A lesbian aesthetic? or aspects of women’s art

“I could not do without a Syringa, for the sake of Cowper’s line” — Jane Austen to Cassandra

“… the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?” — Jane Austen to James-Edward Austen-Leigh

A still from a film, Dyke Pussy (2008) where Allyson Mitchell’s sculptures are seen whirl

Peter Firmin’s woodcut illustration for winter for Vita Sackville-West’s georgic, The Land and the Garden (1927, 1946)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been reading and looking at visual, concrete, and written art by a small group of elite women (known to one another, friends or associates, read from or about afar) cited and studied by Lisa Moore (Sister Arts) from which she posits or carves out a lesbian erotic aesthetic. Moore’s book might be considered a companion volume to Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: Donoghue teases out and identifies clearly too some patterns of social and writing behavior that she argues were typical of lesbian spinsters in the 18th century, recognizable to one another (which we observe are found in Austen, her sister, Cassandra, their friend, Martha Lloyd, and other single and also married friends, a kind of female community).

One difference is Donoghue has so many candidates and verbal explicit demonstration from their writing; in the first 4/5ths of her book, Moore seeks to make do with four and three of them with very little written documentation: Mary Delany and her employer-patroness-mistress-lover(?), Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland; Anna Seward (she provides reams of writing); Sarah Pierce, an educator in the US; in each case, Moore finds other women who work in the same artistic media to create the same kinds of images (mostly botanical, but also sewn, glued as in shellwork, built, lacquered and scissored). Her method is to show that in landscape, garden, botanical, sewing, craft, landscape and house design, these women continually project images of a woman’s sexual organs.

Like Donoghue, Moore argues such relationships included same-sex intimacies and brings forward some (to mainstream ways and tastes) strange and beautiful and obsessive artwork which through her grouping achieves a context in terms of others very like it and no longer seems so odd: Who scissors out 900 sciss accurate paper flowers and then presses them against a lacquered black background sheet and then places them into thick volumes for preservation. Moore waxes graphically descriptive at length of female private parts she sees in it. A kind of Rorschach test is repeatedly applied.

I never thought about how maps drawn in the era by women in their novels (the famous Tendresse one) are themselves expressive art; and I just love the delicate picturesque drawings the book is filled with. She reveals great pathos in thwarted lives, as when Anna Seward carried from room to room a painting by George Romney of a young girl reading which Seward declared an image of her dead beloved, Honora Sneyd. Seward spent most of her life alone, lame, writing letters to others. I almost forgive her her snobbish spiteful attacks on Charlotte Smith’s revelations of another kind of deprived existence. Legend (Moore has to rely on hearsay) credits Seward with designing part of a Litchfield Park in imitation of Hyde Park’s Serpentine Walk:

The first is an engraving by W. Schmollinger, the map for Hyde Park; the second a photo of a lake in a Litchfield Park (no dates)

It does not seem to me that Moore proves her case altogether; maybe it’s not provable: the idea these images she finds in these women’s work are necessarily lesbian only becomes convincing when she shows their behavior like that we might think lesbian. Margaret Bentinck had numerous children by her husband, and used the women she enforced service to herself from; Chicago lived only with men; Delany and Frida Kahlo were bisexual. I remembered Stella Tillyard’s group biography of the Lennox Sisters, The Aristocrats, and then the Companion volume to the mini-series film adaptation by Harriet O’Carroll, where there are plates of art that fit right into Moore’s scheme. Only one of these women was a lesbian.

Moore has a tendency to see vaginas where there are only arches:

A picturesque drawing by Mary Delany: View of Beggar’s Hut in Delvile Garden (1745); she lived with her husband Patrick at Delvile (I wonder if she installed a beggar in that hut?)

Moore will mount a full-scale relationship (friendship, influence) from the tiny twig of the woman’s ideas: such as Mary Delany knew of the work of the other woman (we think), or visited a salacious place (like the Hellfire Club’s Venus Temple) she is said to have imitated — with no proof of visit, no proof she built or even drew a drawing for some of her attributed buildings. I would love to think Moore’s candidates were architects but proof is needed.

There is also a distasteful reactionary justification of her chosen subjects elitism, racism, and ignoring how they used their power over one another and did not fulfill obligations: the Duchess of Portland did not leave a penny to Mary Delany after decades of devoted service, including reading aloud long hours into the night — Betty Rizzo in her Companions without Vows suggests we know which person is the subject one by looking to see who is doing the reading. Sarah Pierce is just fine with slavery and Moore attempts a softened portrait — true that I could see in the Litchfield Academy Pierce set up characteristics of a girls’ school which works that I saw in Yvette’s Sweet Briar (as older girls appointed sister-mentors to younger ones).

In the last fifth of her book, Moore attempts to fill out her theory by citing exemplary women artists from the 19th through 20th century. I thought immediately of Judy Chicago, and indeed her Dinner Party is discussed in the last part of Moore’s book. Moore tells of these women’s lives; she demonstrates quiet partnerships with other women, describes, reprints, quotes their art. I include a few images of this later art, and some snatches of poetry, and passages in lives not well-known.

A photo of one of many fancifully shaped buildings in her book:

Jane and Mary Parminter’s house in Devon; Victorian unmarried sisters, one died 38 years before the other, but managed before that terrible parting for so long to fill the place with paintings, shellwork, feather decorations, decoupage (scissored stuff), semi-precious stone inlay — how lonely all those years must’ve been

Moore enables us to see the feminocentric slant of some repeating absurdities in 19th century women’s art, such as a subject I have seen done by women in the 19th century: they paint Moses as a baby in a basket among the bullrushes — the point seems to be to view the relationships among the (for the moment) powerful women picking the baby up and caring for him. Otherwise, he would have died. No ten commandments.

