Fabrication of a woman | Marie Darrieussecq & Paula Becker (1876-1907)
The first female nude self-portraits & what it means and what it takes to be both a woman and an artist
I chose as a gift for a friend’s birthday a book, Fabriquer une femme by Marie Darrieussecq, published in January this year. As someone who once said to me, “as much as we find books, the books find us”. And that’s precisely why I always love to wander around in the bookstores, not limiting myself to the algorithm recommendations or the bestsellers shelves, in the hope of these serendipitous encounters. The story is set in the 80s, and is about two very different girls, bounded by profound friendship but also too many misunderstandings between them, how they grew up together in the Basque area, in Bordeaux and then parted ways as they both evolved and failed in their own ways in the patriarchal and heterosexual world like the tragic figure Antigone facing the intricate world of rules established by Creon. Darrieussecq realised that the heterosexual way of being is not only a lifestyle but in fact also un regime politique which implies accepting a set of power dynamics and des modes de fonctionnement in the social orders.
The writer herself is also from the Basque area. I’m one of those boring people who prefer the Mediterranean, but the Basque and Bretagne have really made me appreciate the Atlantic side. Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up in the Canton region where there’re multiple languages/dialects and distinct local cultural practices despite a high level of urbanisation; I have a soft spot in my heart for places that manage to reconcile modern life with their local identities and cultural heritage… But Darrieussecq recalled how she was bored in her little Basque village and started reading Madame Bovary at the age of 13, “ce qui était pas bien. je n’avais rien compris. c’était trop tôt.” I also grew up without the Internet and felt very much bored most of the time (boredom is a wonderful and precious feeling in reality), and literature was my first cosmopolitan virtual community. I remember reading La dame aux camélias (in translation of course) at around the same age, barely understanding the true implications of the story and nevertheless weeping over my pillow about the stories of the main characters and refusing to get out of bed as I was totally addicted to the fictional world.
The name of the book evokes of course the writings of Derrida and de Beauvoir, but it doesn't stop there. Darrieussecq also wants to touch the “performance” aspect of the way we construct ourselves as females, in the vein of Judith Butler. In an interview with France Culture, the writer talked about how a woman often builds up her identity in the mirror of other women. She pointed out that there’re almost exclusively images of females in (heterosexual) women’s magazines, while it would be impossible for magazines aiming at a (heterosexual) male readership to have only images of men. Girls are trained at a very young age to look at each other, to examine these images of other women and to fashion their own ways of being a female accordingly, regardless of their sexual orientation. And I’m certainly not advocating that we should do the opposite and teach girls to look at boys in the way that males are taught in our culture to consume images of women — by maintaining and internalising the consumerist gaze, we leave the problem unsolved.
The story is told first in the voice of Rose and then of Solange, the two protagonists of her novels. There are more and more novels recently that use the narrative technique of multiple perspectives — it’s almost like a trend in literature in the last few decades to weave interdependent narratives by including different perspectives of the same timeframe, often in a coming-of-age story. As a reader, we get to live the same episode multiple times through different characters, each depicting another aspect of the object like on the Cubist canvas to present a more complete view of a complex reality that could not be captured by only one perspective/narrative.
Darrieussecq has also written a non-fiction biography on the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. The book is entirely based on the personal letters and journals of the artist. In a very male-dominated avant-gardiste fin-de-siècle artistic circle, she could hardly find her place as a female painter and wasn’t recognised for her pioneering contribution to modern art while she was alive. She is now known as probably the first female artist to have painted nude self-portraits, and her pregnant nudes are particularly striking and contemporary from an art historian point of view. She died after giving birth to her only daughter, Mathilde, at the age of only 31. “Quel dommage !” were allegedly her last words.
Le regard est un pouvoir. And having the lucidity and the liberty to construct the regard toward oneself is one of the highest forms of emotional freedom. How to construct a “naked” image of oneself that is neither a sacralising nor an eroticising when we are women? A woman is so much more than the dichotomous vision of “Madonna or Whore”.
With love 📡💡💙
J.Z.
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