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170 Canadian Review of American Studies David C. Miller, ed. American Iconology: New Approaches to NineteenthCentury Art and Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature is a series of twelve essays written by various authors presumably linked together by the particularly American content of the texts. The title is, however, misleading. "lconology, 11 a term misappropriated from Panofsky's Studies in Iconology is defined with dispatch and thereafter used as a literary vanishing point. The concept is never clearly explained nor developed; instead it is briefly contrasted with iconography, alluded to from time to time as an accepted idea of vaguely monumental proportions, then never seen again. As for what is distinctly American, the reader with unlimited patience will have to plod through pages of dense, grey, semiotic prose only to discover there is no discussion whatsoever. If interested in the American identity one should read W. Zelinsky's The Cultural Geography of the United States which suggests four pervasive themes in the evolution of American culture: individualism, mobility and change, a mechanistic view of the world, and a messianic perfectionism. Miller, himself, sets the tone for this tedious text in the foreword: Far from suggesting that cultural products reflect the conditions of economic production and that ideology therefore operates as a kind of false consciousness, the emerging synthesis of Marxism, poststructuralism , semiotics and feminism has issued in a concept of ideology that involves a much more dynamic interaction between the two. Departing from the earlier reification of the economic sector as a structure in some way mirrored by the superstructure of culture one influential perspective on this relation reformulates both the economic realm and the expressive aspects of culture as processes of production continuously engaged in a dialectical exchange of values often undercut each other. (4) Fortunately, the reader is given fair warning that "in the Afterword" the author will have "more to say about the issues that the authors of this book raise about subjectivity and language" (17). Book Reviews 171 What the authors state about the issues raised by their subject is indeed curious. Harriet Scott Chessman's "Mary Cassatt and the Maternal Body" begins with a promising title and is immediately marred by the extremely awkward insertion of a tiny greyish, smudgy reproduction-a detail of head and neck barely the size of a pat of butter and with the same clarity. It adds nothing visually, but it does manage to shatter the first paragraph so that it cannot be read except with the greatest difficulty. This annoying practise appears throughout several of the essays. Perhaps this is an example of deconstruction ? The essay is continuously flawed by its unsubstantiated assertions , as the author's political and sociological views are superimposed opaquely over the works of Mary Cassatt. They are occluded first by the extremely poor quality of the plates, and then recede further under a pastiche of sociosexual inferences. The inclusion of Cassatt in a group of artists representative of nineteenth-century American art is at best specious. Certainly in spirit her work is more aligned to Degas and post-Impressionism than to any American or necessarily to any other woman, including Morisot. Chessman takes umbrage with J. K. Huysman's remark 11 only a woman can pose a child, dress it, adjust pins without pricking themselves," ignoring he had begun with the phrase "an artist who owes nothing any longer to anyone , an artist wholly impressive and personal" (243). Where Huysman refers to Cassatt simply as a great artist, the author has to call her a "woman artist." Chessman continues with comments concerning the 'safety' and 'sexuality' of children in the paintings and makes false allusions of possibilities of abuse. She writes of Cassatt's Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child, "one of the major keys to the representation of the mother's sexuality lies in the erotic presence of the child. While the mother often may seem hardly to have a body, the child can represent the mother's sexuality indirectly, through a visual metonymy" (247). However, the painting suggests none of this. Chessman continues, "the two brown lines near the child...

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