What is Modernity? You can’t answer that question without talking about the Black American experience.
As a not-Black American, it’s hard to escape myths about what the Black American experience is. I say this even after reading history, even feeling safer in Black spaces than White spaces. But even if you can’t escape the myths—and the beliefs that frequently follow—that doesn’t mean that you don’t intuit that something doesn’t add up.
Which is why I open my Books In Conversation with this collection. Yes, please, read Ibram X. Kendi’s excellent Stamped From The Beginning, among others. That will help explode much of what we’ve been taught. But I wanted to explore these lesser known titles because they tell different aspects of the story. Other volumes will touch on it later in the series as well.
Born in Blackness by Howard French traces the origins of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from a starting point that’s been hiding in plain sight: Portugal. That country used to be seen as the loser of losers in the global rush for power, but given their massive and productive holdings in South America (Brazil) and Africa (Angola) into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that’s nonsense. And certainly, they broke through many technological barriers to initiate sea travel on a scale not seen before. More sinister is their early pilot of the infamous transatlantic triangle, which I think is more fitting to see as a transfer of wealth from one continent (Africa) to three others (Europe and North and South America), which enabled the latter three to continue trading and building wealth among themselves.
Do not let the propaganda fool you: Africa is a continent of abundance, and that’s why it is so attractive. (The immense display of wealth by Mansa Musa of Mali during his pilgrimage to Mecca in the fourteenth century might have been an inspiration for initial voyages there from Portugal.) And while no one should pity the Portuguese during this time, they came to West Africa to establish trade relations, not to conquer. They took enslaved people, but they were hoping to trade primarily in gold.
Anyone reading this already knows that, of course, enslaved human beings were ultimately more profitable, and there’s an irony to this that French underscores at the end of his book. Africa, large as it is, punched below its weight in population even before Europeans and Asians began plundering it, in no small part due to microorganisms more readily found in the tropics. (In The Shadow of Slavery discusses the means by which West Africa in particular adjusted for the consequent agricultural conditions.) The sparseness of the population was exacerbated by the slave raids, which were conducted more by other Africans than by Europeans, at least at first. That this was weakening polities, even as they traded human beings for commodities, wasn’t lost on African leaders, who recognized that they, as a consequence, would have fewer future allies as they weakened other nations. French does not excuse the choices these people made to continue, but he does give the sense that by the time this realization settled, they were enmeshed in an economic system that was going to be brutal to get out of.
Even before the conquest of the Americas began in earnest, Africa was the fulcrum of two other, early “trade triangles”. The spice trade, particularly for melegueta pepper from the area that is now Liberia, drove the exchange for metal and textiles produced in northern Europe. This trade, surprisingly, integrated northern and southern Europe economically in ways that hadn’t been seen before.
The trade in textiles drove a triangle of a more “global” character. While Africans were able to produce fine textiles, those were more readily available in what is now known as India, and they featured cotton, which was more comfortable in the tropics than the cloth produced in Europe. Portugal was again the intermediary for this trade, and what they took for cloth was people.
I bring this up to highlight that African leaders were making economic choices, even if we find them repugnant—they were not being pillaged (at least not initially). They were a source of both direct and indirect wealth, and when they could leverage for advantage, they did. That they were a source of significant wealth is something else that is also hiding in plain sight. Without the wealth generated by African resources and African bodies, it’s hard to conceive of the possibilities of the silver mines or tobacco, cotton, and sugar plantations which powered the European colonies in the Americas.
I think it should be clear to anyone that Africa and Africans suffered losses for their interactions with Europeans. This shouldn’t be a matter of debate, and yet there are those who had argued for decades that Africa somehow benefited from enlightened European systems. French slams this at the end of his book with statistics showing that while Africa’s population may have been below the mean for its size before European “trade”, even after the slave trade had ended and most of Africa was colonized by European powers, the continent *still* hadn’t recovered its population losses, in spite of allegedly superior public health systems. It wasn’t until after decolonization and independence in the middle of the twentieth century that Africa began to make up for its population losses in earnest—this in spite of the narrative that Africa is poor and starving.
Born in Blackness proved, to me, the case that Africa was a net contributor to our global economic history (and that they deserve reparations, even if nothing will ever be enough). One narrative exploded. There were times that I felt outraged and shook my head, but it was an understandable story because it dealt with history and economics. Much more difficult was Slavery and The Culture of Taste. That is a book about psychology and sociology—and a level of sadism I both can’t comprehend and see everyday.
