Modernity, Modernism and Sexual Difference, Again

FRANCESCA BERRY

Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (eds.), The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender,
Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, (Critical
Perspectives in Art History, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York,
2006), 40 b&w ills., 185pp., hardback ISBN 0-7190-6784-7, £55.00

Charles Harrison, Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art,
(The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2005), 50 colour plates, 130
halftone ills., 291pp., hardback ISBN 0-226-31797-8, $65.00

Sexual difference has dominated feminist analysis of nineteenth-century French art

and its practices since the publication in 1988 of Griselda Pollock’s ‘Modernity and
the Spaces of Femininity’.i Whilst Pollock’s seemingly rigid definition of masculine
and feminine experience in relation to representational and social space was subject to
early critique and revision, sexual difference has maintained its prominence as the
analytical model of choice.ii As a means of deconstructing the social, historical and
psychic processes invested in deep structural concepts such as ‘the ideology of
separate spheres’ and the refracted symbolisation of these processes in images, sexual
difference has proved extremely useful.iii

Feminist critics have, however, undervalued the central role played by sexual
difference in the technical development of modernist painting. Conversely, its
material effects have been overstated in feminist accounts of women’s relationship to
urban modernity. Or these, at least, are the claims made respectively in Painting the
Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art by Charles Harrison and The Invisible
Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, a
collection of essays edited and introduced by Aruna d’Souza and Tom McDonough.
These books share a common intent: to re-assess the historical impact of sexual
difference in order to re-dress some of the negative assumptions that have accrued
around mid to late nineteenth-century French art and visual culture. Having identified
signs of generalisation and closure in aspects of the feminist literary canon, each
proposes a less negative assessment of one of the primary objects of feminist critique.
Harrison concerns himself with the viewer’s response to the representation of female
figures in the modernist paintings of, amongst others, Manet, Degas and Renoir. He
forwards a provocative argument claiming the recognition of sexual difference as the
motor of development in modernist painting. Harrison hopes that his book will be
recognised as ‘a contribution rather than a counter to the feminist project’ (p. xi).
D’Souza, McDonough and their contributors return to the flâneur and flâneuse as
asymmetrical metaphors for gendered experiences of Parisian public space. They aim
to build on recent extra-disciplinary scholarship ‘as a means to extend and even
question the dominant model within feminist art history’: Pollock’s 1988 essay (p. 1).
Claims to consolidation are honest in that the thematic categories of The Invisible
Flâneuse have been established elsewhere.

For all that these books converge around a will to use feminist art history’s primary
tropes (space and the gaze) to look again at its primary objects, (the representation of
femininity and the flâneurial metaphor) they are very different kinds of study. Not
least because The Invisble Flâneuse is an edited collection of essays concerning urban
modernity and the broad range of visual and textual experiences available, or not, to
nineteenth-century male and female audiences. Conversely, Painting the Difference is
a single-authored book concerning the subjective effects of ‘exceptional’ modernist
paintings produced between 1863 and the present; effects seemingly available to all
sympathetic viewers regardless of sexual identity or the passage of time. The Invisible
Flâneuse is exactly the kind of book Harrison would seem to have in mind when he
asserts pessimistically of the feminist alignment of art history and visual studies, that
‘in the retrodictive world of postmodern visual culture everything gets to be good of
its kind’ (p. 257). His forceful, though not entirely unashamed, desire to align the
modernist canon with enlightened sexual politics seems intended to challenge current
disciplinary orthodoxies in a way that The Invisible Flâneuse is not.

