The Symbolist Woman
Nick Green mentioned in his lecture ‘The French Nude: Venus or Whore?’ that the Symbolists used female figures as symbols of evil and carnality which represented the root cause of man’s sin. In Alex Potts’ lecture on ‘The Moral Purpose of Art’ he discussed the popular demand for moral seriousness and instruction from painting. Although this lecture was largely about Hogarth, the themes of such series as ‘The Adventures of Mary Hackabout’ and ‘The Harlot’s Progress’ can be seen to have similar intentions. The purpose of this essay is to examine the thoughts and concepts surrounding the portrayal of women in Symbolism.
Gustave Moreau’s portrayals of women, if not active
destroyers like Salome, have a powerful and sinister beauty, and are said to be
‘a powerfully imaginative celebration of male fears of castration and
impotence.” Salome, instructed by her mother, gained the death and head of John
the Baptist by her lascivious dancing. Moreau’s ‘Salome dancing before Herod’
of 1876 described her as “a woman in search of a vague, sensual, and unhealthy
ideal, who destroys men, be they geniuses or saints.’ Some writers have
suggested that Moreau’s attitude to women is due to a repressed homosexuality
but have not offered further evidence for the assumption. Without it there
seems little reason why a lover of men should also be a hater of women. Perhaps
the justification is less about sexual orientation than about the repression of
heterosexuality or just sexuality. Moreau preaches against all sensual and
physical temptation which he sees as being in conflict with the higher ideal of
spiritual thought. The painting ‘Salome dancing before Herod’ carries several
symbols of lascivious pursuit. Salome carries a lotus, an Indian symbol of
female sexuality. Above Herod is a statue of Diana of Ephesus flanked by images
of the Persian god Mithras, both fertility symbols.
Moreau produced other paintings of Salome, for example ‘The
Apparition’ of 1876 and ‘Salome in the Garden’, both of which show her with the
severed head of John the Baptist. Nor was Moreau unique in using the symbol of
Salome, it became something of a cliché with Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations
to Oscar Wilde’s play ‘Salome’ as well as Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Emile
Fabry, Jakob Smits, Max Klinger, Alfred Stevens, Vittorio Zecchin and Pablo
Picasso having produced versions. Salome is probably the archetype of what is
now commonly known as the ‘femme fatale’; but there are other examples.
Moreau’s description of the femme fatale gives a much more
sinister and supernatural evil to the concept than, say, a simple condemnation of
sexual behaviour. ‘She was no longer just a dancing girl who extorts a cry of
lust and lechery from an old man by lascivious movements of her loins; who saps
the morale and breaks the will of a king with the heaving of her breasts, the
twitching of her belly, the quivering of her thighs.’ She had become, as it
were, in Huysmens’ words, the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, ‘the
accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties by the catalepsy that hardens
her flesh and steels her muscles, the monstrous Beast, indifferent,
irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like the Helen of the ancient myth,
everything that approaches her, everything that sees her, everything that she
touches.’ Moreau’s Helen at the gates of Troy’ c. 1880-90 confirms this view of
women and of Helen in particular, as stands aloof in a scene of desolation and
destruction. According to Paul de Saint-Victor’s ‘Hommes et Dieux’, of which we
know Moreau possessed a copy, the city whose homes Helen had devastated, and of
whose youth she had caused the death, was still under her power. The concepts
of beauty and destruction are seen as cause and effect in Helen, he pays
tribute to her beauty in his painting of 1897 ‘Helen in Glory’. Gaston Bussière,
in his ‘Helen’ of 1895, also emphasises her beauty, treating her as a symbol of
love, heedless of disasters it can cause. Tausserat-Radel, writing about Henri
Fantin-Latour’s charcoal sketch of ‘Helen’, c. 1890, said of Helen that she ‘is
the vision of sublime beauty.’ Beauty, therefore, would seem to be a necessary
characteristic for the femme fatale, as well as a capacity for evil far beyond
that of ‘a dancing girl’.
