Rosenthal - Visceral Culture

VISCERAL CULTURE: BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS IN EIGHTEENTHCENTURY BRITISH PORTRAITURE
ANGELA ROSENTHAL
There is a sort of pleasing half guilty blush, where the blood is more in fault than the man tis sent impetuous from the heart, and virtue ies after it not to call it back, but to make the sensation of it more delicious to the nerves. . . . Laurence Sterne, 17681
PYGMALIONS TOUCH
The story of the sculptor Pygmalion in Ovids Metamorphoses begins:

One man, Pygmalion, who had seen these women Leading their shameful lives, shocked at the vices Nature has given the female disposition Only too often, chose to live alone, To have no woman in his bed. But meanwhile He made, with marvelous art, an ivory statue, As white as snow.2
Pygmalion, the narration continues, falls in love with his own workmanship, his snow-white and distinctly virtuous ideal. He prays to Venus to bring his sculpture to life:
And Pygmalion Wonders, and doubts, is dubious and happy, Plays lover again, and over and over touches The body with his hands. It is a body! The veins throb under the thumb. . . . The lips he kisses Are real indeed, the ivory girl can feel them, And blushes and responds. . . .3
ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 27 NO 4 . SEPTEMBER 2004 pp 563592 & Association of Art Historians 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS
Such myths form the symbolic bedrock of European conceptions of artistic creation and its reception (plate 5.1). The legend invokes the spectator as the quintessential connoisseur and, literally, amateur, in whose imagination the work of art comes alive. The fable also underscores the exclusion of women from the ideal roles of creator and viewer. Here the female statue is the matter to which the godlike artist/lover gives both form and life.4 The power of the male artist and his heterosexual desire is reafrmed, spectacularly and magically. More than just a glimpse into a sculptors workshop, the tale presents us with insights into the sensual investment of the artist/art historian in his object of desire. This investment yields an exchange between subject and object that is not merely a matter of one-sided and disinterested judgement, but of an arousing corporeal encounter bringing into being a new self. This essay seeks to recognize the somatic depth of such object/subject relations, and in so doing takes into account the visceral quality of visual culture. Rather than seeing the body in representation only as site for optical consumption, a form of specular subjectivity, it will here be implicated within the processes of ctionalized corporeal animations. I wish to steer a course between the body as a discursive site for resistance and reformulation, and the body as an unquestioned phenomenological core from which perceptions seem automatically to ow.5 I do so with the intent of countering tendencies in studies engaging with the visual world to dematerialize the body. Fragmenting the senses into ve discrete zones often elides the point where the senses intersect: the sensate body. The language with which art and the visual experience of art is described 5.1 Detail of Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Pygma- reveals a fundamental corporeality. We lion and Galathea. r Muse du Louvre, Paris. e speak of a body of work and of being touched by art. We might nd an image moving or seductive. Pictures often strike us or leave us cold. These sensations were of critical importance to the emergence of art criticism and the launching of aesthetics as an independent modern philosophical discipline in the eighteenth century. Certainly, critics like Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, sought to overcome navely affective spectatorial positions (often associated with women and the uneducated), through the cultivation of 564
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disinterestedness and by transposing art into a seemingly separate realm of contemplation. Aesthetic judgement, in its most inuential form, as formulated by Baumgarten and Kant, required that art be viewed as an object in itself, removed from the everyday and from the personal interest and desires of the beholder. Yet, in the so-called Age of Enlightenment the ability to suspend disbelief, to be enthralled by performance, transported by literature and aroused by nature or by a work of art, was still regarded as a sign of superior sophistication. And reections on aesthetic response often focused on how the blurring of the boundaries between life and art, body and mind, were achieved by one, overwhelming blow, or in a slow and seductive process.6 Such an understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetic experience gels with studies of visual culture that urge a return to the everyday, so as to account for the experience of, say, women and other marginalized social groups, and to reconcile the mind/body split. Regarding the latter, it seems indeed impossible to reduce the human consciousness, as Tamsin Lorraine has put it, to physiological processes, for
those that depict consciousness as either a disembodied process or the effect of a mental thing, fail to capture the ambiguity of human existence. Human beings come to experience the world as conscious, sentient, embodied subjects through a process in which no clear distinction can be made between mind and body, thought and matter, reason and emotion, interiority and exteriority, or self and other.7
Attending to visceral culture can help to bridge the gap associated with the divisive polarity pitting mind against body the one elevated and disembodied, the other disavowed. The mind/body binary with its longstanding gendered pairing of masculine/feminine has plagued much philosophical debate; it may be overcome, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests in Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, by regarding the body as a threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undeniably at the pivotal point of binary pairs.8 The implications of a visceral turn in studies addressing visual culture would clearly help to nurture a holistic language for addressing the interaction between the senses, and to reconsider the longstanding hierarchy of the senses. Some of these issues are already on the visual culture agenda.9 What concerns me here in particular, however, are the corporeal reverberations of visual culture: how an object or image might be imagined to be sensate and corporeal, and how it produces a kind of punctum, as theorized by Roland Barthes: a wound, that is, which designates how an object or image affects the beholder viscerally. The punctum originates, Alison Conway notes, not in the spectatorial gaze, but in the object itself; as Barthes states, it rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.10 My interest resides, therefore, in understanding the image as active and as possessing some of the penetrability associated with real bodies, or as possessing a life of its own; indeed, as W.J.T. Mitchell has recently asked, What do pictures
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really want?11 It is not only the body viewed as this kind of peculiar object to follow Lorraine, but also, one might add, the object viewed as a peculiar subject:
neither simply a psychical interior or a corporeal exterior but something with a kind of uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside that would provide a perspective from which to rethink the opposition between inside and outside, private and public, self and other, as well as other binary pairs associated with the mind/body opposition.12
In an effort to confound, productively, categories of subject and object, inside and outside, real and ctional, my focus falls here on an involuntary bodily performance: the blush. The colour that rises to the young womans face in the Ovidian tale marks the moment of her transformation, her metamorphosis from inert matter into palpable life. The blush is a physiological symptom of her new state, a sign of her vivication and health. But in Ovids narrative, the blush also marks a psychological awakening, signalling her feminine modesty and, therefore, her virtue. For unlike the real women whom Pygmalion had rejected, his ivory girl was pure. This purity was guaranteed both by her living whiteness and her ushed cheeks. The myth of Pygmalion enjoyed enormous popularity in eighteenthcentury Europe. The story appeared on stage as theatrical and ballet performances, but also in the graphic arts, in painting and, especially, in sculpture. At the Salon of 1763 Etienne-Maurice Falconet attracted the attention of Diderot with his marble group (plate 5.2), and in 1774 the London Royal Academician Charles Banks won the gold 5.2 Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Pygmalion und medal for his sculpture of PygmaGalathea, 1763. Marble, 82 52 40 cm. Paris: lion.13 In suggesting an answer as to Louvre, Pavillon de Flore r Muse du Louvre, e why Pygmalion captivated the European Paris. imagination, and provided space for self-identication, I propose that the Pygmalion story operated within the larger context of eighteenth-century racial discourses. Specically, I read the story as a metaphor for the eighteenth-century creation of the white woman, the fair sex. 566
