A Fine Body of Work:
Female Sexuality in Manet's Paintings of Victorine Meurent
Nathalie Lagerfeld, Princeton Class of 2009In the spectrum of Manet’s paintings of his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, Gare Saint-Lazare (1872) stands out glaringly. Gone is the aggressive nude body of his famous Olympia (1863), replaced by a demure navy dress with a tasteful fringe of lace at the throat. The powerful sensuality of Victorine’s body, the driving force of Manet’s most famous paintings from 1862 to 1866, has been replaced by the modesty of a virginal nanny. This disconnect makes it difficult to fit Gare Saint-Lazare into the narrative Manet seems to create in his paintings of Victorine. Perhaps for this reason, in Manet/Manette, Carol Armstrong writes a masterful chapter on the common themes in the Victorine paintings but excludes Gare Saint-Lazare as “an anomaly” to be dealt with in a later chapter, and even there Victorine barely figures in the analysis (Armstrong 144). In fact, most commentaries on the painting fail to deal with Victorine at all. The consensus seems to be that, as Harry Rand puts it, the “lack of overtly expressed personalities” in Gare Saint-Lazare renders the identities of the models unimportant (Rand 27). As Victorine’s sexuality disappears from the painting, so she disappears from the literature about it.
Yet isn’t this very disappearance noteworthy? In Manet’s original paintings of Victorine, clothing (if any) always seems an attempt to control her, to force concealment on an unwilling body: cumbersome, heavy skirts and blatantly fictitious costumes are awkwardly thrust upon it. In Gare Saint-Lazare, however, the body seems reconciled (or at least resigned) to its disguise. Gare Saint-Lazare thus represents a resolution of sorts to the Victorine series, not an anomaly outside them. But a resolution of what? Intriguingly, the trajectory of these early paintings of Victorine are an increasing confrontation with her body, beginning with the heavily cloaked Street Singer (1862) and culminating in the powerful nude Olympia. These paintings appear to be Manet’s attempt to control and to understand Victorine’s aggressive female sexuality, which posed a dangerous challenge to his upper-class values. If Olympia is Victorine’s triumph, Gare Saint-Lazare is Manet’s: in Gare Saint-Lazare, Manet incorporates this once dangerous body into bourgeois domesticity, signifying his triumph over the sexuality that once challenged him so strongly.
The Exhibit
Challenge
Exclusion
Concealment
Costume
Uproar
Confrontation
Victory
Works Cited
About the Author