Shuré notes that Delila was on of ‘these enchantresses devoid of love
who break down the strength of men through scheming and voluptuousness.’ In his
‘Delila’, c. 1880, Moreau paints her at the moment when her maid has just
finished preparing her for the arrival of Samson, the man she will enchant with
her beauty in order to draw from him the secret of his strength. Symbolism was
as much a literary movement as an art movement. As well as providing subject
matter for their paintings, it is significant that De Vigny’s ‘La Colère de
Samson’ from which comes the line ‘Woman is always DELILAH’ also has:
‘An eternal struggle in all times, all places
Takes place on earth in the presence of God
Between the goodness of Man and wiles of Woman
For woman is an impure being in body and soul.’
The fact that the condemnation of lust is invariably centred
on the female in Symbolist thought is more a question of religious misogyny
than literary morality.
In Christian mythology it was a woman who first brought evil
into the world through the figure of Eve. Talking of Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer’s
‘Eve’, of 1896, Thévenin commented that ‘the woman exiled from Eden is a symbol
of the pagan world, of the rule of nature and of the senses’. The triumph of
the physical over the spiritual can also be detected in Gustav de Smet, Max
Klinger and Henri Evenepoel’s respective paintings of the same subject.
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer’s ‘Circe’ of 1895 is a more classical femme
fatale. Circe was the sorceress of the Odyssey who lured sailors from their
boats and turned them into pigs. ‘The Siren’, painted by Armand Point in 1897
shows a type of femme fatale which is very close to the Circe myth. The Sirens
enchanted passing sailors with their song, causing their boats to crash on the
rocks. Again the source is Homer, although Point only illustrates one of the
three mentioned Sirens. Point paints the moment that Odysseus’ boat appears,
before, on the advice of Circe, he escapes the clutches of the Sirens. There is
nothing overtly erotic in the story but the Siren here is painted as a nude,
playfully riding a seahorse. The desire to cloak erotic subject matter in moral
rectitude in a society where women legally held secondary importance seems to
have facilitated their portrayal in the role of scapegoat (both in the common
sense of the word and with the original Biblical sense of transferring and
symbolising man’s sins and errors of judgement.) In this mindset the devil is
thought to use the attraction of the female form to place heterosexual men at her
and his mercy and to do his bidding. This idea receives its personifications in
such femme fatale as Salome, Helen, Delila, Eve, Circe and the Sirens.
Moreover when conflict is depicted between the sexes, it is the
male that is represented on the side of good and women as monstrous, evil and
corrupting. Gustave Moreau’s ‘Oedipus and the Sphinx’, circa 1864, shows the female
sphinx clawing and clutching at Oedipus’ chest. For Moreau this represents a
life struggle between male and female nature, good and evil, life and death. Fernand
Khnopff’s ‘The Caresses of the Sphinx’ of 1896 seems to have similar intent as
the press commented: ‘a most interesting symbol of the struggle between the
desire for earthly dominion and that of abandonment to sensual pleasure.’ The
female cat-like figure represents sensual pleasure and the contact between the
sexes is seen as one of conflict and mortal danger. There is even this idea in
the more superficially straightforward ‘The Kiss of the Sphinx’, circa 1895, by
Franz Von Stuck where the male is subjugated by the dominant Sphinx. Again
Symbolist art is paralleled by Symbolist literature, in this case the poem ‘The
Sphinx’ by Oscar Wilde. The ‘Temptation of Saint Anthony’ treated by Fernand
Khnopff and Henri Fantin-Latour both show the Saint tempted by erotic women as
if overwhelmed by demons.
The idea of the femme fatale in art is not unique to this era but
the extent to which it has been painted by this group of artists is unusual,
despite attempts to cross-reference to such Pre-Raphaelite paintings as
Rosetti’s ‘Astarte Syriaca’. There is very little precedent for such titles as
Otto Greiner’s ‘The Devil showing Woman to the People’, Giovanni Segantini’s
‘The Punishment of Lust’ or Jean Delville’s ‘Idol of Perversity’ amongst
Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Yet it is odd that Jean Delville should attack Jef
Lambeaux for what he called his ‘vaginal brain, phallic soul, copulative
imagination…this demoniacal kneeder of the buttocks’ since this is the very subject
matter he chose himself for such works as the ‘Idol of Perversity’ and ‘Satan’s
Treasures’. As JK Huysmans said ‘It was through a glimpse of the supernatural
of evil that I first obtained insight into the supernatural of good. The one
derived from the other.’
