A Room of One’s Own

If history, literature and, in general, the vestiges and proofs of our culture have been predominantly crafted by men, what relevance does the act of giving birth have in the history of our civilisation? Are there any instances of such scenes not associated with the religious concept of giving life that predate the 20th century? We have to wonder if childbirth is actually something worth making visible for, as Woolf noted, we cannot measure or assess something that has been omitted from our recorded history. The historical occupations of women, such as care or housekeeping, are those which Woolf says have no benchmark against which to gauge them. “There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures, neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper.” Where there should be marks, there are only absences or holes. The very lack of quantifable standardised criteria to narrate, analyse or dignify those activities is the reason why these visual records in the museum’s collection require a new interpretation.

This portrait radiates neatness and modesty thanks to the plain, simple, sober colours of the spinner’s attire, virtues which are further reinforced by the pristine white linen cap that hides her hair. Usually that part of a woman’s body was only revealed in private rooms, with obviously erotic connotations. The dedication and zeal this picture conveys make the act of spinning the true protagonist, and the spinning wheel the main narrative element. In this case, spinning is an activity associated with femininity: it was performed inside the home, not necessarily as a profession but as a skill to be acquired in the process of becoming a woman. It validates the sitter’s gender, reaffirming that clearly defined roles, rather than the moment of birth, corroborate gender identity. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”

For the sake of contrast, we suggest comparing this work with Gerard ter Borch’s Portrait of a Man Reading a Document, which we will see later, where an occupation is represented not only as a defining trait of the sitter but also as paid work, the free exercise of a profession outside the home in exchange for monetary compensation, with the power it brings.

Here—by now we are in the 18th century—the object of desire is the boy, who enjoys the tickling, and the dominant subject is the young lady, who stares at us and asks us to be discreet. This work, which clearly reflects the bourgeois tastes of the Rococo period, is pertinent to our theme because it also illustrates the separation of traditional gender roles, where women occupied the domain of sensory delights and men that of intellectual pleasures (as we will later see in works like Corner of a Library by Van der Heyden, Portrait of a Man Reading a Document by Ter Borch, or The Reader by Ferdinand Hodler). Rita Segato and other authors believe that the patriarchy arose from the concept of original sin and similar myths, widespread in many cultures, where woman is the embodiment of sin, a slave to her passions, and man is forced to take control, in a triumph of his will and self-discipline, by the cognitive and moral route. Here the woman is inciting another to sin in some way, under the seemingly innocent guise of a tickle.

Finally, the candlestick with the burnt-down candle indicates the hours devoted to study. Although no one is in the room, the narrative quality of the objects allows us to imagine how it was used, the actions that took place there and the guests who were invited to share it: men (possibly the artist himself) of a certain social position with the capacity, power and resources needed to play a part in the production of knowledge. We might say that this room has been appropriated; in Woolf’s words, it is “the offspring of luxury and privacy and space”. It is a room of one’s own, in every sense.

In a way, this picture, like others in the Thyssen collection, shatters the historical silence on home-making—in other words, the lack of information about the customs and tasks that made the family’s existence and subsistence possible. It also illustrates the dichotomy between paid labour outside the home and caregiving labour in the privacy of the home. That historically ignored private life between four walls shaped the concept of intimacy that has endured to this day: the home is still considered a predominantly female domain, although this idea is gradually fading thanks to efforts to revisit and revise that notion.

In those days, the mother’s use of corporal punishment would have been considered irreproachable. In fact, raising children with a firm hand positively reinforced the woman’s role within those four walls; it confirmed her as an authority figure, rather than prey to the supposedly inherent weakness of Eve’s descendants.

This canvas also raises a question about motherhood in connection to the central theme of this tour: Why would a woman need a room of her own, a place only for her, if her personal development and self-fulfilment is found in caring for others? To put it another way, do women assert themselves in their own right, or is maternity what gives their lives purpose? If we take away motherhood, what roles can they play?

