Emilie Sitzia

Women on the Edge:

Berthe Morisot and Liminal Spaces

Berthe Morisot is an atypical nineteenth-century woman and artist. She

is a female artist at a time when women were not encouraged to pursue a
career, especially not an artistic one. She’s an avant-garde painter with official
recognition, as her regular exhibitions both in the Salon, the official state
exhibitions, and the Impressionist exhibitions show. She’s a “plein air” painter
when her condition as an upper class woman wouldn’t allow her to roam
freely in nature on her own. She seems to be respecting the social and artistic
conventions and restrictions of her class and gender while challenging them.
This ambivalent woman, a good wife and mother as well as an acknowl-
edged artist, is well known for representing a woman’s view of her contem-
porary world. Interestingly most of her representations of women are located
in liminal spaces: women on the margin of landscapes; women at windows be-
tween inside and outside; women on balconies, on the border between public
and private spheres; women in gardens between home and nature, where the
boundaries seem to dissolve.
This positioning of women is significant in nineteenth-century France as
the cultural life is then deeply organized in spatial terms: center versus periph-
ery. Moreover, being a painter of modern life implies a particular bond with
the center—that is to say the Parisian life—that was just impossible for women
at the time.
We propose to study here these representations of women on the edge,
as mirroring not only the ambiguous cultural and social position of Berthe
Morisot as a woman artist, but also more generally commenting on the status
of women in nineteenth-century French society. We will first consider how
Morisot creates a gendered identity through the representation of space. We 167
will then question some of these representations as transgression.

I. CREATION OF A GENDERED IDENTITY THROUGH THE REPRESENTATION OF SPACE

As Doreen Massey underlines in Space, Place and Gender, places and spaces
“both reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and under-
stood” (179) especially in terms of limitation or mobility.
In nineteenth-century France, the home is considered as the ultimate
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private space and therefore feminine space. It is hence not surprising to find
many representations of women in their homes in Morisot’s paintings. In
paintings such as The Cradle, the location and occupation of her feminine
subjects are similar to the ones found in feminine popular visual culture
such as fashion plates (Higonnet 116). But what Morisot brings to this space
is a sense of introspection and solitude. In Places on the Margin, Rob Shields
defines liminality as such: “classically liminality occurs when people are in
transition from one station of life to another, or from one culturally defined
stage in the life cycle to another” (83). Therefore even when women are
pictorially in the centre within the traditional feminine environment, they
might actually be in a liminal state as opposed to space.
We often find in Morisot’s work a questioning of the stages and cycles
of the feminine life. This might be partially explained by the fact that she
lives among women who are very close to her heart, such as her mother, her
sister Edma, and later in life her daughter Julie. But it is also because her own
occupation as an artist makes it difficult for her to envisage herself within
these expected cycles. In 1869 when Edma is expecting her first child and is
about to abandon her own artistic career, Berthe Morisot writes to her: “Do
not grieve about painting. I do not think it is worth a single regret” (34). But
on the other hand the concerns of Berthe’s mother and remarks by Berthe
Morisot herself in her letter such as: “[. . .] the place is ruined by children.
There is no way of setting up my easel anywhere without being surrounded
by them, and I dread having them about—so much so that I have given up
working in the streets or on the roads” (85) show that motherhood is not an
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obvious choice for Morisot.

We find this questioning of motherhood in The Cradle where the care-
taker doesn’t appear quite fulfilled. As the character of the mother seems to
weigh her solitude, we can feel the rupture, the potential sacrifices that moth-
erhood entails. This is particularly striking if you compare this painting with
168 contemporary fashion plates where there is always in the image someone
communicating or at least the possibility of communication and contact. In
The Cradle, the pink ribbon of the scalloped veil separates mother and child,
creating two detached and distinct spaces. The opposing angles of the elbows
of the child and the mother reinforce this sense of disconnection. Moreover
this curtain separates the child and the viewer, excluding the spectator from
any contact with the child. There is no reciprocal tender gaze, no sense of a
united family; this is not a representation of a fulfilled mother in domestic
bliss.
 Dr. Emilie Sitzia

