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Gericault, or the
Absence of Women
LINDA NOCHLIN
It was Charles Clement who said it, in the context of a discussion of the
young woman observer in Gericault's lithograph TheParalyticWoman:"The young
girl's form is ravishing; she is practically an exception in the work of the master.
Gtricaulthas, so to speak,neverrepresented women."l
Indeed, women are relatively rare in Gericault's admittedly truncated pro-
duction. In this, it is unlike David's oeuvre,in which gender opposition plays a
central role in the creation of meaning; nor does it resemble that of his slightly
younger contemporary, Delacroix, where woman, allegorized as Liberty, repre-
sents the very aspiration-the unified and exalted project-of the variegated
male figures following behind her in the artist's painting of 1830. It is hard to
think of women or a place for women in G6ricault's work, and when we do, we
come up with models of abjection and marginalization: a child, a cripple, two
madwomen, a corpse-and perhaps a portrait or two.2
Even in cases where the representation of woman might originally have
figured, or-even more-occupied a central place in the signifying structure of a
painting, it is ultimately omitted. I take as my major example Gericault's most ambi-
tious painting, TheRaft of the Medusa,which bears witness to this striking occlusion
of the feminine in the earliest stages of Gericault's development of his subject.
In a preliminary study for a different moment in the tragedy-the Sceneof
Mutiny-a family group occupies the center stage and was obviously of considerable
importance to the intentions of the artist, as he carefully experimented with the
pose and expression of this woman-centered group in at least two detailed drawings.
But this emotionally charged group, consisting of a dying or exhausted mother, a
meditative father, and a heroically nude child, quickly disappears; it is absent
from the most finished preliminary study for the mutiny incident, certainly no
1. Charles Clement, Gricault: EtudeBiographiqueet critique,intro. Lorenz Eitner (Paris: Laget, 1973;
reprint of definitive edition of 1879), pp. 217-18 (emphasis added).
2. The latest candidate for the (much contested) representation of Gericault's lover, his aunt,
Alexandrine Modeste Caruel, may provide an addition to the rare corpus of female portraits by the
master. The work, Portraitof a YoungWoman,of circa 1816, which was published in the Sotheby's New
Yorkcatalog from October 17, 1991, has been partially attributed to Gericault by Lorenz Eitner.
Opposite:Scene of Mutiny.
Gericault, or the Absence of Women 47
longer present in the next stage of the development of the subject, the Sceneof
Cannibalism,and never to appear again in any of the sketches or the final version.
In the completed Raft, the family group has been replaced by the single-sex
"father-son" dyad, a paternal topos replete with pathetic evocations of the
Ugolino legend. Age difference has been substituted for the original gender
opposition; or rather, one might say that the father-son couple now takes over the
emotionally charged position previously occupied by mother-child-father-the
family triad-in an earlier stage of conception.
One might insist that Gericault altered his cast of characters in the interests
of accuracy: that he was merely following the all-male scenario offered him by the
classical account of the shipwreck offered by the survivors Savigny and Correard.
But these witnesses, in their hair-raising, highly detailed account of the fate of the
raft-their Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816... Comprising an Account of the
Shipwreckof the Medusa, a narrative that includes the events preceding, following,
and synchronous with that tragedy--did not, in fact, stipulate an all-male cast of
characters, for they included, with considerable prominence, a woman; yet, neither,
on the other hand, did their story mention a family group among the raft's
shipwrecked survivors.3 G6ricault is usually held to have stuck closely to this
3. Savigny and Corr6ard, Narrative of a Voyageto Senegalin 1816 ... Comprisingan Account of the
Shipwreckof the Medusa (London: Henry Coburn, 1818, 2nd edition). This English translation of the
Naufragede lafregatela Midusefaisant partie de l'expeditiondu Senegalen 1816... (Paris: Hocquet, 1817) is
extremely accurate.
48 OCTOBER
4. Both women and a family were present on the frigate Medusaand escaped to the African shore
in boats. These included the heartless and snobbish daughters of the captain and the famille nombreuse
of one M. Picard, the greffier (clerk of court) of Senegal. All in all there were 18 women and 8 chil-
dren on the frigate. The raft itself, after the shipwreck, set out originally with 147 or 150 aboard: 120
soldiers, including officers; 29 men, sailors and passengers; and one woman.
