1. Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin in Oeuvres , ed. J. Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1960), 2:1173. All translations in this essay are my own.

2. Ibid.

1. Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin in Oeuvres , ed. J. Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1960), 2:1173. All translations in this essay are my own.

2. Ibid.

3. Paul Valéry, "Philosophie de la danse," in ibid., 1:1403.

4. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crayonné au théâtre," in Oeuvres complètes , ed. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1945), 304.

5. Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin , 1173.

6. This metamorphosis follows the story told by Ovid of the beautiful Gorgon, raped in the temple of Athena by Poseidon, god of the sea, and then punished by Athena by having her lovely hair turned into snakes.

7. Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin , 1202. Theodore Reff echoes Valéry's remark in "Edgar Degas and Dance": "Like the laundress pressing down hard on her iron or yawning, overheated and exhausted, like the street-walker waiting on the café terrace in a continue

torpor, the dancer in Degas' work is often not an embodiment of feminine charm but of the lower-class woman's struggle for survival, burdened and deformed by her labors"; Arts Magazine 53, no. 3 (November 1978): 147.

8. "Marchandes à la toilette" and "danseuses" are already associated with prostitution by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet in his pioneering study De la Prostitution dans la ville de Paris , 2 vols. (Paris, 1836), 1:183-84. Subsequent studies mention "blanchisseuses," "repasseuses," and "modistes" as likely to be sexually available. See for example C.J. Lecour, La Prostitution à Paris et à Londres 1789-1877, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1882), 197-200; or Octave Uzanne, Parisiennes de ce temps (Paris, 1910), 421-22. Both are cited by Carol Armstrong in her brilliant doctoral dissertation, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Princeton University, 1986), 74-75. Susan Hollis Clayson attributes the appeal of the "modiste" as a motif for the impressionist painters (Renoir, Degas, Manet) to her combining an ambiguous sexuality (was she or was she not for sale like the hats in her store?) with a "commodified" social condition. See her stimulating dissertation, Representations of Prostitution in Early Third-Republic France (University of California, Los Angeles, 1984). The social and cultural conditions for the prevalent association of laundresses with a debased working-class sexuality are read from an illuminating ideological perspective by Eunice Lipton, "The Laundress in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Imagery, Ideology, and Edgar Degas," Art History 3, no. 3 (September 1980): 295-313. For an analysis of the role of the caféconcert as a prostitutional arena, see T.J. Clark's superb chapter "A Bar at the FoliesBergère," in The Painting of Modern Life (New York, 1985).

9. As Carol Armstrong points out, Degas's Famille Cardinal monotype series, made to illustrate Ludovic Halévy's stories about two sisters, both dancers at the Paris Opéra, is his most explicit rendering of the social and sexual meanings of the coulisses; Odd Man Out , 84-99. For reproductions of these images, see Jean Adhémar and Françoise Cachin, Degas: The Complete Etchings, Lithographs, and Monotypes (London, 1974), monotypes nos. 56-82. For a discussion of the Jockey Club's special role in these venal transactions, see Joseph-Antoine Roy, Histoire du Jockey Club de Paris (Paris, 1958).

10. The monotype technique was apparently invented by the Genovese artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1600-1665). William Blake made a series of twelve beautiful monotypes in 1795 on themes from the Bible, Milton, and Shakespeare. For other artists who have used the medium, see the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum exhibition, The Painterly Print: Monotypes from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (New York, 1980).

11. Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out , 215-16, has persuasively shown that Degas's use of the monotype base is remarkably original in that it actually reverses the traditional role of chiaroscuro. Instead of reinforcing the bond between surface and ground, the monotype foundation, she argues, produces a kind of negative effect, as of an emptiness that tends toward the obliteration of surface gesture and detail.

12. The sketches illustrating La Fille Elisa have been published by Theodore Reff in The Notebooks of Edgar Degas , 2 vols. (New York, 1985), notebook 28, nos. 26-27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 45, and 65 (described by Reff in 1:130).

