Women artists as self-made persons
Leila's personal identity is that of a self-made artist. We need to go back to the MA years of Leila to realize how it all began. It was then when she changed her name from Louise Zandberg to Leila Sand to her father’s horror and her mother’s delight - George Sand was one of her mother’s heroines - p.52/II. This is certainly a convincing move in terms of the dynamics of her self-styled individuality as an artist and allies itself to the myth of the American dream of a self-made prospering people. From this point on Leila is ‘pissed off’ if someone gives away her original name (let alone to a famous art dealer) as happens later - p.56/II.
What is also relevant for Leila’s search of selfhood is her deliberate choice of George Sand’s name. The reader might be struck that Erica Jong hasn’t picked up not the name of a lady artist for Leila but that of a writer. However the room for parallels between George and Leila Sand are vast though they are always left implicitly in the text. For instance, Leila’s way of managing her career like a man is evident in the male pseudonym George Sand took for her first name. Leila also act like a poet and writer trying to share and follow the life of such a pioneering woman-of-letters. On the other hand Erica Jong seems to credit George Sand’s bravado in being the first woman who dared to pursue both her literary and sexual aspirations. Leila needs such a role model, to step in the tracks of a kindred being and to get a firm sense of the tradition embodied by the myth of George Sand, in order to take it even further in our time. [Hadgikosev 1984]
Leila Sand’s ‘self-portraits’ are also of interest as a clue to her self-assertiveness as an artist. Leila’s face becomes a simile - a key through which to enter the fine arts domain:
My face is like my palette. I know every inch of it - every enlarged pore, every birthmark, every sag of a skin, every discoloration.p. 87/VI
And the words go on mixing and painting a verbal canvas of ‘dulled to mud once hazel-green eyes, titian curls, rosy cheeks, big pink nipples, reddish bush’. Leila’s claim that she knows her face as her palette may probably suggest that her personal and professional selves are of such equal value to her, that she is likely to identify her innermost self with her exterior ‘I’ as an artist. For a complete artist titian curls seem to be just the proper ones but hardly enough of an individual mark. Leila cuts her hair ‘that was Pre-Raphaelite red in a shiny helmet a la Louise Brooks’. Another one of her early ‘idols’ is Louise Brooks who is regarded as a powerful role model alongside George Sand, while the reference to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is focused solely on the luminous colour scale which predominates in Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood paintings. Yet this brief remark brings in an air of the strong and influential group’s impact on both their contemporaries and subsequnet generations. Leila is to grow cogent and resourceful, looking always for the ‘truth in nature’ as the young male artists from the Pre-Raphaelites did. [Atkins 1993]
Surprisingly or not, there are no more self-portraits depicted in the book despite the fact that Any Woman’s Blues is a book that deals with the self-portrayal of Leila Sand. There is a single reference to the ‘usual’ self-portraits that Leila begins ‘when no other model comes to hand’. The unfinished portrait could be found amongst the chaos in her studio which mirrors the chaos in her mind - ‘a million things begun and nothing finished - a wild casting about to find inspiration in the past, in my children, in myself’- p.73/IV. This portrait however turns out to be very enticing for a love-scene. Leila is making love with Dart on her own easel, taking ‘special pleasure’ from the fact that she is leaning over her own easel, on which is ‘perched’ an unfinished portrait of hers. The special feelings this seems to be a prompting are important in building the self-love that Leila needs so much, and which she is destined to discover later in her life. However at this point Isadora enters and argues that this scene is a case of abuse. Perhaps the answer is to be found in Leila's arguments that this is also a story about the ‘fine line between love and self-annihilation’. This is also the fine line between the fierce feminism, represented by Isadora and Erica Jong’s own understanding of a woman artist. Where Isadora and Leila clash is on the fine grounds of feminism claiming that such a scene is graceless and spoiling to the image of the proper feminist; i.e. that a woman who acknowledges her true sexual identity, allowing for a self-defeat and love at the same time is not suited for the realm of feminism. No wonder that the few occasional positive remarks to The Story of O[...] are potentially dangerous for the build-up of Leila Sand as an appropriate member of the feminist sisterhood. Obviously Erica Jong’s own approach is different from the popular Feminism of the 1970-80s. Thus her heroine - Leila Sand is happy to differentiate herself from conventional popular feminist claims and to search for her own place in our contemporary culture. [Jong 1994/a]
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998