5. Savigny and Correard, Narrativeof a Voyage,p. 90.
Gricault, or theAbsenceof Women 49
6. Ibid., p. 93.
7. Ibid., p. 119. There is a great deal more in this vein.
8. One 'Jean Charles, black Soldier" is noted in the list of fifteen who were "Alivewhen we were
saved." He is listed as "Dead"under the heading of "Notice of their subsequent fate." Ibid., p. 145.
50 OCTOBER
Le factionnairesuissedu Louvre.
provide a measure of relief. One might even go so far as to say that the object of
desire hovering so tantalizingly on the horizon is the ever (in Lacanian terms)
absent phallus: that which is missing and appears, delusionally, in the unattain-
able distance.
This mounting toward nothingness, toward the perpetually doomed and
frustrated chase after the missing phallus, is as far from the psychic (and formal)
structure of Davidian balance as it is from that of Delacroixian allegory, in both of
which women must be presentto figure the opposingterm,the closureof the trope,as it
were. G6ricault's figuration remains-painfully, dramatically, romantically-
open.9 Indeed one might go further and say that the agonized figuration of desire
in G6ricault's Raft marks the onset of a certain recognizable structure of the
romantic itself in visual representation.
Still another strategyof displacement of the feminine in Gericault'sproduction
is constituted by the artist's frequent positioning of the male as victim. In his vari-
ous military paintings and drawings, like the WoundedCurassieror WoundedSoldiers
in a Cart,men are usually relegated to this time-honored feminine position. Or, to
put it another way, one might say that in the whole series of memorable works
dealing with wounded soldiers and veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, masculine
vulnerability functions as a sign of the feminine. But even more provocatively, the
wounded man-as in Le factionnaire suisse au Louvre,a lithograph of 1819-may
covertly suggest castrationrather than mere victimization.
One might maintain, of course, that femininity and castration are mirror
images of each other, interchangeable within any given system of representation.
And castration imagery, in the form of executions and decapitations, haunts the
Gericauldian imaginary, from the time of the artist's days in Italy to those of his
voyage to England, and in between, in his preparatory studies for the Raft. These
themes can be seen in such works as Executionin Italy and Gibbet.But the series of
uncanny still lifes of DecapitatedHeads constitute the ultimate post-Revolutionary
castration topos in Gericault's work. But even more important, the meaning they
construct, read in the context of the historical situation and G6ricault's position
within it, is political as well as sexual, or, more accurately, political and sexual at
the same time.
To summarize my argument so far: I would say that despite the nonpresence
of women in G6ricault's oeuvre,the signs of femininity and the feminine-in the
form of the castrated (or otherwise marginalized or disempowered male body)
abound in his work. It is simply that these signs of the feminine have been
detached from the representationof the actual bodiesof women.To paraphrase the title
of a recent, important book by cultural critic Tania Modleski, what we have here is
"femininity without women."10
Nor are these the only strategies of substitution. Despite the dangers of
parlor Freudianism, I must make a few observations about the central place
occupied by the horse in Gericault's production of the sensual body, a place
more usually occupied by the human female. The equine body is lovingly
explored from front to rear throughout his career, from forelock to fetlock, as
it were. Can a horse be the object of the fully desiring gaze? If so, the animal
portrayed in Head of a WhiteHorse (Paris, Louvre) certainly is that object: soft-
muzzled, hot-blooded, seductively coiffed. The object of desire may have four
legs and a tail, and, indeed, be the object of a different kind of desire, but the
analogue to a certain kind of erotica makes itself felt in terms of the sheer invest-
ment of libidinal energy in these and many other horse images. The animal
sensuality at play certainly raises the excitement level of these pictures from the
banality of the sporting print to something more spine-tingling.
Yet, of course, actual women arerepresented in GCricault'soeuvre,representa-
tions that, if marginalized in every sense of the word-constituted by female
subjects who are immature, crippled, mad, or black-are nevertheless profoundly
engaging and significant: marginal for good reason. Or, to put it another way, the
marginality of women is so conspicuous in G6ricault'svisual production that it may
be said to constitute a central issue in the critical discourse surrounding his work.
