Bodying Forth the Truth
SIMON, JOHN
Bodying Forth the Truth Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form By Marina Warner Atheneum. 417 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by John Simon Painstakingly researched, fulsome-ly...
...Granted, a great many books do not depend on originality...
...Third, that in the very societies where female bodies were put to moral, patriotic, religious, and esthetic uses, the social and political positions of women were markedly inferior to those of men...
...Again, after discussing the story and iconography of Godiva as an example of "good" nudity, the author, in a note, summarizes the plots of Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna and an obscure pantomime in which Colette once appeared, only because both feature a woman revealing herself nude to a man...
...for another, they were not works of allegorical art...
...that would sound better coming from someone who did not write "less than four books," "cannot help but," "both destiny, moira, and daimon," "unbeknownst," "try and imagine," "Godiva-typetale," and numerous other solecisms large and small...
...The first point we knew all along...
...and photography, a cognate field, is barely noted...
...That, I fear, is poppycock...
...Enough ofthis.Arethereno redeeming features to the book...
...She has no objection, however, to apho-tograph of Imogen Cunningham and her nude model, Twinka, with the lat-ter's nipples similarly erect, presumably because it was taken by a woman, Judy Dater...
...Sometimes the flak's vocabulary runs dry, and we are left with derisory praise: "Adrian Stokes, in his expressive Reflections on theNude," followed by an excerpt that is anything but expressive...
...Still more unprofessional is Warner's ingenuous but irritating way of glowingly praising almost everyone she quotes— especially questionable because many of her authorities are feminist writers and artists of dubious stature...
...And enjoys herself all the while...
...Here Warner indulges in a considerable excursus about three medieval female luminaries, Hroswitha of Ganders-heim, Hildegard of Bingen, and Had-ewijch of Brabant, who are only very marginally relevant to her topic...
...The faulty parallelism at the end brings me to the third problem with the book: exceedingly sloppy grammar and syntax...
...here, too, her previous books about the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc (from a feminist point of view) are put to renewed use...
...In "The Bed of Odysseus," marriage is the theme...
...but it lacks sound motivation forabookof417 pages...
...It is merely that "in our use of the female as sign, in text and image, we need to generate a philosophy of possibilities, not reaction...
...Warner revels in an esoteric vocabulary (apotropaic, sauromach, iconodulia, ecphrasis, teratology, hierodule, etc...
...This brings us to " Part Three: The Body in Allegory...
...The rhyme here is better than the reason...
...In "Part Two: The Figure in Myth," we get a first chapter,'' Engendered Images," dealing with sundry myths of giving birth and their artistic representation...
...in"The Aegis of Athena," the chaste warrior maiden sprung from her father's head (a put-down of women, of course...
...Inconsistency is frequent: Warner is shocked to the point of mispunctuation by the "grisly example"of a Swedish statue, "a bared female torso—with nipples sculpted in an emphatic state of arousal—[that] could still be considered eloquent of freedom in a socialist country—in 1955...
...But the moment one tries to derive a coherent theory from all this, the most one can come up with is that "voluptuous virtuosity," even from a Rubens, "attenuates the nude's significance" when the context is not overtly erotic...
...Her structure is one of them...
...How much of Maidens and Monuments, with all of its monumental background reading, is quoted or paraphrased from other books rather than the author's own insight...
...of the lOth-century Abbot Odo of Cluny's inveighing against women, "We are repelled to touch vomit and ordure even with our fingertips...
...Zeitlin has written in an inspiring and brilliant essay," "the new 'essentialism' of which Susan Griffin is the most inspired and interesting exponent," and so on and on, the quotations rarely living up to their advance publicity...
...Thus a long account of the exploits of the Greenham women protesters, though rendered with great empathy and not uninteresting, is scarcely to the point, even if these women did occasionally strip to symbolic nudity...
...But if the inclusions often seem capricious, the exclusions appear even more so...
