INTRUSIVE PORTRAITS: DECIPHERING ART IN THE FICTION OF
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Anne-Marie Evans
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel – every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
In An Artist’s Studio, Christina Rossetti, (1830-94).
While recent novels such as Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With A Pearl Earring (1999) have
helped to make the intersection between literature and art once again in vogue, the Rossetti
poem subversively hints at the threat posed to female consciousness by masculine art. This
paper considers the implications of the gendered gaze; while male figures are frequently
perceived as consumers and producers of art, the female is consistently relegated to a
product of art, as the muse, the model, the passive inspiration. As Deborah Barker has
commented: “The male artist’s use of the female, as described by Baudelaire, also points to a
tradition of depicting the female body as an object of male desire that ignores the possibility
of women desiring their own, or other women’s bodies”.1
Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ for many years set the
precedent for gendered art critiques. Twenty-six years later, the ground-breaking The Theory of
the Leisure Class: an Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899) was published. A
blistering social critique by socio-economist Thorstein Veblen, the work is a meticulously
constructed argument savaging the excesses and ostentatious consumerism of the wealthy
Americans of the Gilded Age. Veblen specifically attacked the role of women, claiming they
functioned as little more than ornaments for their husbands’ wealth and had been almost
totally aestheticised as attractive decoration. This argument against consumerism can be
paralleled with perceptions of the male artist-female model traditions; there is an apparent
affinity between the consumer and the artist in their position of power, the female position
of product-model is repeatedly cast in the voiceless role. For example, note that in the
opening poem by Rossetti, the voice of the female model is silent, the omniscient narrator
interprets the situation as a disturbing one but the woman herself is allowed no voice. In
Deborah Barker, Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature; Portraits of the Woman Artist, (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 2000), 121.
1
essence, this restoring of the female model’s voice functions as one of Siri Hustvedt’s prime
objectives in her fiction.
Earlier this year her latest novel What I Loved was published to great critical and
popular acclaim. Previously known mainly for her position as Mrs Paul Auster, Hustvedt has
been quietly gaining an admirable reputation in literary circles for her tight, mesmeric and
evocative prose. When examining each of her three novels to date, the symbolic function of
art, from traditional masterpieces to voyeuristic photographic images, can be analysed in
relation to the politics of spectatorship and the gender divide.
All three of her works begin with an act of voyeurism, neatly illustrating Hustvedt’s
interest in the relationship between cruelty and the erotic. Her debut novel The Blindfold
(1992), follows the bizarre adventures of Iris Vegan, a Literature graduate student who
undergoes a series of uncanny encounters with the increasingly bizarre, from her addiction
to cross dressing to the ten days she spends on a neurology ward and an intense affair with
her literature professor. Hustvedt’s New York is one of extraordinary characters, haunting
cramped apartment blocks, dimly lit bars and lonely streets, images which prompted Julie
Myerson, writing for London based The Guardian, to admit she was impressed by the ‘sizzling
New York sophistication and sense of urban metaphor and magic.’2 The text presents itself
as a conundrum to the reader, with unnamed chapters and unclear chronology; it is a
meticulously constructed diachronic literary kaleidoscope.
Writing in the New York Times, critic Janet Burroway claimed, ‘This is an author for
whom seeing is a creative, invasive and defining act.’3 In The Blindfold, Hustvedt undermines
the usual male dominance of the gaze as Iris is placed in the unique position of both voyeur
and subject. The novel starts as she watches the naked man in the opposite apartment, ‘I hid
in the darkness of my bedroom and he never knew I was there.’4 Iris revels in her role as
spectator; unseen and secretive, she delights in the power of subjecting an unwitting male to
the power of the female gaze. As the text continues, Iris’s early confidence in her own
abilities as author and critic are severely tested.
Meeting the enigmatic art critic Paris, Iris discusses Giorgione’s masterpiece The
Tempest. Giorgione himself was a mysterious figure from the Italian Renaissance. A Venetian,
he studied under Giovanni Bellini and produced only five paintings which can be attributed
to his hand, of which The Tempest is the most famous and widely regarded as his most
accomplished.5 The image depicts a woman and baby to the right foreground of the picture
who look straight out at the viewer; on the left across a small riverbank stands a man staring
at them. They are near water and in the background resides a city with a storm threatening
overhead. This is a portrait where the gaze is central to an understanding of the work; two
things are startling about Iris’s relationship with the image: her incredibly detailed description
of the work and her editing of the male figure from the scene. Paris explains his theory to
Iris that:
You became the man.... You stepped into his shoes and promptly deleted him
from the painting. He’s a spectator, too, almost a double of the person viewing
2Julie
Myerson, ‘Art and soul,’ The Guardian, 11.01.2003.