The same sense of liminality is visible in Portrait of Mme Pontillon (1871),

the portrait of her pregnant sister, who is in transition between being a
devoted sister to becoming a devoted mother. The change is not visually
straightforward and it takes a moment to realize that the character is preg-
nant. The transformation is hidden in the comfort of the traditional portrait
of the bourgeois lady in her interior. A similar depth of analysis of this
gendered society and its constraints is present when Morisot is painting her
adolescent daughter. Morisot is observing the alterations, the stages in the
women’s life placing them in the traditional indoor scenes. All those liminal
states are intrinsic to women’s lives in nineteenth-century France. And those
expectations and limitations imposed by society on women are represented
by Morisot within the woman’s territory of the household.
Another environment in which Morisot often paints her female model is
on the edge between public and private space: in locations such as balcony,
veranda and window frames. Once again we find similar locations in fashion
plates of the time (Higonnet 116).
This image of the woman on the edge conveys the idea of seeing and
being seen (a very suitable idea to advertise for dresses in fashion plate). This
is once again quite a standard motif at the time. But what Morisot brings to
this motif is a sense of introspection and even sometime of boredom. In the
The Artist’s Sister at the Window (below), there is an unsatisfactory feel to this
borderline space.

169

BERTHE MORISOT, The Artist’s

Sister at the Window, Ailsa Mel-
lon Bruce Collection.
Image courtesy of the Board
of Trustees, National Gallery of
Art, Washington, 1869. Oil on
canvas, 22 x 18 inches.
 Emilie Sitzia

Morisot manages to convey a sense of an internal life, a daydream that

the spectator is excluded from. As for the outdoor life, the street life, the
main character is not interested in looking or in taking part in it. Notice the
two characters on the opposite window that seem to be discussing from one
window to the other. Morisot, once again, underlines a sense of solitude and
isolation. The position of the character on the fringe of society seems to be
reflecting a disengagement from society expected from women at the time
and its consequence: boredom.
Passy at the time is a suburban space between country and city with
its own specific architecture and population. It was a luxurious bourgeois
suburb and has been qualified as “woman’s land” (Adler 41) as during the
weekdays and the daytime only women seemed to live in that area, while
the husbands and sons were busy engaging in the life of the Parisian centre.
It then became an extension of the home (Adler 37). As Shields underlines
the geographic marginality is a mark of being a social periphery (3) which is
what being a bourgeois woman means in nineteenth-century Paris. But in
View of Paris from the Trocadero (1872) the women in the painting don’t seem
to long for the Parisian glitter. Only the child faces the cityscape. The barrier
is the physical mark of the separation between male and female space. But
that separation in that specific case can be read as an empowerment as the
experience of liminality is a unifying one. So it seems the marginality of the
female characters in this painting is not a claim for more autonomy, it is the
representation of this “woman’s land,” a demonstration of the autonomy the
Passy women already have in their own environment.
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II - TRANSGRESSIONS?
If we consider “landscapes as a system of power relations which are vital
to the production of gendered identities” (Dowler 1), is Morisot transgress-
ing social and cultural rules in some of her paintings when she is placing
170 her female character in landscape scenes outside what seems to be the usual
feminine environment? Or are Morisot’s women stereotypical in regard to
their place in the landscape?
In Morisot’s work, we find many family scenes taking place in gardens
such as Hide and Seek (1873). The association of women and gardens is a
topoi of art and literature. Women are associated with the idea of Nature
while being contained in an extension of the home, the garden. The sense of
claustrophobia or restraint that Griselda Pollock claims comes through the
sense of shallow depth (Pollock 63) isn’t, I believe, the most striking feature
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of this image but rather how the garden as a borderline space is constantly
associated with women and how Morisot echoes the garden and nature in
the female character included in the garden. She uses the usual association
between the garden and feminity and pushes it a step further. The knot in
the tree branches echoes the waistline bow of the woman as her hat melts in
with the top of the tree. The woman and the tree create a central pyramid,
unifying them. The garden and the woman fuse into one concept, a protec-
tive figure to the child. Another example of this blending of the concept of
woman and garden is Collecting Butterflies (1874). The woman and the tree are
in axial alignment. The woman is the absolute central figure in the garden as
the colour of her dress is echoed throughout the composition. The garden
can then be read as a metaphor of feminity not only as a place of protection
and fertility but also as the link between home and nature. Those characters
in the garden offer a certain sense of freedom within the boundaries of a
protected environment rather than being captives in an enclosed space. The
garden wouldn’t have been lived by Morisot like a prison but much more
like a space for painterly experiment, an extension of her studio very much
like her Impressionist colleagues.
Paintings such as Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry (below), depicting
women at work in the landscape, are ambiguous as there was an unsaid rule