13. Adhémar and Cachin, Degas , 75. Among Degas's friends, Cachin mentions the Halévys and Rouarts. Artists she considers likely to have seen the monotypes (no evidence is cited) are Paul-Albert Bartholomé and Camille Pissaro and, perhaps, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin. A number of monotypes in the dark-field manner of scenes not explicitly related to brothel life carry scratched-in dedications to friends of Degas; see ibid., monotypes nos. 160, 161, 163, and 165. break

14. See Eugenia Janis, "The Role of the Monotype in the Working Method of Degas," Burlington Magazine 109 (January-February 1967). Janis drew up the first comprehensive catalogue of the monotypes for an exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum in 1968; Degas Monotypes: Essay, Catalogue, and Checklist (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

15. Adhémar and Cachin, Degas , 80.

16. Typically, Valéry refers to Huysmans's writing on Degas precisely at the moment when he wants to buttress his assertion of the artist's misogyny; Degas Danse Dessin , 1204.

17. J.-K. Huysmans, Certains (Paris, 1975), 294.

18. Ibid., 296.

17. J.-K. Huysmans, Certains (Paris, 1975), 294.

18. Ibid., 296.

19. Auguste Renoir also found something peculiarly chaste about Degas's bordello images. Ambroise Vollard quotes him as saying: "When one paints a bordello, it's often pornographic, but always hopelessly sad. Only Degas could give an air of rejoicing to such a subject along with the look of an Egyptian bas-relief. This quasi-religious and chaste aspect of his work, which makes it so great, becomes still more pronounced when he treats the prostitute"; Degas (Paris, 1924), 59-60.

20. Here Huysmans, who did not publish his comments on Degas's pastels until 1889, is echoing the praise Octave Mirbeau proclaimed three years earlier for Degas's rigorously unsentimental and antiromantic depictions of women. They do not "inspire passion or sensual desire," Mirbeau writes. "On the contrary, there is a ferocity that speaks clearly of a disdain for women and a horror of love. It is the same bitter philosophy, the same arrogant vision, that one finds in his studies of dancers"; La France , 21 May 1886; quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886 , The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco catalogue (San Francisco, 1986), 453. Huysmans, it seems, codified in its most extreme terms an interpretation of Degas's attitude toward women that had already gained a certain acceptance among professional critics. See Martha Ward's excellent review of the criticism of the 1886 exhibition, as focused on the question of Degas's misogyny, "The Rhetoric of Independence and Innovation," in The New Painting , 430-34.

21. Huysmans, Certains , 297.

22. Ibid.

21. Huysmans, Certains , 297.

22. Ibid.

23. Freud remarks of the scopophilic instinct that it begins as a narcissistic formation. Its first stage, which is never left behind, is autoerotic: "It has indeed an object, but that object is part of the subject's own body"; "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works , ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1964), 14:130.

24. Edward Snow, A Study of Vermeer (Berkeley, 1979), 28.

25. Carol Armstrong, "Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body," in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives , ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 239.

26. Eunice Lipton, "Degas' Bathers: The Case for Realism," Arts Magazine 54 (May 1980): 96.

27. Armstrong, "Degas and the Female Body," 238.

28. A number of the reviewers of Degas's contribution to the 1886 exhibition specifically define the observer's perspective as that of a voyeur: Degas, writes Gustave Geffroy, "wanted to paint a woman who did not know she was being watched , as one would see her hidden by a curtain or through a keyhole"; La Justice , 26 May 1886; quoted in The New Painting , 453. Geffroy notes the obliqueness of Degas's points of view but apparently considers them to be realistically determined by the voyeur's adoption of concealed places for clandestine observation. As Martha Ward, "Rhetoric of Independence and continue

Innovation," 432, remarks, the voyeuristic perspective was felt by the critics to reveal woman as instinctual animal. Only one critic, Octave Maus, in L'Art moderne (Brussels), 27 June 1886, was able to see anything positive about the exposure of woman's unself-conscious physicality. He imagined the bathers as domestic cats cleaning themselves, whereas the majority of the critics chose to compare their gestures to the wild movements of monkeys or frogs; see The New Painting , 432-33.

