More on the women artists
To round off this discussion about professional identities, there are few remarkable instances of Erica Jong elaborating on real historical women artist’s identities, which can further support our thesis on Leila Sand. By bringing up this subject the narrator, however, sticks to her basic concerns of the pressing issues of the contemporary woman artist. Perhaps that is also the reason for deviating for a while from her protagonist and inventing two more sidestory characters of women artists - Cordelia Herald and Rivka Landesmann.
Erica Jong’s reclaiming of women artists
It is quite intriguing that it is Dart’s father, Mr. Donegal- the paragon of the patriarchal WASP-establishment, who is the first in the book to open this highly neglected by the society subject of women artists, something in which he claims ‘to be knowledgeable’. He asks what Leila thought of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Rosa Bonheur - all the icons and would-be myths of women old masters, newly ‘discovered’ by feminist art history at that. Leila’s identification with and respect for them could be summed up in her great admiration - p.41/II. Unsurprisingly Mr. Donegal keeps asking whether women artists of the 1980s were still discriminated against. One could assume that Leila’s view on contemporary lady artists is realistic enough when she answers that the discrimination ‘was still there but had taken new forms’. These are those new forms of the old myth of women artists we are actually concerned with in this paper. The old myth needs to be revisited now and then as if it can bring good luck, protection and bits of wisdom for any woman artist. Isn’t that what myths are for?... And Leila Sand does’t miss to make use of them, calling up the ghosts of female artists of the past to protect her ‘like ranks of guardian angels, painted in wet lime on some Venetian ceiling’. Here are but a few of the ghosts: Marietta Robusti, ‘La Tintoretta’, Lavina Fontana, Rosalba Carriera, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Angelika Kaufmann, Anna Peale, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisor, Mary Cassat, Kathe Kollwitz, Paula Moderson-Becker, Vanessa Bell, Georgia O’Keeffe. [All mentioned in the very special essay by Linda Nochlin].These are the ghosts of the real teachers of Leila:
All the technique, the love, the infinite capacity for taking pains, the courage, the guts, the heart of these women who drew and painted against all odds, comes into my fingers. Oh, the longing to make the difficult look easy! I want to be like one of those old fresco painters who had such talent, such craft, such knowledge of chemistry, even, that they could put down the colour before the lime had time to dry, leaving the illusion of spezzatura - that wonderful Italian ideal of making the difficult look easy - for all eternity, or at least five hundred years. p.185/XI
What Leila dreams to be like is one of those infinitely courageous women painters. No wonder her dream invokes so many attributes of power and courage in the paragraph above. Leila dreams to live up to her own role models despite the social conventions which are still setting up difficulties on any woman artist’s road. Isn’t that a clear sign that one can follow one’s own myths with the only risk that one might be ostracized and outcast by the community? Despite all her unusually wide recognition Leila Sand keeps feeling as an outcast. It is even evident in her craving to be like the mythical rebel - Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun. Out of the ‘wide’ range of women artists Leila picks up only her - the one who lived by her brush and survived in very troubled times. Elisabeth’s personal story is far more than an exemple to Leila. There is a brief account of that mythical/inspiring story which Erica Jong accommodates in the anxieties of her Leila Sand.
Leila as the mythical rebel Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun
As a court painter to Marie Antoinette, Elisabeth became penniless because her husband spent all the money and she had to make her fortune anew, painting landscapes, touring around the European courts. In England, where Sir Joshua Reynolds still ruled the taste of the time, he ‘condescended to praise her even though she was a woman’. She returned to Paris, to paint Napoleon’s court, published her Souvenirs, and died at 87.
What a life! If Vigee-Lebrun could do it during the French Revolution, why am I rushing headlong into the arms of Danny Doland? 206,7/XII
The exclamation conveys both Leila’s admiration and her eagerness to be like Elisabeth. Leila does not belong to the world of the proper millionaires like Danny’s, nor could she be part of their collections. But there is probably another implication of her life-parallel with Elisabeth. The troubled times of the French Revolution are as much troubled as the times of the Women’s movement from the late 1960s up until now for women artists in particular. The verb ‘condescend’ is still ruling the popular attitude towards those rare birds, creative women. If you are a woman and if you dare to aspire to the land reserved for the creative man you might be sure that you will still be treated in the vein of Sir Joshua Reynolds: ‘Even though you are a woman’. What turns quite convincing is that Elisabeth’s story is also told in the ‘you’ point of view, which cuts short the temporal distance and extends a promising invitation for the reader’s identification with Elisabeth/Leila. Erica Jong goes as far as to suggest that Elisabeth’s husband who ruined his wife and then ‘trimmed his sails to the prevailing wind’ might as well be ‘your husband’, might as well be Danny Doland, himself. Thus Elisabeth’s blues are no longer confined to her historical moment but to any woman’s blues.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998