Janet Burroway, ‘Let's Have a Fivesome,’ The New York Times, 09.03.2003, <query.nytimes.com/search/fullpage?res=9903E0DF123CF93AA35750C0A9659C8B63> [accessed 01.11.03]
4 Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), 9. All subsequent references to the text
refer to this edition.
5 ‘Giorgione,’ Art Archive, <http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/giorgione.html> [accessed 19 August 2003]
(para. 1 of 1)
3
the picture. For you he was expendable. You saw him but didn’t see him’
(Hustvedt 152).
In Giorgione’s picture, the male figure is clothed and watching the woman.
Subjected to the male gaze, vulnerably naked and feeding her child, the woman does not
acknowledge his presence.6 Instead she employs the female gaze at the viewer of the picture,
thus building a bridge with the spectator which the man is alienated from, as Iris states, ‘her
expression is.... calm, remote, but you feel that she’s looked up for one instant and seen you,
and that single second is forever,’ (Hustvedt 150-1). Hustvedt cleverly chooses a painting
that places the viewer in the position of consumer-voyeur, literally caught in the act of
looking.
Paris implies that Iris’s identification with the male figure is more significant than her
description of the female. He is aware of her troubled history and the period of time she
regularly spent dressed in male attire. Like many an enterprising Shakespearian heroine, this
practice originated from the need for self-protection but Iris soon becomes dangerously
addicted to her alternate identity. Paris’s sly comment that he sees it as ‘natural, natural to
Iris’ (Hustvedt 152), to assume the male role, links the work of art to a monumental moment
in her past. Art in this context becomes a space of subterfuge and secrecy; with the
possibility that Iris’s identity is inextricably contained in the artwork.7 Art for Hustvedt is
essentially all about people and the painting reveals much about the viewers, for example,
Paris’s relishing of psychological power through knowledge and Iris’s reluctance to have a
piece of art render her remotely comprehensible. Like the text that contains her, Iris resists
legibility. The Tempest in this context functions as a monument to the intricacies of the female
psyche; Iris is spectator rather than silent model and takes an active role in the scene.
The one instance where Iris does become a model is fraught with disturbing tensions.
Asked to pose for a photograph by George, who defines himself as ‘an artist who took
photographs, not . . . a photographer’ (Hustvedt 42), Iris finds the male gaze can be
seductive, realising with a shock, ‘There is a pleasure in being looked at, and I seemed to
discover it all over again as I sat there on the floor listening to the camera’s shutter,’
(Hustvedt 54). The traditional pattern of flaneur and model is again disrupted; the scene is
written from Iris’s perspective rather than the artist’s with the emphasis firmly placed on the
sensuality of the process rather than the aesthetics. However, when developed, the finished
photo distorts reality, Iris admits, ‘At first I didn’t even recognise myself,’ (Hustvedt 62). Her
image has been mutilated, dissected and distorted in the photo by obscure camera angles and
intersections of shadow, prompting Iris’s rejection of the work as an interpretation of self, ‘It
was a face without reason, and I hated it. I am not that, I thought,’ (Hustvedt 63).
For Iris, the private has effectively been paraded in the public domain, ‘I had not
only been stripped. I had been turned inside out,’ (Hustvedt 74). Crucially, she is no longer
her own author; colonised, deconstructed and replicated by the male artist. Yet, she realises
this and articulates her concern, as Hustvedt gives a voice to the artist’s model, the ‘silent
cipher’ in Barker’s analysis of Baudelaire. Iris’s experience as the subject of George’s
See Sophie Wackenhut, ‘The Tempest,’ in Art Encyclopaedia,
<http://www2.students.sbc.edu/wackenhut02/euroart116/giorgione.html> [accessed 18 August 2003] for a
more detailed reading of the painting speculating on the identity of the two figures.