Egon Schiele’s ‘Cardinal and Nun’ and Gustave Adolphe Mossa’s
‘Profanation’ both use clergy engaged in animalistic sex in an attempt to
highlight the contrast of images of good through images of evil. Jan Toorop’s ‘The
Three Brides’ of 1893 places The Innocent Bride halfway between the sensual,
blood thirsty Hellish Bride and the spiritual Nun Bride. Although the innocent
bride is sexually alluring there is still an unspoken fear in the male viewer
that he may make the wrong choice or that his bride turns out to be different
from his expectations. The femme fatale, as well as being Satanic, expresses male
fear of women being dominant over the man. Jules Marcel Lenoir, explaining his
‘Monster’ of 1897, said ‘The Monster’s principal idea is the subjugation of man
to woman.’ The male sex is represented by two cockerels, every time one may
seemingly wins the battle, assuming the prize to be the woman, he is condemned
to death by the panther-like chimeras on either side of the idolised woman. In
the left margin more men agonise and fight over the privilege of taking the
woman by force, on the right are men who dote upon her bringing gifts of a
crown, rose and a case of jewels. The ‘Monster’ is unobtainable and definitely
in charge. In another image, Arnold Bӧeklin’s ‘Calm Sea’ of 1887 a mermaid is
shown as dominant on her rock, while the normally mighty male Triton sinks
impotently away into the depths.
That other Symbolist preoccupation, Death, intertwines, in
its own way, with their concept of woman. This can be traced back to an earlier
image by Anton Wiertz’ ‘The Beautiful Rosine’ of 1847 which in turn was
inspired by ‘Death and the Woman’ by the medieval engraver Hans Baldung Grien
of 1489. But in Wiertz the intention was not an exercise or genre piece but to intertwine
the concept of Woman with the concept of Death, to show that the pleasures of the
senses pass quickly. Albert Besnid’s ‘Death unites them’ of 1900 shows death
uniting two lovers. ‘The Rhine Maidens’, taken from Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’, by
Gaston Bussière,
shows the arrival of Siegfried on the banks of the Rhine where he is approached
by the three Rhine maidens, Woglinde, Welgunde and Flosshilde. They announce
that the ring which he wears on his finger is forged out of Rhinegold and that
its curse will send him to his death. Armand Point’s ‘Death and the Maidens’,
circa 1872, Odilon Redon’s ‘Death: My Irony Surpasses All Others’ and Carlos
Schwabe’s ‘The Death of the Gravedigger’ translate death into a female figure;
what Huysmans calls ‘a terrifying image of lechery which merges as the poet
wants into the effigy of death itself.’ It would seem that a fear of erotic
pleasure and a fear of death make good bedmates.
Huysmans praised Félicien Rops for having ‘celebrated the
spirituality of Lust, which is to say Satanism; and painted, in pages which
could not be more perfect, the supernatural aspect of perversity, the other world
of Evil.’ Although the moralistic overtone is still clear, Huysmans’ language
has the implication that Rops is revelling in, rather than purely disgusted by,
lust. So, although Rops’ ‘Les Amours de la Femme Sauvage’ is morally
straightforward at a superficial level, it comes as no surprise to learn that
Rops himself gathered something of a reputation as a ‘womaniser’. The Goncourt
brothers comment, ‘Rops is truly eloquent in depicting the cruel aspect of
contemporary woman, her steel-like glance, and her malevolence towards man’ may
therefore be slightly misguided.
To quote Rops himself: ‘The love of women, like Pandora’s
Box, contains all the griefs of life, but they are enveloped in such luminous
golden spangles, they are so brilliantly coloured, have such a perfume, that it
is never necessary to repent for having opened it.’ Rops’ work for the
pornography publisher Poulet-Malassis is his most erotic (although Poulet-Malassis
also published Baudelaire). ‘The Right to Work’ and ‘The Right to Rest’ are a
comment on masculine sexual pride and have a sense of humour which distinguish
his attitude to sex from that of the other Symbolists.
