Embracing the Sphinx: Woman as Chimera
One widely agreed aphorism about the Symbolists artists is that many of them were misogynists. Why, all one need do is look at the many horrific presentations of the female in the paintings, drawings, and graphic work of Moreau, Redon, Munch, et al. A veritable Greek chorus of critics and art historians accuse these widely diverse male artists of maintaining a united front against woman and her changing role in the late nineteenth century.
This allegation seemed to smack more than just a little of stereotype, especially when I learned about the strong influence of personalities that today we would recognize as Gay upon the Symbolists and Decadent art community. As I myself am a Gay identified artist, I feel I have to reexamine these images through a lens of shared sensibility and temperament. My own relationship with woman’s image is much more complex than can be summed up in a single sentence, and I believe that a similar intricacy lies behind many of the works of this period.
Not that I am claiming that no symbolist or gay male was or is misogynistic; I am sure that some are. But what I am saying is that being a misogynist is not germane to either being a symbolist or a male homosexual. Ever since Stonewall, we have been trying to change the perception that being Gay means that one hates the opposite gender. Yet, even after thirty years of Gay Liberation, how often, for example, when speaking about a Gay man is the euphemism “He doesn’t like women” used to describe him?
The Female Image
A rich body of work about the female image in art has been penned by far more wise and creative hands than mine since the rise of feminist thought in western society. The image of woman in art has been recognized as containing a wealth of meaning. “For woman…cannot be seen as a fixed, preexisting entity or ‘image,’ transformed by this or that historical circumstance, but as a complex, mercurial and problematic signifier, mixed in its messages (Nochlin 35). When looking at Symbolist art, with its emphasis on nuance rather than the overt gesture, its exploration of dream state signifiers, one is required to consider beyond the immediate reaction of the moment. Though he was discussing popular advertisement, “(t)he late, great sociologist Erving Goffman demonstrated how much we can learn about expectations about sex role by looking not through the visual signifiers…but rather at the signifiers themselves. Variables like dominance vs. submission, energy versus passivity, childishness versus maturity can be associated within specified contexts with appropriate indicators of masculinity or femininity…. Goffman’s analytic strategies seem eminently applicable to the… art of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an art in which the representation of woman plays a dominant role( Nochlin47)(emphasis mine). The many femmes fatales in symbolist art beg for a post-feminist reading and differentiation. There is too wide a spectrum to claim that all have an identical meaning.
I will be narrowing this discussion to that of the exhibition of woman as chimera; that is, an imaginary monster made up of incongruous parts; and more specifically that of the Sphinx, in three works: The Caresses, Ferdinand Khnopff (1896), The Sphinx, Gustav Moreau (1886), and The Kiss of The Sphinx, Franz von Stuck (1895).
But Who’s Gay?
The modern Gay identity is primarily a twentieth century phenomenon, though the term “homosexual” was coined by Karoly Maria Kertbeny in a letter to the German activist Karl Ulrichs in May of 1868; contemporaneous with the Symbolist movement. “…(M)en who loved men had become a familiar urban type…the homosexual subculture that had begun to take shape in Carravagio’s time,. . . now burst into public view in the mushrooming cities (Saslow 152). The questioning of such basic societal givens as gender roles, ethics, and the function of sex and religion in the modern industrial city attracted the scrutiny of influential political thinkers. “Voltaire wrote flatly,’ When not accompanied by violence, sodomy should not fall under the sway of criminal law, for it does not violate the rights of any man (Saslow 153).’”
The outpouring of symbolist painting and graphics echoed literary fascination with the androgyne, whose mysterious omnisexuality recalled Ulrich’s third sex, and with the metaphysical links between beauty and spiritual uplift. Already by 1866, the French magazine Le decadent drew art, sex, and religion together in its enthusiasm for current cultural evolution. ‘ Man is becoming more delicate, feminine, and divine (Saslow188) .’
However, it remains difficult to apply the modern categories of Gay and Straight to any pre-Stonewall personality. Even Oscar Wilde, often called the Saint of Gay Liberation, was married to a woman. Perhaps the difficulty lies in the tendency to confuse what one does with what one is.
Older scholars minimized homosexuality by limiting it to behavior, not feelings. But what matters to us today is less ‘who did what to whom’ than who wanted whom –– not just physical acts, but the nature of same sex desire itself: how it feels, how it may combine or conflict with heterosexual passions, blossom or wither in various social climes. ‘Homosexuality’ here embraces a continuum of emotions between people of the same sex, from homosocial friendship to homoerotic intimacy to genital passion, whether or not they culminate in sexual union. The boundaries between them are vague and easily crossed, as revealed in the ambiguous word ‘love’: in English as in many languages, it can mean either spiritual affection or physical desire (Saslow 7).
Thus defining our arena opens up the discussion to a wider range of inquiry. None of the three artists of the herein examined works is as much definitely Gay ( von Stuck was in fact married to a woman), as it seems they were influenced by a Gay sensibility.
Threads of sympathy and collaboration knitted England’s artists to a web of symbolists and decadents stretching from Paris to Brussels, Sicily and Boston. The French poets(‘) Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, who jointly wrote a ‘Sonnet to the Asshole,’ …native capital was permanent host for the opulent cultural banquet, recalled nostalgically as ‘La belle epoque,’ which lingered until World War I (Saslow187).
The Artists
Gustave Moreau (b. 1826), teacher and mentor to younger artists such as Matisse, Rouault, and Khnopff, remains a bit of an enigma in regard to his personal life.