The construction of whiteness is, in my opinion, implicitly embedded in the narrative and in its revival in the eighteenth century. Fascination with the Pygmalion myth ourished at a moment when European interest in colonial travel and African trade intensied. The white and female body, sculpted notionally from snow-white ivory, emblematizes or literally emerges from goods gained by controlling foreign lands; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ivory was imported from India and Africa. Ivory was one of the tangible materials of colonialism. George Barne, writing in the seventeenth century, observed that ivory resembled the natural fairnesse of mans skinne.14 Eighteenth-century artists translated Pygmalions statue into marble, a material index of the Graeco-Roman past. It was this stony ideal that captured the imagination of contemporary viewers and posited a particular aesthetic tension between petrication and animation that played out, predominantly, on the female body. This tension was rendered manifest in the famous sculptural enactments performed by Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, which hinged on the dramatic, Pygmalionesque denouement, when Hamilton, responding to tactile-erotic gazes, came, as it were, to life.15 Studies of race in eighteenth-century visual culture still concentrate largely on the representation of so-called otherness, considering the representation of the black subject in the context of slavery or anti-slavery.16 Although certainly revealing, this focus has tended to overlook a more differentiated analysis of skin and complexion, but also other corporeal expressions of human difference as they appear in visual culture.17 White remains the unraced norm (as Richard Dyer put it) against which all difference is measured. Thus black skin, rather than red cheeks, emerge as raced. The challenge to address the universal claims of whiteness set forth by Dyer has not yet been taken up in studies of eighteenth-century art and visual culture.18 Dyer initiated a paradigmatic shift by demanding that cultural investigations of race should not focus on blackness alone but realize that whiteness is itself a racial concept. In doing so he built on the work of writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin as well as on reections by former slaves, who have, as bell hooks put it, interrogated whiteness as a means of survival.19 Baldwin and hooks offer salutary reminders that studies of whiteness ought not to set the concept unproblematically at centre stage, and thus recapitulate the hierarchies of early modernity, but rather as Ruth Frankenberg has recently argued should constantly decentre whiteness and its implicit power structure.20 A major challenge that emerges when dealing with whiteness is that the white body as a constructed norm insistently refuses analysis. Whiteness, like blackness, refers to skin colour, but it also transcends the actual multicoloured nature of bodies. Anchored in ideals of skin pigmentation, it appears to exist implicitly within discourse. That is, its qualities only emerge in contrast to, or in comparison with, that which it is not. I wish to show that white(ness) as a visually racial category emerged as an explicit value in the eighteenth century. In particular, I aim to demonstrate that within the cult of sensibility whiteness
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became preeminently visual through a particular physiological capability perceived as a feminine virtue: fair womens capacity to blush.21
SKIN DEEP
The contingent character of white skin in paintings before the late eighteenth century appears most apparently in reference to the pictorial trope of the woman with a black page. This iconographic type probably originated, as Paul Kaplan has discussed, with Titians portrait of Laura Dianti, but the subject became particularly popular in the seventeenth century, above all in Holland and England, and later also, but to a lesser degree, in France.22 This pictorial geography is not
5.3 Pierre Mignard, Louise Rene de Penancoet de Kroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, e e . 1682. Oil on canvas, 120.7 95.3 cm. London: National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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surprising as David Dabydeen and Kim Hall have demonstrated if the artistic and economic links between the Netherlands and Britain, and their participation in the slave trade, are considered. These slaves were for the most part sent to the Americas, so that black servants in British society and art did not reect a slavebased agricultural economy, but functioned more as exotic curiosities. Like dwarfs, dogs and horses in portraits, these pages were made to serve as advertisement for their employers access to wealth, international power and civilizing agency, and, pictorially, to animate the sitters they attended and thus produce a value for whiteness.23 Carrying rose blossoms, sometimes fruit, oysters or other signs of fertility, as in Pierre Mignards painting of the Duchess of Portsmouth, Louise Rene de e Kroualle (plate 5.3), black pages in portraits of fair women are not only signs of e . life, but also symbolize the sexuality of the women.24 The lavishly adorned child in this painting, probably a girl, presents her mistress with coral and a shell lled with pearls. She places this maritime cornucopia onto the Duchess lap, thereby drawing attention to the sitters womb as a sign of her fertility. The red sprouting coral often thought to ward off disease and evil in offspring might also refer to her name, Kroualle, thus literally aligning the white woman with colonial e . treasures. Along with these luxury goods, the black girl emphasizes the array of signs through which the sitters status is achieved and maintained. Characterized (and caricatured) as an ideal colonial subject through a seemingly natural submissiveness and an inexhaustible willingness to offer commodities and to volunteer services, the girl page presents a counterpoint to the leisurely, female whiteness that is made palpable in the sensual juxtaposition of complexions. The rich, velvety texture of the shimmering brown neck of the black child brings out the whiteness of the pearls that encircle it and, more broadly, the pearly whiteness of Kroualle herself. e . The girls or pageboys often represent specic individuals; their appearance does, therefore, open up a space for a black presence in Western art (albeit a space fenced off by aristocratic whiteness with the barriers of gender, class and race). Literally denigrated, the black gure, while sensual, appears sexually unthreatening, effeminate and infantalized, positioned to give value to a superior and desirable whiteness.25 This valuation is addressed in Anthony van Dycks portrait of the Marchesa Elena Grimaldi (c. 1623, National Gallery of Art, Washington), in which the fair sitter is presented as a stied even stuffed presence. The lively black page animates the pictorial eld and literally protects his mistress whiteness, by shielding her skin from the darkening effects of the sun.26 In Van Dycks Henrietta of Lorraine of c. 1634 (plate 5.4), this subordination is registered in the infantalization of the black, submissive gure, perhaps a young man, who is dwarfed by the elongated body of the aristocratic lady.27 In general, a striking contrast in corporeal and gestural expression seems characteristic of all paintings of this genre. The page is shown in playfully dynamic movement; the white womans body is composed, archaic, even stonelike and unanimated. All
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5.4 Anthony van Dyck, Princess Henrietta of Lorraine, c. 1634. Oil on canvas, 213 127 cm. The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London.
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5.5 Simon Francois Ravenet, after William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, pl. 4, The Toilette, 1745. Engraving, 38.4 46.7 cm. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art. Courtesy of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; purchased through a gift from the Hermit Hill Charitable Lead Trust. r Photo: Jeffrey Nintzel.
hints of liveliness seem to be stripped away, bestowing upon her a sculptural and monumental presence. In these paintings the statuesque woman is drained of vitality; her liveliness is displaced onto the animated other. The visual conguration of white woman and black page valuing the former through economic and libidinal displacement came, in the eighteenth century, to represent aristocratic corruption. This is perhaps most poignantly and famously expressed in The Toilette, from William Hogarths series Marriage A-la-Mode of 1743 (plate 5.5), which offers a satire on high life, poking fun both at the aristocratic display of wealth and at the apeing of such false magnicence. As in the portraits by Mignard and Van Dyck, the black page performs as a sign of sexuality. Here, this is made explicit by the young page toying with a gure of Actaeon, a horned symbol of cuckoldry, and by the other, adult black servant, who emerges like a shadow from behind to offer hot chocolate to the woman, whose moral core is ironically lampooned by the white dress she wears.28 Within the rapidly expanding culture of international trade and banking, the signs of global economic hegemony the servant and the chocolate could advance the cultural aspirations of the middling classes emulating traditional forms of
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courtly display and luxury. Within this erasure of visible markers of distinctions between classes Hogarths biting parody, contrasting black page and white mistress, also signals an exhaustion of this visual conguration. Like class, whiteness could no longer be framed as a natural hierarchy visible through contrast. Instead, whiteness required an autonomous, explicit visual mode.
TA L K AT I V E S K I N
This mode, quite unlike the open display of luxury and sexuality mocked by Ho garth, can be seen in a new feminine ideal, promoted during the 1770s, that feted inner virtues. These were to be expressed through a fair face alone. The eighteenthcentury cult of sensibility constructed a form of internalized and dematerialized femininity, a femininity always on the verge of its own unbecoming. This came to be represented in aesthetic discourses by means of an emphasis on the transparency and paleness of female skin, a skin that had so to speak split off its darker, uncivil, erotic drive. No longer was white femininity construed, dialectically, through juxtaposition to an Other the page or the shadow; rather feminine virtue was directly registered, and understood to be registered, in the skin itself. The statuesque women of the seventeenth century gave way to an eighteenth-century interest in animating feminine matter. In this regard, the colourism of Allan Ramsay marks a fundamental turning point. Separating, in the 1750s, his formal means of representing male and female sitters respectively, Ramsay gendered the grounds of his canvases, using an intense dark red background for his male portraits as in the portrait of Lord Auchinleck of 1754 (plate 5.6) and a distinctive 5.6 Allan Ramsay, Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, 1754. Oil on canvas, 76.2 63.5 cm. soft pink beige underpaint for the deTate Britain, London/Art Resource, New York. piction of women as in the portrait of Margaret Lindsay of 17589 (plate 5.7).29 Ramsays technique also had an effect on the physical presence of his sitters and the gendering of the appearance of their skin. While Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, is given a startling three-dimensional corporeal presence, with his skin appearing almost wax-like in texture, Margaret Lindsays body appears captured in the two-dimensional plane. Her skin seems transparent, pastel-like and almost breathing (like a soul that inhales and exhales under the surface of skin), or like the semi-translucent surface of marble. It is no longer the body, but rather that which lies beneath which is suggested by an animated surface. 572
5.7 Allan Ramsay, Margaret Lindsay, c. 17589. Oil on canvas, 74.3 61.9 cm. Edinburgh: National Portrait Gallery. r Courtesy of the National Galleries Scotland.
