Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (review)

The eighteenth century was characterized by tension and change in every sphere. The Enlightenment set the stage for the great social upheavals of the modern world, as absolute monarchies and hereditary aristocracies were challenged the world over. In the realms of art and music the delicate materialism of the rococo style was superseded by the antique sparseness of neoclassicism, whereas in the sphere of poetry the Sturm und Drang movement looked toward nineteenth-century romanticism. Yet despite all that was new and prophetic in this rational era, past traditions still held sway. This was especially evident in medical views of women, which summoned powerful conventions to justify barring the female sex from the realm of creative genius.

Mary D. Sheriff's book is devoted to the concept of "enthusiasm." While this term today refers to high-spirited advocacy, its primal meaning was "possession by a god." The person possessed, originally an oracle, was believed to have been entered by the spirit, knowledge, or power of the god—hence the term "divine inspiration." Eighteenth-century medical tradition, drawing upon Greek humoral theory, defined "enthusiasm" as a kind of ecstatic delirium, which impelled the creative impulse. Sheriff applies this concept to women, demonstrating the belief that they were more susceptible to uncontrolled enthusiasm and its negative consequences—sexual deviance and mental illness. As evidence, she employs works of art by such rococo masters as Watteau, Chardin, and Greuze, which picture highly sexualized women, marginalized by their uncontrolled erotic imaginings. By contrast, she shows how ancient mythologies and traditions worked to normalize male artists seized by the same rapture. This double standard is demonstrated in Sheriff's deft analyses of three important figures in eighteenth-century cultural discourse: Pygmalion, the male artist who made and loved his own creation; Sappho, the deviant woman; and Héloïse, whose erotic letters kindled the impressionable imaginations of female readers.

This makes interesting reading, even if the discussion tends toward a rather myopic treatment of medical definitions of femininity. One yearns for some mention of astrological theory, female anatomy, or even a hint of the social situation that instigated the need to marginalize women in such a way. Most of the concepts introduced as defining eighteenth-century views—the need to control women's reading, their weak and impressionable minds, their susceptibility to nymphomania, and their fundamental instability—were mainstays of social and medical discourse in the seventeenth century and earlier. Even the concept of enthusiasm is part of the age-old discourse of melancholia, where it applied to prophets, saints, and hermits said to suffer from "religious melancholy."

Sheriff's analyses of art are similarly one-dimensional. Augustine Bernard d'Agesci's delicious Lady Reading the Letters of Héloïse and Abelard, which graces the book's jacket, is an example: art historians familiar with basic iconographic traditions would have much more to say about the foreground still life of book, letter, pearls, and sheet music than that it has the ability to "cross the distance between herself (the viewer) and the painted woman" (p. 207); to an eighteenth-century audience, these carefully chosen objects would have supplied an obvious and specific context in which to place the voluptuous female subject. In this instance, as elsewhere, the book's argument is so caught up in the weighty apparatus of contemporary theoretical rhetoric that discussion of the eighteenth century becomes anachronistic.

Despite these difficulties, Sheriff effectively shows how eighteenth-century medicine and art joined forces to communicate and define the roles and capabilities of women in society. In the end, Moved by Love reinforces this powerful, often unacknowledged, partnership.