Slavery and The Culture of Taste by Simon Gikandi was the most difficult book I have ever read, no contest. (More difficult to read than Orientalism by Edward Said, and I don’t speak French.) The concepts were easy to understand, and that made it more painful.
I came to the book because I finally noticed how much I had been hearing the word “taste”. What, exactly, did that mean? Why were people like Austin Kleon and Ira Glass talking about how their tastes “improved” even as their art didn’t while they were in the formative stages of figuring out what their artistic orientation was? We judge people by it all the time—but why? What is taste, and what does it signal?
I finally did a search for it in my fantastic library system, and as soon as I saw this title, I knew I had to read it. While the title may seem a mashup, it’s not.
Gikandi starts with the problem of modernity, and this is something French gets at, too: for all of our enlightened associations with modernity, it doesn’t begin in earnest until the explosion of enslavement. The Modern Person is an independent contributor to a society that values, among other things, humanity and the values of The Enlightenment (rationality and independent judgment being chief among them) and sees themself in opposition to the hidebound traditions that characterized, roughly, the medieval era, particularly religious deference and socially proscribed conduct. It is the original era of optimism, an OG Everything Is Awesome.
Whereas the Middle Ages might have demanded, through its deference to God and Church, the presentation and internal embodiment of Goodness so that we could be seen to Heaven, the Age of Modernity demanded the performance of Happiness, which spoke to our Success, so that we could be trusted with future Opportunity. The Modern Era is the Age of Possibility and more than a little Awe over how far we have come.
But what these early modern specimens knew in a way that they could not deny was that all of the Progress was underwritten by the enslavement of people who were not invited into the benefits of modernity in any way. The modern subject saw the slave and knew that their age was built on a foundation of clouds.
So what is taste in this context? It’s the set of aesthetic practices and habits of mind that is supposed to limn the difference between what is supposed to be the idealistic magic of modernity and the root of slavery beneath it. The Culture of Taste flowers in eighteenth century England, and it’s possibly where the British first learn to sublimate what they can’t make peace with (or control).
(Is this a successful strategy? That tastes change so frequently would tend to indicate that it’s not.)
It can’t be overlooked that the practices include politeness, and here it’s hard not to think of the rule to avoid discussions of religion, politics, and sex. It is also, at its deeper root, an admonition to make sure everyone is comfortable by making sure everyone has a pleasant experience in which they can all experience—wait for it—Happiness.
It’s when you contemplate politeness that you start to realize Marx had it wrong: the opiate of the modern masses is Happiness, and like all addictive drugs, we chase it most especially when we don’t have it. I would argue that our quest to always live in a state of perpetual happiness is the cause of much of our sociological, if not psychological, ills. As Ryder Carroll, the creator of the Bullet Journal, pointed out, being in one emotional or psychological state all of the time is generally considered a sign of mental illness. I would argue that it also retards our growth as a civilization—and that just might be the point.
Gikandi is not the first to note that the presence of enslaved people and their importance to the economy built up around them is not an ironic but a logical cause of the heightened calls for “liberty” among the people who aren’t enslaved. (We’ll talk about that more when we get to Sunny Auyang's The Dragon and the The Eagle.)
It was difficult reading about performance, for reasons that I’m sure many people will understand. I grew up with a parent who frequently didn’t seem to have emotions but performed them. I might not be putting that the best way, but it’s something that left me having trouble trying to distinguish between genuine displays of emotion and emotional manipulation. Part of why I’m having trouble putting it into words is that it’s an extreme version of an accepted phenomenon, which has led me to question the validity of the practice. Gikandi’s analysis doesn’t do anything to affirm confidence.
It is harder still to read about the twisted psychic underpinnings of our civilization. To the extent you suspected something was wrong, his explanation proves you’re correct. It should no longer be a question of what replaces this abusive system, but why haven’t we stopped it already? Because even if you deny the humanity of the exploited people who make the system, it’s difficult to deny the toll that living with the contradictions of it has done to even those who aren’t exploited by it—or, perhaps better to say, are exploited differently. (I think now of the psychological case studies at the end of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; a subject for another day, but for now it’s clear after reading that the culture of violence does its own damage to those who perpetrate it.)