6
Hustvedt seems genuinely fascinated on the relationship between, art, literature and life and is currently at
work on a volume of non-fiction essays of art criticism.
7
photograph commodifies her as a product and result of the male gaze, replication forms a
source of terror as she is haunted by visions of ‘my image multiplied into the thousands,
scattered like so much litter in the streets of New York,’ (Hustvedt 66). Contrary to a
Veblenesque reading, Iris interprets the photo as a dismembering of the feminine rather than
holding any decorative purpose; an exercise in male power as well as male possession.
Earlier in the novel, a girl suffers a seizure on the pavement outside George’s
apartment building and has her indignity immortalised on film as he rushes not to help her,
but to fetch his camera. Appalled by such behaviour, Iris caustically comments, ‘Nothing like
a heavy dose of human suffering to make a terrific photograph,’ (Hustvedt 85). By
juxtaposing these two images at his subsequent exhibition and by labelling his work as ‘art’,
George justifies his violation of the intimate and personal, reflecting the broader postmodern
dilemma, the move away from the modernist contemplation of beauty and towards the
postmodern crisis of categorisation; the question of what precisely constitutes a work of art.
The gaze performs as another variant in the continual male consumption of the
female within this parasitical relationship. Crucially, within the New York environment, the
space of ‘unplanned chaos’ and ‘virtually no rest,’ the power of the gaze magnifies in a city
operated on rules of ever increasing verticality and surveillance. 8 Hustvedt’s female
protagonists must struggle for coherent independence away from the limitations of the
gendered gaze and the dangers of a self-obsessed urban consumer culture.
As the novel ends, Hustvedt has Iris running blindly ‘like a bat out of hell’ (Hustvedt
221), into the night after a near rape at the hands of Paris. She is left alone and struggling
within the impenetrable city landscape. However, after ‘a transfictional marriage,’ according
to Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster, Iris’s fate is affirmed. 9 Iris eventually marries Peter
Aaron, narrator of Auster’s novel Leviathan (1992), which Hustvedt is delighted about
because ‘I was worried about her ...[ ]..I always thought it was nice that she ended up in
another book, actually doing quite well. I had that nice feeling that Paul had saved her.’10
Despite the happier reincarnation of Iris in Leviathan, her fate in The Blindfold, is deliberately
uncertain.
Unlike Iris, Lily Dahl, the nineteen-year-old heroine of Hustvedt’s second novel The
Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996) fully recognises the power of the visual image. The text, part
noir mystery and part romance, documents the affair between Lily, a waitress and aspiring
actress in small town Minnesota and Edward Shapiro, a visiting artist from New York. From
the start, he is positioned as a mysterious figure, his art becomes symbolic of secrecy and
ambiguity. Lily spends much of her time before the commencement of their affair watching
him from the bedroom of her first floor apartment:
Before that moment, she had scolded herself a little for spying on him, but the
thought that she had been discovered filled her with sudden, acute shame. She
had been so careful, too, always crouching beside her window with only her
eyes above the sill, making sure no light was on in her room, and every time
Paul Goldberger, The City Observed: New York, A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan, (New York: Vintage,
1979), xiiv, xvi.
9 Gaby Wood, ‘Anything You Can Do....’ The Observer Review, 12.01.03, 5.
10 Ibid., 5.
8
she did turn them on to shower and get dressed for work, she had kept her
curtains slightly closed.11
Shapiro, in contrast to Lily’s unease, is supremely content in his role as spectator.
Performing a slowly sensuous strip for him at the window one night, Lily becomes aware of
her power to retain the male gaze. This becomes an instance of performance art as Lily
savours her new found sexual power, ‘This is wonderful, she said to herself, and unbuttoned
her cutoff jeans,’ (Hustvedt, Enchantment 38). Like another more famous Lily, the Lily Bart of
Wharton’s classic The House of Mirth (1905), whose participation in the tableaux vivant scene
translates simultaneously into what Cynthia Griffin Wolff has called Lily’s ‘one great
success’12 and what can also be interpreted as the moment of her downfall, her reincarnation
as Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd, presenting her at her most appealingly attractive while
labelling her available as a sexual being to the lascivious male audience, Lily Dahl fully
comprehends the power of attracting the male gaze.