The painting captures the delicate complexion, the pale, rosy forehead that transforms into the colour spectrum of the reddish-blond and amber-brown hair. Simultaneously the rendition establishes an analogy between the porcelainwhiteness of the oriental vase and the soft pastel tone of the ourishing blooms, often called, because of their colour, blushing Roses as they emulate the colour of fair skin.30 The skin appears translucent, the red of blood shimmers underneath, merging and dematerializing into a pale space. It is as if Ramsays portrait establishes a dialogue between the surface of skin and the eshy texture beneath.
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As the transparency of the fair skin suggests the contact with the depth of the ne blood-infused esh underneath, so does the white lace dress of the woman evoke a transparent skin, that rests on the rose fabric underneath.31 The surface becomes a shallow space, a thin layer in which the movement of the nervous system projects against the skin from within so that now the inside becomes visible on the outside. The skin then does not constitute a cover of the self as a see-through veil, which, in analogy to Mary Ann Doanes reections in Veiling Desire, simultaneously hides and reveals and thus produces a desire for the internal.32 No longer opaque matter, the skin becomes a mediating zone, promising, if only yielding in the viewers sensate imagination, a deeper layer of selfhood. This quite remarkable re-articulation, through which the skin receives its own communicative value, and through which the so-called inner virtues become visible, constitutes a form of spatialized subjectivity that features white skin as the open threshold to this more profound level of being. Thus Oliver Goldsmith wrote (with clear racial bias) that of all the colours by which mankind is diversied, it is easy to perceive that ours [white] is not only the most beautiful to the eye, but the most advantageous. The fair complexion seems, if I may so express it, as a transparent covering to the soul; all the variations of the passions, even expressions of joy and sorrow, ows to the cheek.33 White skin and in particular its propensity for colouristic variety now represents a transparent threshold to the soul; it is, therefore, the precondition of emotional legibility.
BEAUTY AND THE BLUSH
This rhetorical physiology bore directly upon aesthetics. In his treatise The Analysis of Beauty (published in 1753, just before Ramsay painted Lindsay and Auchinleck), Hogarth offers a fascinating aesthetic theory concerning colour and beauty in his chapter Of Colouring. Hogarth argues that the principles of varying colours . . . cause the effect of beauty.34 Focusing on skin and the constitution of complexion, Hogarth explains that
Nature hath contrived a transparent skin, the cuticula, with a lining to it of a very extraordinary kind, called the cutis. . . . These adhering skins are more or less transparent in some parts of the body than in others, and likewise different in different persons. . . . The cuticula alone is . . . somewhat thinner, especially in fair young people, which would show the fat, lean, and all the blood-vessels, just as they lie under it. . . .
Hogarth describes how the blood vessels under the skin form a network of threads. This he illustrates in the frame of g. 95 of the second plate; here the prole bust of a woman is seen whose cheek, nose and temple are marked by cross-hatched lines. So marked, these areas register pictorially the anatomical threads of Hogarths cutis.35 These threads also possess implications for painting and colourism, for Hogarth says they are lled with different colourd juices, 574
which result in skin colours and affect beauty. The white juice serves to make the very fair complexion . . . dark brown the mulatto; black, the negro.36 For Hogarth some persons have the network so equally wove over the whole body, face and all, that the greatest heat or cold will hardly make them change their colour; and these are seldom seen to blush . . . whilst the texture is so ne in some young women, that they redden, or turn pale, on the least occasion.37 Upon the whole of this account we nd, that the utmost beauty of colouring depends on the great principle of variety.38 Perhaps it is not unexpected that in The Present State of the Arts in England of 1755, the Swiss artist and critic Andr Rouquet praised English e artists as the greatest colourists. It was not the intensity or lavish use of colour that caught Rouquets eye, but their ability to capture subtle tonal variations and gradations, especially in portraying the complexion of fair women.39 The aesthetics of variety in British painting, promoted by Hogarth and recorded by Rouquet, was not only clearly gendered but also racialized. Aesthetic and racial discourses openly intersect in late eighteenth-century writings concerning talkative white, and mute black skin. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (written in 17812) Thomas Jefferson poses the following rhetorical questions concerning this binary:
And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the ne mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?40
Uvedale Price, in An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1796), argues for the superiority of white over black on the basis of the aesthetic principle of variety; here again the dermo-rhetorical female white body played a key role in this aesthetics:
Variety, gradation, and combination of tints, are among the highest pleasures of vision: black is absolute monotony. In the particular instance of the human countenance, and most of all in that of female, the changes which arise from the softer passions and sensations, are above all delightful; both from their outward effect in regard to colour and from . . . the inward feelings of the mind: but no Ethiopian poet could say of his mistress, . . . Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That you might almost say her body thought.41
Like white skin, the painted canvas was thought capable of rendering manifest the inner motions of the soul. Denis Diderot (having white skin in mind) even describes the skin as analogous to the fabric of the canvas, thus aligning painterly and epidermal meaning. This human visage, this canvas that becomes excited,
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animated, ushed, or pale . . . expands or contracts in tandem with the innite multitude of alternatives sustained by this light, eet expiration we call the soul?42 The skin-like canvas, infused with colour, could express corporeally. From the mid-1770s onwards, and noticeably towards the end of the century, numerous portraits of women such as Joshua Reynoldss portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire of 1776 (The Huntington Library, Art Collections, San Marino) or John Hoppners swagger portrait of the Duchess of York of c. 1790 (Private collection) show the sitters cheeks glowing with a splash of deep red, while her body is strikingly white.43 The delicate suffusion of pink found in Margaret Lindsays features gives way to a more abrupt eruption of the face; the crimson blush sported by so many later eighteenth-century painted female sitters is not without erotic charge. While the high colour of these faces may be construed as indicating health, anger, or arousal, the most commonsensical interpretation is that these reddening cheeks refer to the sitters propensity to blush as Desmond Shawe-Taylor indicates.44 Thomas Lawrences portrait of Catherine Rebecca Gray, Lady Manners, of 1794 (plate 5.8) renders this phenomenon spectacularly. Lady Manners seems to be carried down the elegant marble steps by a cloud of wavering white muslin fabric. A meaningful pool of light emphasizes her chest and, implicitly, her heart.45 The veil around her head, swirled into a turban, ows to merge with the white clouds of the blue sky. Her skin shows few signs of colour. The suffuse blue reections on her neck and elbow seep into a celebration of pale hues of light yellow, rose and lilac. Lawrence does draw attention to his sitters blood-infused elbows, but the rosiness visible in the blushing rose she holds in her hands nds restatement only in Lady Manners crimson-tipped ngers and, especially, the high colour of her cheeks and nose. This colouristic counterpoint takes place against the sitters smooth white dress that runs into, and becomes indistinguishable from, her creamy white skin. The two mingle to form a semi-translucent substance, which, sheathing the gures limbs, lends the body an otherwise lacking sense of material structure. There is, in fact, hardly any qualitative tonal difference between her and the nymph on the marble urn. Lady Manners appears only more transcendental. The alabaster purity of her person invites the viewer to attribute to this woman profound and pure internal virtues. This bleached body seems dematerialized, presenting whiteness visually as ethereal and threatened. The strategy of colourlessness is staged most effectively in dialogue with Lady Mannerss companion, the virile peacock, symbol of Juno. The prismatic vibrancy of the peacocks feathers contrasts with her delicate paleness its multiple eyes sharpening the spectators gaze into the chromatic void. The spectacular tail of the birds brief encounter with Lady Mannerss back in direct inversion of what one might expect from a painters brush seemingly sucks colour from the slender gure. The peacocks feathery, strutting tail thickens into a solid body that seems to contain the entire colour spectrum drained from Lady Mannerss body. With its swollen neck, gaze turned sideways ogling at Lady Manners, the 576
5.8 Thomas Lawrence, Catherine Rebecca Gray, Lady Manners, 1794. Oil on canvas, 255.3 158 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 1961.220.