29. Armstrong, "Degas and the Female Body," 239.

30. Snow, Study of Vermeer , 30. In a letter of 1884, Degas describes what seems to be precisely such an ontologically negative self-assessment: "If you were a bachelor and fifty years old (which I became a month ago), you would have moments such as I have when you would close yourself up like a door, and not only to friends. You suppress everything around you, and, once alone, you annihilate yourself, you kill yourself finally, out of disgust"; Lettres de Degas , ed. Marcel Guérin (Paris, 1931), 64-65.

31. In La Revue de demain for May-June 1886, Henri Fèvre remarked: "Degas lays bare for us the streetwalker's modern, swollen, pasty flesh. In the ambiguous bedrooms of registered houses, where certain ladies fill the social and utilitarian role of great collectors of love, fat women wash themselves, brush themselves, soak themselves, and wipe themselves off in basins as big as troughs"; quoted in The New Painting , 453. Another reviewer, J.M. Michel, associated Degas's bathing women with Zola's notorious heroine Nana: "Nana bathing, washing herself with a sponge, taking care of herself, arming herself for battle--that is the Impressionist ideal," he remarks sarcastically; La Petite Gazette , 18 May 1886; quoted in The New Painting , 453. In her article on the bathers, Eunice Lipton argues that the only women they could conceivably represent are prostitutes because depiction of middle-class women bathing would have constituted an ideologically unthinkable breach of decorum. Moreover, the postures of the women washing themselves and the decor of their surroundings are reproduced quite clearly in a number of the brothel scenes, whose only difference from the bather pastels is that in the former a client is looking on. Although this resemblance is indubitable, it is strange that more reviewers did not see the bathing women as whores and that Huysmans, atuned as he was to this subject matter, did not spell out the identification. One can only conclude that the signs of the figures' social identity must have been ambiguous enough that they failed to add up into a single readily acceptable meaning.

32. The derivation from personal experience is put into question not only by Degas's notorious personal shyness and sexual reticence but also by his having represented prostitutes naked in the brothel salon when they usually appeared partially clothed in shifts and corsets. This is how they are dressed, as they wait for clients and gossip among themselves, in the brothel scenes painted by Constantin Guys, some of which were owned by Degas's friend Manet. Susan Hollis Clayson argues that the props of Degas's brothel scenes, upholstered furniture, large mirrors, and fancy chandeliers are sufficient to identify the category of brothel portrayed as a deluxe grande tolérance , where specialized erotic services were available to a wealthy clientele of connoisseurs; "Avant-Garde and Pompier Images of Nineteenth-Century Prostitution: The Matter of Modernism, Modernity, and Social Ideology," in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers , ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax, N.S., 1983), 56-58. The prostitutes' nudity may have been a feature of such luxurious establishments. This argument, though plausible, is not totally convincing because the props of Degas's scenes are so repetitive that they seem to belong to a typically Degasian repertoire of motifs, which could well have a literary origin, rather than to any specifically realistic inten- soft

tion. First among the literary descriptions of prostitutes that Degas would surely have known and admired are those of Baudelaire in his essay on Guys, "Le Peintre de la vie moderne." Baudelaire's marvelous evocation of life in a bordello could almost serve as a description of Degas's images:

Without trying, sometimes they assume poses so daring and noble that the most fastidious sculptor would be enchanted, were the sculptors of today sufficiently bold and imaginative to seize on nobility wherever it was to be found, even in the mire. At other times, they show themselves prostrated in attitudes of desperate boredom, in the apathetic poses of public house patrons, masculine in their cynicism, smoking cigarettes to kill time, with the resignation of oriental fatalism. They sprawl on sofas, with their skirts rounded in back, spread out like a double fan in front, or they balance on the edge of stools and chairs. They are heavy, dull, stupid, extravagant, with eyes varnished by alcohol and foreheads swollen by stubbornness.

Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1961), 1189.

33. All these etchings are included in Georges Bloch, Pablo Picasso , vol. 4: Catalogue of the Printed Graphic Work, 1970-1972 (Berne, 1979).

34. The degree to which this project is free to treat the real as material for private fantasy is strikingly illustrated by two etchings in the Degas series (Bloch, nos. 1968 and 1969), where suddenly the whorehouse appears as an ideal Hellas and a prostitute becomes an Arcadian deity dallying with a faun.

35. T.J. Clark, Painting of Modern Life , 111. Clark's brilliant and challenging chapter on Olympia demonstrates how Manet's painting subverts both the conventions of the nude and the social category of the courtisane and inscribes the signs of class, albeit ambivalently, in the prostitute's nakedness.

36. Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin , 1173.

37. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes , 304.

38. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , ed. Philip Reiff (New York, 1963), 216.

39. Here my argument joins up with that developed by R. Howard Bloch in his stimulating contribution to this issue of Representations . Bloch shows that the early misogynistic tradition of biblical exegesis interpreted woman as "a tropological turning away" from the proper and literal, which is synonymous with male being.

40. For an excellent discussion of the relation of Degas's imagery to the graphic language of caricature, see Carol Armstrong's chapter "Reading the Oeuvre of Degas" in Odd Man Out .

41. Beatrice Farwell has written interestingly about the relation of "realist" treatments of the nude to the popular tradition of erotic imagery. See "Courbet's 'Baigneuses' and the Rhetorical Feminine Image," in Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970 , ed. Thomas Hart and Linda Nochlin (New York, 1972), 65-79.

42. The influence of pornographic photographs on the iconography of Manet's Olympia has been studied by Gerald Needham, "Manet, 'Olympia,' and Pornographic Photography," in ibid., 81-89. The stereoscopic photograph that Needham reproduces of a bare-breasted woman ironing shows a motif used by Degas treated from a purely voyeuristic point of view.

43. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 177.

44. Many of the monotype images, especially those done in the dark-field manner, convey an almost tactile sense of this marking, insofar as Degas often modeled the women's bodies by pressing on the ink with his fingers, leaving visible imprints.

45. I first encountered this interpretation of the monotypes in Clayson, Representations of continue

Prostitution in Early Third-Republic France , to which I am greatly indebted. Although Clayson remarks that "it is a hopeless task to gauge the misogynistic content of an image" (105), her illuminating analysis of the monotypes constitutes an implicit defense of Degas's representational practice. "The point of [the prostitutes'] particular, tenacious physicality," she writes, "seems to embed them in a world of the sheerly material, where the subjective 'self' has been suspended, cancelled, or long since overridden. Degas' prostitutes lead an existence in which the 'self' and the body have become the same, and the women's sexuality has been lost entirely to the world of exchange" (115).

46. My thinking about pornography is indebted to two articles, John Ellis, "Photography/Pornography/Art/Pornography," Screen 21, no. 1 (Spring 1980); and Graham Knight and Berkeley Kaite, "Fetishism and Pornography: Some Thoughts on the Pornographic Eye/I," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 9, no. 3 (Fall 1985). I would like to thank Constance Penley for recommending these articles.

47. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, 1973), 59. In Das Passagen-Werk , 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1982), 1:637, Benjamin declares pithily that "love of prostitutes is the apotheosis of intuitive feeling for the commodity [ Einfühlung in die Ware ]."

48. Berthe Morisot, Correspondance , ed. Denis Rouart (Paris, 1950), 23.

49. Ibid., 31.

48. Berthe Morisot, Correspondance , ed. Denis Rouart (Paris, 1950), 23.

49. Ibid., 31.

50. Quoted in Adhémar and Cachin, Degas , 86.

51. Norma Broude, "Degas' 'Misogyny,'" The Art Bulletin 59 (March 1977): 95-107. Broude combines a biographical approach with thematic and visual analysis to conclude that Degas valued intellectual independence, creative accomplishments, and individual character in women. Broude's argument, based on her readings of Degas's portraits of women of his own social class, has trouble accounting for his pictures of lower-class women, whom she finds to be "reduced to types" (101).

