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The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000) 293-320



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Slashing Henry James (On Painting and Political Economy, Circa 1900)

Thomas J. Otten

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IMAGE LINK= On opening day of the Royal Academy Exhibition in the spring of 1914, a woman whom the London Times would the next day describe as "elderly" and "of distinctly peaceable aspect," dressed in "a loose purple overcloak" with "ample folds," was among the visitors. 1 She seems to have attracted no notice until she produced from beneath her cloak a meat chopper and used this utensil to attack John Singer Sargent's recently completed portrait of Henry James (figure 1). Striking the painting three times, she broke the glass, cutting the painting on the left side of the head, the right side of the mouth, and below the right shoulder, leaving jagged slashes which in some places stripped away the paint from the canvas. This is viewership with a vengeance.

After a "scuffle," the slasher, Mary Wood, was restrained and arrested and taken to the Marlborough Street Police Court. At some point along the way, she revealed herself as a suffragist, stating that "[i]f they only gave women the vote, this would never have happened." In a letter to the Women's Social and Political Union, she similarly stated that "I have tried to destroy a valuable picture because I wish to show the public that they have no security for their property nor for their art treasures until women are given the political freedom." Likewise, in court, when the value of the painting was reported to be 700 pounds, Mary Wood shot back that if the picture had been painted by a woman, it would not have been worth so much.

While it may be an alluring possibility to regard this incident as the founding moment of feminist critique of Henry James's fiction--and of Sargent's paintings, which have to many readers often seemed continuous with that fiction--the historical record makes this approach hard to develop because that record leaves Mary Wood's motives for choosing this portrait curiously underexplained. So far as one is able to tell, Wood never referred to either James or Sargent in her statements; there is no evidence that she was a frustrated reader of James's novels, irritated by the tendency of James's heroines to capitulate and renounce, nor that she found in Sargent a confinement of women to the realm of the decorative. Indeed, Jamesian scholarship has never quite found a use for this incident, and so has consigned it to the realm [End Page 293] of the bizarre, the meaningless coincidence. 2 I think this moment is worth dwelling on, then, not because it critiques James's poetics--although it may do so--but because it exaggerates and thus makes more clearly visible some assumptions about paintings and their viewers that have wide currency at the century's turn, and that shape James's fiction and Sargent's paintings in important ways. My point is not merely that slashing a painting is a scenario James himself had represented in his fiction (although that's true, and I'll return to it later). Nor is my [End Page 294] point quite that in his novel The Tragic Muse, James had, like Mary Wood, understood painterly and political representations in terms of each other (although that's also true and I'll return to it later as well). Rather, my argument is that both James and Wood work from a conviction that painting makes its viewers, that viewing painting is a physically intimate, almost immediate process that shapes and forms and frames the body of the viewing subject. The work of painting, then--shaping bodies on a canvas--is understood as continuing in front of the finished canvas in the body of the person viewing it. To consume a painting is to be produced by it.

Understood in this light, Mary Wood's motives become far more comprehensible: she attacks James's portrait because she sees in it a set...

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