Humanity yields to the mercy of its historical interpreters, whether they be writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, or critics. The authorized interpretations of humankind, for the most part, are efforts written, painted or sculpted, composed, mused, or described by men. These interpretations by men are generally for other men, but are often about women--women who enjoy, deny, and oftentimes accept a variety of appellations from beauty to bitch.
Edwin Mullins' recent book, The Painted Witch, examines our cultural conditioning about the anxieties and hostilities towards women expressed by artists from the Greeks to Goya. Vexed and stimulated by Germaine Greer's comment in The Female Eunuch that "Women have very little idea of how much men hate them," Mullins states his thesis:
The evidence of art is that nothing in the world has held men's passions and longings in such thrall as women: neither money, nor goods, nor gods, nor friendship, nor conquest, nor kingdoms. But what passions? What longings? Hate there is, certainly: all those rapes, tortures, and.brutal martyrdoms. As well as more covert manifestations of man's hatred: the temptresses and whores, the witches and hags, the sanitized virgins and penitent sinners--images that are chimeras of men's buried terrors of what women might do if allowed to be themselves unchecked. But balancing these hate images, art offers us the most wonderful variety of images of love--from sexual passion to comradeship in old age to a response of almost helpless rejoicing that the world can contain a creature so perfectly lovely as woman.
Here again, women are judged from an elusive vantage point seemingly without regard for the knowledge, even Mullins must possess, of contradictions women have raised about these traditional categorizations. He attempts to heal a few open wounds with the ancient elixir of patronization and even elevates and exonerates four artists from the judgmental mire of their stereotyped subjects: Rembrandt, Watteau, Goya, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Mullins contends that Rembrandt's works depict human relationships: that Watteau 's women are not the frothy creatures we see before us but actually independent mistresses in control of their own emotions; that Goya exposes his own emotions as clearly as his subjects; and that Lautrec's women possess an identity not defined by men but by women themselves. However, Rembrandt's Potiphar's Wife Accusing Joseph still presents the view of woman as repentant; Watteau's The Shepherds is woman as plaything; Goya's Maja-Naked and Clothed is most certainly woman as temptress; and, Lautrec's brothel figures are definitely whores albeit compassionate ones (a quality which seems to perplex Mullins),
Mullins concludes his metamorphic journey by asserting that men's images of women are offered as "camouflage behind which the dominant sex [man!] hides horrible doubts about his fitness to dominate." It's little wonder!
The investigation of feminine imagery and the interpretation of that imagery must also come through women and more strongly than ever before. If women feel they have conquered the major battles of antiquated views on women's roles, current publications such as The Painted Witch (1985) clearIy illustrate that more skirmishes lie ahead. Mullins possesses the intellectual sensitivity to attack feminist issues straight on; however, as with many of his peers, he falls back and the timeworn pitfalls again emerge leaving the reader questioning the author's understanding of and sympathy for women's issues. Perhaps the same conclusions will be drawn, but women must fervently continue to articulate their own hypotheses more clearly and openly and emerge from what can be termed, in many cases, self-imposed isolation.
Martha Collins, a contemporary writer and Nebraska native (currently serving as Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts), hits upon this issue of women in isolation in her poem, "Homecoming":
. . . But please
understand
and try to find
your own space
where you can see beyond
these ceilings and floors
and windows and walls.
It shouldn't be hard:
you have been miles
away, after all,
while I have been
making myself at home.
Women
must leave "home" and become travelers on all frontiers, accepting the
responsibility and cherishing the baggage they carry to provoke and to demand
appreciation and understanding. Some
will tote an overnight case--some steamer trunks. Some will shoulder the
load to enlighten the rest through significant observations by filling
collective bags of recognition with aesthetic gold.
Others will simply lure with falsehoods and weak artistic form which
merely consume vital space, confuse, and promote intellectual suicide.
In any event, these points of view will demand inspection with women at
the center of the arena of discussion and dissemination, instead of perched on
the detached, isolated pedestal of subjective male scrutiny.