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peacock stages a contest between colour and void, even in terms of gendered difference, while simultaneously drawing our looks back to Catherine Rebecca Gray. Her waist is accentuated by a deep-blue sash that resembles the phallic birds neck and head. The pale blue glove, with light yellow lining, whose empty hand she holds with her dressed left, reects in the semi-translucent texture of her dress. It throws an awkwardly limp shadow onto Lady Mannerss insubstantial body and merges with that spectre cast by her left elbow. Apart, perhaps, from this very elbow, which nakedly and thus somewhat provocatively points out towards the viewer, there is almost nothing substantial or corporeal about Lady Manners. To see this celebration of whiteness in representation as simply an aesthetic choice, demonstrating artistic style or new fashion, is to overlook how style, taste, fashion are all subject to, and intricately linked with, larger concerns about cultural identity. Simply describing the seductive formal qualities of the painting runs the risk of unleashing, fetishistically, the power of whiteness. Instead, I would draw attention to the corporeal instabilities as the artice of whiteness itself. The spectacular performance of whiteness as an erasure of corporeality, a chromatic void and a cancelling out of bodily existence is maintained only with some effort by a palpable materiality. Akin to the glistening white brook in the valley, Lady Mannerss dress appears to transform into a liquid; it spatters like a splash of milk that now runs in a thick stream to the ground, ready to curl and swirl into creamy puddles. It seems, in other words, as though Lady Manners metamorphoses into that very bodily uid most associated with the feminine. This liquid whiteness reminds us of the unbounded quality of femininity. Elizabeth Grosz has indicated that while the male body came gradually to be seen as symbolically closed off into an impermeable body, the female body was construed as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid, which was dialectically linked to the idea of the female body as a vessel, a container. Skin contains the female body, but the female body also contains the skin.46 In Lawrences painting it is difcult to imagine slippered toes, beneath the elongated high-waist dress, tentatively searching for rm ground. Furthermore, Catherine Rebecca Grays chest seems almost entirely exposed, barely covered by the milky fabric that reveals its very thinnest layer precisely where it would be most called for. Just a strip of white muslin licks her chest; the viewer is left to guess if it veils or unveils. That said, breasts are left to be imagined. Lawrence takes no steps to ensure bodily matter separate from the insubstantial fabric. Her body is liquidating, thinning out. It is as if the body, detached from the mark of touch, is rendered transcendental from within. And it is from this volatile, insubstantial body, projected in fantasy alone, that the blushing face erupts with corporeal certainty. But how to explain the meaning of the blush as it both heightens the transparency of the body while simultaneously and vehemently redrawing corporeal boundaries? And why did this ephemeral sign of psychosomatic destabilization nd such popularity? 578
F R AT E R N A L F E A R S
It seems to me not at all coincidental that the redrawing of corporeal lines occurred at a moment of heightened anti-slavery agitation. In the visual norm of whiteness, I wish to read both the assumed privileges of white identity and the anxieties about the loss of stable subject position during the rise of anti-slavery sentiments in the 1770s, culminating with the abolition of colonial slavery in 1834. Although this period is often associated with the appearance of a rmly emancipated and condent (white) self, the abolitionist movement brought about, if not a crisis, then certainly anxieties about embodiment. In response to the large numbers of black immigrants ooding into the British Isles during the 1770s, many Britons began to question the primacy of a self-sufcient white subject. In the visual register, I believe this led to particular attention being paid to the white female body as a marker of ideal selfhood and nationhood. The body in representation was seen less as a safe harbour of identity than as a cultural battleground of diverse competing claims to gendered, nationalized and racialized selfhood. The zenith of the abolitionist movement, from 1789 to 1792, is probably best illustrated by Wedgwoods immensely popular medallion (plate 5.9) showing a shackled and imploring slave, doubly captured, as Deirdre Coleman has put it, by chains and by discourse, with the Christian motto hovering above his head: Am I not a man and a brother.47 The image emerged in 1787 as the ofcial seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Sarah Watson Parsons has shown that there is nothing natural about the cause of slaves being represented by a half-naked, kneeling man begging to be considered a human being. Rather, the medallions representational strategy has signicant ramications for the historical construction of whiteness; this subjugation constructs a form of upright, unthreatened and paternalistic whiteness imagined beyond the frame.48 Indeed, the medallion also reveals a fundamental ambivalence characteristic of the anti-slavery movement. The interrogative motto stands curiously open to a positive or negative response, a reection perhaps, as Coleman has put it, of the white racist specter that often underlies sentimental ideas of equality between white and black: the shadowy fear of too close a blood kinship, the term brother reading literally rather than guratively in a nightmare confusion of race through interracial sex.49 For free black men quickly came to be seen as a threat to the institution of whiteness, and the kneeling submission could all too easily be seen as representing a black man courting white women. This is most apparent in prints such as The Rabbits of 1792 (plate 5.10). Here, the subservient and unthreatening potential of the former slave of Wedgwoods emblem is turned around, subverted and set into dialogue with a white woman. For now a dressed black mans kneeling pose no longer refers to humble servitude, but rather to erotic proposition. A black rabbit seller bends his knee in front of a white woman, who steps out of the open doorframe to inspect a rabbit for purchase. She thus appears beyond the safe threshold of the domestic
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5.9 (left) William Hackwood for Josiah Wedgwood, Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 1787. Black and yellow jasper medallion. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, Staffordshire. 5.10 (right) Anon., The Rabbits, sold by R. Sayer, 1792. Engraving, 21.6 16.8 cm. British Museum: Department of Prints and Drawings. r The British Museum.
sphere.50 Their features are racially stereotyped, her prole according to neoclassical ideals, his with a broad nose and thick lips. The text that accompanies this print runs: O la how it smells sure its not fresh; he replies cleverly, Be gar Misse dat not fair If Blacke Man take you by Leg so you smell too. The joke addresses white racialized fantasies about black mens sexual proclivity and the smelling white womans willingness to give in to her lower senses: indeed, she is not fair. The erotic implications of her lifting the rabbit by the hind legs and the mans response invites us to imagine the white woman being held to spread her legs for the black man, evoking direct sexual associations. These, for sure, do not escape the white man in the doorway, who suggestively blows his nose with one nger towards the viewer in gleeful recognition of the sexual innuendo. The rabbit seller evokes parity between blacks and whites, but the creatures he sells to white women suggest metaphorically the ctional fear that blacks and whites might mix and reproduce like rabbits. As soon as public opinion appeared to be turning against the slave trade from the 1770s onwards, pro-slavery writers moved quickly to play upon the peril of a Britain overrun with freed black men, like a farm teeming with rabbits. Already in his Candid Reections of 1772, the pro-slavery activist and Jamaican planter Edward Long stated that: The lower class of women in England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention . . . in the course of a few generations 580
more, the English blood will become so contaminated with this mixture . . . till the whole nation resembles the Portugese and Moriscos in complexion of skin and baseness of mind.51 Similarly, in 1792 Clara Reeve argued that, with abolition, the Africans will ock hither from all parts, mix with the natives, and soil the breed for the common people, producing a vile mongrel race of people, such as no friend to Britain can ever wish to inhabit it.52 The perceived danger of miscegenation led to heightened attention being paid to white women, because they represented to European men an ideal of purity, with nationalistic symbolism. As Kim Hall maintains: Concerns over the whiteness of English women and the blackness of African men (and the mixture of both) projects onto the bodies of white women the anxieties of a nationstate in which women are the repository of the symbolic boundaries of the nation.53 It is this threshold that Kathleen Wilson so aptly describes as The Island Race.54 The emphasis on a white corporeal ideal is thus not simply an aesthetic choice but one that denes corporeal boundaries of the skin in relation to the geographical and political boundaries of Englishness.
