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CHAPTER฀THREE฀ BEAUTIFUL฀OBJECTS ฀ 47 When Porter’s Princess walked the streets of her father’s kingdom, fascinated male onlookers “searched the folds of her robes with cautious stares, wishing their eyes were hands; and turned away, saying each one to himself, ‘Not even the gods know what manner of woman is concealed in that robe!’”1 Curiosity , fear, and desire draw these male spectators to the Princess’s armored body. Because she has rejected the simple shifts that would have coded her physical state for her culture, her body becomes undefined, potentially a threat, for if a different “manner of woman” is hidden under the thick robes, what then of the cultural order that hitherto had determined gender identity? Seizing control of her own body, the Princess seizes control of the central medium on which her culture institutionalizes its gender codes. The cautious and curious gaze of these male spectators reveals their need to know whether those codes yet remain intact, whether they, as men in a patriarchal order, yet retain their power. As in so many other fictional moments in Porter’s work, the depiction of the Princess and her anxious audience raises questions crucial to a woman artist: Whose cultural and aesthetic resource is the female body? Who controls that body’s meanings? For whom does the female body perform those meanings ? How does a woman transform herself from an object in someone else’s discourse to a self-creator, a professional artist? In the world of Porter’s Princess, the female body traditionally served as medium for male cultural scripts. So too in the Western art world Porter sought to enter. In the high form of painting, for example, “the traditional image of the female nude in fine art not only reinforces a view of women as erotic objects, it also helps maintain an ideological fiction in which men are always seen as creative artists and women as their passive models.”2 As we have already seen, Porter was keenly attentive to the ways in which her own move into the posi- 48฀ ~฀ C H A P T E R ฀ T H R E E tion of creative artist threatened her identity as a woman. In a group of stories written early in her career, she turned her gender-thinking to the relationship of male artist and female subject, exploring how women respond to being models, muses, or erotic objects. At the same time, she is attentive to the men’s experience within this traditional relation, for the female body not only serves as inspiration and subject matter for male artists, but in the representations they create, men inscribe their fears and desires. Why have women participated in this relationship for centuries, Porter asks. Where do women find pleasure and reward sufficient to sustain and justify their continued role as the medium through which men represent their dominance? On July 5, 1925, at the near-center of the twenties, Porter reviewed at length the published proceedings of a national symposium: “Sex and Civilization: Our Changing Morality.”3 “Sex and Civilization” collects statements by notable contemporary thinkers, male and female, on the striking changes in sexual behavior and gender roles witnessed since the turn of the century. Porter’s review not only summarizes and analyzes the symposium but also contains significant personal responses; she used the symposium as a way to question her own position on the relations between the sexes and to address the connections between art and gender that were much on her mind throughout the decade. The most personal and significant section of Porter’s review brings together three different essays, each addressing the relations between women, men, and the arts. She begins with Sylvia Kopald’s query, “Where Are the Women Geniuses?” Kopald argues that genius springs from freedom; once women are free “from the petty personal demands of others, [they] will also do great work in the arts.” Kopald’s argument undoubtedly appealed to Porter, but in her review, she juxtaposes Kopald’s thesis with another by the anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser, who argues that “woman’s greatest work of art is the child . . . and her creativeness expresses itself best in domestic craftsmanship.” “This is as it should be,” Goldenweiser affirms. The “capacity for self-liberation is a male characteristic.” Porter then adds to these seemingly contradictory arguments a third posited by Beatrice M. Hinkle, a well-known New York psychoanalyst. In her essay, “Women and the New...

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