Lily’s idol is Marilyn Monroe and showing an intuitive comprehension of aesthetics,
she resists the imitation ‘art’ which pervades the movie and collectible stores she haunts in
search of the real Norma Jean, as Hustvedt skilfully exposes the modes of cheap production
behind certain artistic endeavours:
Lily found Marilyn Monroe everywhere: in magazines, tabloids, comic books,
on T-shirts and stickers, on posters and flags. She noticed little statues of her in
ceramic and metal and rubber and saw her face and body emblazoned on
ashtrays, mugs, pencils and clocks. But for Lily these icons were no more than
crude approximations of the person on the screen, cheap leering versions of
something intimate, almost sacred, and she avoided them (Hustvedt,
Enchantment 25).
The profundity of Monroe imagery, this saturation of culture with replication and
simulacram, devalues any artistic truth and acts as shallow memorial to Monroe’s life.
Operating from within the Veblen schematic, Monroe continues even after death as an
attractive object to be collected and surveyed. Unlike her idol, Lily is one of the few
Hustvedt heroines never to be re-imagined as a work of art within the text. However,
Shapiro verbally translates Lily to an object of admiration by describing her in exacting
physical detail, ‘Slowly, meticulously, he moved down her body without ever looking at her,
providing such detail that she felt her body no longer belonged to her,’ (Hustvedt,
Enchantment 111). While she may not be silenced on a canvas, Lily still manages to be
objectified and reduced into a sense of alienation from her own body by the male artist.
This verbal form of seduction positions Lily as a passive sexual being yet is counterbalanced by her gradual realisation of the latent danger in Shapiro’s working methodology.
His artistic routine involves drawing a large still life of each subject, while the top quarter of
the painting is divided into three boxes. These boxes tell a story, intimate details from the
life of the model which have usually never before been disclosed, such as the death of a
sibling and homosexual affairs. This inscribing of the past within a painting could be
Siri Hustvedt, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, (London: Sceptre, 1996), 2. All subsequent references to the text
refer to this edition.
12 Cynthis Griffin Wolff, ‘Lily Bart and the Beautiful Death,’ American Literature, vol. 46.1, 03.1974, 16-40, 37.
11
interpreted as cathartic for the model, a way of expressing pictorially what could not be
contemplated verbally.
Disturbingly, there is a risk in this artistic resurrection of hidden history; while some
models ask their boxes to be filled with pictures of their dead, making each work of art a
literal monument to the deceased, one of the models, a local man named Tex, chooses his
boxes to be filled with images of death; the murder of a woman and a hanged man. Shapiro
becomes a collector of people’s stories, a connoisseur of confidential and dangerously
influential knowledge. ‘They’re all so private, Lily thought. In fact, when she thought about
the pictures, she had the feeling that Ed was painting privacy itself – people who looked
straight out at you, but who were alone at the same time,’ (Hustvedt, Enchantment 118).
Artistic licence involves dangerous consequences; one character even faints when
presented with the finished paintings. Although the artist figure is male, the models possess a
degree of artistic control in the composition of each work; it is their words that determine
the structure of the canvas, all is not irrevocably left to the interpretative imagination of the
artist. Male models, such as Tex, are also used, again a reinvention of the traditional gender
dynamic. Shapiro’s work becomes an aesthetic paradox, at once a deconstruction of the self
and retrieval of repressed memory and simultaneously an unveiling of the real and a careful
construct of a fabulated, fantasised self. One character, Martin, warns Lily not to allow her
lover to paint her, as though she will irrevocably lose something vital during the process of
objectification, as Hustvedt constructs Shapiro’s artistic endeavours as similar to a mental
and emotional form of rape. As with Iris’s photograph, the secret and personal becomes a
part of the public arena. Delores, the town prostitute and another model, states the truth of
the situation in a way Lily is unable to, ‘He lives in them pictures of his… [ . . . ] . . . if I
wasn’t in paint, I don’t think he’d give a damn,’ (Hustvedt, Enchantment 202). Mabel, another
model, is increasingly disturbed by the process:
The portrait’s bothering me, Lily…I don’t know what to do. You should see it
now. We worked today. It’s, it’s, oh, I don’t know, when I look at it, I feel
upset. I’m well aware that no one’s going to care one way or the other about
the identity of the old lady in Edward Shapiro’s painting, and yet I feel that I’m
being pulled into a crisis a part of me willed and another part resists. I’m not
sure Ed fully understands it. I’m not sure he even knows what he’s doing, but
there’s something in him that’s aggressive, not his manner, you understand, but
the work – he strikes the heart (Hustvedt, Enchantment 208).
