Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914 (review)

This volume attends to blind spots both in masculinity studies and in discussions of how interior space was represented in the long nineteenth century. The relative lack of research into the complexities of French masculine identities — until recently at least — is matched in its curious persistence by an ongoing critical tendency to perpetuate the traditionally gendered ideology of separate spheres between a supposedly masculine public domain and an apparently feminine private realm. Interior living in the nineteenth century had risked being coded feminine by key cultural turns in French history, such as Rousseau’s advocacy of the expulsion of women from the public sphere and Baudelaire’s privileging of boulevards and cityscapes for the artistic mind. In their richly detailed Introduction, the editors’ fresh approach to the representation and relevance of domestic space is highly welcome. Their intention is to challenge the conception of the public and the private as separate and essentialized spheres. Following recent discussions of how nineteenth-century women were becoming increasingly active in the public sphere, they here demonstrate French men’s very active involvement in private spaces. Rather than stunting the development of masculine artistic processes, ‘the interior was a rich site for self-exploration and the elaboration of masculine identity’ (p. 3). The editors take care not to diminish the significance of the domestic for women’s self-expression; indeed, their key objective is to explore how men had to negotiate a complex relationship between gender and space that blurred and unsettled the public–private divide. The twelve essays themselves cover a broad and exciting range of visual material across the period, from painting and sculpture to photography and fashion. Among fascinating discussions of topics such as family portraiture, the artist’s studio, and the cabinet de travail, the volume also offers engaging reflections on key nineteenth-century figures. Delacroix’s rendering of the private as public in his little-known double portrait of Charles de Mornay and Anatole Demidoff (1833) testifies to the significance of honour, militarism, and fashionability for men living under the July Monarchy; differences of approach between Cézanne and Manet in their portraits of Zola sophisticate each painter’s understanding of interiority; and telling tensions between performativity and contingency emerge in Rodin’s use of photography for self-portraiture. All images are beautifully presented and meticulously set out, while an extensive bibliography provides an up-to-date resource for the fields discussed. There are, however, no original French citations, which is regrettable given that a good deal of references are taken from lesser-known material that is not widely available. Notwithstanding such a concern, this volume’s extensive consideration of the domestic realm as a fertile creative space for men reinforces the importance of interior spaces to the development of modernity. At the same time, it echoes a range of other voices in masculinity studies that have questioned whether the notion of ‘masculinity in crisis’ (promoted by R. W. Connell in the late 1990s) underestimates the ways in which gender was ambiguously and dynamically realized.