Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (review)

At the close of her first chapter, Carol Mavor writes, “My book has a disease that I would call love” (56). This review has the same disease: I love Mavor’s book. I love even the way it looks and feels: a thick white block of fine paper, the text enhanced by different fonts, touches of sky-blue ink, and more than two hundred photographs.

Carol Mavor is professor of art history and visual studies at the University of Manchester. She is also a disciple of Roland Barthes, a lover of Proust, a sometimes skeptical student of psychoanalysis, a mother of three sons, and a hedonist—a label applied to her by Marina Warner, which she accepts. Reading Boyishly combines all of these aspects of Mavor into a feast of words and images intricately linked to each other like a cat’s cradle, constantly surprising, amusing, enlightening, and filling both eye and mind.

Reading Boyishly is not literary criticism, nor memoir, nor biography, nor psychoanalysis, nor a critique of visual art, although it contains elements of all these. It is (and others have used the same term about Mavor’s work) a performance, in which Mavor recreates not only her scholarly thoughts and approaches but her Proustian leaps of associative memory—of her adolescence, her children, food, colors, photographs, fifteenth-century paintings, contemporary works of sculpture, history, and films. This kind of writing can so easily tip over into self-indulgence or plain messiness. But her light touch with theory, her sense of humor, and her profound affection for her subject all keep her work fresh and lively; her scholarship keeps it under control. She says she wants to “rescue nostalgia . . . as a formidable critical tool” (34); in my view, she succeeds.

To “read boyishly” is “to covet the mother’s body as a home both lost and never lost” (14); it is “to embrace effeminophobia . . . and to boldly, if quietly, articulate the effeminizing relation between a boy and his mother as a specific and beautiful production” (30)—though Mavor admits that such sentences are much too clear to represent what she is doing. She turns her tender yet sophisticated gaze on four “boyish” men and one boy, all of whom lived in the early years of the twentieth century: J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986), D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971), and Roland Barthes (1915–1980). The “boy” is Lartigue, who began taking photographs when he was eight years old and continued to photograph, and to arrange and organize those thousands of photographs, as his life’s work. He was our first child photographer, Mavor says, and remained an “ancient boy” throughout his life. All five, indeed, are “ancient boys, aged children, adolescent gentlemen,” deeply attached to their mothers, or, in Winnicott’s case, to the idea of mother, throughout their lives. Mavor “dish(es) them up as boyish cuisine”(5).

Mavor does nothing so obvious as devote a separate chapter to each “boy.” She weaves them in and out of all ten chapters, a little more focus on Barrie in one, a little more focus on Winnicott in another, more of Lartigue’s photographs in yet another, yet all combining and recombining through various images—visual and verbal—of flight, photography, food, kisses, birds, breath, nests, string. For example, Barrie and Lartigue are joined not only by their skill as photographers but by the idea of flight: in 1904 Barrie’s Peter Pan brought never-before-seen representations of flight to the theatre, and in that same year, as a boy of ten, Lartigue took the only photograph of the first public airplane flight in France. Various scholars enrich Mavor’s feast: Julia Kristeva, Adam Phillips, Melanie Klein, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick. The poetry of Emily Dickinson wafts past occasionally; Oscar Wilde joins the other “boys” briefly in chapter 6. Freud’s...