...But the author is not a radical feminist and would not discard allegorical figures of women nude, clothed or armored...
...To substantiate its possibility, Warner (leaning on Anne Hollander's Seeing Through Clothes) adduces one example, Thomas Eakins' painting "William Rush Carving the Schuylkill River,' where, she argues, the "careful study of a work of art in the process of being made acknowledges that art is a construction, that the nude is used as a sign, but that the sign is inhabited by a real individual...
...There are three maj or problems with Warner's approach...
...Part One: The Female Presence" contains chapters on New York's Statue of Liberty, on public art in the streets of Paris, and on certain London monuments, along with special emphasis on some caricatures in the press—both friendly and hostile—of Margaret Thatcher as Britannia...
...The fuzziness often extends to the underlying logic, as in "an impassioned though often fine condemnation," where the "though" is nonsensical: Why shouldn't passion be fine...
...When more women become artists, they will no doubt similarly reify the male body (something a lot of male artists have always done, though Warner passes over the fact in near-silence), and so redress the balance—if redress is needed...
...Better than that, there are useful bits of history, art history, iconography, and interpretation of myths scattered throughout the book...
...always equally high-minded and otiose...
...How did Eakins demonstrate this real individuality...
...Galba, too, gets duly indexed...
...Works of this kind are not unnecessary or unwelcome, provided they can keep us sufficiently instructed and entertained and surprised along the way...
...it is to eroticize the male one, if such a thing is still necessary...
...This, in sum, is what Warner has to tell us: First, that the body of a girl or woman has consistently been used in art to express a number of abstract ideas, such as Liberty, Justice, Victory, Fortune...
...Similarly, several pages about the Dou-khobors in Canada marching about naked for religious reasons are irrelevant: For one thing, the stripped bodies were both female and male...
...the second and third points, we had, at the very least, powerful inklings of...
...There are numerous references to misogynist patristic lore, albeit, like so much else, second-hand, since Warner was clearly not about to slog and slush through Jacques Paul Migne's endless Patrologia...
...We gather forthwith that female allegorical figures can have positive and negative values, or both at once...
...It then emerges that Warner will concern herself with literature as well as with art, and that Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, a host of Greek and Roman poets, playwrights, historians, and philosophers, and the Bible, among others, will be examined...
...and that the absence of a waterfowl is particularly aphrodisiac...
...Whaaat...
...And who, after her well-padded bibliography, produces a bulging index including among its items "Heliogabalus, Roman Emperor," referring to a passage in the text stating that, except for its mountainous bosom, a certain inferior statue might be mistaken for "a Galba of Heliogabalus...
...Subtitled The Allegory of the Female Form, it is a grab bag of relevant, vaguely apposite and irrelevant material, rather like a PhD thesis by a sedulous but not especially judicious student who, having done several years' worth of assiduous reading and note-taking, cannot bring herself to jettison an iota of her findings...
...Reviewed by John Simon Painstakingly researched, fulsome-ly documented, commandingly (though far from correctly) written, Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens strikes me as one of the least necessary and most bizarrely organized books I have encountered in recent years...
...And what of "paregoric memories of woodlands" where something less medical, e.g., "soothing" is called for...
...Warner's scholarship is made suspect from the very Foreword, where we read about "the allegorical character of John Voxd'sHighNoon,'' even though, as the lowliest movie buff knows, thefilmwas directed by Fred Zinnemann...
...No less troubling than the questions of structure are those of authorship and authenticity...
...As more women become artists, and more homosexuals are able to paint and sculpt their fantasies, a companion volume, The Allegory of the Male Form, could easily be written—assuming anyone were deluded enough to feel a need for it...
...The Slipped Chiton" discusses women with one bare breast (based on representations of the Amazons) or two (as Charity suckling the needy—oddly enough, without any discussion of the Caritas Romana—or as Liberty leading the people to victory), barebreastedness along with barefoot-edness turning them into a part of nature...
...Or: "the double inversion of natural law...
