L'Esprit Créateur

Modeling, Mothering, and the Postpartum Belly in Zola's L'Œuvre' Marie Lathers OF THE TITLES THAT ZOLA IMAGINED for his novel of the artist's life, L'Œuvre (1886), several recall the birthing process, including Faire un Enfant, Procréer, Engrosser la Nature, Enfantement , Accouchement, Parturition, Conception, Enfanter and Les Couches saignantes (IV, 1338).2 Many readings of L'Œuvre have focused on Claude Lantier's failed attempt at sustaining a new movement in art. Although some of these readings cite the painter's indictment of the model's body as a factor in this failure, my own reading positions that failure of the female body at center stage.31 will propose that L'Œuvre inscribes the deformations of gestation onto the female belly and then presents the ventre, poses it, before the artist (and reader) as unrepresentable, even as the very sign of unrepresentability . Indeed, one way that Zola works through the problem of the nude is to ask the question "Can the postpartum model pose?"—this in a novel that repeatedly, even compulsively, stages the pre- and post-partum belly as problem for the artist and metaphor of artistic production. This essay reads naturalism 's posers in terms of the relationship between modeling and motherhood and, to a lesser extent, modeling and aging, for both motherhood and aging mark the body of the model in such a way that her posing potential becomes questionable. After the model's youth in Balzac's Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (1832), she reaches motherhood and middle age in L'Œuvre and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon (1867); her "death" is then staged in Guy de Maupassant's Fort comme la mort (1889). The evolution of realist literature in France follows this life span of the model (i.e., of her body) from youth to maternity, to decline and death.4 As the terms artist, woman, mother and model took on new meaning in the nineteenth century, the pregnant and postpartum model emerged as the worrisome site of conflicts posed by the intersection of the body, art and gender. It is useful, therefore, to first inquire of these terms. Then, after a brief reading of Octave Mirbeau's tale of the aged model, "L'Octogénaire," and references to Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon, the strategies centering on the postpartum belly in L'Œuvre can be untangled. I will argue that in L'Œuvre the female ventre inhibits the successful passage from the problem of the model (the real woman) to the problem of the nude 30 Summer 1999 Lathers (the canvas).5 Overcoming the deformities of the model's body is a task the painter assigns himself as he elaborates the terms of his participation in the making of modern art. Griselda Pollock explains that in the nineteenth century the artist became the idealized opposite of the work-identified bourgeois.6 To expand on Pollock , the artist was a peculiar type of male because what defined him was his ability to exist without working, as a bohemian or flâneur. The artist was nonetheless acceptable because he represented the necessary underside of the bourgeois. Women could not take up the brush because female identity did not depend on the work/not work opposition—women functioned, in theory at least, completely outside of this opposition. Definitions of artist and woman thus depended on either a perverse relation or no relation to work. In fact, working women were not really women at all. It followed that woman artist was an impossible identity. One could not both represent the opposite of work—the artist—and that which stood outside of the opposition and guaranteed it—woman. The slow development of the idea of the woman artist is indicative of this impossibility: a woman could not be an artist, she had to be a woman artist.1 This incompatibility of the categories artist and woman and (artistic) production and (maternal) reproduction paralleled the sexual division of labor of capitalist culture. Women artists had to relinquish their "womanhood " by not becoming mothers. At the same time, working women were represented as negligent mothers who did not, or could not...