These questions are at the heart of the first part of the book. They’re the easy part. The second half is devastating. As much as people have pretzeled their arguments to deny that enslaved, captured people were just that, their captors understood perfectly that they were dealing with fellow human beings. And they proceeded with that informed understanding to break and destroy their captives’ previous identities.
This is part of what makes this particular flavor of slavery extra-special cruel and evil. Yes, slavery and captivity existed before the Portuguese dropped down into West Africa, but the system that was exported to the European colonies took on far more degradation than what had been seen before. The people who were enslaved were now intended to exist only for their service to someone else.
The recognition of the humanity of these people is implicit in the cruelty of the methods that were employed, and yes, dear reader, this is where I cried. Imagining the psychological disruption of being removed from family, friends, community, and home, and being taken to a strange environment by people who were known to be brutal and violent was terrifying. The fact that many of them did not speak the language of their captors was even more disorienting.
I can’t stress enough that this was known and obvious, if only through the continued resistance to capture, captivity, and enslavement at every step of the way. And even if we look at the middle-men of slavery and excuse them for not having power, they made choices within that system. They did not learn the names of their captives; they renamed them. While some artifacts of their former lives miraculously made the journey, for the most part, everything that had bound them to their previous identity was taken from them. Please imagine what it must have been like to have had their identities stripped from them, particularly as adults, but even for children. It made not only for loss but a certain kind of madness.
The barbaric cruelty of slave owners and their overseers is infamous. What may be less appreciated is that it was intentional. It wasn’t just sadism—although that can’t be discounted—but a calculated strategy to keep enslaved people from asserting their humanity. When we consider the elaborate means of torture many households with enslaved people employed, it’s clear that the violence was planned and strategic. Gikandi makes the point that the tools, preparation, and execution of the violence borders on sexual fetishism, and it’s hard to look at the pictures of the idealized violence and not see sexual undertones. I would argue that this is a continuing, perverse, and unwilling recognition that the people who are being subjugated and dehumanized are still people.
This part was painful to read, but it’s not all about dehumanization. Perhaps you’ve noticed—Black Americans are real people, and their ancestors fought for their humanity every step of the way, and in every way. They went beyond mere survival. For as much as enslavers tried to deny the humanity of their captives, in many places they had to make concessions to them. (I would argue that the combination of these concessions and the inconsistently applied violence actually made conditions in some ways more terrifying.)
Enslaved people got precious little time off, but during those times many communities gathered to remember and reconstruct their identities from their original communities, including songs, music, and dancing, as well as sharing their original language. (Even this sometimes proved to be too much for their captors, some of whom reported feeling haunted by the sounds of that music.) In some places, they also had the “right” to grow their own food on small parcels of land adjacent to their homes. While this might stretch the definition of a concession—the arrangement was frequently an alternative to a captor providing food—many enslaved people used these plots to assert their identities, growing a mix of subsistence items from their nation of origin and their new settings. (If you’re wondering how they had seeds from their homes, In The Shadow of Slavery touches on that as well.)
This control over their spaces, social as well as physical, is one way enslaved people subverted their captors’ admonition that “there shall be a place for everything and everything shall have a place.” (Boy, does housekeeping take on a significantly more sinister tone in that light.) These are just some of the ways that African slaves were able to not only maintain their humanity but forge an identity in the face of psychological oppression.
Gikandi cites Freud to highlight the importance of play as a psychological device to limit the damage of oppression—but notes that is not a substitute for freedom itself. Still, at times, it must have been briefly satisfying, especially in the festivals popular in the West Indies, in which slaves openly copied the culture of taste in order to ridicule it. Surprisingly, some of these, particularly the “John Canoe” festivals, actually included their aristocratizing captors. (Perhaps a contemporary comparison would be a mashup of a drag ball and a roast.)
Both French and Gikandi make clear that Africa—and African enslavement—are the basis for modernity, in all its ugliness. But let’s admit that economic and psychological repercussions may require some thought and analysis, because they aren’t all immediately obvious. That’s alright—Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body covers territory that everyone will immediately, viscerally understand.
I came across Strings’ book first when I heard Brooke Gladstone’s On The Media episode about the moral panic around body size. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the study mentioned in that episode—and briefly in Strings’ book—paints a different picture when smokers and people who have been diagnosed with serious illnesses—people who are thin for reasons that no one wants to emulate—are removed. Being in the BMI category considered healthy weight is, in fact, healthier and encourages greater longevity. However, even though a lower BMI is healthier, that doesn’t excuse, condone, or license bullying of people with higher BMIs.