Mabel’s diction in describing Shapiro’s work, the latent aggression and disregard for
the feelings of his subject, when coupled with the revelation that his decision to paint his
wife, a fellow artist, effectively ended their marriage, highlights the dangerously disturbing
qualities to artistic creation. Advancing from Veblen’s 1899 social analysis, the female here
realises her position as attractive decoration in a literal sense and attempts to resist it. This
truth must eventually be realised by Lily, just as Iris experiences her own moment of selfrevelation with George’s voyeuristic photography. The male artist consistently values art
over the female as a human being, devaluing any truth in the emotional relationship as a
result.
What I Loved, Hustvedt’s most accomplished work, is a novel which revolves around
the recognition and appreciation of art and works of art. Set in the bustling New York art
world and documenting the twenty-five year friendship between an art historian, Leo
Hertzberg and an artist, Bill Weschler, the text reverberates with artistic metaphor and
subtext. Bill’s early paintings slowly earn him an enviable reputation but what fascinates the
reader is Bill’s attempt to draw the figure of the spectator into each piece. As Hustvedt
explored the politics of the gaze in both Iris’s affinity with The Tempest and Lily’s observation
of Shapiro’s portraits, here she develops her ideology of art to a further stage by having Bill
paint the figure of the viewer into his fictional work, adding double layers of voyeurism and
observation to the concept of art work, model and viewer. As in The Blindfold, the
background urban scene of New York functions intrinsically to the novel as a whole and to
Bill’s art, for example, one of his early nudes depicts the model carrying a miniature of the
famous New York yellow cab, an easily recognisable icon of the city, while Leo’s son, Matt,
obsessively paints images of New York.
The voyeurism at the start of this novel is not an act of watching but of reading, as
Leo reads the love letters, deeply personal memorials to the past, from an artist’s model,
Violet, to Leo’s friend Bill, the artist. Entirely differing from the unsettling experiences of
Iris and Lily’s inexperience, Violet, who later becomes Bill’s wife, chiefly concerns herself
with the erotics of being an artist’s model:
I watched you while you painted me. I looked at your arms and your shoulders
and especially at your hands while you worked on the canvas. I wanted you to
turn around and walk over to me and rub my skin the way you rubbed the
painting. I wanted you to press hard on me with your thumb the way you
pressed on the picture, and I thought that if you didn’t I would go crazy, and
you never touched me then, not once. You didn’t even shake my hand.13
Violet breaks the mould of the artist’s model. As a social historian, she is vocal in her
criticism of Bill’s work. In this novel more than any other Hustvedt work, the body is
presented as a work of art. While authors such as Kathy Acker continuously explored the
concept of the body as text, Hustvedt uses latent sensuality to convey her understanding of
the artistic body beautiful. The creative process becomes one of self-discovery for both artist
and model. Revealingly, it is the male body here objectified, not the female, as Violet’s letters
to Bill reveal her cartographical approach to their sexual relationship, ‘I thought I would
have more time to chart your body, to map its poles, its contours and terrain, its inner
regions, both temperate and torrid – a whole topography of skin and muscle and bone,’
(Hustvedt, What I Loved 58). Art here becomes a sensual journey of discovery for both artist
and model.
The gender politics of the similar scene in The Enchantment of Lily Dahl are neatly
reversed, with the model becoming the bodily surveyor of a male, not female, form, again reimagining the sexual dynamics of artistic practice. Violet casts herself in the traditionally
male role of explorer-discoverer, claiming a position of power in this sexual relationship by
challenging herself to excavate Bill’s body and soul, thus moving away from Veblen’s
construction of the passive female. Her sexualised gaze here translates as part of Hustvedt’s
interest in observation and the ability to see clearly, often presenting a recurring theme in her
work. For example, Leo narrates the story, warning the reader at the start that his eyesight is
now failing and later significantly entitling his six hundred-page tome of art criticism, A Brief
History of Seeing in Western Painting. As Janet Burroway suggested, the act of seeing is integral
to Hustvedt’s understanding of social and cultural dynamics. Leo’s scholarly work
Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved, (London: Sceptre, 2003), 2-3. All subsequent references to the text refer to this
edition.