‘Not the flâneur again?’ we might indeed ask, thereby echoing the title to one of the
essays of The Invisible Flâneuse. A series of questions frame this collection. These
include: was there either discursively or in practice a feminine equivalent to the
flâneur? Were women’s experiences of the city as socially proscribed as has been
claimed? Was the discursive construction of flâneurial authority actually a symptom
of masculine anxiety? Are the flâneur and flâneuse still useful analytical categories?
Such questions are not new. They characterise two decades worth of responses to the
work of Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock.iv Amongst others, cultural geographers and
literary theorists have established more complex feminine spatial practices and
exposed to critique the presumed authority of the flâneurial metaphor.v This book
provides a welcome return to the visual terrain of nineteenth-century Paris, tracking
‘the elusive flâneuse in and out of visibility across a variety of visual media’ whilst
questioning the ‘fictive mastery’ of the flâneurial gaze (p. 2). The collection is
composed of an introduction and eleven essays, including an essay by Janet Wolff, an
afterword by Linda Nochlin and transcripts of artistic performances by Simon Leung
and Helen Scalway. D’Souza and McDonough provide a scholarly introduction that
locates their book as a development within an ongoing feminist debate. They
elucidate the considerable contribution and key drawbacks of Wolff’s and Pollock’s
essays in which both, in different ways, argued that there was no feminine equivalent
to the flâneur.vi Via Elizabeth Wilson’s 1992 response to Wolff and Pollock, D’Souza
and McDonough direct particular criticism at the distorted emphasis Pollock
attributed to the ideological formation of historical subjectivities.vii Contributors are
challenged to maintain the political force of the 1980s interventions, whilst
accounting for the actual and symbolic presence of women in the public spaces of
Paris.

Janet Wolff is the first to take up the challenge, but not with a new essay or one
specifically about Paris. Wolff’s essay is reprinted from her 2003 book,
AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States.viii She
maintains her 1985 position that there was no feminine equivalent to the flâneur and
moreover, that there is no political value in continuing the search for one. Wolff alerts
the reader to the classic Baudelairean construction of the flâneur as a necessarily
masculine figure anonymously wandering the city, self-reflexively observing without
obvious intent.ix The flâneuse cannot be constructed out of a female shopper or the
cinema-goer - some of the more common flâneurial manifestations of feminist
literature.x It is only, Wolff persuasively argues, in abandoning the flâneurial
paradigm and uncritically rigid definitions of public and private space that ‘the micro-
practices of urban living’ enacted by women, the real women that haunt the discourses
of modernity, will become visible (p. 28).

In the remaining essays, the flâneurial paradigm is certainly retained, even as its
spatial and scopic authority is questioned. These essays can be grouped thematically
into those concerned, firstly, with women’s experiential negotiation of urban spaces;
secondly, those problematising flâneurial authority; and finally, those examining
flânerie within the context of consumption. Of those working within the parameters of
the first category, Greg M. Thomas returns to a familiar subject: the representation of
women in Parisian parks in the work of Morisot, Cassatt and Manet.xi His analysis of
the work of Cassatt and Morisot is, perhaps, less interesting than his argument about
the public/private hybridity manifested in Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries (1862).
Thomas identifies with the flâneurial attitude the several female figures that, like their
male counterparts, return the viewer’s gaze. In a manner typical of the multiple
narratives this collection supports, Marni Kessler proposes a contradictory
interpretation of these same figures’ imaginative capacity for looking in her topical
analysis of the veil. Kessler invites us to imagine what the experience of looking
might actually be like for the painting’s five figures. Of one of the figures identified
by Thomas as a kind of flâneuse, Kessler claims the veil ‘infiltrates her visual field,
reminding her of her position within the social hierarchy’ (p. 60). Kessler is prompted
to see displaced veiling practices in the surface patterns and focal shifts of the
painting. Suggesting, perhaps, an imaginatively veiled (feminine) subject position for
the viewer? Finally, Helen Scalway transports the issue of women’s negotiation of
urban space to a late twentieth-century context with her experiential account of
walking London. The narrative shifts between feelings of belonging and anxiety
manifested in acute sensitivity to route choices, visual foci and walking pace. Even as
these essays insist upon women’s physical presence in public space, that presence is
necessarily negotiated in relation to the social codes of sexual difference.