But what does all of this have to do with modernity?
Kidnapped Africans were beginning to be seen in European cities in the seventeenth centuries, and the ambivalence people felt about the benefits versus the material origins of modernity is reflected in the way they perceived those people. While European artistic standards did not consider stereotypical African faces to fit with the conventions of the time (pointed noses and “fine” lips were held to be more attractive), their bodies fit with the European ideal of a “well-formed, proportionate figure”. Initially, there was even artistic admiration for these bodies.
This does not last, though sexual objectification and exploitation of Black bodies endures to this day. Strings makes clear that it is in perceptions of the Black body that we can see the twisted and ugly ways Europeans tried to justify the contradictions of modernity: If an enslaved person is being treated as a beast by someone else known to be rational, it must be because they are, in fact, a beast. Like all other animals, they don’t control their desires for food or sex, which both explains and is explained by the differences in the average body types of Europeans and Africans. (One is tempted here to remind early and contemporary observers that members of both groups have never had a unified body type, but I suspect this would fall on deaf ears.)
Now the special, modern twist: Make sure you prove your ability to control your baser impulses, particularly around food, lest you be revealed as a beast. Ludicrous as this sounds, it seems a number of Europeans were in danger of being revealed to be just that.
The slave trade made the sugar trade possible, as French discusses in Born in Blackness. While Europeans had used sweeteners before, the explosion of the availability of sugar in the eighteenth century was a new paradigm. What came right along with it was the availability of coffee (and tea—but we’ll let Raj Patel talk about that in Stuffed and Starved). There’s some debate about whether sugar is addictive, but there is no debate about coffee, tea, and caffeine in general. Even more importantly, coffee had a prestige we in the twenty-first century have trouble appreciating. Consuming it, at least initially, was a signal of sophistication and even erudition, and in the beginning of the Age of Performance, coffee was the perfect prop. And if consumed in the new cafes that were popping up all over European cities that became a stage for intellectual activity, so much the better.
I don’t think I need to explain why sugar consumption made coffee drinking more palatable (confession: I hate coffee), and I probably don’t need to explain that consuming large amounts of sweetened drinks—many times with milk—in combination with the sedentary lifestyle of the cafe dweller led not only to health problems like gout but also weight gain. This phenomenon was a subject of deep, almost existential concern, and part of their response was the development of the “standards of taste” Gikandi refers to. Polite individuals are also admonished to practice table etiquette and show restraint when dining.
It’s during this period that we begin to see women being encouraged to be the smallest people they can be, as well as the beginnings of the diet craze (or is that crazy diets?). Once colonization of the Americas begins in earnest, new women’s magazines begin to encourage their readers to take responsibility for their own diets and the diets of their families to make sure that they are the healthiest specimens possible. This projection of a perfect body is a crucial part of the performance of morality as well as an assertion of their Anglo-Saxon superiority.
As ideals of European and then White American bodies developed, Black bodies continued to be denigrated. But while the definition of “Black” has contracted and expanded—how people feel about mixed race children has changed repeatedly—the definition of “White” is even more amorphous. One of the things that perked my ears up about this book was during Strings’ interview with Gladstone, when she saw how frequently *Irish* bodies were denigrated in similar, at times identical language as that used for Black people.
I continue to take exception to comparisons between the indentured servitude of White Europeans and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants—one was not permanent, nor was it passed down to children—but when Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism points out that the English took their first stab at colonialism in Ireland, it’s difficult to deny that the Irish were treated as little better than property. (And not just the Irish: per Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, African enslavement didn’t take off in earnest until the Slavs of Eastern Europe built fortifications to protect themselves from slave raids.) As bizarre as it may seem to us today, the Irish were not seen as White, and in fact many tried to argue that they must have had “Asiatic” or African roots because they were darker skinned and smaller in stature. English writers and philosophers like Thomas Carlyle went so far as to use the Irish Famine, which brought so many of the Irish to the United States, as proof of their animal nature, because surely it was their “gluttony and poor self-control” that led to them not being able to control their food sources.