171

BERTHE MORISOT, Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul
Mellon. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton, 1875. Oil on canvas, 13 x 6 inches.
 Emilie Sitzia

that women working outdoor freely were of dubious morality or of lower

extraction.
But while those paintings are located at the boundary between city and coun-
tryside, we’re quite clearly in a nature environment as opposed to a cityscape.
One could wonder if there is in Morisot’s painting a moral aspect linked to
the place in the landscape as you would find in her male counterpart’s work
associating the countryside with good and the cityscape with evil. So in that
work she’s not representing daring women or ideal free women nor is she
using the usual comparison between woman and nature but she is simply
representing a scene of contemporary life of women of lower extraction.
She’s being a “painter of modern life” as much as a respectable woman at the
time could be.
In the same way there is no sense of transgression in the painting Har-
bour at Lorient (below), first because she represents her sister, implying that
their chaperone is close by, and above all because there are no other visible
persons on the canvas.
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BERTHE MORISOT, Harbour at Lorient, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection. Image courtesy
of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1869. Oil on canvas,
17 x 29 inches.

In the Harbour at Lorient, the main character is, as Griselda Pollock puts
it, “squeezed off centre” (62) but all the lines of construction bring the eyes
of the viewer toward her. The seascape gives a sense of depth and the closed
 Emilie Sitzia

horizon brings your attention back to the main character. It seems that the
landscape puts her in context in the same way the description of a room
helps to define a character in a Balzac novel. A feel of quietness emerges
from the waveless sea. The boats imply the idea of travel and transport the
spectator into a daydreaming state.
Very often with Morisot the transgressions you perceive at first glance
are uttermost appropriate. She offers the point of view of a woman which is
not so dichotomised and uses the constructed nature of the representation to
convey a sense of self and a sense of women’s identity. It seems that Mori-
sot’s main transgression is one of style. She goes from a passive artistic role to
an active artistic role. Women painters were often restrained into the realm of
still life, miniatures or copies of masterpieces. Morisot dares being an innova-
tor and as such uses the space on the edge of society of the women artists to
acquire more freedom from the normative rules and demands. Her style is
qualified and excused as feminine by George Moore in Modern Painting:

Madame Morisot’s note is perhaps as insignificant as a sparrow’s,

but it is as unique and as individual a note. She created a style,
and has done so by investing her art with all her feminity; her art
is no dull parody of ours; it is all womanhood—sweet and
gracious, tender and wistful womanhood (231).

A similar style by a man, Monet for example, is regularly dismissed

as sketchy and unfinished. Therefore her feminine space is not just one of
oppression but also one of freedom. One must note that she never in any
official paper stated her profession as an artist.
There are differences between the Impressionists women’s representa-
tions of space and their male counterparts, as Griselda Pollock showed. But
the differences are mostly due to the space that was allocated to women.
Therefore those images provide us with a true reflection of the social space
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given to women at the time. Berthe Morisot does not confirm gender stereo-
type but she doesn’t revise them either. She is in fact twisting the rules show-
ing very proper images of women but locating them on the edge of socially
accepted spaces. She’s questioning the social rules and her sense of self as
well as women’s identity. She presents the fragile balance in which women
lived walking on the thin string of social conventions.
 Emilie Sitzia

Works Cited

Adler, Kathleen. in Edelstein ed. Perspectives on Morisot. New York: Hudson Hills Press:
Rizzoli International Publications [distributor], c1990.
Dowler, Lorraine, Josephine Carubia and Bonj Szczygiel. Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating
Morality and Space. London: Routledge, 2005.
Higonnet, Anne. Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge [England]: Polity Press, 1994.
Moore, George. Modern Painting. London: Walter Scott, 1893.
Morisot, Berthe. The Correspondence with her family and friends: Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas,
Monet, Renoir and Mallarme. Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1987.
Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art. London;
New York: Routledge, 1988.
Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1991.
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