In the first illustration the penis has become the man, a
proud, strutting figure, in the second the figure is flaccid and defeated. It
is a satire on the sexual pride of the male and how quick it is to be deflated
(or satiated). At the turn of the century sexual behaviour and any associated feelings
would remain private and rarely discussed. Hand in hand with repression of any
emotional response to these natural impulses could often be a sense of conflict
and guilt (or in religious terminology it might be called a feeling of
committing sin). Charles Brison states that ‘Rops did much to dispel the
prevalent attitude, for his art was an art of release. He reinstated, via his
work, the joy and vigour of sexual activity.’ But this is probably only partly
true; in ‘Voluptuousness’ and ‘Agony’ women are shown in the grips of devils,
and the horrifying ‘Syphilitic Death’ calls to mind the Biblical assertion that
“the wages of sin is death”. It would not be right, then, to separate Rops
entirely from the culture of his time, but it could be said that he showed
greater enjoyment in the painting of erotic subjects than some of his
contemporaries.
Many of Fernand Khnopff’s female types are based on his
sister whose beauty obsessed him. Dumont-Wilden, writing of Khnopff’s work
said, ‘these feminine physiognomies, at the same time energetic and languid,
where the desire for what is impossible, and the anguished thirst of
unslakeable passions, assert themselves.’ This is the impression one gains from
‘I Lock the Door Upon Myself’ of 1891. Khnopff lived as a bachelor except for a
short, abortive marriage with Marthe Worms. Nonetheless the impression of such
works as ‘By the Sea’ and ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Sister’ is not carnal
frustration but an honest appreciation of feminine beauty. This is in spite of
‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’ and ‘The Caresses’.
Khnopff’s moral views and repression were no less vehement
than Moreau’s, but he was possibly less of a misogynist. In his ‘Angel’,
otherwise known as ‘Animality’, Khnopff contrasts two types of women, following
Péladau’s
idea of the eternal duel between Love and Thought. A woman in armour places her
hand upon a crowned female sphinx. The sphinx is the incarnation of perverse
love, where absence of forehead betrays a being dominated by instinct. The
admittedly fairly androgynous and sexless woman, dressed like a knight of the
Holy Grail, is the personification of angelic thought and virtue. The allegory
had first been put forward in the novel ‘L’Ange et la Sphinge’ by Edouard Shuré.
Sympathy for the plight of woman in the dilemma between
spiritual thoughts and physical desires is expressed in Georges de Feure’s
series entitled ‘The Voices of Evil’ in which ‘methods of seduction are used to
turn a woman away from the path of virtue.’ De Feure’s ‘Seekers of Infinity’,
which portrays two women, is a reference to Baudelaire’s poem ‘Femmes Damnées’
in which he is sympathetic to lesbianism. The novels of Jean Lorrain and
Catulle Mendés
also extend this moral liberation to women. Paintings with such sympathetic
insight include Joseph Graniés ‘The Kiss’, of 1900, Corbineau’s ‘The
Friends’, circa 1895, and his painting of Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her lover,
‘Du Côte
de chez Swann’.
The ideal of the beautiful woman at the turn of the century
was distinctly cadaverous, “The disquieting pallor of the Host, the emaciated
oval of a face bearing an expression of both spirituality and suffering, the
wide-staring eyes…she personified the psychic beauty of the twentieth century”
(Jean Lorrain). Although it is not the art we remember them for now, some of
the symbolists, like the painters before them, earned their money in portrait
commissions. Edmond Aman-Jeans most charismatic pictures are of women, and,
whether society ladies or symbolist allegories, they appear pensive and
withdrawn. Roger Marx said of them, “the unfathomable mystery of their gaze and
their distant smiles betray troubled thoughts taking wing.” The ‘Portrait of
Madame Albert Besnard’ or his ‘Woman in a White Hat’ show the fin de siècle
taste for frail and delicate containers of introspective, pensive souls.
Antonio de La Gandara’s ‘Portrait of a woman’ of 1891 displays the same
characteristics, as Albert Samain writes, “How I adore your women…you have
spiritualised and mysteriously extended their elegance through your art,
transforming them into a dream.”
