain Turc (figure 2) as it represents a highly sexualised ‘native woman’ in the confines of a private space which in this case is the bath. This more explicit depiction was due to the increasing popularity of depictions of Orientalism as highlighted by Tara Mendola and the increasing exploration of modes of depicting the Orient.[14]

Figure 2: Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath (Le Bain turc), 1852-59, oil on canvas, 108 x 110 cm, Musee du Lourve, Paris.

Despite the lesbian eroticism that is evident in the image, such as in the two figures in the foreground with one woman grabbing the other’s breast, as argued by Mendola the male gaze is facilitated within the confines of a) a space where nudity is expected b) within the style of a conventional nude in its classical pose.[15] The woman staring out towards the corner of the image demonstrates this as she is created in classical pose, with her body rendered within a contrapposto position. However, the ‘native’ eroticism is maintained through the deliberate aspiration to nudes of ancient Greece as argued by Philippa Levine which allows the artist to demonstrate that even though he tried to render the women as like that of ancient Greece, their nakedness is inherently sexual and therefore they are inferior.[16] The native ‘eroticism’ is also maintained through the use of a rounded canvas that promotes a kind of voyeuristic gaze and the extreme excess of female nudity, as if Ingres is representing the ‘native land’ as one of abundance of sexuality. The female body in this instance allows Ingres, through the combination of sexual fantasy and conforming to classical methods of depicting female bodies allows him as Pollock writes to explore his “modernity” through imperialist ideology and “compete for leadership of the avant garde”.[17]

Figure 5: Jean Jules Antione Lecomte de Nouy, The White Slave (L’Esclave Blanche), 1888, oil on canvas, 149.5 x 118.3 cm, Musee des Beaux- Arts de Nantes, Paris.

Jean-Jules-Antione Lecomte de Nouy’s The White Slave (figure 5) also facilitates this imperialist male gaze, rendering the nude female body in service of the artists and imperial France’s “claim of modernity”.[18] This is done once again like Ingres’ through representing an excess of nudity. The classical position of the woman in the nude is in stark contrast to the inclusion of ‘Oriental space’ that of the bath, assumedly in a Harem. The woman takes up most of the frame, whereas details of her ‘exoticism’ are made miniscule. Whilst, she is rendered in a classical way, hiding her breasts, her explicit sexuality as a ‘native woman’ is reiterated through the inclusion of the ‘Oriental food’ and the detailed depiction of the pillows and cloth that surround her. She is once again, like Delacroix’s work (figure 1), shown to be a ‘native woman’ but of no threat to the imperialist order as the strong lines of her surroundings maintain her captivity within a private space, as if at the beckon of the imperial male gaze. Additionally, as argued by Anne McClintok this confinement of the woman allows the male spectator and artist to “claim their modernity” as she is trapped within onto “prehistoric, atavistic and irrational” therefore inferior to the “historical time of modernity.”[19]

In conclusion, this essay has argued that one of the ways French male artists utilised women’s bodies to “claim their modernity” was through the reflection of imperial superiority over the ‘native other’. These male artists, such as Ingres, Delacroix and Antione, were able to compete for “leadership of the avant-garde” through the use of realism to express that their work was truthful and through the use of classical allusions but was ultimately achieved by the fact that they progressed the imperial project of France at the time. Their mostly male audience meant that the expression of the ‘native woman’ as fantasy and simultaneous undermining of her was a way in which male artists appealed and did not threaten the masculinity of the modern French man. Of course there are many instances where women’s bodies are explicitly politicised by male artists, but the exploration of the way in which Orientalist paintings functioned demonstrates that the use of the female body was a reflection of the overall feminization of ‘native lands’ and therefore a reason to justify the complete penetration of ‘native land’.

[1] Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the spaces of femininity” in her Vision and Difference. Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, (London: Routledge, 1988), pg. 265. [2] This involvement in the progress of the colonial order by male artists was both conscious and subconscious and may have been motivated not by a personal desire but by a commercial desire. However, artists were aware of “notions of colonial progress” as Jocelyn Hackforth Jones stated. [3] Gen Doy, “Out of Africa: Orientalism, `Race' and the Female Body,” Body and Society 2, no. 4 (1996), pg. 18. [4] Anne McClintok, Imperial Leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pg. 23. [5] Isra Ali, “The harem fantasy in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings,” Dialectical Anthropology 39, no. 1 (2015), pg. 39. [6] Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society, ed. by Nochlin, Linda, (New York: Routledge, 1989), pg. 33. [7] Ali, “The harem fantasy,” pg. 29. [8] Pollock, “Modernity and the spaces of femininity,” pg. 265. [9] Julie Codell, “Orientalism” in Art: The Case of John Frederick Lewis,” in A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art, ed. Michelle Facos, (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), pg. 121. [10] Emer O’Beirne, “Veiled Vision: Assia Djebar on Delacroix, Picasso, and the Femmes D’Alger,” Romance Studies: a journal of the University of Wales 21, no 1. (2003), pg. 40. [11] Ali, “The harem fantasy,” pg. 37. [12] Pollock, “Modernity and the spaces of femininity,” pg. 265. [13] Doy, “Out of Africa: Orientalism,” pg. 18. [14] Tara Mendola, “Magrebines: Historical Representations of North African Women in 19th Century French Orientalism and Post-1950s North African Narrative,” Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2005-6 1, no.1 (2006), pg. 7. [15] Mendola, “Magrebines: Historical Representations of North African Women in 19th Century French Orientalism,” pg. 7. [16] Philippa Levine, “Naked Truths: Bodies, Knowledge, and the Erotics of Colonial Power,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (2013), pg. 8. [17] Pollock, “Modernity and the spaces of femininity,” pg. 265. [18] Pollock, “Modernity and the spaces of femininity,” pg. 265. [19] Anne McClintok, Imperial Leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pg. 34. [20] Ali, “The harem fantasy,” pg. 37. [21] Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: towards a feminist reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pg. 73. [22] McClintok, Imperial Leather, pg. 125. [23] Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, Promoting the Colonial Idea (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pg. 10. [24] Mendola, “Magrebines: Historical Representations of North African Women in 19th Century French Orientalism,” pg. 7.