Hollis Clayson

Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875 (review)

typical of countless ones told by male artists or writers at the time: the studio is cold and unkempt, the artist is vulgar, the model is tired and abused, and her tentative comments on art are ignored. Pauline gives no narrative of her upbringing, how she came into modeling, what her life outside of the studio is like – all that would count as memoirs. To propose that “The memoir’s existence restores what was suppressed in the studio: the model’s subjectivity and voice” (108) is to draw risky conclusions from a series of brief dialogues penned by an unknown author who perhaps invented all the material (and perhaps was a man). Chapter 3 addresses women artists of the nude, especially Marie Bashkirtseff, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt. Since women did not typically have the education or opportunity to paint or draw after the nude, there is not much to offer here, although Dawkins draws some important connections. The final chapter, on women journalists and critics of the nude, focuses on Marie (Marc) de Montifaud, who wrote salon reviews and fiction. It is important to attend to this neglected figure, but the material on the nude itself is slight and the use of lengthy quotes is at times distracting. The short stories by Montifaud that present scenes of nakedness are presented by Dawkins as original examples of the female writer’s approach to the nude. Dawkins fails to note that this genre of stories has a long tradition in the nineteenth century and that the same types of voyeuristic scenes can be found in collections such as Alphonse Daudet’s Femmes d’artistes, for example. This is not to say that Montifaud’s taking up of this motif is not worthy of note, but the larger context would need to be provided; the conclusion that gender is at the source of these scenes is unconvincing. The study is well worth a read with these cautions in mind. It will be most beneficial to readers who already possess a good knowledge of the issues involved and can therefore tease out Dawkins’ particular contributions, or those interested in a particular focus, especially the decency and censure laws of the time or the general contributions of Marc de Montifaud.