It was, of course, not only the English who held a poor view of the Irish. Proud American Anglo-Saxons like Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed that the Irish were deficient specimens, as well as being short, dark, and of Asian origin. However, Emerson didn’t confine his critiques to the Irish. He, like many other Americans, held that the “Anglo-Saxon” combined the best of Western and Northern European populations and were the “Ultra-Caucasians”. Not surprisingly, part of the proof of this superiority was in the (ideally) taller and thinner bodies of these Anglo-Saxons. Heaviness was a sign that maybe you—and the rest of your “race”—really weren’t ultra anything, so the pressure increased to be thin. (Please don’t name check Emerson to me again.)
It should go without saying that the penalties were stiffer for Anglo-Saxon/White/European/Whatever women who were heavy. And yet...don’t be too thin. Per Harper’s Bazaar in the late nineteenth century:
“...a woman must have some fat to avoid the scrawniness of the Reform years, and...beauty [is] to be found only in women whose delicacy and littleness cause emotions of tenderness and protection taking them to be admiration of beauty.”
There’s a discussion to be had about how the Victorian abhorrence of adult sexuality led to institutionalized pedophilia, but that’s another subject for another day. For our purposes now, it’s self-evident that most adult women are going to have a very hard time fitting into an ideal of “delicacy and littleness” that’s more appropriate to a child. As the majority of American women (and men) know, it’s akin to being thrust into a game with rules stacked against almost everyone forced to play. That, in part, goes some way toward explaining the rise of Diet Culture in the late nineteenth century.
One thing we can say about the likes of Graham, Kellogg, and the Seventh Day Adventists is that they begin to emphasize the consumption of “good” foods over the prohibition of “bad” foods. We might also thank Kellogg for his emphasis on “hydrotherapy” and vegetarianism, which may have had genuine public health benefits (even if you’re a committed omnivore, you probably wouldn’t have felt safe eating the mass-produced meat of that age). But that is all.
Kellogg, perhaps surprisingly, didn’t want to see (White) women too thin—because that might make it difficult for them to bear children, and that was abhorrent to a eugenicist like him. (Also, he was not alone in the belief that Black people were so constitutionally inferior that they were eventually going to die out as a “race”. We can only assume that it didn’t occur to him that health problems Black Americans experienced could be ameliorated by not having to live in a racist system.) This should sound familiar to anyone who has had to listen to any fascist rhetoric—please think of that next time you buy breakfast cereal.
What Strings showed is that much as we try to run away from the contradictions and hypocrisies of our modern system, there is no escape, because they are baked into the systems that govern—literally and figuratively—our very bodies. Of all of the books in this group, I saw hers as the one with the strongest, if unstated, call to action to dismantle the systems that are destroying our health and psyches. It just works out, as far as I’m concerned, that doing so will dismantle the rot of modernity as well.
The books above explain the economic, social, psychological, moral, and even physical origins and consequences of our pervasive systems of modernity. While these are paradigms that we should be actively changing, they are total. There is no one who lives in this civilization who isn’t in some way a party to these modes of existing. So it is always, but we should be forgiven if we’re left unable to *see* it for what it is even if we *know* it for what it is. It is here, perhaps, that we can use our visual media as a clue, or at least a partial glimpse in the mirror.
Catherine McCormack’s Women in the Picture is light reading compared to the other three titles. But her subject matter—systemic sexism as reflected in our media—is just as serious as the systematized racism that makes modernity possible. And if the other three titles made me cringe in horror, this one made me wince in recognition.
McCormack is concerned with European and American art, and she opens with an acknowledgment of how privileged and rarefied the world of art history and criticism is. As with so many other professions, it’s self-selecting: you must already come into the field with deep knowledge of history, Greco-Roman mythology, and religious imagery, as well as familiarity with classical works. If art history is its own language, you need to be privy to the syntax before you start, at the very least so you can get all of the in-jokes. In and of itself, these prerequisites limit participation to those who come from means, and until a few generations ago, to men.
Which is all to say that a critical feminist perspective of art was lacking until relatively recently. While McCormack isn’t the first to attack the problem, she’s still going into relatively uncharted ground.
Women in the Picture divides its subjects into four categories: Venus, The Mother, Maidens and Dead Damsels, and The Monstrous Woman. They are all classical archetypes, but we see reflections of them to this day.
