Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations

Géricault and "Masculinity"

NORMAN BRYSON Gericault and "Masculinity" I N this paper, I bring together two distinct inquiries: the first, an inquiry into some aspects of the cultural construction of masculinity ; and the second, an inquiry into certain works by the French nineteenth-century painter Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). But first, I should explain what lies behind this juxtaposition. My claim is that, in some sense, the two inquiries are one and the same: that you can view Gericault's work as itself an inquiry into the construction of masculine identity or identities in the specific context of his class and period. His class would be the aristocratic and upper bourgeois milieu to which Gericault belonged, and the period is the years of Ghicault's output as a painter-from the late Napoleonic context of his first military subjects (after 1810) to the post-Restoration context of his last paintings (18221823 ). If Ghicault's work is itself a series of explorations of masculinity and masculine identity, then to talk about his painting in our own time would be a strange enterprise if we were not to take into account current discourses that explore masculinity. These are necessarily diverse and contradictory; selection is essential, and here my selection has been guided by the questions raised in film studies (though entirely pertinent to art history) concerning the gendered nature of the gaze. A classic objection to the juxtaposition of works of visual art with discourses on sexual difference is that inevitably the work of art ends up merely repeating and confirming the themes and terms of the discourse on sexuality, that Ghicault's paintings are sure to end up as allegories of that discourse, that painting is bound to be demoted and relegated to a secondary and illustrative status. This charge has particular force when the discourse on sexuality does not of itself address the visual. Then one is dealing far more with two independent fields, where the reality of painting as a visual construction is lost in, or becomes secondary to, the verbal discourse on sexuality. But what is interesting about the way the present period theorizes sexual difference is that questions of the visual are of primary importance in the discourse on sexuality: What is visual or "figural" about painting-as opposed to whatever discursive or iconographic content it may possess-is no longer outside or please refer to the print version of this book To view this image, 230 NOR MAN B R Y SON lost to the discussion but has moved almost to center stage. Crucial to the discussion of the image has been the analysis of the gaze; in particular , that kernel of the analysis that describes a dominant "heterosexual" optic in which visual activity is culturally constructed across a split between active (= male) and passive (= female) roles-where the man is bearer of the look, and the woman is the object for that looking, is image. Perhaps I should explain that I have no particular quarrel with this analysis, which seems to me to conform to the facts not only of current constructions of visuality but of important phases and formations within Western European painting. In this paper, I want to follow the recent work of others, including Kaja Silverman, Steve Neale, and Mary Ann Doane, in adding to that model with the intention of extending its explanatory power and also, perhaps, its political effectiveness.! My principal modification to the model ("Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look") concerns what may appear as an anomaly within it: that while the model probes issues to do with the male's perspective on the female, as preordained object of looking, it may be relatively underdeveloped in dealing with what is at stake in the male gaze upon another male. The model establishes voyeurism as the central process in the male spectator's relation to the image of the female, and identification as the central process in the male spectator's positioning with regard to the image of the male. For example, Laura Mulvey's initial analysis of the relation of the male spectator to the male character in the films she cites, stresses how the male viewer steps into the male character 's shoes, aligns his viewpoint with that of the character, projects himself into the landscape of the narrative, and sees from within that diegetic space.2 Mulvey suggests that this process is easy for the...