Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism (review)

Beryl Schlossman,Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. viii + 235 pp.

In 1866, Khalil Bey, a former ambassador of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish or Egyptian by birth, acquired a painting by Gustave Courbet entitled L'Origine du Monde. Like the "Maltese Falcon," the painting surfaced from time to time, but was long believed lost or missing, until the Musée d'Orsay acquired it and displayed it in 1995 following the settlement of the estate of none other than Jacques Lacan. It turned out that Lacan and his wife, Sylvia Bataille (the first wife of Georges), had acquired the painting in 1955, and had displayed or hidden it at their country house; Lacan had had his brother-in-law, André Masson, construct a protective screen for the painting, à la fois visible and invisible, like a purloined letter.

The painting, for which Whistler's mistress was the model, is the representation of a woman's torso, her pubic area and genitals occupying the center of the canvas. If we know from art history who the model was, the painting tells us nothing of the sort. The prominent pubic region is erotic and yet we can never know if our vision is justified: perhaps the woman at whom we are looking is a virgin. This seemingly unthinkable position, the eroticisation of the virgin and of virginity itself is at the center of the canvas of Objects of Desire, a brilliant new book by Beryl Schlossman. Schlossman's work moves with ease from mariolatry to James Joyce, from Sappho to Don Giovanni to Baudelaire, and informs us along the way about a myriad of cultural, artistic, and literary phenomena.

"Through all Christian minstrelsy," the cult of the Virgin Mary is in part a means of keeping masculine or male desire in check. This structuring and repression of male desire--and of female desire as well, but in a model of sympathetic adoration--itself remains fairly unshaken until the development of a bourgeois society in the eighteenth century makes the question of virginity less one of starry-eyed mariolatry and more one of the circulation des biens. If "the feminine object is torn from her pedestal" (2) by the iconoclasts of modernism, like Baudelaire and Flaubert, each in his own way a "violer d'amores," it must be said that the pedestal was already beginning to feel some tremors a century earlier. There is far less of an abyss between Richardson's virtuous heroines, Pamela and Clarissa, and Defoe's Moll Flanders than one might suppose. Laclos and Kleist follow suit. Mozart and da Ponte's characters, studied at length and with great subtlety by Schlossman, are a case in point. Leporello, Don Giovanni's faithful servant, points out to the seduced and abandoned Donna Elvira that "non siete voi, non foste, e non sarete né la prima, né l'ultima [you are not, were not, nor will be the last]." Madonnas fallen from pedestals and seducers dragged down by statues are the avatars of the pre-modern.

Schlossman moves effortlessly between seemingly disparate fields of inquiry, as she ties them together by relating figures of the feminine as constructed through masculine eyes, and as deconstructed through those of this literary and cultural critic. After an introductory chapter in which she stakes out the territory of the eroticized madonna, Professor Schlossman turns to the figures of heterosexual Socratic and Platonic love, as well as of desire as it is expressed in a fragment by Sappho. Jumping to the invention of the modern, Schlossman shows effectively how figures like Baudelaire and Flaubert use elements of classical and Renaissance ambiguity (at least to the almost-modern sensibility) to tear down the vestiges of Romanticism that still studded mid-nineteenth-century thought.

The second chapter returns us to a reading of James Joyce, the central figure of one of the critic's previous books, Joyce's Catholic Comedy of Language. This chapter is...