Commonplace 86 George & The Male Gaze PART TWO Diana And Her Nymphs At Play.
Paul Delany in his biography of our man points out that George confused the subject and title of this work and refers to it as Susanna, possibly as in Susanna and The Elders also by Domenichino, below. Susanna is the biblical Hebrew girl who was the victim of the male gaze - she was bathing in a stream, in what she took to be privacy. However, she was being watched by some dirty old men. They accused her of being promiscuous, and tried to blackmail her into having sex with them. She refused and was about to be put to death for being a slut, when a defender stepped forward and mounted a challenge to the elders' claims, and defend her honour. Ultimately, justice was served; the dirty old men were executed for their falsehoods and Susanna was freed.
Diana is the Roman goddess of the hunt, childbirth and the moon. She is associated with nature and particularly, woodlands. She also offered support to slaves and plebeians who could claim asylum in her temples. Along with fellow goddesses Minerva and Vesta, she vowed never to marry. She didn't need to - she was a goddess, and had Apollo for a brother. The Greek name for her is Artemis.
The story depicted here is this: Diana/Artemis, when bathing, is being spied on by Actaeon - if you look at the big barking hound just off centre, to its far right, lurking in those bushes, is a watcher/Peeping Tom. Some of the nymphs know he's there - they are alerting their leader to his presence, whilst other nymphs continue to practise their bow-womanship. Has Domenichino captured Diana at the exact moment she has just decided Actaeon's fate - she will turn him into a stag and set her hounds on him to rip him apart? She is about to slay a man because of his male gaze, and she is looking at us - 'we' will be mostly men, because she knows all about who is the watcher and who is the watched in classical Art - and is enjoying that moment of power over 'us'. That's why she is smiling so cheekily, the little minx that she is, and not sexually, She is about to rip a man to pieces! The male gaze is about to be punished!
George said about the painting that he was viewing (that is, the Diana taking a bath with her nymphs): The loathsome 'Susanna' where the woman props herself on her back in shallow water, and is a mere prostitute at play.
Totally different stories: one, a victim of the male gaze; the other is the punisher of the male gaze. An easy mistake to make with the title - but it's more than this. George is guilty of parapraxis - a Freudian slip - an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of an unconscious (dynamically repressed) subdued wish, conflict, or train of thought guided by the ego and the rules of correct behaviour. click
Now, Susanna is a virginal victim of male power and is always taken as not complicit in the offence perpetrated against her. To label her as a prostitute at play - if he mistakes her as Susanna - is the same as saying she had it coming, flashing her body to inflame whoever passed by. How dare she lay there revelling in her nakedness and then complain when men strike? If he is looking at the picture and is thinking of Diana - and he's just got the name wrong - then perhaps he feels the lash of that female gaze and knows he is just as guilty as Actaeon, and so is stealing something from the goddess - her right to privacy. Might a man feel intimidated by the young woman bathing surrounded by her girlfriends, like a beautiful wild creature in an Arcadian paradise, all man-less and happy on it, not asking a man's permission to be there? Ah, but she is a goddess and mere mortals shouldn't be looking at goddesses - let alone getting a perky from doing so - so she knows she will never be a victim of the male gaze, and men will only have themselves to blame if they end up as the hunted.
Let's explore the phrase as if George just made a Freudian slip of the tongue, and he really was thinking of Diana - so, why is she loathsome to him?
Might he be unconsciously employing Freud's mental mechanism of reaction-formation?
Diana is the Roman goddess of the hunt, childbirth and the moon. She is associated with nature and particularly, woodlands. She also offered support to slaves and plebeians who could claim asylum in her temples. Along with fellow goddesses Minerva and Vesta, she vowed never to marry. She didn't need to - she was a goddess, and had Apollo for a brother. The Greek name for her is Artemis.
The story depicted here is this: Diana/Artemis, when bathing, is being spied on by Actaeon - if you look at the big barking hound just off centre, to its far right, lurking in those bushes, is a watcher/Peeping Tom. Some of the nymphs know he's there - they are alerting their leader to his presence, whilst other nymphs continue to practise their bow-womanship. Has Domenichino captured Diana at the exact moment she has just decided Actaeon's fate - she will turn him into a stag and set her hounds on him to rip him apart? She is about to slay a man because of his male gaze, and she is looking at us - 'we' will be mostly men, because she knows all about who is the watcher and who is the watched in classical Art - and is enjoying that moment of power over 'us'. That's why she is smiling so cheekily, the little minx that she is, and not sexually, She is about to rip a man to pieces! The male gaze is about to be punished!
George said about the painting that he was viewing (that is, the Diana taking a bath with her nymphs): The loathsome 'Susanna' where the woman props herself on her back in shallow water, and is a mere prostitute at play.
Totally different stories: one, a victim of the male gaze; the other is the punisher of the male gaze. An easy mistake to make with the title - but it's more than this. George is guilty of parapraxis - a Freudian slip - an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of an unconscious (dynamically repressed) subdued wish, conflict, or train of thought guided by the ego and the rules of correct behaviour. click
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| Diana |
Let's explore the phrase as if George just made a Freudian slip of the tongue, and he really was thinking of Diana - so, why is she loathsome to him?