Within the category of essays contributing to the deconstruction of flâneurial

authority we might include those by Ting Chang and Tom McDonough. In the manner
of Walter Benjamin’s flâneurs mastering ‘the art of getting lost’, Théodore Duret and
other literary tourists pursued a ‘radical loss of their bearings’ in China and Japan.xii
Yet neither were they able to be anonymous in the crowd nor did they choose to
wander and look spontaneously. Moreover, Chang detects a re-assuring ‘retreat to
systematicity’ in the collecting of Asian objets d’art (pp. 69-70). Tom McDonough
similarly identifies projections of a threatening difference in the reports of random
street attacks that dominated the Parisian press of 1844. Given that many of these
crimes were eventually found to have been invented, McDonough’s conclusion seems
entirely apposite: these violent apparitions stemmed from the bourgeoisie’s fear of
itself in the guise of the anonymous passer-by. In this respect the post-1848
mythological figure of the flâneur seems to function both as a reassurance to the
fragile bourgeois ego and as a potent symbol of its own anxiety. Simon Leung’s
transcript of a performance delivered in 1991 provides something of a foil to these
anxious flâneries. His psychoanalytically informed narrative of anonymous
homosexual encounters in public toilets conveys a sense of the inter-subjective leaps
enacted in these ‘heterotopic’ spaces. In all three essays, sexual difference is
constructively made to cede ground to ethnicity, class and sexuality, even as the
structural principle of difference remains.
The last category, those essays examining flânerie in the context of consumption,
includes essays by Ruth E. Iskin and Aruna D’Souza. Iskin’s essay seems largely
consolidating of a body of recent literature in that she claims the flâneuse became
publicly visible in a genre of 1890s advertising posters portraying women shopping.xiii
These posters depicted female figures confidently negotiating unsolicited male gazes.
It is Iskin’s argument that this new imagery helped to re-shape attitudes to the women
currently accessing public space in increasing numbers. In addition to manifesting
some indifference to women workers’ presence in the city (a problem for the
collection as a whole), this essay risks generalising bourgeois women’s fin-de-siècle
‘entry’ into public space via consumption, something that other contributors have
studiously avoided. Nonetheless, Iskin is the only contributor to directly reference
and, in this instance, oppose Wolff’s re-stated claim to the invisibility of the flâneuse.
In one of the most insightful essays of the book, Aruna D’Souza turns the familiar
issue of women artists’ exclusion from public space on its head. She asks why the
Impressionists (male and female) never painted the department store. Her answer:
because the department store existed beyond the permissable visual horizon of the
flâneur, around which Impressionism was organised. It is flâneurial vision that
excludes itself from the commercialised femininity of the department store, not men
or women in actuality. In arguing this, D’Souza shows an uncommon sensitivity to
the nuances of Pollock’s 1988 essay, noting that Pollock had not claimed that women
Impressionists were actually physically impeded from accessing certain public spaces
(as is often misunderstood), but that they could not be seen to see such spaces.

The appropriation of flâneurial vision, including its blindspots, is the theme, finally,
of Tom Gretton’s innovative essay on the consumption of illustrated magazines. In
essence, Gretton argues that such magazines enjoyed a fractal relationship to the city.
Magazine and metropolis shared ‘a cultural logic of the boulevard-as-consumed-by-
the-flâneur’ (p. 100). Reading such a magazine was, in other words, the democratic
discursive equivalent to perambulating the city. The reader was required to develop a
discriminating viewpoint in order to navigate the magazine’s complex structure of
interiorised spaces, diverse neighbourhoods and river of free-floating images inviting
readers to see ‘through the eyes of the painter of modern life’ (pp. 101-9). Gretton
deploys published readers’ responses to weekly puzzles as a means to gain some
access to the profile of the illustrated weekly’s national readership and it is here that
the essay has most to contribute to the issue of women’s relationship to urban
modernity. Magazines were consumed in sites of bourgeois sociability, such as cafés
and domestic drawing rooms. These places defy simple mapping onto either public or
private spaces or even spaces of masculinity and femininity. Whilst the puzzle
respondents were typically male, women also ‘felt entitled to make themselves
known’ (p. 100). As such, ‘the possibility of “joining in” to the metropolis was not
anything as gender-specific as the figure of the flâneur has seduced us into supposing’
(p. 111). Of course, to assert this is to accept that urban modernity is performed as
much in the consumption of magazines as it is in the corporeal experience of the city.

