The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott's Critical Feminism

8. Unlikely Couplings: The Gendering of Print Technology in the French Fin-de-Siècle

I begin this essay with a trope of late–nineteenth-century French print culture —the erotic pictographic coupling of a solo female dancer with the star wheel of a lithographic press. Typically this mechano-sexual hieroglyph is used to distinguish “art prints” pulled by hand from those mechanically produced . But occasionally the pair is enlisted to perform a more elusive, improvisatory dance. I mean “dance” both literally, in terms of pictorial references to actual dances and dancers, and metaphorically, in Mallarmé’s terms, where the solo female dancer signifies artistic innovation. It is the latter that interests me here. The pictograph, born of shifting technologies and systems of valuation in late–nineteenth-century French print culture, appears mostly in watermarks, bookplates, and posters for print collectors and the luxury book trade. Through a close reading of three works, this essay recuperates the pictograph ’s visual syntax, its distinct signs and variable patterns of interrelation. An address card by Richard Ranft for Auguste Delâtre’s Imprimerie artistique (fig. 8.1) and a print cartonnier carved by François-Rupert Carabin (fig. 8.2) use related versions of the schema’s erotic coupling of dancer and printing press to signify the possibility of an “advanced” graphic art. The mechanical and reproducible are recast as a link between transgressive sexuality and a libidinal impulse for repetition grounded in the late–nineteenth-century discourse of hysteria. The third case study, Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1893 lithograph L’estampe originale (fig. 8.3), utilizes the same primary elements but a very different pictographic logic. The dancer stands remote from the working of the press; she is identifiable—the well-known cancan dancer Jane Avril—rather CHAPTER EIGHT Unlikely Couplings The Gendering of PrintTechnology in the French Fin-de-Siècle JANIS BERGMAN-CARTON 188 | JANIS BERGMAN-CARTON than generic; and, absent any sexual encounter of figure and machine, there appears to be no radical disjunction or transgression. But I will argue Toulouse-Lautrec’s pictographic improvisation does in fact unsettle sexual and social norms by casting Jane Avril as the artist’s surrogate in a variant that posits the ideal of a new, self-generative model of artmaking. Juxtapositions of women and printing presses as related signs of reproduction date back to the origins of the technology. Female personifications of print processes appear continuously in early modern illustrated histories of the technology and in advertisements for nineteenth- and twentieth-century print ateliers. Women were associated with the technology of printing, in part, because it was one of the few trades with a genuinely mixed-sex culture. From the technology’s beginnings women worked alongside men and, as Joan Wallach Scott writes, in the nineteenth century the numbers grew exponentially .1 There is no evidence, however, that women ever were employed by art Figure 8.1. Richard Ranft (1862–1931), address card for Imprimerie artistique. Figure 8.2. François-Rupert Carabin (1862–1932), carved bookcase, 1890.Wood, wrought iron, glass, 290×215×83cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo:Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource,N.Y. 190 | JANIS BERGMAN-CARTON presses, the specific context for the hieroglyph. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Though important work remains to be done on the relation of this image to the material conditions of actual women in France’s print trade, my focus here is the realm of the symbolic.2 The earliest couplings of women and printing presses are found in July Monarchy caricatures directed at censorship debates such as J. J. Grandville’s Descente dans les ateliers de la liberté de la presse (fig. 8.4). Credit for the “birth” of a free press is represented in the lithograph as a power struggle between Marianne, the materfamilias, and Louis Philippe, the usurping paternal authority . Marianne is cast as the press’s maternal protector, and the September Figure 8.3. Henri deToulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), wraparound cover for the portfolio L’estampe originale (The original print), 1893. Lithograph, sheet: 227⁄8 ×323⁄4. Publisher: Editions du Journal desArtistes (Andre Marty). Printer: EdwardAncourt, Paris. Edition: 100. Grace M. Mayer Bequest, 1997.The Museum of ModernArt, New York, N.Y. Photo:Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource,N.Y. Figure 8.4. J. J. Grandville (1803– 1847), Descente dans les ateliers de la liberté de la presse, 1835. Lithograph, 28.6 × 46.6 cm (sheet...