...or to personify Rome, France (Marianne), Britannia, etc...
...that there is nothing unerotic about a "rather thin contemporary girl"—quite the contrary...
...With so loose a subject it becomes easy to ramble, and the author is not one to resist...
...For all the learned references and quotations—not to mention the profusion of epigraphs sprinkled on the heads of every section and chapter, ranging from Artemidorus and Empedocles through Kafka and Walter Benjamin to Barthes, Lacan and a number of prestigious poets, plus some pop figures such as Lionel Bart—Warner often betrays a basic dimness: She speaks of "the Moi-rai and the Fates" as if those were different things, or misidentifies a passage from Euripides' Ion as "Aristophanes, op...
...has written,' "asFromal...
...Her insen-sitivity to words prevents Warner from seeing the unsolicited joke in naked female saints who "follow suit," or the barbarousness of "Dream figures from the ideal world the Virtues may be, but their translation into paint, stone, material of all kinds and into text and its movement places them in consciousness, and there, their weapons, however big and threatening, do not automatically refer, in this writer's opinion, to the phallus, unless the sphere of reference is itself sexual...
...cit., 1048-60, p. 72...
...That is a pious wish periodically expressed by journalists (Warner is an English upper-echelon journalist, radio and television broadcaster, and writer of adult and children's fiction) in diverse openly or veiledly moralizing forms...
...Fourth, that we cannot reject past art out of hand, yet it would be better for future art not to reify women and their bodies, not to serve male suprema-cism and lust...
...Finally, in "Nuda Veritas," we reach full nakedness, but such totally unencumbered naturalness merely emphasizes the Otherness—if not, indeed, the rapability—of woman...
...The solution is not to de-eroticize the female body, if such a thing were possible...
...On the other hand, "to condemn altogether the applied erotic power of the female body entails denying an aspect of the human condition...
...The surrealists, who made very curious use of the female body, are hardly mentioned—one brief reference to Delvaux is all...
...of a lecture to the Royal Academy of 1880, in which Henry Weekes informed his audience that "the absence of color in a statue" has the beneficent effect of allowing "the most vulgarly constituted mind [to] contemplate it without its causing any feeling of the sensual kind...
...In an epilogue, "The Eyes of Tiresi-as," the hermaphroditic seer becomes a symbol of Warner's hopes for a sort of unisex art...
...Thus we learn of a carving in Barcelona where the Virgin feeds the infant Jesus with a bottle...
...That is not to say there isn't in Monuments and Maidens the stuff of a pregnant, solid essay or two...
...Does this mean grabbing the nearest man, stripping him to a loincloth, and stretching him across our knees...
...And like all feminists— even the moderate ones among whom she clearly belongs—she is carried away by her zeal...
...The Goddess of Success" is Tyche or Fortuna in various guises, and as Nike, goddess of victory, she bleeds almost imperceptibly into the next chapter, "The Sword of Justice...
...Warner's book can be pretty much deduced from its table of contents, however, and that isoneofthe troubles with it...
...334-5," as though that famous poem could not be found anywhere else, or needed footnoting at all...
...The bibliography is enormous and, like the notes, sometimes ludicrous...
...The author even considers the model a dryad, part of nature and her Otherness, yet she calls the picture "witty and charming...
...Indeed, one could as readily argue the opposite: that the model in Eakins' painting is more arousing for being a flesh-and-blood-and-tossed-off-clothes woman...
...It is in equal parts studentish and ostentatious for Warner, after providing her own adequate translation of a passage from Frangois Villon, to annotate: "See Robert Lowell, Imitations (London, 1961), p. 19 for another, very free, version...
...What, in fact, are we to make of an author who is continually thanking, no matter how scrupulously and touchingly, this one and that for calling such and such to her attention or looking up such and such for her...
...For a quotation from "To His Coy Mistress" we get a reference to " The New Oxford Book of English Verse, pp...
...Warner sounds here dangerously like the unhappy Henry Weekes...