LOOKING INTO WHITENESS
Around 1800 paintings of blushing women were so common that the blush was even the subject of satire.55 In George Woodwards watercolour drawing Lard Sir You Make Me Blush! of c. 1800 (plate 5.11), a lecherous elderly gentleman charms a lady of advanced age. His open-handed gesture and tense thighs signal excitement.
5.11 George Murgatroyd Woodward, Lard Sir You Make Me Blush! c. 1800. Ink and watercolour drawing, 26 23.6 cm. By kind permission of Andreas Bartsch, Galerie Bartsch & Chariau, Munich.
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Meanwhile, her smiling face (which betrays some missing teeth) is modestly lowered towards her chest in submissive embarrassment; the feather on her head tips favourably in her companions direction; and her discomture is amplied by her arms, which she crosses in playful refusal over her lap. Her white chest provides a dramatic stage for the glowing crimson that spreads over her temple, nose and cheeks. The blush secures the objectsubject hierarchy of traditional Western amorous tropes, of the Pygmalion-like agency of the man and the materiality of the woman. But it also produces a closed circuit of communication that denes a racial ideal. This drawing stages the blush as an erotic body art, expressive of social relations, or more explicitly here, of heterosexual gender relations. For the blush as the visual sign of whiteness emerges as a response to the probing colonizing gaze of the white heterosexual man. The woman who colours responds to the receiving looks with a somatic act of confession, an artistic automatism akin to an evanescent readymade in a Barthesian vision of reading. In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon described how the look from the place of the other can summon the dark-skinned man into negritude, effecting a powerful epidermalization, that is, a racialization of skin.56 In the case of the paintings of female sitters in which their skin seems drained of colour while their cheeks burn with excessive red, the implied normativity of heterosexual intersubjectivity also reects an active racialization of the woman. I would suggest that the blush as the sign of whiteness is being looked at women. Yet given that whiteness serves as an idealizing strategy, rather than as a form of denigration, this epidermalization does not measure up to the devastating corporeal and psychic process described by Fanon. Nevertheless, the production of gendered whiteness is also dependent on a form of corporeal, psychic, and here psychosomatic subjugation that is part and parcel of colonialist discourse itself. If whiteness can be looked at someone, then the instability that surrounds whiteness is, moreover, displaced, by means of the blush, onto the most vulnerable of bodies, the youthful female and typically as in the case of Pygmalion virginal body, whose vulnerability must be protected from the intrusion of foreign others. For imagery stressing the blushing white cheeks of female participants not only becomes the focus of the performed ars erotica but also expresses, I would like to insist, an anxiety about purity, specically racial purity. These anxieties hinged quite literally on the circulation of blood. In Britain, it was a study by the biologist and obstetrician Charles White, entitled An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man and in Different Animals and Vegetables (1799), that became a standard reference work for racist theories. In this treatise, White plots the extinction of the pure white race over the next three hundred years, alarming his readers by suggesting that by then not 1/100 of the pure white race would exist. In the early nineteenth century the texts of Long and White were followed by a great number of pseudo-scientic 582
treatises addressing the blush by commentators such as Charles Bell (1806), Alexander Morison (1824), Thomas Burgess (1828) and later Charles Darwin (1872).57 In Burgesss The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, the blush appears as the quintessential marker of the humans superior spirituality. The continuous debate, about whether black individuals could blush is in these treatises less a controversy regarding physiognomic appearance, than a discussion about their spiritual and moral state of development. The assumed inability to blush the argument goes was the external sign of an internal failure.58 Thomas Burgess does relate his frequent opportunities of observing a scar . . . on the face of a negress, noting that [the scar] invariably became red whenever she was abruptly spoken to or charged with any trivial offenses.59 The scar, as Burgess construed it, was to be regarded as the white in the [black] woman.60 Physiologically speaking, Burgess saw the scar as representing the truthfulness of the vera cutis, that is the true skin, beneath the external, pigmented veil; nonetheless, despite positing this morally legible substratum, Burgess does not alter his attitudes concerning the moral inferiority of the darker races.61 It is also striking that in considering black skin, the discourse of love changes to a scientic experiment of looking the black woman into whiteness through as he states abrupt speech and charges dramatized by the frequency of a scar, the scar being the wound of the colonized and subjugated black skin.62
THE APPLIED ART OF COSMETICS
While black skin was seen as an illegible mask, commentators also feared that the e use of cosmetics would render fair skin illegible.63 Andr Rouquet, after describing at length the state of the art market in Britain, and genres such as landscape and portraiture, commented on another form of painting: the art of daubing ones cheeks. With clear satisfaction Rouquet noted that the English ladies did not give in to this articial creation of the blush, but allowed nature to show through.64 In contrast to the French courtly fashion for rouge, the art of trickery, Rouquet noted with satisfaction that English women left their faces, relatively, untouched: the little paint which some ladies secretly use, he writes, is not arrived to such a degree as to be able to hinder the appearance of that charming red which informs the lover of his victory, and which so delightfully reveals the rst weakness of a heart just ready to yield.65 By contrast, the Marquise de Pompadour, seen here in Francois Bouchers painting of 1758 (plate 5.12), engaged in the very act of enhancement so deplored by Rouquet. She wields a cosmetic brush, the instrument of her artistic illusion. She, it might be said, paints herself.66 Pompadour competes with the Pygmalionesque artist/lover controlling the instruments of her self-presentation. For, in painting her face, Pompadour takes away from the male heterosexual viewer, or lover, that most obvious of signs which renders the female face legible: the blush. The market for cosmetic products alluring its customers with the promise of an ideal beauty ourished in the eighteenth century, within what Anne
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5.12 Francois Boucher, The Marquise de Pompadour at her Dressing Table, 1758. Oil on canvas, 81.2 64.9 cm. Harvard University: Fogg Art Art Museum. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Bequest of Charles E. Dunlap. r President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard University. Photo: Photographic Services.
McClintock, albeit in reference to the nineteenth century, has described as a form of commodity racism.67 Cosmetics possess a cosmo-political aspect, in that they promise secrets from other cultures and thereby both blur and dene notions of national beauty. According to an advertisement of 1774, for instance, the popular 584
5.13 John Raphael Smith, A Woman Holding a Black-Face Mask, c. 17941800. Pastel on woven(?) paper, laid down on canvas on a stretcher and framed, 33.7 26.7 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
rouge Circassian Bloom was used by the celebrated beauties of the Caucasus and Giorgia; these women were recognized by leading scientists such as the inuential German theorist Blumenbach as the most beautiful women on earth.68 Bleaches could lighten skin tone, powders could combat uneven complexions, and blue paint was available for the redrawing of veins, thus emphasizing the ideal fairness and transparency of the skin. But still, in Britain, cosmetics were viewed with suspicion. For, although women could aspire through make-up to the white complexion of ideal beauty, cosmetics simultaneously masked like the black face the fundamental movements of the soul, and thus perhaps also the seemingly natural differences between the races.69 This play on racial identity is staged in an extraordinary pastel by John Raphael Smith dating from the last years of the eighteenth century (plate 5.13).