Throughout this tour we find female figures in a variety of poses and situations, but how many and which of them do we assume are mothers? Which ones have that status? Throughout history, motherhood has not only been considered a state of grace or the result of a divine decision; it has also served to distinguish between different “classes” of women, upholding the “mother” as an example of supreme dignity and worth whose fulfilment nullified or somehow disguised the search for or attainment of her own subjectivity, while simultaneously disqualifying her from pursuing a profession or owning assets.

Once again, Woolf inspired the choice of this picture: the issue was not just the rooms that women were unable to conquer, but also the wages they could not earn and the professions that were not open to them, “because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned”.

It was an act in which a woman adorned and fitted herself with corsets, lace, petticoats, satin, garters, feathers and jewellery. A woman did not just get dressed; she conformed. Here, the male painter’s perspective embellishes the depiction of something he is not generally allowed to see, thereby introducing a voyeuristic element. This act of “powdering one’s nose”, as Woolf put it, is what painters portrayed in their pictures as “women’s rooms”, personal spaces in which to beautify themselves. It is yet another example of the surrender— or abandonment, depending on your perspective—of women to the exclusively sensible realm, within the sense-versus-sensibility dichotomy so reviled by subsequent modernity.

If this image were reversed, we would find it odd to see a male figure at his toilet, preparing to bathe or dressing, and we probably would not interpret it as a moment of introspection or space for self-affirmation. As the next work will show, in the world of men, time dedicated to oneself was a more solemn affair.

This canvas, perhaps better than any other work in the collection, reflects the relationship between the female body and its commodification. The women for whom both men are competing is situated in the centre of the picture between them, with her back turned to us, while one admires her and the other exposes her naked form. Here the nude body is portrayed as a commodity, pointing to one of the other tasks assigned to women: that of satisfying the desires of others. From our perspective, the hand that conceals her face with a sheet, as part of the story told in Barante’s text, takes on new meaning, signifying the woman’s anonymity. We can just barely make out the profile of her timid, bashful countenance, but her face is hidden, leaving us to guess her identity and, if we cannot, condemning her to remain anonymous. The sheet acts like a wall, making it impossible to identify and accurately portray the person, who is therefore presented to us as a body intended for another’s pleasure.

Probably not a jug and bottle of beer beside a newspaper, a book, a smoking pipe and a nibbled biscuit. They would more likely be—as we saw in the previous painting—personal toiletry and cosmetic items or objects for prayer, elements that defined and fixed the gender roles we still identify and perpetuate today. In fact, judging from this still life and the aforementioned work by Boucher, it seems that men read, drank and smoked in their free time, while women safeguarded the ideal of beauty, almost as if they had a monopoly on their respective pursuits.

The girl is shown in profile, lost in thought. The artist caught her in the act of acknowledging and asserting her own body, a very different attitude from that of a model posing for a male painter. In this scene she poses only for herself, though her role is still that of the “beautiful object”, the secret to the success of female portraiture in a patriarchal society that has traditionally personified Vanity as a woman gazing into a mirror.

The reader’s still pose naturally lends itself to painting, but it also has a certain theatrical quality, as if the brushstrokes might let us re ad what the person is reading. In this picture, we know the subject is reading a newspaper, and although we cannot make out its contents, we undoubtedly identify a certain affection in it. This male portrait is a veritable tribute to that theatrical rendering, the externalisation of reading.

The expressive brushwork captures the monumental burden of the passing years, drawn in the man’s wrinkles and white hairs, and directs our gaze to the newspaper resting on the table on which his eyes are fixed; the reader’s hand conceals his gaze from us, as if attempting to shut out the rest of the world. The main theme is therefore the glorification of the “self”, understood as the exaltation of subjectivity rather than an embodiment of moral rights and duties that justified the relevance of a portrait based on the sitter’s social status, as we have seen in other works on this tour. On the contrary: this sitter is moved, he “somatises” the reading.