D’Souza’s and Gretton’s arguments converge. The same illustrated magazines that
Gretton identifies with the mimicry of flâneurial experiences are employed by
D’Souza to evidence the representation of department stores as the flâneur’s
feminised blindspots. Amidst the many rich narratives being told in this collection it
can be difficult to find ones that concur. There is, for example, little agreement about
how flânerie is actually to be defined. Wolff, Chang and McDonough either directly
or indirectly subscribe to the classic Baudelairean definition of anonymous urban
wandering that is most redolent of the period before 1848 and that haunts its later
manifestations. Kessler and Thomas define flânerie in broader terms as scopic agency
within Haussmann’s public spaces. Meanwhile, Iskin and D’Souza identify flânerie
with either shopping or its negation. That the differences between the classic and
looser definitions of flânerie tend to revolve respectively around discussions of the
flâneur and flâneuse does, however, point to the terminal impassivity of these
analytical categories. As does the collection’s reliance upon a familiar range of
historical characters. We might ask whether there are not different stories to be told?
These might focus upon female shoppers in the Parisian arcades of the July Monarchy
or the flâneurial practices of male and female workers more generally. Without the
latter, the prostitute retains its dubious status as the sole representative of working-
class women’s flânerie. This seems a missed opportunity. These are, however, minor
objections that do not undermine the significance of this collection. Certainly, The
Invisible Flâneuse constitutes both a consolidating and catalytic intervention into art-
historical debates about both the flâneurial paradigm and men’s and women’s
relationships to urban modernity. This is precisely because it speaks to the interests of
an interdisciplinary audience. Disappointingly, the book is not well supported by
Linda Nochlin’s afterword. This provides a general narrative about women gaining
access to public space during the early part of the twentieth century. This narrative is
based on an unquestioned acceptance of the hegemony of bourgeois ideologies of
sexual difference – an assumption that each contributor has worked productively to
complicate, if not completely negate.

Charles Harrison’s book, Painting the Difference, is a critique of the negative

meanings attached to the representation of female figures in modernist paintings.
Unusually for an argument in defence of the modernist canon, Harrison is keen to
reinforce the historical impact of sexual difference. This he loosely defines as
meanings and values attached to ‘the biological distinctions that serve to classify
humans as either female or male’ (p. xi). Linda Nochlin’s 1988 essay ‘Women, Art
and Power’ is singled out early on.xiv Here Nochlin argued that shared assumptions
about femininity ‘constitute an ongoing subtext underlying almost all individual
images involving women’ of the modern period (p. 5). It is not that Harrison
necessarily disagrees with Nochlin about the ‘utter passivity’ attributed to femininity
in much of the art of the modern period. It is more that he intends to identify and
account for the important exceptions that justify this rule.