The theme of motherhood formed an important part of George
Minne’s sculpture and drawing. The ‘Mother crying for her child’ and ‘Weeping
mother’ confront the concept of maternity and life giving with the concept of
death. Jakob Smits’ ‘Mater amabilis’ and ‘The symbol of the Campine’ present a
less tragic maternal theme. His work portrays the traditional images of
gentleness and fertility; E. Van Den Bosch calls it the “image of life
attaining its full power, of life which regenerates itself, of fecundity, of
tenderness…He (Jakob Smits) creates a combined and indivisible image of the
Mother and Child.”
Odilon Redon in his portraits of women with flowers, ‘Woman
in Profile with Flowers’, ‘Woman with Flowers’ and ‘Violette Heyaman’, uses
women as symbolising the beauty of nature. Eugène Carrière,
another artist with similar tendencies writes of Redon, “Trees and plants
revealed to him their analogy with those beautiful young women with smooth legs
rising like slender columns to the moving torso, upon which the breast swells,
on which the head rests heavily, connected by a strong and supple neck, as a
fine fruit bursting with juice weighs down the branch.” Maurice Denis in his
‘Eva Meurier in a green dress’ and ‘Portrait of Madame Paul Ranson’ gives a
less obvious parallel with nature; but nonetheless he sees in his figures a
fusion, rather than friction, between the physical and the spiritual, “the
beauty of Nature is a proof of God. The beauty of the human body gives the
artist the idea of perfection.” Fidus (pseudonym of Hugo Hӧppener)
was concerned with the mystical expression of beauty by means of dance and the
naked body. No. 4 of the accepted subject matter of the Salon de la Rose +
Croix was, after all, “The nude made sublime”.
Charles Maurin’s group of naked women in the ‘Dawn’ triptych,
circa 1891, are both earthy and idealised, as noted by Jules Gire, “Raised in
the city streets – bizarre flowers – we can see in them an ideal born of the
flesh.” Emile-René Menard’s nudes like ‘Autumn’ forge a harmony between
nature and spiritual aspirations. ‘To the Abyss’ of 1894 by Georges de Feure,
despite the fatalistic title, show two female nudes in a landscape representing
the eternal vitality of nature. In this sort of work, love is not impaired by
flesh but is seen, according to Aurier, as the aesthetic feeling between the
work of art’s ideals and the viewer. There is none of the terror of female
sexuality of Edvard Munch’s ‘Vampire’ here, but a love of the ideal and of
elevated desire.
Max Klinger’s ‘Early Spring’, c.1877-9, uses nature in a
slightly different manner. Here he equates Spring with virginity. Eugene Carrière
uses the Christian Virgin in his ‘Virgin at the Foot of the Cross’ to embody
sorrow and a revolt against the absolute and irredeemable. Whereas Maurice
Denis uses the concept of virginity in it’s more literal sexual context. His
‘Orchard of the Wise Virgins’ of 1893 shows the wise virgins shunning the
apples of temptation in white robes in the foreground. Three nude bathers in
the background probably represent three of the foolish virgins despite the Biblical
parable simply being about unmarried wedding guests having enough oil in their
lamps to be able to “see the light” in a spiritual sense rather than sensual
temptation.
In contrast ‘The Invocation to the Madonna of the Green
Onyx’, by Marcel Lenoir, is an attempt to express the internalised faith which
gives force to the prayer of the woman through a mystical, slightly Egyptian
inspired, face. Gustave Moreau’s ‘Mystic Flower’ c.1875 is similar in intent.
It shows a richly robed young woman supported by an enormous lily as symbolic
of virgin purity. In his ‘Unicorn’ c.1885 the unicorn is taken to symbolise a
sublimation of sexual desire and a defence of female virginity. Wisdom, Purity
and Love are thought to be symbolised in Odilon Redon’s lithograph of 1886
known as ‘The Priestesses were waiting’. Eugène Carrière’s
‘Joan of Arc’ and Armand Point’s ‘Hope’ show innocent femininity in the face of
war and, although not so obvious as Carlos Schwabe’s ‘Virgin with Lilacs’, they
probably also embody some concept of holy virginity.