11. For a different and far more critical interpretation of G6ricault's portraits of the insane, see
Albert Boime, "PortrayingMonomaniacs to Service the Alienist's Monomania: Gericault and Georget,"
OxfordArtJournal,vol. 14, n. 1, 1991, pp. 79-91.
12. SeeJane Kromm, "Marianneand the Madwomen," ArtJournal46 (Winter 1987), pp. 299-304.
Gericault,or theAbsenceof Women 55
The ParalyticWoman.
13. Yale graduate student Beth Handler has, however, a very different and more critical reading of
Gericault's representation of blacks in her unpublished seminar report on "Blacksand TheRaft of the
Medusa"for a seminar on "The Body in the Nineteenth Century,"Fall 1991.
14. Clement, Gericault,p. 218.
15. It would seem to me that this print, like others of this series, owes a good deal to popular prints
of the period, and specifically to English ones.
16. Clement, Gericault,pp. 217-18.
56 OCTOBER
brated vehicle to the right is a splendid funeral coach, decorated with a coat of
arms, suggesting the impending doom of the victim in the foreground, as well as
offering a meaningful contrast to her state of impoverishment. The paper tacked
up on the wall above her seems to be an advertisement "For all sickness and
the . . ." although it is tantalizingly unclear like the meaning of the piece as a
whole.17 I, myself, would find a gender-specific subtext at work here. General
paresis or general paralysis, the ultimate stage of syphilitic infection, was viewed,
in the eighteenth century as well as the nineteenth, as the natural punishment of
sexual infraction and was represented in Hogarth's well-known series of engravings
The Harlot's Progress(1732) as the final stage of her ironically titled "progress."
Could Gericault, thinking back to Hogarth, be representing a prostitute fallen on
evil days? Would this account for the exaggerated reaction of the younger
woman? Does this implicate the bestiality of the male assistant? Is the barred
structure in the background a graveyard?I would think so, partly because it is so
like the graveyard in the background of one version of Rossetti's Found, which
also, though much later, figures an urban, specifically London setting and a
fallen woman. One can also speculate, in contemplating this pictorial meditation
on poverty, misery, social inequity, and the modern city of London, that
Gericault must have read Blake's most apposite Song of Experience,which ends:
"But Most thro' midnight streets I hear/ How the youthful Harlot's curse/ Blasts
the new born Infant's tear,/ And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse."18
Though not an exact equivalent, Blake's lines are, like Gericault's print, a potent
evocation of the dark side of urban modernity, using figures of commodification,
death, and prostitution to make their point.
Clement expresses regret at one point about his hero's lack of appreciation
of the more refined type of feminine beauty, asserting: "Itdoes not seem that the
audacious and knowledgeable painter understood feminine beauty in its delicate
and distinguished aspect." Nevertheless, Clement was well aware of the extraordi-
nary quality of the group of erotic drawings that he then went on to discuss,
prefacing his comments with a brief anecdote illustrating Gericault's lusty-even
coarse-appetites where women were concerned. "He himself said, 'I begin a
woman and it becomes a lion,"' and even more revealingly, "And also, very insinu-
atingly, slapping one of his friends on the back, 'We two X__, we like big
a s.'"19This anecdote reveals Gericault's directness in sexual matters but, at the
same time, the intense privateness of the expression of such feelings. For draw-
ings like Nymph and Satyr or Couple Embracing were obviously intended for private
17. Michael Fried has suggested that the missing words on the poster are "evil eye," making the
complete message "Forall sickness and the evil eye." I would agree with this part of his interpretation,
but not with the broader continuation of it in which he suggests that this is in fact a representation
focused on seeing and looking. Michael Fried, "Le romantisme de Gericault," presented at the
Gericault colloquium at the Louvre, Paris, November 1991.
18. William Blake, Poetryand Prose,ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1927), p.76.
19. Clement, G&ricault,p. 218.
or theAbsenceof Women
G&ricault, 57
M0700?l
,- 2T 3*NNymph
_-
and Satyr.
r'i
20. Ibid. For the materialization of these qualities in Gericault's erotic art, see especially the recently
published Scene d'interieur:Coupleenlace aupres d'unefemme etendue,a small painting formerly in the
collection of Dantan Jeune. Sales Catalogue,Ader Tajan, Paris, Hotel Drouot, Friday,June 26, 1992, no.
