The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Tamar Garb's book is a closely focused and carefully written case study of two specific modes of nineteenth-century painting, both of which focus on the image of the woman. Her first chapter looks in detail at Degas's images of the anonymous young ballerinas of the Paris Opéra. After discussing the reasons for Degas's lifelong obsession with the figure of the dancer, Garb demonstrates, with reference to Mallarmé and Valéry, that these images are the site of dialogues between the present and the past and the artificial and the real that throw new light on Degas's approach to modernity and memory. In her second chapter Garb discusses (self-)portraits of women artists and their relation to the emerging type of the 'femme nouvelle'. Garb's discussion of the figure of the New Woman shows how perceptions of the emancipated woman were informed by caricatures by Gavarni, Grandville, and particularly Daumier, whose 'bas bleu' cartoons helped to shape the viewer's largely negative perception of this new breed of intellectual female. Garb sets these images alongside the normalized image of the female artist — who was safely posited within the domestic sphere — in order to show how portraits by female artists, either of themselves or of other women, attempted to insert women into the dominant male sphere. Garb's readings of the relatively unknown (self-)portraits by Rosa Bonheur, Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa, and Marie Bashkirtseff add another dimension to late nineteenth-century depictions of women, showing not only that these women were wryly aware of the public's perception of them but also that their engagement with this perception demonstrates that they responded to it in a variety of ways, ranging from wit through assertiveness and self-knowledge to quiet perspicacity. By looking at lesser-known portraits, Garb is also able to show how these pictures challenge the nineteenth-century gender stereotypes held both at the time and by viewers and critics today. As with her persuasive use of poets' writings on art in the first chapter, Garb convincingly combines her own comments with a discussion of the responses of contemporary art critics such as Camille Mauclair and Marius-Ary Leblond. Garb concludes that these various pictorial responses ultimately reveal that 'the category of the New Woman was a fragile and fraught construction, one that was as much a projection of a fantasy of female empowerment, yet still institutionally enshrined, as an attempt to alter the terms of female representation inherited from the past' (p. 78). This is a concise and delightfully expressed volume that offers a detailed analysis of a number of paintings, most of which were relatively unknown and almost all of which are reproduced. Rather than overly engaging with other academic work on the subject, Garb prioritizes her own insights, with judicious use of footnotes (but with no bibliography). The two very different kinds of painting analysed here throw new light on a familiar topic, and each chapter also uses very specific examples to engage with broad questions relating to the representation of the female body and the social and artistic make-up of nineteenth-century Paris.