The picture plane is key to identifying these exceptions. It is, Harrison argues, the
single aspect of painting that is most specific to the medium. There is no other
‘technical concept that serves so effectively to mark the difference between critical
and uncritical responses to relevant works’ (p.10). Normatively stable, certain
exceptional paintings - most notably those depicting a figure looking out of the scene
as though directly engaging an already imagined viewer - transform the picture plane
into ‘a moment of self-critical exchange’ (p. xii). An unusual but traceable feature of
certain pre-modernist paintings, it is Harrison’s contention that technical experiments
effecting a consistent dialectical play between literal surface and figurative depth
made pursuit of the self-reflective picture plane a key modernist objective. By the
early 1870s a painting’s modernity was recognised by its capacity to ask: ‘“Who is
supposed to be seeing what this picture shows?” and to do so as a necessary part of its
effect’ (p. 36).
So who is supposed to be seeing what these pictures show? Harrison differentiates
between actual and imagined viewers. The actual viewer may be anyone at any
historical moment. The imagined viewer is located physically by the painting (as the
object of the represented figure’s outward gaze) and socially in relation to class and
gender (as the likely historical object of the represented figure’s outward gaze). With
enough attention, actual viewers are able to assume the identity of the imagined
viewer who, Harrison recognises, was predominantly constructed as male. The most
remarkable inter-subjective encounter is, therefore, one operating across the
boundaries of sexual difference: between the imagined male viewer and a depicted
female figure. It is Harrison’s bold conviction that the recognition of sexually
differentiated subjectivity produces a hiatus, putting ‘the presumed authority of the
male gaze – or of patriarchal interests – significantly and immediately in question’ (p.
233). The actual viewer is drawn to ask empathetically of the depicted female figure:
what does it mean to look or even feel like this?

Harrison challenges the reader to re-conceptualise the dominant male gaze in order to
imagine that look as something other than objectifying. This promises to be an
enlightening, if proscriptive, experience. But what, we might ask, does this re-
formulation mean for actual female viewers? Harrison claims that there is no
biological impediment, though perhaps some cultural inhibitions, preventing actual
female viewers from adopting an imagined male viewing position. But this crucial
question for feminists is dealt with only summarily and constitutes an elision
surprisingly at odds with the detailed analysis otherwise characterising Painting the
Difference. Moreover, Harrison risks forgetting that feminist art history developed
precisely as a set of viewing positions other than that of the dominant male gaze. His
unwillingness to acknowledge fully the social, psychic and consciously political
factors structuring the field of vision is, perhaps, a result of conceptualising sexual
difference in largely biological terms.

It is Harrison’s disarming thesis that from the 1860s modernist painting was driven by
the self-conscious and self-critical exploration of sexual difference. Moreover, he
asserts that a critical examination of the typically male regard continued as a sub-
tradition of twentieth-century practice. Each chapter of this richly illustrated book
presents an artist-centred moment in the development of modernism’s gender
critique. Painting the Difference stages a familiar cast of modernist painters, with
Manet playing the role of originator. Olympia (1863) constitutes the ‘first notable
occasion on which a distinctively modern technique was seen to serve a critical
account of men’s regard upon women’ (p. 41). Together with Un Bar aux Folies-
Bergère (1882), these ‘portraits’ of a self-contained but self-consciously proximate
feminine subjectivity demand an equally self-conscious response on behalf of the
viewer. Like Thomas and Kessler in The Invisible Flâneuse, Harrison is concerned
with the outward gaze of the female figure in a painting by Manet. As the means to
attain some access to feminine experience, all three invite the reader to imagine what
this look might see. But it is Harrison alone who is alert to the subjective viewpoint of
working-class femininity, by reminding the reader that the view reflected in the mirror
of Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère belongs to the barmaid.

Harrison acknowledges that his assertion of Manet’s critical modernity is hardly

original. More innovative are his claims to what happened next: Renoir and Degas
took up Manet’s challenge. Cast in the role of self-conscious flâneurs, viewers of
Renoir’s Les Parapluies (c. 1881-5) and La Loge (1874) are offered an arresting
opportunity to experience what it feels like to be the feminine object of a solicitous
gaze. The projected difference characterising the cross-cultural encounters described
by Chang and McDonough in The Invisible Flâneuse give way in Painting the
Difference to empathetic identification with an other. Harrison is surely aware that
Renoir’s progressive approach to the representation of women is a bitter pill for
feminist art historians to swallow. But this is precisely his point; a point he continues
to make with Degas who drives modernism’s obligation to femininity forward.
Depicting self-absorbed figures located at the absolute forward limits of the picture
plane, his bather pastels are, according to Harrison, the first images to represent nude
women as though they are not being looked at. Disqualified as an external voyeur by
the body’s immediacy, the viewer is invited as an effect of the metaphorical
suggestiveness of the pastel surface to imagine how inhabiting such a body might feel.
The result is that ‘by the mid-1880s the possibility of representing the female figure as
the sole possessor of her own space and body amounted to a critical requirement by
which the work of Degas and others may be seen to stand or fall’ (p. 121).