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This pastel shows a fair young woman in a white, almost translucent dress, holding a racially stereotyped skin-textured mask of a black subject in her hand while addressing herself reassuringly to the beholder. The black face is used to uncover and discover the gendered value of fairness (while that which is not fair is dark and other). This contrast is further emphasized by the black domino that slips from the white womans shoulder. The popular masquerade costume with its large black hood would, if worn, entirely conceal her body. The image toys with racial identity as a removable mask and as a second skin. Placed in the white womans hand, the black mask also reveals a tension concerning the threatening possibility of a playful transformation of racial identity; if women could be looked into whiteness, they could also be looked into blackness. In Samuel Jackson Pratts comedy The New Cosmetic, or, the Triumph of Beauty (1790), masking cosmetics seem to register the limits of racial and sexual meaning of complexion itself.70 Pratts text also indicates that, like Smiths pastel, racial identity possessed a performative quality, with whiteness presenting itself as the act of racial subtraction and the consequent revelation of an unraced being. As Tassie Gwilliam has shown, colour appears in this play not in the sense of an application of synthetic products, but rather in the sense of a removal of skin, as an un-colouring and bleaching of dark complexion through white-washing.71 The play takes place in the West Indies where Louisa, the once beautiful, desirable and fair English woman is rejected by her lover, Lovemore, because her skin has darkened through exposure to the sun and to the rough climate. To Lovemore, she is now neither sexually attractive nor racially acceptable. One man describes Louisa as a black wench, adding that no man thought of her once after she became a Mulatto.72 Louisas cousin, the delightfully named Hannah Bananah, brings to the rescue a bleaching cosmetic that returns Louisa to her former whiteness and, therefore one learns her beauty. The play reaches its dramatic climax at a waxwork display. Surprised by Lovemores unexpected appearance, the re-whitened Louisa leaps onto a pedestal in order to disguise herself as one of the sculptures. Lovemore, predictably, is enamoured of the living sculpture, whose fair skin he aches to touch: for upon my soul the articial vermilion of the limbs looks much like real, balmy benign true blood, that I . . . shall forget myself and fall in love with a piece of wax.73 Re-enacting the Ovidian metamorphosis, Lovemore brings Louisa to life. No longer mulatto-like, Louisa returns to the aesthetic norm of whiteness, looked into this category by the male heterosexual gaze. Wax under Lovemores thumb, Louisa comes back to life, her colouration, her balmy benign true blood, securing her place in her lovers heart. The blood that speaks the truth emblematized in the blush which, following Sigmund Freud, has been described as a mild erection of the head can be seen in the context of racial discourses of the late eighteenth century as a cultural defence mechanism (in analogy to Freud, even as a cultural castration anxiety).74 586
At once theatrical and absorptive, the blush redraws corporeal boundaries while simultaneously announcing, like a bold exclamation point, a vulnerable sense of self.75 Its proliferation in paintings of women during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries stages a chromatic epidermalization of whiteness, seemingly animated by the viewers gaze, while concurrently expressing an anxiety concerning the loss of this quality. Reecting on visceral culture, including corporeal expressions such as the blush, might indeed offer new explanations of how notions of gendered and racial difference come into being. It shifts emphasis away from ideas of the body as repository of a preconceived racial essence, or a masquerade of difference, suggesting instead how within cultural frameworks the body as a site of subjectivity performs its own corporeal signs of gendered and racialized difference.
Notes I have presented aspects of this work at a number of institutions, most compre hensively as the Tomas Harris Memorial Lecture series at University College London, and as fellow at the Huntington Library, Pasadena, California, and the Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts. I am especially grateful to fellows, friends and colleagues at these institutions for their insightful comments.
1 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey [1768], ed. Paul Goring, London, 2001, 88. 2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk 10, lines 243ff., trans. Rolfe Humphries, Bloomington, 1955, 2412. 3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk 10, lines 2924, trans. Humphries, 243. The key section in Latin runs: dataque oscula virgo/sensit et erubuit timidumque ad lumina lumen/attollens pariter cum caelo vidit amantem. 4 Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 18301908, Cambridge, 1990, 24f. 5 Michele Aaron, ed., The Bodys Perilous Pleasure: Dangerous Desire and Contemporary Culture, Edinburgh, 1999, 2. 6 Alison Conway, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 17091791, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2001, esp. 113; David Marshall, Forgetting Theater, in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau and Mary Shelley, Chicago, 1988, 105134; Hans Reiss, The Rise of Aesthetics from Baumgarten to Humboldt, in H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, eds, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1997, 65880; David Marshall, Shaftesbury and Addison: Criticism and the Public Taste, in Nisbet and Rawson, eds, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1997, 63357. 7 Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy, Ithaca and London, 1999, 3. 8 Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, 3; Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, 1994, 23. 9 W.J.T. Mitchell, in Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture, Journal of Visual Culture, 1:2, 2002, n. 15, attends to the visual and haptical (unmediated vision is not a pure optical affair, but a coordination of optical and tactile information). Martin Jay, in Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn, Journal of Visual Culture, 1:3, 2003, 276, calls into question the hierarchy of senses. 10 Conway, Private Interests, 7; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York, 1981, 26. 11 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Really Want? in October, 77, Summer 1996, 7182. 12 Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, 3. See also Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body, London and New York, 1996; Deborah Cherry, Troubling Presence: Body, Sound and Space in Installation Art of the mid1990s, Revue dart canadienne, 25: 12, 1998, 12 30. esp. 267; and Michele Aaron, The Bodys Perilous Pleasure. On feminist criticism and Derridas concept of ocularcentrism, see Martin Jay, Phallogocularcentrism: Derrida and Irigaray, in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought, Berkeley, 1993, 493542.
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13 On Pygmalion representations in art, see Oskar B. tschmann, Pygmalion als Betrachter: Die Rezepa tion von Plastik und Malerei in der zweiten H. lfte des 18. Jahrhunderts, in Wolfgang Kemp, a ed., Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptions. sthetik, Cologne, 1985, 183224; a Mechthild Schneider, Pygmalion Mythos des . schopferischen Kunstlers: Zur Aktualit. t eines a Themas in der franzosischen Kunst von Falconet bis Rodin, Pantheon, 45, 1987, 11123; and Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France, Chicago and London, 2004, chaps 4 and 5. Herder employed the myth of Pygmalion to differentiate between visual and haptical reception, privileging the enduring and slow process of touch over the quick idea gained by the sense of sight. Johann Gottfried Herder, Einige Wahrnehmun. gen uber From und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume, in Schriften zur Philosophie, Literature, Kunst und Altertum 17741787, 10 vols, 4th edn, ed. Martin Bollacher, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, vol. 4. 14 George Barne, describing the voyage of John Locke, 4:57; quoted in Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca, 1995, 51. 15 Beholding one such performance by Emma Hart, Goethe stated that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations, in Italian Journey, 17861788, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Ayer, London, 1970, 208. On Emma Hart, see Ulrike Ittershagen, Lady Hamiltons . Attituden, Mainz, 1999. 16 Among the numerous publications here, see especially: Hans-Joachim Kunst, Der Afrikaner in der europ. ischen Kunst, Bad Godesberg, 1967; E.C. a Parry, The Image of the Indian and the Black Man in American Art 15901900, New York, 1974; Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, 4 vols, New York, 197686. On the use of the term race, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Race, Writing and Difference, in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds, Women, Race and Writing, London and New York, 1994; for important new studies on race in relation to eighteenth-century visual culture, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York, 1996; David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century, Ithaca, 2002; Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, eds, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 16601830, Manchester, New York, 2003; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, London and New York, 2003, 1115; Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 2003.