Literature, biographical or otherwise, always entails a degree of self-referentiality; it rests on the very concept of the subject, someone who has something to say and needs to put it in writing. The same is true of visual representations of workplaces. Practically every aspiring artist of the last four centuries painted his or her workshop at some point as a correlate of their subjectivity, a kind of self-portrait. Showing oneself through a room of one’s own has a narrative component, for that “ownness”—ownership—confirms character, secures dignity, and attests and delimits a subject’s place in the world. In short, ownership determines the process of subjectification. Its absence, as in this case, places us in a vulnerable, indecisive limbo where words are not written down and brushstrokes fail to dry, where we glimpse anonymity.

The image of this woman sitting on the edge of the bed conveys an unsettling feeling of loneliness, a constant in the American painter’s oeuvre, which also lacks the conventional accessories associated with female imagery that we saw in the other works. In underclothes, she holds a train timetable in her hands. We only see the profile of her face, with no identifiable expression, underscoring the artist’s need to speak to us of anonymity. The absence of decorative elements confirms the perception of an empty, impersonal space, and the vertical lines that frame the room are overpowering, leaving us before an inert boxed-in form that exudes a vague narrativity.

Almost all of the domestic spaces we’ve seen on this tour have a slightly impersonal feel, but that impersonality is more solemn in a hotel room, designed to house a few fleeting moments of life. Many later artworks have focused on transitory places where we leave something of ourselves. Exploring those traces we leave behind, and in dialogue with this canvas, in the 1980s Sophie Calle created a remarkable photographic series in which she compiled “incriminating” evidence in four-teen hotel rooms in Venice (L’Hôtel). She, a woman, became a voyeur and detective of the intimacy woven there. In addition to photographs, the artist produced a written record, almost like a police report, of the facts that can be gleaned from the vestiges and objects found in those rooms. Her work may be a tribute or response to Hopper’s, but unlike him, Calle accompanied it with exhaustive documentation in an attempt to avoid anonymity and vagueness. We could interpret Calle’s work as a woman artist’s attempt to appropriate the narrative, to be the subject of the plot— in other words, to be the one who gives meaning to those rooms, appropriating their potential history.

Meanwhile, the naked Jeanne looks straight at the prints in foreshortened perspective, turning her bare back to us. The choice of pose and its prominence within the scene is an obvious tribute to Ingres’s Turkish Bath, a quintessential example of voyeurism.

Both versions of Jeanne, absorbed and focused on the task at hand, seem to complement each other, illustrating what the painter perceived as different facets of his wife. The naked woman is entirely receptive to the art before her, focusing her attention and her gaze upon it while nonchalantly showing us her nude form. The dressed woman “shows” whereas the naked woman “shows herself”. We might think that Manguin duplicated the model here as a kind of tribute to his wife’s different facets, the intellectual and the sensitive side. However, it is more likely that this double portrait has no significance beyond mere visual formalism, and that in painting her nude, the painter was once again comparing the female silhouette to a beautiful object in a kind of arabesque—like the prints she is holding, which contrast with the profusely and colourfully decorated room.

Even so, we still see the scene (as in Boucher’s case) as an example of a pictorial print in itself, summarising the conventional male perception of female identity as a projection of their own desires. As Woolf concluded, “Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction.”

For a woman to portray a city was a bold act at the time. Georgia O’Keeffe herself was sharply criticised for wanting to capture the impressive streets of New York City in her work. Her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, was opposed to the idea of including this picture in her solo show at Anderson Galleries in 1925 because the setting and theme were supposedly too masculine. Instead, he suggested that she exhibit oil paintings of enlarged flowers, deemed more appropriate and feminine. One year later, O’Keeffe managed to include it in her show at The Intimate Gallery and sold it on the first day for one thousand two hundred dollars. “From then on, they let me paint New York,” the artist remarked.