Moore says that Emily Dickinson admired the botanical illustrations of a contemporary, Fidelia Bridges. This one belongs to the many picturesque garden, flower and landscape images of the book. According to Moore, these resemble Delany’s and several other lesbian women flower artists, but I see an austerity which is lovely because it does not lend itself to a Rorschach description:

Fidelia Bridges, Calla Lily 1875 — click to make larger

I did not know the story of the 19th century black sculpturess Edmonia Lewis’s experience of betrayal by white women. Lewis’s genetic background included New England black and Ojibway Indian people; her mother feared she’d be kidnapped into slavery so sent her and her brother to Canada to live among Ojibway. After the civil war was over, due to her brother’s efforts, she attended Oberlin College in 1860s. It was a staunchly abolitionist place, and she seemed at first to thrive, but she was accused of poisoning two white girls on sleigh riding date with 2 white boys; she was exonerated but dragged out into February night and beaten severely by thugs. The headmistress prevented her registering for last semester lest this provoke the local community again, so Lewis never graduated –-  her sculpted women figures are women seen as outcasts.

Hygeia, commissioned by a woman physician, then terminally ill

After Lewis returned to the US and experienced the post-civil war backlash, she returned to Italy where she drops out of historical record — she was last seen by Frederick Douglas living with Adelia Gates, a flower painter.

Turning to the 20th and 21st century, Jim and I saw an exhibit of Mickalene Thomas’s paintings the last time we were in NYC together and he in good health; I am aware of Frida Kahlo’s bisexuality and use of flower, botanical, craft imagery; landscape installation art of contemporary women (Ana Mandieta, Alma Lopez, Tee Corinne), Alice Walker’s silhouettes. I did not know for sure that Georgia O’Keefe had a long-time woman lover (though she is depicted this way by Suzy McKee Charnas, in her Dorothea Dreams). Moore places Jane Addams and her long-time friendship with another woman here.

Appropriate for the season, from Vita Sackville-West’s The Land and the Garden, “Winter” poetry for which Peter Firmin drew the woodcut illustration (above):

You watcher at the window, you who know
Life’s danger, and how narrow is the line,
How slight the structure of your happiness,
— Think on these little creatures in the snow,
They are so fragile and so fine,
So pitiably small, so lightly made,
So brave and yet so very much afraid.
They die so readily, with all their song.

There are equally moving lines across “Winter:”

It is not the Winter, nor the cold we fear;
It is the dreadful echo of our void,
The malice all around us, manifest …

Fabulous flowers flung as he desires.
Fantastic, tossed, and all from shilling packet
— an acre sprung from one expended coin, —
visions of what might be.
We dream our dreams.
What should we be, without our fabulous flowers?

Homesick we are, and always, for another
And different world …
And so the traveller
Down the long avenue of memory
Sees in perfection that was never theirs
Gardens he knew, and takes his steps of though
Down paths that, half-imagined and half-real,
Are wholly lovely with a loveliness
Suffering neither fault, neglect, nor flaw;
By visible hands not tended, but by angels
Or by St. Phocas, gentlest patron saint
Of gardeners …. Such wisdom of perfection
Never was ours in fact though ours in faith,
And since we live in fabric of delusion
Faith may well serve a turn in place of fact.
Luxury of escape! In thought he wanders

Down paths now more than paths, down paths once seen.
Gold is their gravel, not the gold that paves
Ambition’s highway; velvet is their green;
Blue is the water of the tide that laves
Their island shore where terraces step steep
Down to the unimaginable coves
Where wash on silver sand the secret seas.
Above such coves, such seas, he strays between
Straight cypresses or rounded orange-trees,
And sees a peasant draw a pail from deep
Centennial well; and finds a wealth in these.
Across the landscape of his memory
Bells ring from distant steeples, no cracked bell
Marring the harmony, but all as pure
As that spring-water drawn from that clear well.
What time the English loam is bare and brown
Elsewhere he roams and lets his reason drown
In thought of beauty seen. There was a key
Opened an iron door within the wall
Of thee thick ramparts of a fortress town
Where the great mountains sudden and remote
Like clouds at tether rose,
But the near larkspur seemed as tall
Dashing her spire of azure on their snows;
And, wandering, he might recall
Another garden, seen as in a moat
Reflected, green, and white with swans afloat,
Shut in a wood where, mirrored sorrowful,
A marble Muse upon her tablets wrote.
Look, where he strays!
Images, like those slow and curving swans,
Sail sensuous up, and these drab northern days,
This isle of mist, this sun a shield of bronze,
Melt in the intenser light away.

As sensitive natures seek for comfort lest
Th’assault of life be more than they can bear …

Sackville-West’s poem is Cowperesque and reminded me of how Austen loved Cowper’s poetry. There are telling lines of convergence in Moore’s choices.

I was drawn to Moore’s section on the mixed-media work of Toronto artist, Allyson Mitchell — as in the above sculptures of cats from a film and below from a film, Oxana, again we have what we see all book long: carpets remnants, rug hooking, fringe, needlework, bits of lace (seen in all sorts of European women’s art and their metaphors for their art):

The above reminded me of the runners in Judy Chicago’s place settings; below the real treat of Mitchell’s art is not in imposed supposed sexual fantasies prompted by the art, but a delicate playful allusion to motherhood:

Allyson Mitchell — Moore describes this image from a film solemnly — it’s a Teddy Bear substitute for a well-cared for cheerful young child

Ellen