17 See Roxann Wheelers investigation into the meaning of religious and racial identication in ction: The Complexion of Desire: Racial Ideology and Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Novels, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:3, 1999, 309332; and Wheelers The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, Philadelphia, 2000. See also Deirdre Colman, Janet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36:2, 2003, 16993. 18 Richard Dyer, White, Screen, 1988, 46; Richard Dyer, White, London and New York, 1997. The lack of inquiry regarding whiteness in the age of Enlightenment is, to me, particularly surprising, given its emerging systematic racial and thus racist discourses, and given the cult of Neoclassicism and early Romanticism which, for the visual arts, can almost be described as an outright fetishization of the white body towards an utter erasure of skin-colour pigmentation. On this, see Angela Rosenthal, Die Kunst des Erro tens: Zur Kosmetik rassischer Differenz, in Das Subjekt und die Anderen: Interkulturalit. t und a Geschlechterdifferenz vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Herbert Uerlings, Karl Holz and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Berlin, Bielefeld and Munich, 2001, 95117. 19 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of White Folks, Darkwater, New York, 1920, esp. 11113. James Baldwin, On being White . . . and Other Lies, in Essence, April 1984, 9092; bell hooks, Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination, in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston, 1992, 16578. For an excellent discussion of whiteness studies as emerging out of a long tradition of Black thought about white people and whiteness, see David Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, New York and Toronto, 1998, xi and esp. 326. For the growing literature on whiteness, see also, among others, the following essays and anthologies containing further references: Peter Erickson, Proles in Whiteness, Stanford Humanities Review, 3:1, Winter 1993, 98111; Peter Erickson, Seeing White, Transition, 67, 1995, 166 85; Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness, New York, 1999; Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall, eds, Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reections, Lanham, 1999; Birgit Brander Rasmussen, et al., eds, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, Durham and London, 2001. 20 Ruth Frankenberg, Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness, in Displaying Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Durham and London, 1997, 133. 21 A number of studies have addressed the blush in literature. On modest blushing, see the chapter in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel, Chicago, 1991; Mary Ann OFarrell, Telling Complexion: The
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Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Blush, Durham, 1997; Ditmar Skrotzki, Die Geb. rde des Errotens a im Werk Heinrich von Kleists, Marburg, 1971. On anthropological debates, see Vieda Skultans, Bodily Madness and the Spread of the Blush, in John Blacking, ed., The Anthropology of the Body, London and New York, 1977, 14560. And for emerging colonial discourses, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narrative, Baltimore, 1995, chap. 5; Tassie Gwilliam, Cosmetic Poetics: Coloring Faces in the EighteenthCentury, in Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von . Mucke, eds, Bodies and Text in the Eighteenth Century, Stanford, 1994, 14459. Paul Kaplan, Titians Laura Dianti and the Origin of the Motif of the Black Page in Por` traiture, Antichita Viva, 21:4, 1982, 1018. See also Jane Fair Bestor, Titians Portrait of Laura Eustochia: The Decorum of Female Beauty and the Motif of the Black Page, Renaissance Studies, 17:4, 2003, 62873. David Dabydeen, Hogarths Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art, Athens, 1987, 2136; Hall, Things of Darkness, 24053; Gerlinde . Volland, Gepletschte Nasen, schwulstiger . Mund und ein zu kleines Hirn: Uber den Beitrag . von asthetischen Kriterien zu den aufkommenden Rassenlehren und zum wissenschaftlichen . Sexismus im 18. Jahrhundert, in Einspruche: Multidisziplin. re Beitr. ge zur Frauenforschung, a a Dortmund, 1993, 12761, esp. 149f.; Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting, Durham, 1999, 36. On the representation of white women with black pages, see Dabydeen, Hogarths Blacks, 2136; Hall, Things of Darkness, 24053; Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 2755; David Bindman, A Voluptuous Alliance Between Africa and Europe: Hogarths Africans, in Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, eds, The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, Princeton, 2001, 2609. Helen Weston has pointed out that the verb denigration derives, originally, from de-nigerate meaning to make blacker. Weston, Representing the Right to Represent: The Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representatiobe of the Colonies by A.-L. Girodet, in RES, 26, Autumn 1994, 8399, 83 n. 6. Van Dycks painting is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Recent studies on skin and incarnation emerged especially from European (visual) cultural historians: George Didi-Huberman, The Figurative Incarnation of the Sentence (Notes on the Autographic Skin), Journal: A Contemporary Art Magazine, Spring 1987, 6770; Claudia Benthien, Haut: Literaturegeschichte, Korper bilder, Grenzdiskurse, Hamburg, 1999 (Skin: On
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the Cultural Border Between the Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap, New York, 2002); Daniela Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe. Korperlichkeit und Materialit. t in den Gem. lden Tizians, Emsdetten and a a Berlin, 2002; Mechtild Fend, Inkarnat oder Haut? Die Korperober. che als Schauplatz der Malerei a bei Rubens und Ingres, in Pygmalions Werkstatt: Die Erschaffung des Menschen im Atelier von der Renaissance bis zum Surrealismus, ed. Helmut Friedel, Cologne and Munich, 2001, 719; Ulrike Zeuch, ed., Haut Zwischen 1500 und 1800: Verborgen im Buch . Verborgen im Korper, Wolfenbuttel and Wiesbaden, 2003. On the intersection of race, skin and cosmetics see Gwilliam, Cosmetic Poetics; and Rosenthal, Die Kunst des Errotens, 107110. I owe this observation to Viktoria SchmidtLinsenhoff. Dabydeen, Hogarths Blacks, 2236; Bindman, A Voluptuous Alliance, and Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 379. Rosenthal, Die Kunst des Errotens, 102. The technical examinations of the canvases have been undertaken by Rica Jones at Tate Britain: see Manners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting 17001760, ed. Elizabeth Einberg, London, 1997, 26. On Ramsay, see Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, ed. John Ingamells, London and New Haven, 1999, 8, cats 20 and 435, and Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: Painter, Essayist and Man of the Enlightenment, New Haven, 1992. As Uvedale Price remarked in his Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and, on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, 3 vols, London, 1810, 218: From the charming suffusion in the human face, which can only take place where the skin is transparent, we borrow an epithet very commonly given to the most beautiful of owers: an Ethiopian lady may admire the roses blushing hue (and it is said that the black nations have a sort of passion for the rose), but no such pleasing association can arise in her mind. On the notion of layered skin, see Daniel Turner, De Morbis Cutaneis: A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin: In Two Parts with a Short Appendix Concerning the Efcacy of Local Remedies, and the Manner of their Operations, London, 1736, vvi. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory and Psychoanalysis, London, 1991, 545: The veil serves to ensure that there is a depth which lurks behind the surface of things. Oliver Goldsmith, A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, vol. 1, London, 1774, 375. See also Uvedale Prices Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiul, London, 1796 (1810). On the skin as manifestation of the soul in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism:
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38 39
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44 45
46 47
Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Cambridge, 1993, 38. On Hogarths concept of beauty in variety, see Dabydeen, Hogarths Blacks, 44 f., and Frdric e e Oge, The Flesh of Theory: Erotics of Hogarths e Line, in Fort and Rosenthal, eds, The Other Hogarth, 6275. Bindman has observed that the anatomical threads of Hogarths cutis resemble the hatched lines by which tonal gradation is produced in print-making. David Bindman, Hogarth and his Times: Serious Comedy, Berkeley, 1997, 1723. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson, New Haven, 1997, 88. Hogarth also emphasizes the transparency of the skin of white women (90). Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 89. On Hogarths drawing illustrating the network of the skin, see Bindman, Hogarth and his Times, 172f. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 92. Andr Rouquet, The Present State of the Arts in e England, London, 1755, 45: The English painters are naturally good colourists. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, English edn London, 1787, quoted in Winthorp Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 15501812, Chapel Hill, 1968, 458. Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, 21718 (Quoting John Donne); Dabydeen, Hogarths Blacks, 44; Volland, Gepletschte Nasen , 150. Notes on Painting, in Diderot on Art, vol. 1, trans. John Goodman, London and New Haven, 1995, 201; Benthien, Haut: Literaturgeschichte, Korper bilder, Grenzdiskurse, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1999, 1201; Fend, Inkarnat oder Haut?, Cologne and Munich, 2001, 71. Reynoldss painting was subsequently praised by one commentator for the very engaging sensible countenance, and the extremely delicate, blooming and transparent complexion. David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven, 2000, cat. 327. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians: EighteenthCentury Portraiture and Society, London, 1990, 124. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1794. Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians, 160, comments on the symbolism of the illuminated chest by reference to Cesare Ripas allegorical gure of Purity. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 198ff.; Benthien, Haut, 102. Deirdre Coleman, Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Womens Protest writing in the 1790s, English Literary History, 61, Summer, 1994, 34162; see also David Bindman, Am I not a Man and a Brother: British Art and Slavery in the Eighteenth Century, Res, 26, 1994, 6882.