The concern for sexual difference becomes something of a sub-tradition in the

twentieth century, as modernist painting pursues alternative interests. It is kept alive,
nonetheless, in a range of surprising images. Harrison identifies the subjective
experience of the female figure as a theme of the brothel and neo-classical nudes,
odalisques and domestic bather images of Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard. Attention
then shifts to Rothko and a novel argument about the inter-subjective properties of
abstract paintings. The book finishes where Harrison claims it started: a series of
paintings produced in the early 1990s by Art & Language, Index (Now They Are).

Thus far Painting the Difference seems to be concerned exclusively with the practice
and products of iconic male artists. In general, it is. Perhaps surprisingly, women
artists are accorded a relatively minor role in the technical exploration of sexual
difference. Morisot and Cassatt were ‘considerable’ rather than exceptional painters
that inconsistently followed the lead of Manet and Degas. Meanwhile, Sherman’s and
Kruger’s photographic deconstructions of the male gaze were simply misguided.
These mistakenly conflated modernism with patriarchy and belatedly reinforced an
uncritical understanding of the male gaze as oppressive.

Harrison’s general hypothesis is provocative, innovative and alluring. It places an

enlightened sensitivity to sexual difference, feminine subjectivity and oppressive
masculinity at the structural heart of developments in modernist painting. Indeed, a
painting’s modernity is to be defined precisely by its sensitivity to these concerns – a
seemingly feminist position. As with The Invisible Flâneuse, the reader is invited to
engage with a more positive understanding of the relationship between femininity,
modernity and modernism. Feminist scholars are challenged even to rehabilitate
Renoir. But one key question remains. Where is the evidence to support Harrison’s
argument? He dismisses social history’s capacity to explain modernism’s concern for
femininity, admitting that ‘it is easier to describe the technical conditions of this
development than it is to explain the development itself’ (p. 25).xv The explanation he
does proffer is that ‘once this kind of complementarity’ between the sexually-
differentiated exchange and the self-reflexive picture plane ‘becomes established as a
desideratum in modern painting…it tends to restrict the range of themes that can be
successfully treated’ (pp. 35-6). The unwillingness to account in more detail for the
social conditions of this phenomenon is only compounded by an unfortunate lack of
attention to the immediate pre-history of modernist painting.

Harrison rightly demands that ‘the work of art be kept in focus all the time’ (p. 10).
He excels at detailed visual analysis and at focusing the reader on a painting’s
physical properties. According to Harrison, all the evidence that is required to confirm
modernist painting’s concern for sexual difference is to be located in these properties.
It seems sexual difference as the motor of development in modernist painting did not
register as a theme of contemporary artistic and critical discourses. But Harrison
would locate this omission in the critics’ inability to look with enough care,
something he pursues to considerable effect. At times, however, Harrison’s persona of
the attentive viewer is compromised by the vehemence with which feminist
arguments are critiqued. Despite initial overtures, certain feminist scholars are
indirectly accused of ‘self-regarding vigilantism’ (p. 118). More problematically, and
in contrast to The Invisible Flâneuse, feminist art history is made to assume a
monolithic identity.xvi If Harrison’s hypothesis is correct feminist scholars were, in
any case, beaten to the critique of masculine scopic authority by the artists they have
accused. Not that Harrison is claiming Manet, Renoir and Degas to have been proto-
feminists. But without historical evidence to support or deny their motivations, these
artists appear to have been inexplicably, even heroically, ahead of their time.