13
concentrates on the active role of the spectator rather than the artist, placing the emphasis
on the interpreter and translator of art rather than its creator.
After the death of Bill’s father, the art he creates becomes both memorial and
testament to his father’s life, ‘It was grief as energy,’ (Hustvedt, What I Loved 35), notes Leo.
During the course of the novel, as Bill’s art and ideas develop, Hustvedt describes in
astonishing detail each exhibition he creates, from Bill’s deconstruction of the American
Dream in his ‘Hansel and Gretel’ series, to ‘O’s journey,’ an installation piece of twenty-six
boxes described as ‘Bill’s great American novel,’ (Hustvedt, What I Loved 125). In a series of
seven pieces poignantly entitled Missing Men, Bill assimilates his art into the grieving process,
creating endless images of his father, all with their back to the viewer so his face can never
be seen. Covering each painting with the debris of everyday life, ‘letters, photographs,
postcards, business memos, receipts, motel keys, movie ticket stubs,’ (Hustvedt, What I Loved
45). This pastiche of the mundane and trivial then becomes more significant when covered
by a layer of glass, creating both a sense of distance from the viewer and a protection from
them, which ultimately, ‘turned the work into memorials. Without it, the objects and papers
would have been accessible, but sealed behind that transparent wall, the image of the man
and the detritus of his life could not be reached,’ (Hustvedt, What I Loved 46).
Parallel to Bill’s highly personal approach to the work concerning his father, is his
later creation of pieces based on the nineteenth century understanding of female hysteria.
Hustvedt’s research into neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and the Parisian sanatorium at
Salpetriere is absorbing, disturbing and complex. Bill, a fictional creation, incorporates
images of these real life female patients into his art. A character frequently cited in What I
Loved as the ‘pin up for hysteria,’ is Augustine, a real life inmate of Charcot’s institution. As
Elaine Showalter discusses at length in The Female Malady; Women, Madness and English Culture,
1830-1980 (1987), the female patients of Charcot’s Parisian infirmary were photographed
repeatedly in a variety of poses, to the extent that these images were later published in three
volume form, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere.14 Augustine was the star of many such
pictures, bearing titles with a distinctly sexual undertone, such as ‘Supplication amoureuse,’
‘Extase’ and ‘Erotisme,’ (1878).15 These images often hint at some attempt at dramatic staging;
some of the poses of the inmates are remarkably similar to such well know works of art as
John Everett Millais’s Ophelia of 1852.16
These images are reproduced by Bill, using
long dead models for his inspiration. Bill’s installation art, consisting of a series of rooms to
be entered by the viewer with a different ‘patient’ in each creates a sense of eerie pathos for
the original cases. The re-inscription of the past, the sympathy created for these women who
were so manipulated by their doctors, is evoked in Bill’s juxtaposition of Barbie dolls with
copies of the original photographs. Although these women are again on display and it could
be argued that the female figure has once again been repositioned as an object of voyeurism
with the diseased body which here becoming a work of art, a literal decoration in the Veblen
mode of interpretation, Hustvedt iterates her intention is to reveal the message of the lives
of the women of Salpatriere, existing solely as medical puppets, a bizarre but moving
monument to the long dead, deftly illustrating her concern with the performative role
women have often been forced to play.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady; Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987),
150.
15 Ibid, 151-153.
16 Ibid, 90-91. Showalter here documents the Victorian obsession with the tragic yet romantic figure of
Ophelia.
14
In conclusion, the binary opposition of male artist and female subject which has
increasingly developed is surreptitiously challenged by Hustvedt. Building on Veblen’s
dissemination of the situation, Barker defined the gender and art conundrum using Victorian
ideology of the notion of ‘separate spheres’ from the male perspective as, ‘Seeing too much
could lead to sexual promiscuity, while thinking too much could lead to sterility.’ 17
Hustvedt’s heroines, in contrast, all enjoy the liberty of seeing clearly and thinking
compulsively. Essentially, Hustvedt seeks in some small way to redress, re-think and reanimate the traditionally passive figure of the artist’s model through sexual independence,
intellectual debate and deployment of the female gaze.
Deborah Barker, Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature; Portraits of the Woman Artist, (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 2000), 38.
17