48 I am grateful to Sarah Watson Parsons for sharing with me her unpublished paper The Arts of Abolition: Race, Representation and British Colonialism, 17681807. 49 Coleman, Conspicuous Consumption, 355. 50 I owe this observation to Marcia Pointon. 51 Edward Long, Candid Reections upon the Judgment lately Awarded by the Court of the Kings Bench, London, 1772, 489. 52 Clara Reeve, Plans of Education, with Remarks on the Systems of Other Writers: In a Series of Letters between Mrs. Darnford and her Friends (1792), New York, 1974, 901; emphasis added. Coleman, Conspicuous Consumption, 357. 53 Hall, Things of Darkness, 9. 54 On the female embodiment of Englishness, see Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, esp. 1921, and for the term island race, see Wilsons chap. 2; see also Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human, esp. 13550, 240. 55 I am grateful to Katja Wolf for drawing my attention to this work, and to Andreas Bartsch, Munich, for kindly providing me with a photograph of Woodwards drawing and granting reproduction rights. 56 Frantz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness, in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, New York, 1967, 109140; for the expression looked into blackness see David R. Roediger, White Looks: Hairy Apes, True Stories and Limbaughs Laughs, in Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader, New York and London, 1997, 3546. Stuart Hall (The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks? in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, London and Seattle, 1996, 1237, 20) speaks succinctly of the epidermalization of the racial look. See also Kaja Silverman, Fanon and the Black Male Bodily Ego, in Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, 2731, who describes Fanons text as the interpellation into negritude of the dark-skinned male subject. I am grateful to Darby English for discussing Fanon with me and for encouraging me to think about the psychic process of racialized subjectivity. On the relationship between subject formation and colonial identity, see Henry Louis Gates, Critical Fanonism, Critical Inquiry, 17:3, Spring 1991, 458. 57 Charles Bell, The Anatomy of Expression (1806), 3rd edn, London, 1844 (Blush assorts well with youthful and with effeminate features, 96); Alexander Morison, Outlines of Mental Diseases, Edinburgh, 1824; Thomas Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (1828), 2nd edn, London, 1839; Charles Darwin, Blushing, in Introduction to the Science of Sociology, eds Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Chicago, 1921, 36570; Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in
590
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61
62 63
64
65
Men and Animals (1872), ed. Paul Ekman, 3rd edn, New York and Oxford, 1998. See also Jakob Henle, . Uber das Errothen, Breslau, 1882. Vieda Skultans, Bodily Madness, 153. Bell, The Anatomy of Expression, 1844, 95, 96, describes blushing, this token of sensibility in the variation of colour, as an indication of the mind. These musings echo the speculations found in Johann Jacob Bodmers epic verse Inkel und Yariko (1756). Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 31; Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, 318; OFarrell, Telling Complexion, 84. This perverted attitude had its echo in the colonial context of the West Indian slave trade. Relating the reports to him from a traveller from the West Indies, Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted in his diary regarding whipping that, the Negroes often console themselves in their cruel punishments, that their wounds will become white. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 vols, ed. K. Coburn (1805; London, 1957), 2:2604, quoted in Coleman, Conspicuous Consumption, 358. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing; Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, 318; Bell, The Anatomy of Expression, 1844, 96, argued in relation to the example of the scar that blushing for dark-skinned people would be completely superuous (If the black blushes unseen, it only shews [sic] that the incidental colour does not affect the general structure and processes). See OFarrell, Telling Complexion, 84. On scar, see OFarrell, Dickenss Scar, in Telling Complexion, chap. 4. Perhaps it is ironic that Ariosto compared blushing itself to a mask: Because shame threatens the soul that is revealed to us by means of facial expression, blood rushes to the face to cover it. See Werner L. Gundesheimer, Renaissance Concepts of Shame and Pocaterras Dialoghi Della Vergogna, Renaissance Quarterly, 47:1, 1994, 3456. esp. 47. Rouquet, The Present State of the Arts, 48f. Rouquet initiates his comments with the following words: Let us not forget an art, which as yet is only in its infancy in England, the barbarous art of daubing ones cheeks. Rouquet, The Present State of the Arts, 48. In J. Bell, ed., Belle assemble: or, Bells Court and Fashionable e Magazine, London, 1806, vol. 1, 1806, 119, we read: A French woman may use her rouge in order to relieve the sallow hue of her sun-burnt face, and to brighten a complexion which has seldom any rose to boast. But surely an English woman, whose beauty is the praise and admiration of the world, and the pride and boast of her countrymen, can little need, in any case, to resort to so wretched an expedient of increasing it.
66 On this picture, see Melissa Hyde, The Makeup of the Marquise: Bouchers Portrait of Pompadour at her Toilette, Art Bulletin, 82:3, September 2003, 45375; Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Pompadours touch: difference in representation, Representations, 73, 2001, 5488. See also Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity, Representations, 20, 1987, 7787. 67 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, London and New York, 1995, 209. On cosmetics and skin, see also Benthien, Haut, 11821. 68 Neville Williams, Powder and Paint: A History of the Englishwomans Toilet: Elizabeth IElizabeth II, London, 1957, 66; Corson, Fashions in Makeup, 230; Gwilliam, Cosmetic Poetics, 146; for Blumenbachs rst use of the term Caucasian, see Londa Schiebinger, Natures Body: Gender in the Making of the Modern Science, Boston, 1993, 129. Nell Irvin Painter, The Caucasian, lecture presented in the session on Human Variety and Cultural Difference, at the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies convention, University of California, Los Angeles, August 2003. For Blumenbachs concept of the term race, see Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 17701870, Durham, 1997, 703. As Zantop shows (87f.), Christoph Meiners tried to prove the superiority of the Germans as the fairest of them all die Hellsten unter den Hellen, which Zantop describes as a kind of Snow White syndrome. 69 Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Fictions of Modesty, 74) states that a dark skin, like a mask, threatened to obscure vital truth about a person; see also Gwilliam, Cosmetic Poetics, 148. On rouge as camouage of lost innocence, see Roy Porter, Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England, Etudes anglaises, 37:4, 1985, 38596. esp. 389; also see Benthien, Haut, 118f. 70 Samuel Jackson Pratt, The New Cosmetic, or, The Triumph of Beauty, London, 1790; the comedy was authored under a synonym Courtney Melmouth. 71 Gwilliam, Cosmetic Poetics, 148. Here, the racist term whitewashing refers to the practice of white men having offspring with black slaves or servants, thus literally washing the darker race whiter. 72 Pratt, The New Cosmetic, 30; Gwilliam, Cosmetic Poetics, 153. 73 Pratt, The New Cosmetic, 61; Gwilliam, Cosmetic Poetics, 157f. 74 Norman O. Brown, Loves Body, New York, 1966, 134: The erection is in the head, as in the case of virginal blushing. See also OFarrell, Telling Complexion, 145, n. 6. A blush and an erection clearly share a somewhat involuntary nature.
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The one, moreover, might evoke the other. Moreover, in her Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Fanny Hill tirelessly describes a white mans erection as a column of the whitest ivory, beautifully streaked with blue veins, and carrying, fully capped, a head of the liveliest vermilion, and ekphrasis that resembles the white women in the paintings described above. John Cleland, Fanny Hill: Or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Wagner, London, 1985, 83. In a talk entitled The Colour Crimson (at the conference Rethinking Regency Representation, National Portrait Gallery, London, 1718 October 2003), Marcia Pointon, in reference to Fanny Hills descriptions, argued that the suggestive crimson in Thomas Lawrences dashing portrait of Andrew Reid helped to stabilize British masculinity through its reference to both the battleeld and the bedroom.
75 Through the blush a subject denes itself in relation to its surface, thus visualizes the skin-ego, which seeks to maintain the cohesion of the psyche. On the skin-ego, see Didier Anzieu, Das Haut Ich, trans. Meinhart Korte and Marie-Hlene e` Lebourdais-Weiss, 3rd edn, Frankfurt am Main, 1992; see also Didier Anzieu, La peau de lautre, marque du destin, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, 30, 1984, 5568. Didier Anzieu, Le Penser: Du Moipeau au Moi-pensant, Paris, 1994; Kaja Silverman, The Bodily Ego, 937; Benthien, Haut, 23. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has described shame (and by extension its carnal visualization in the blush) as located between theatricality and absorption, and as deriving from and aiming towards sociability. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shame and Performativity: Henry Jamess New York Edition Prefaces, in David McWhirter, ed., Henry Jamess New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, Stanford, 1995, 206239, 212.
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VISCERAL CULTURE: BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS IN EIGHTEENTHCENTURY BRITISH PORTRAITURE

The story of the sculptor Pygmalion in Ovids Metamorphoses begins:

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

BLUSHING AND THE LEGIBILITY OF WHITENESS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2004

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