Here are some synonyms of 'loathsome': nauseating, abominable, despicable, contemptible, reprehensible, execrable, damnable;
hideous, ghastly, vile, horrible, nasty, frightful, obnoxious, gross, foul, offensive
disagreeable, hateful, detestable, abhorrent, repulsive, odious, repugnant, repellent, disgusting, revolting,
sickening.
Look at a close up of
Diana's cherubic, cheeky very immature face... is that what you see? So, what is going on in George's mind?
Might he be unconsciously employing Freud's mental mechanism of reaction-formation?
George clearly finds this Diana sexy - but he feels ashamed and this makes him anxious, and so he claims to find it repulsive. (Think of someone being in thrall to pornography but so ashamed of this that they campaign to have pornography banned - a charge often made against Lord Longford click who had an irrational fear of porn polluting the minds of ordinary folks, which made him spend a great deal of time looking at the stuff).
Why would George be ashamed of looking at a painting? Because nice men shouldn't be looking at girls who like to be naked - and this little Diana is just loving being naked! Classical naked - solemn naked, naked with no enjoyment evident - that was okay. But a happy to be naked girl with sparkling eyes and a cheeky grin was too flagrantly sexy. He does not like to see women free to be little animals enjoying their nakedness - girls who do are, to George, whores. A Roman Patrician 'lady' would never lay back and bask in naked joy and make no attempt to cover herself and avoid the male gaze unless that gaze belonged to her husband - but Diana is a single girl, and she doesn't care what the onlooker thinks - and she is definitely not submissive to the male gaze.
In traditional Art - the sort George looked at - the male gaze determines what is valuable in a woman, and that value is usually based on her appearance, her agreeableness, and her usefulness. Here, George decides what is attractive and what is not in a woman - he is writing to Eduard Bertz (not a man whose gaze fell on many women) of his visit to the Vatican's Sala Rotunda in January 1889:
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| Julia Domna |
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| Plotina |
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| Faustina the Elder |
And in the same Sala Rotunda are three busts of Roman empresses to which I gave close attention. These are (1) Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus; (2) Plotina, the wife of Trajan; (3) the elder Faustina, wife of Antoninus Pius. All are magnificent busts, & representing very different women. Julia Domna is the most pleasing; it is a notably Patrician face; about the fine lips there is a touch of idle scorn & pride, yet not ill-natured. Of rather slow understanding, one would say; a woman to humour and to be friends with. She would take her dignity as a matter of course, but might easily fall below it. - Plotina is anything but beautiful & scarcely even Patrician; & yet one sees that the bust is idealized, for all that. Very heavy features, high cheek-bones, big mouth & chin. A dull, homely woman, but conscientious; there is even a touch of anxiety on her forehead. She looks like a careful housewife, & one to be trusted in small things & great. - Faustina is an intensely aristocratic type of beauty. The good-nature of Julia is here lacking; on her lips & forehead is a cold pride. She has a splendid coronet of woven hair. A woman to be afraid of, unsubduable.
A woman to be afraid of, unsubduable.
Subdue: to overcome, quieten, or bring under control (a feeling or person). To conquer, defeat, vanquish, get the better of, overpower, overwhelm, crush, quash, quell, beat, trounce, subjugate, master, suppress, triumph over, tame, bring to their knees, humble, chasten... An uncharacteristic bit of insight from George - how he fears those strong, unsubduable women! Those women he can't bully into submission. As he was on the run from Edith at the time he took his second trip to Italy, she was very much on his mind.
This Diana and Her Nymphs would be viewed as unconsciously threatening to George, as one whose power over male sexuality is so complete she can turn them into hunted animals and then kill them when she wants, He cannot accept her right to her sexuality and he has to demean her by insulting her with the words a mere prostitute at play. This Diana would be deeply troubling for a man who has complicated sex needs and harbours unresolved sexual issues. But, we know George liked girls with a hint of danger to them - work girls he considered social inferiors, students he taught, pubescent shop-girls, married landladies, his little sisters' chums, statisticians working for the Board of Trade, middle-aged spinsters with English as a second language... He liked his women submissive, biddable, under his thumb, but he deliberately chose women he would be in conflict with in order to have that sort of power tussle that sadists enjoy. By concentrating his conscious desires on those he considered inferior, he gave free rein to his capacity to wallow in the salubrious and seedy side of life but in a superficial, acceptable way. He made feeble attempts to 'redeem' his first two wives, but he didn't really want a goddess in his bed - she would have intimidated him, He wanted naive and helpless women who knew their place and were grateful for his patronage. But he despised them for not being Patrician aristocrats, whilst unconsciously punishing them for agreeing to marry him. Why else did he abandon Marianne to her fate and why else did he hate Edith so much? Marianne aka Nell was too ill to argue and she stayed well out of his way. Edith put up an heroic fight against his tyranny, and he had to flee the country to stop that particular Diana from turning him into dogs' meat!
JOIN ME IN PART THREE TO LOOK AT THE VENUS GEORGE SAID LEFT HIM COLD AND MARK TWAIN CLAIMED WAS PURE PORN.
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