… Gustave Moreau…was (a) reclusive bachelor, whose imaginary realms of misty enchantment, peopled by winged fairies and densely encrusted with bizarre decorative details, lit a beacon for his many followers. Beginning in the 1870’s, his panoply of favorite subjects – eroticized male androgynes and menacing femmes fatales like Salome– constantly hint at what his carefully covered tracks never quite confirm. Among classical and biblical ephebes like Narcissus and Saint Sebastian, he illustrated a novel scene of The Angels of Sodom staring down through the smoky aftermath of the sinful city’s destruction; with the poignant ambivalence of a repressed homosexual who destroyed personal papers and forbade any biography, he paints the avenging spirits as a pair of androgynes hovering arm in arm ( Saslow 189).
The facts of Moreau’s life as well as the hostility evident towards women evident in his paintings tempt one to diagnose a classic Oedipus (!) complex. For most of his adult life, Moreau lived alone with his mother in a large and gloomy mansion in the center of Paris. When she became deaf, he communicated with her by means of little scraps of paper. After her death, which occurred when he was 58, he was inconsolable, and closed off her bedroom and the dining room where they had eaten together. Apart from his mother and one mysterious and long–lasting sentimental friendship, Moreau seems to have had little time for women except in his bizarre fantasies (Bade17).
Ferdinand Khnopff (b.1858) is most frequently described as a dandy and a narcissist, or as having incestuous desires for his sister Marguerite. There is some mention of his masculinizing Marguerite’s features in many of his works and his use of ephebes (androgynous or feminized male figures).
The youngest of the three, Franz von Stuck (b. 1863) spent most of his life in Munich where he taught artists such as Klee, Kadinsky,and Albers at the Munich Academy. Though the only one of the three to be married, his sensual nudes certainly captured the pansexuality of the Decadents.
Reading the Sphinx
Hybrid Monster – half animal, half woman– formed a special category of femme fatale. The Sphinx took on a new lease of life and artists were extraordinarily inventive in adding new creatures to the repertory…(Bade8). Though usually labeled simply a femme fatale expression of misogyny, can we interpret the signifier itself? I think yes. When looking at these three images, I get less a sense of horror than one of innate erotic and psychic power.
Nochlin’s comments (though speaking of Gericaults Head of a White Horse [1816]) are applicable here. “The object of desire may have four legs and a tail, and indeed, be the object of a different kind of desire, but the analogue to a certain kind of erotica makes itself felt in terms of the sheer investment of libidinal energy (68).”
The Gay sensibility of the Sphinx, subconscious though it may be, lies in her intergendered nature. Nineteenth century woman was considered at once to be more animalistic and more divine than man. If she was not “fulfilling” her natural role as Mother, she was prone to becoming debased into barren sensuality. As Mother, however, she was the humanizing and socializing force to ameliorate the bellicose and bestial nature of Man.
The higher qualities of woman are represented by the human head of the Sphinx, while the violence and animalistic qualities of man are literally embodied by the feline torso and legs. The Sphinx is thus a kind of spiritual hermaphrodite, and as a signifier, resonant with the sexual ambiguity of the Symbolist mind set.
Another layer of complexity arises from the additional reading of the Sphinx in the role of anima. “The anima is a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptivness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature and – last, but not least– his relation to the unconsciousness (Von Franz 186).” All these characteristics are very much in keeping with the spirit of Symbolist art. There was an abiding interest in dreams, psychic phenomena, spirituality, and ecstatic union with the divine.
Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man’s mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths.… (T)he anima takes on the role of guide or mediator to the world within and to the Self (Von Franz 192).
Let us not forget the importance of the mythos of the Sphinx. She blocked the mountain pass to the city of Thebes after the death of the king Laius at the hands of his son Oedipus. There she poses a riddle to travelers to the city. “A…subtle manifestation of…anima appears in some fairy tales in the form of a princess who asks her suitors a series of riddles or, perhaps, to hide themselves under her nose. If they cannot give the answers, or if she can find them, they must die – and she invariably wins (Von Franz 190).” When Oedipus answers her riddle, she casts herself from her rocky perch to her death.
In none of these paintings do we see the death of the Sphinx or the death of those who faced her; though in the Moreau, she is surrounded by corpses, we see her gazing serenely, perhaps even intelligently, into the distance (fig.1). In the Khnopff painting (fig.2) she is not only serene, but contentedly smiling. Thus the Self and the Anima are momentarily at a peaceful equilibrium.
This positive function occurs when a man takes seriously the feelings, moods, expectations and fantasies sent by his anima and when he fixes them in some form– for example, in writing, painting, sculpture, musical composition, or dancing. When he works at this patiently and slowly, other more deeply unconscious material wells up from the depths and connects with the earlier material. After a fantasy has been fixed in some specific form it must be examined both intellectually and ethically, with an evaluating feeling reaction ( Von Franz 192).
Also in the Khnopff, but even more so in the von Stuck (fig.3), the Sphinx is a figure of affection and even passion.
“What is surprising here is the figuration of women as sexual beings, active participants in the contest of passion, not merely passive objects of the gaze…. These women– mythic, for the most part, it is true, and creatures of fantasy– are strong and active, not passive victims (Nochlin77).”
The anima is not just something to be conquered, but a force to be actively sought and embraced. The patriarchal oppressor of church and state “slain”, this ecstatic union gives rise to the victorious and fully integrated Self.
Bibliography
Von Franz,M.L. Man and His Symbols, Part 3 The Process of Individuation, London: Aldus Books, 1964
Dorra,Henri. Symbolist Art Theories. Los Angeles: University of California UP, 1994
Gibson, Michael. Symbolism. Koln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag GmbH., 1999
Saslow,James M. Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, New York: Penguin Putnam, Inc., 1999
Nochlin, Linda. Representing Women, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999
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