The Invisible Flâneuse and Painting the Difference make persuasive cases for
returning to feminist art history’s primary objects and tropes: the spaces and gazes of
late nineteenth-century French art and visual culture. Most convincingly, and to very
different ends, these books invite the reader to look again at the relationship between
femininity, modernity and modernism, and where appropriate, to do so no less
critically, but certainly more positively, through a reconfigurated model of sexual
difference. It is to others to decide whether, in each case, these revisions are enacted
at the expense of feminist art history’s political emphases or, indeed, a full
acknowledgement of its discursive complexity and development. Ultimately,
feminists might assess each book on the basis of what they contribute to the history of
feminine agency in relation to modernism and modernity, since it is this that
originally concerned both Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock. In the form of artistic
practice, feminine agency erupts only occasionally. Its most poignant example is not
artistic but literary: evidenced in the readers’ responses to the illustrated magazine’s
puzzles. These absences might be explained differently. For The Invisible Flâneuse it
seems a matter of women’s discursive elusiveness. For Painting the Difference it
seems a matter of women’s lack of artistic originality. In either case, it seems fair to
conclude that women have been excluded from the literature of modernity.
i
G. Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the History
of Art, (Routledge: London and New York, 1988), pp. 50-90.
ii
K. Adler, ‘The Suburban, the Modern and “Une Dame de Passy”’, The Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 12, no. 1, 1989, pp.
3-13; E. Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, New Left Review, no. 191, January-February 1992, pp. 98–103.
iii
See, for example, T. Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, (Thames & Hudson:
London, 1998). For an important essay on the value of sexual difference as an analytical tool see L. Tickner,
‘Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference’, Genders, no. 3, Fall 1988, pp. 92-128. For a recent attempt to employ
a more fluid analytical model that ‘insists on the intersectionality of gendered experience as inherently, simultaneously,
and irrevocably raced, classed, sexed, and so on’ see J. Doyle & A. Jones (eds.), ‘New Feminist Theories of Visual
Culture’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 31, no. 3, Spring 2006, p. 608.
iv
Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 2,
no. 3, 1985, pp. 37-46; Pollock (1988), pp. 50-90.
v
Wilson (1992), pp. 98-103; P. Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City,
(University of California Press: Berkeley and London, 1994).
vi
For Wolff, this was because the sociological literature of modernity rendered the private sphere invisible whilst
controlling the means by which women were allowed to be visible in public. For Pollock, this was because bourgeois
women could not respectably experience ‘the spaces of modernity’ as they were structured by masculinity’s scopic
regime. Wolff (1985), pp. 37-46; Pollock (1988), pp. 50-90.
vii
Wilson (1992), pp. 98-103.
viii
J. Wolff, AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States, (Cornell University Press: Ithaca
and London, 2003).
ix
C. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, (Phaidon Press:
London, 1964), pp. 1-41.
x
Wolff cites A. Friedberg, ‘Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition’, Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 106, no. 3, 1991, pp. 419-31; G. Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined
Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, (Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J., 1993); A.
Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture, (Princeton University Press:
Princeton, N. J., 1999).
xi
See Adler (1989) and C. Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century: Writing the City, (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992),
pp. 164-88.
xii
W. Benjamin, ‘M [The Flâneur]’, The Arcades Project, (Belknap Press: Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2002), pp.
416-55.
xiii
See, for example, L. Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France,
(University of California Press: Berkeley, 2001).
xiv
L. Nochlin, ‘Women, Art and Power’ (1988), Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, (Thames & Hudson:
London, 1989).
xv
See the critique of Harrison’s turn to ‘neo-aestheticism’ in D. Beech & J. Roberts, ‘Spectres of the Aesthetic’, New
Left Review, no. 218 (1996), pp. 112-115.
xvi
There is a tendency both to cite only those examples of feminist analysis that are either particularly negative or
generalising and to avoid full acknowledgement of the diversity and development of feminist debates. One obvious
omission from Harrison’s discussion of the feminist response to Degas is Linda Nochlin’s positive analysis of the
brothel monotypes made in ‘The House is not a Home: Degas and the Subversion of the Family’, R. Kendall & G.
Pollock (eds.), Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, (Pandora Press: 1991), pp.
43-65.