Women Readers in French Painting, 1870–1890: A Space for the Imagination by Kathryn Brown (review)

This study of women’s relationship to print culture focuses on a transitional moment in the history of literacy in France: the Camille Sée law of 1880 created a public system of collèges and lycées for girls, and the following year primary education was made free for children of both sexes under the Jules Ferry law. The Republican ideology of secular education for all was underpinned by ideals of cultural and linguistic integration, but visual art often depicted modes of literacy that were clearly disconnected from the proper spaces of the classroom. Kathryn Brown’s book is the first to be devoted to the liseuse genre in this period, and it draws on a variety of media — painting, print, drawing, and sculpture — in mapping out the social, political, and aesthetic questions raised by changing female reading practices (reading in public urban spaces, women’s access to journalism, reading in the workplace) and the ways in which these were posed by artists. Brown’s main argument is that ‘the motif of reading was capable of communicating a concept of female agency that eluded the interpretive control of a desiring gaze’ (p. 9). Indeed, the legibility of the liseuse is held to be problematic: she is the site of political and personal, or conjugal, anxieties (as betrayed by Jules Simon’s prescriptive discourse on women’s reading) that were often connected with the supposed dangers of female sexuality (artists were attentive to the solitary pleasures of reading in the bedroom). Brown’s attention to the postures and ‘contours of the reading body’ (p. 157) — secrecy, closure, discipline, and abandon — is where her discussion is at its most engaging, and here artists are shown to negotiate with contemporary discourses of feminine idealization and sexualization, just as they circumscribe the limits of the viewer’s apprehension. The scope of this book is vast, encompassing avant-garde and academic traditions, and one of its virtues is to place a wide range of well-known artists (Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Cassatt, Renoir, Fantin-Latour, Dalou) alongside those contemporaries with whom the reader is likely to be less familiar (Carrière, Gonzalès, Lavieille, Toulmouche, Bonvin). Brown also draws substantially on canonical literary fiction (Flaubert, Maupassant, Huysmans, Zola) in order to contextualize her discussion of women readers; clearly, that iconic reader heroine Emma Bovary (and the stakes of female literacy in the trial of Flaubert’s novel) still held an important place in the cultural imagination at this point in the century. But, while these literary references are helpful in setting the scene, the reader might question whether certain connections are overdrawn, not least that between Zola’s Nana and Degas’s monotypes of naked women readers. This consideration notwithstanding, Brown’s book is an ambitious and valuable study that illuminates a diverse genre of painting with ample illustration (sixty images, reproduced in black and white) and contributes a nuanced account of the place of the liseuse in visual art as a subject caught between the aspirations of Republican gender politics and a more countercultural vision of reading’s potentially illicit or subversive possibilities