52. Carol Armstrong, "The Myth of Degas," chap. 5 of Odd Man Out , esp. 352-58. The components of the myth that I enumerate below are those identified by Armstrong.

53. At the outset of a monumental four-volume monograph on Degas, P. A. Lemoisne suggests that the peculiarity of his subject makes the endeavor he is undertaking almost impossible. Since Degas's works are "so full of reticences, so willfully effaced," he remarks, to understand the artist's evolution one should get to know the man.

But if there was ever a man difficult to know, walled up as he was in an impregnable discretion, a kind of timidity that made him caustic and often severe when he felt menaced, that man was Degas. . . . When you try to get closer to the man, you soon find yourself turning in a vicious circle, Degas having been truly himself, audacious despite an insurmountable modesty, ardent despite a fierce reserve, decisive despite eternal scruples, brilliant despite an innate sobriety of expression, only in his works.

Degas et son oeuvre , 4 vols. (Paris, 1942), 1:1-2. One aspect of the Degas myth that biographers have built up from the meagerest of evidence into an indisputable cause of the artist's misogyny is his impotence. For example, Roy McMullen declares that "there can be little doubt that [the] reason for [Degas's] celibacy . . . was impotence--either psychic or physical impotence, and perhaps, as is often the case, a combination of the two"; Degas: His Life, Times, and Work (London, 1985), 268. In an article entitled "Degas as a Human Being," the thesis of which is that the artist barely qualified, Benedict Nicholson speculates that "there may be something in the theory that he was a repressed homosexual"; Burlington Magazine 105 (June 1963): 239. break

54. See Roy McMullen, Degas , 7-8. In the 1830s the family paid to have a bogus genealogy drawn up to confirm their noble heritage and their claim to the aristocratic name de Gas . According to his niece's report, Degas said that he changed the spelling of the family name because "the nobility is not in the habit of working. Since I want to work, I will assume the name of a commoner"; Jeanne Fevre, Mon oncle Degas (Geneva, 1949), 23.

55. Paul Gauguin, Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals (Bloomington, Ind., 1958), 131.

56. Nothing this and other conflicts in Degas's class position, Eunice Lipton concludes that it was because "Degas had little at stake in the prejudices of a particular social group" and was located "outside conventional social and emotional structures" that he was able to develop "a unique and subversive vision of society"; "The Laundress in French Culture," 310. Although the implied causality here is somewhat reductive, Lipton's analysis is helpful insofar as it locates Degas on the margins of the dominant ideology. According to her interpretation, Degas is aware of his implication in the ideological structures of patriarchy, especially in its voyeuristic debasement of women, but is determined to distance himself from those structures so as to frame their operation in art.

57. In the brilliant conclusion to her thesis, Carol Armstrong discusses Degas's photographic self-portraits as exercises in viewing a self that cannot be represented as a subject seeing and discusses the portrait of Mallarmé and Renoir, in which Degas is an effaced presence reflected and negated in a play of mirror images. She reads these photographs as emblematic of Degas's life-long preoccupation with "the act of vision as a fact of self-negation"; Odd Man Out , 411.

58. The possibility of such a reading was suggested in Susan Suleiman's discussion of an earlier version of this paper presented at the third annual Conference on Twentieth-Century Literature in French at Baton Rouge. I am grateful to Professor Suleiman for her perceptive and stimulating critique, to which I hope the present version of my paper is at least a partially adequate response.

59. Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre , 1:119. break

I owe a special debt of gratitude to James Cunniff and Lynn Hunt for criticism and encouragement. Particular thanks to James (not Lynn) for sitting with me through not a few of these movies.