...Or: " Hesiod...
...Or: "man still falls by woman's guile...
...to expand our consciousness of one another, and an understanding of the female, not limit the areas of search, experiment and inquiry...
...created a fancy which every little girl has at one time believed revealed mean something personal...
...or to embody such mythical figures as Eve, Athena, Galatea, and Judith of Bethulia...
...to individual generosity and courtesy and consideration, to a wider caritas...
...The point is "to tap [this erotic power] and make it fructify...
...There and in the following chapter, "Lady Wisdom," we see how a good many pagan maidens and mothers became Christian icons, and how Caritas and Sapientia finally blended into the Virgin Mary...
...they are content to document and confirm what, intuitively and inchoately, we already knew...
...In "The Sieve of Tuccia," we get the chaste woman falsely accused, and in the image of the Vestal miraculously carrying water in a sieve, the symbolism of leaky and nonleaky vessels...
...It begins with "The Making of Pandora," treating of Creation myths: Pandora, Eve, and the related Pygmalion story...
...or thinks that affranchie in Baudelaire's "La Belle Dorothee" means "freed from the museums" and not simply "freedwoman.' Furthermore, I tend to distrust scholarly works that bracket Horace and Andrew Marvell with the song "As Time Goes By" inthemovie Casablanca, suggesting that they made equally notable contributions to the carpe diem topos...
...Opening the book makes one feel like a terzo incommodo intruding on an impassioned dialogue between a star pupil and her thesis director...
...Second, that the reason for making these figures female had to do partly with the underlying male supremacist myths, partly with grammars in which moral abstractions tend to be nouns of the female gender, and partly with male artists viewing women either as obj ects of their sexual fantasies or as manifestations of Otherness particularly suited to allegorical use...
...and the fourth point—a steady undercurrent that asserts itself strongly at the end— makes good reading only for those who relish feminist tracts...
...How then can we ever want to embrace what is merely a sack of rottenness...
...She gushes with phrases like "as Clifford Geertz has penetratingly observed," "as Peter Dronke, the most sensitive and learned translator and exponent...
...The artist must perform "that most desirable entropy [?], the broadening of sexual desire to enliven other impluses...
...Yes, some amusing details do crop up almost parenthetically...
...of the annual Godiva pageant where the Lady wears leotards and once, in 1919, the horse wore trousers too...
...Paregoric" is what my stomach needs after exposure to such prose...
...And what are we to make of the pretentiousness of our not being able to see a certain painting "without experiencingpieta...
...the occasional forays into literature look arbitrary, isolated, puny...
...Now the theme of male artists' and other men's ambivalence toward women comes to a head: Woman as object of desire but also as cause of fear and deprecation...
...Warner's swinging, with-it references become particularly transparent when couched in highfalutin, clotted and opaque prose: "A characteristic 20th-century difference is that Superman is presented as the hidden but antithetic Clark Kent, and no longer brought into play as a single aspect of the soul, with its multiple virtu-ality [sic], as a medieval writer would have admitted, or a contemporary psychologist recognize...
...Consider this: "It mortifies the body to strip it, to endure cold and heat without clothing, that distinctive outer sign of European culture, and in the process of mortification it [?] sanctifies it...
...By displaying the model's clothes piled up on a nearby chair, by depicting an elderly chaperone knitting away, by choosing as a model" no gleaming white marble wrinkle-free ideal form, but a slender, rather thin contemporary girl" who does not have on her shoulder a waterfowl such as Rush is carving on his statue, but makes do with a plain book to suggest the bird—in short, a girl who "in her nudity still belongs to the world of civilization...
...are acceptable," "where women have always had our being," "whom [sic] the Third Republic thought could embody France," and even a nonexistent "be-sport themselves" for "disport themselves...
...In any case, the book should have stuck to art...
...appears...
...Like all tendentious historians, Warner suffers from preferring her thesis to mere history...
Vol. 68 • December 1985 • No. 16