48, with a notice by Philippe Grunchec. I am grateful to Robert Simon for having brought this work to
my attention.
58 OCTOBER
his character, the sensitivity, tenderness, and excellence of his heart."21Yet we may
count ourselves lucky, perhaps, that Gericault kept his elevated character and his
tender heart to himself insofar as the representation of women was concerned.
The issue, of course, goes far beyond the psycho-biographical one of a single
artist's feelings or "attitudes" toward women. Gericault the artist produced his
work at a specific moment in the social history of women as well as the history of
representation. Social and cultural historians of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries like Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, Dorinda Outram, and
Chantal Thomas have "made us aware of the peculiarly relentless exclusion of
women from the radical renovation that ought logically to have furthered their
liberation."22To borrow the words of Dorinda Outram, "The same arena which
created public man made woman into fille publique."23 The exclusion of women
from public life that began during the French Revolution continued apace in its
aftermath. In order to constitute a suitable public iconographic context for the
representation of women, Gericault could, like Ingres, have resorted to
Madonnas, Odalisques, and conventional portraits. To none of these practices
would he lend himself. Some kind of representational rapport with women exists,
powerfully but privately in his work, in the form of a fantasied sexual connections
with self-determined women engaging in agons with often incompletely human
male creatures, like centaurs.
It would seem that Gericault gave himself permission to fantasize in private
images what was not possible, even thinkable, in his public ones. By restricting the
representation of the female nude to the realm of the private and by investing his
erotica with such directness and energy, Gericault left himself with no place to go
in terms of public exhibition: hence his strangely reduced, marginal production
of this subject.24
I seem to have arrived at the paradoxical position of asserting that only
those who, in the conventional terms set forth by Clement, are misogynists are
capable of representing women fairly-an odd position for a feminist, but then
again, not really. In their different ways Degas, Seurat, and, finally, Gericault seem
to have made out the most interesting cases for feminine representation in the
nineteenth century-not those apparent admirers and idealizers of them, Ingres
and Renoir. In the nineteenth century, with its increasingly commodified system
of representation of the female body, a body disempowered, objectified, pacified,
or prettified, exaggeratedly sexualized or purified, Gericault's banishment or
marginalization of women, like his representation of other oppressed groups-
the poor or blacks or the insane-assumes the position of a positive intervention
within the dominant discourse. Or one might say that, briefly, living as he did
before the conventional modes of both conservative and vanguard objectification
of women's bodies were definitively put in place, at the very time of what costume
historian J. Flugel has called the "great masculine renunciation," the boundaries
of gender representation were still relatively fluid, more flexible and open to
exploration than they were to become later in the century.25
Gericault was working at the beginning of a long trajectory: the hardening
up and rationalization-through science, through recourse to the realm of the
"natural," through the commodification of visual imagery-of clearly defined
"separate spheres" for the two sexes-in social practice as well as in representa-
tion. Gericault was in fact, to borrow Clement's terms, but with quite different
implications, too refined, too sensitive to indulge in this commodified kind of
representation, or to create a sexualized image of woman at all, it would seem,
except for his private pleasure and that of his close friends. Within the complex
but generally oppressive discursive construction of femininity during the early
years of the nineteenth century, I understand Gericault's removal of women from
his oeuvreas constituting a relatively positive gesture: an absence that is, in fact, a
moving and provocative presence.
No one can escape from ideology, history, or the psychosexual wounds req-
uisite to coming of age in our culture, past or present; yet some few have managed
to make an intervention, no matter how slight, or with what lack of intentionality,
in the seemingly monolithic structure of illusory signs and significations that
construct femininity in the world of representation. Gericault, by removing
women from his representational field in the way he did, and by establishing
feminine presence where he did, was one of those-highly exceptional-interveners
in the dominant discourse of his time.
25. See, for example, Thomas Crow's exploration of new constructions of the male body during
and after the French Revolution in "Revolutionary Activism and the Cult of Male Beauty in the Studio
of David," in Fort, ed., Fictionsof theFrenchRevolution,pp. 55-83.