The ideal of the non-sexual woman also found expression in
the asexual or androgynous idol. According to Péladan, who wrote the novel
‘L’Androgyne’ in 1891, ‘Art created a supernatural being the Androgyne beside
which Venus disappears.’ The androgyne appears as the being freed from the
strife and anxiety of sexual seeking: it is the human form made whole, the
union of male and female. At the same time virginal but also virile, the
concept of the androgyne can be traced from neo-Platonism through to Zohar and
Swedenborg. Artistically the nineteenth century concept of sexually ambiguous independence
peaks with the Symbolists and can also be seen to a lesser extent in other groupings
such as the Pre-Raphaelites. In Fernand Khnopff’s ‘Weeping for other days’ an
idealised woman kisses her own image, representing the other half of her soul,
in a mirror. The Symbolist vision of the androgyne has already been noted in
the ‘Angel’ or ‘Animality’ but it is clearer in Moreau’s depiction of poets,
for example, ‘The dead poet borne by a centaur’ or ‘The Siren and the Poet’
tapestry.
A vision of the ideal, of course, need not be sexless. Armand
Point’s ‘The Eternal Chimera’ c.1895, who is totally absorbed in her book,
suggests a reflective and cultural elevation above everyday life, and time but
is clearly a woman. Yet Nerval persists in describing the Chimera not so much
as a mythical combination of animals but as a symbol of woman’s sexuality:
‘Woman is the Chimera of man, or if you like, his demon’. In addition Moreau’s ‘Chimeras
(Satanic Decameron)’ of 1884 describes the Chimera as woman’s primary evil essence
and practising perverse and diabolic seduction. This flip in a heartbeat
between the representation of women as a sexless spiritual ideal and women as a
bestial, sexual, evil is central to the ambiguity and contradictory nature of
the male Symbolist artist’s portrayal of women.
At one extreme we find the femme fatale, portrayed by
Moreau, using mythical and historical figures such as Salome, Helen, Delila,
Eve, the Siren and so on as a kind of propaganda. On the other side we find the
embodiments of purity, nature and selfless maternity. These are sometimes imagined
without reference to figures from classical literature and so come across as a
more measured view of women but in reality these are also strangely remote and
idealised. In between these two extremes we have relatively few accurate portraits
of individual women as this was never going to be central to the imaginary
dream worlds and tortured psychological themes of the Symbolist world even for
those tantalisingly few female Symbolist artists that have been recognised such
as Jeanne Jacquemin’s androgynous ‘St George’, Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘Self-Portrait
as a Sphinx’ or the sculptures of Camille Claudel.
Albert Mockel in ‘Propos de littérature’. Their work is
symbolic because they not only portray the individual but deduce from his
physical appearance some broad moral attitude which, whether they are conscious
of it or not, provides a link between the sitter and the moral universe.’ A
Symbolist work deals in mystical, mythological and moral ideals. There is no
room for middle ground. At its most stylised and typical examples this entails
expressing the negative feelings of animal lust and even the then currently
fashionable imagery of Satanism.
Arthur Symons, writing of Aubrey Beardsley, draws parallels
between the moral import of Satanism and the campaigning work of social
moralists like Hogarth and Rowlandson. The theory was that the deeper the evil
portrayed the greater the moral effect. ‘And so a profound spiritual
corruption, instead of being a more “immoral” thing than the gross and
pestiferous humanity of Hogarth or of Rowlandson, is more nearly, in the final
and abstract sense, moral.’ Thus the moral seriousness of the Symbolists is
probably more profound than the moral seriousness dealt with in Nick Green and Alex
Potts’ lectures, even if it is slightly more melodramatic and contains elements
of misogyny. Huysmans writes ‘Is not man led into fleshly delights and crimes
by woman.’
But the femme fatale is not the only Symbolist woman. The
Symbolist artists’ attitude was ambiguous, containing all embodiments from Good
to Evil. Some artists, like Rops, can be seen to be ambiguous or inconsistent about
all aspects of contemporary society and morality. Indeed many Symbolist writers
were later to try and avoid obsessive interpretation of moral purpose on the
grounds that it had been one of the characteristic pitfalls of nineteenth
century society. ‘Let the masses read works on morality, but for heaven’s sake
do no give them our poetry to spoil’, wrote Mallarmé.
