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

Viewers familiar with late nineteenth-century French painting have undoubtedly encountered images of women reading. Such depictions are an anomaly against the myriad images in which women exist only “to-be-looked-at”: prostitutes, artists’ models, bourgeois women posing decorously, to name a few. While many scholars have held up images of liseuses as rare proof that women did indeed engage in cerebral and imaginative activities within this deeply segregated culture, the subject merits more sustained study. Kathryn Brown’s Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890: A Space for the Imagination provides a prolonged examination of this topic, aiming to shed light on such imagery, while revealing early Third Republic attitudes toward gender. Depicting women reading, Brown notes in her introduction, “… was an effective way of communicating information about a woman’s intellect, social standing, personal relationships and private morality” (1).

While the object of her study is narrow in subject and chronology, Brown includes images in a wide variety of media, created for diverse audiences. Throughout she argues for “literacies rather than literacy.” In contrast to many earlier studies, which treat only images of well-heeled young women reading in comfortable domestic or domesticated spaces, Brown’s book makes it evident that women of the working class, too, were reading. Brown wisely notes that images of women reading do not necessarily reflect the “reality” of rising literacy rates or audiences, but rather shows “… how women readers were constructed in the social imagination” (5). As Brown makes clear, the increased popularity of the liseuse in painting is closely linked to wider debates on female agency, education, and biology familiar to students of late nineteenth-century social history.

Throughout the book, the central argument emerges that images of liseuses were capable of evoking entirely contradictory interpretations. Such activities might be seen as highly subversive, dangerous distractions from a woman’s real focus on her husband and children, or alternatively, as a liberating act, one of the only available spaces of contemplation, imagination, and intellectual engagement for women of the bourgeois class.

Rather than an overview, the book presents discrete investigations into topics through numerous approaches. Chapter one looks at avant-garde paintings that promote “portable privacy” by denying the viewer access to the portrayed texts (even the titles are illegible). Chapter two focuses on newspaper reading and how it challenged notions of female readership as frivolous or limited to bourgeois circles, drawing on recent studies maintaining that the newspaper became a kind of arm-chair flânerie in the 1880s. The third chapter continues this investigation into working-class literacy. The fourth chapter is a hodge-podge of sorts, examining, in turn, how images of liseuses link to earlier art, the ideal of “sheltered reading,” and reading linked to “practices of deception” (the connecting thread of this chapter was lost on this reader). The next chapter focuses on the fascinating link between books, female sexuality, and the body. The final chapter explores the relationship between reading and sociability.

While Brown has done a great deal of research, her art-historical interpretations are at times less than convincing. She includes Renoir’s Woman Reading an Illustrated Journal as a reflection of the increased acceptance for female readership of newspapers and mass media (51). However the spread appearing in the painting consists exclusively of illustrations, undermining, rather than strengthening, the depicted figure as a “serious” reader. The author argues that “the depiction of close textual engagement outweighs conformity to conventions that attached to the presentation of feminine beauty” in a Tissot print of a fashionable young woman (57). Brown’s proposition that the figure in Renoir’s Green Reader is “concealing her reading material”—this in a painting where no element is clear or precisely depicted—is hard to accept. In the case of Degas’s monotypes, however, her argument works quite well. Yet how can we accept the monotype...