Part of my admiration for McCormack stems from her analysis of the myth of Venus (Aphrodite). Proud myth nerd though I am, I had never heard the goddess’ origin story in quite this way. My understanding was that Cronus colluded with his mother Gaea to take down his father Uranus. (Gaea, you may recall, was outraged because Uranus had imprisoned their younger, uglier children within the bowels of the earth after they were born. He couldn’t stand to see them walking on their mother, the earth—so he kept her pregnant with them.) Cronus, youngest of the Titans, was the only one willing to take on his all-powerful father, and he did it when he was at his most vulnerable: coupling with Gaea. Cronus emasculated Uranus with his famous sickle. Uranus fled, and from the drops of his wound’s blood sprung up the Furies. His genitals were tossed into the sea, and from that foam arose Venus/Aphrodite.
Only maybe it wasn’t the foam, but the genitals themselves that the goddess formed from. Maybe she is in fact Uranus’ genitals—his penis, in particular—reborn as an object of desire...to stimulate other male genitals. She is, in this interpretation, male sexuality, re-presented to itself in female form. Perhaps this might explain why representations of Aphrodite/Venus are so unrelatable for so many women, because she was never intended to be a woman but a proxy for male desires—the perfect object of the Male Gaze. (We’ll pick this up when we talk about Narcissus, Echo, and the rest of the gang in Roberto Calassso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.)
In many ways, the archetype of The Mother is just as limiting as the unattainable goddess because it was created to be. McCormack takes pains to make clear that this is not the same as the maternal figures of older religions and mythologies which were so closely intertwined with nature, in all its glory and terror. This mother is a walled garden, her fertility channeled in the most contrived ways, to serve the ends of the civilization that stands in opposition to nature. The “virgin mother” is perhaps the perfect starting point for our understanding: she is production that isn’t preceded by personal sexuality or even desire. She ultimately exists to serve.
“Cringe” doesn’t appropriately describe my reaction to McCormack’s descriptions of the aspirational Dutch paintings of the perfect wife and mother, cuddling her children in a chair or managing their studies while getting on with her own work. These paintings were made for the husbands who were making their fortunes overseas, an assurance that everything was as it should be and would be waiting for him in a perfect state when he returned. The aesthetic of those paintings is surprisingly similar to modern Instagram and magazine spreads, wherein The Mother is presented in an open but luxurious space, using the latest technology, and surrounded by her always clean, happy, and beautiful children. And it reminds of nothing so much as how we imagine Marie Kondo’s advice come to life, right down to “everything being in its place”. Here is where I wished I could sink into my chair, as I uncritically love Kondo’s advice and genuinely feel better following it, but it’s impossible to deny what it legitimizes. (More, I promise, when we discuss Marie Kondo and The Cultures of Collecting.)
There is another side to the modern archetype of the perfect mother, and that is one who is noble in her loss, particularly of her child. This trope is repeated and venerated ad infinitum in our modern media—how we love to watch a Black mother in particular mourn the loss of her child, usually her son, to violence, addiction, or other wickedness of our civilization. Someone could mount a collection of photos of the Mourning Mother—whether in the initial throes of grief or the numbed shock of the aftermath—and fill a museum.
It goes without saying that people have been calling BS on these narratives for centuries. McCormack highlights the struggle to recognize mothers’ (and women’s) unpaid work as exactly that. Modern capitalism has demanded divisions of labor, necessitated by the site of work, and that translated for centuries into a sexual division of labor. The rise of capitalism is arguably intertwined with the rise of sexism, and because of the extreme violence against women during the centuries’ long persecution of witches (though, as Carl Sagan notes in The Demon Haunted World, not all of the victims were women), women lost much of the power they needed to challenge their confinement to domesticity and the devaluation of their work.
The artist Mirele Laderman Ukeles created a photography project in 1969 that highlighted women’s work, documenting her everyday tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, as well as participation in religious ceremonies. She saw that work in solidarity with other “maintenance” work, particularly of public structures, that was only slightly more valued and compensated. Ukeles’ work is of interest to McCormack because this was, in one way, an answer to the question of how a woman could exist as an artist—or vice versa—and still fulfill her “roles”. Work as an artistic statement was part of Ukeles’ answer.
It isn’t lost on historians of work and feminist activists that women who function as homemakers have better tools to do their jobs. However, they turn the marketing narrative on its head: instead of seeing vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers as devices to make their work easier, those machines have made work harder because they have raised the standard of expectation of cleanliness. I would argue that they have also worsened the class-divide, as those standards apply even to those households that can’t afford to make those purchases. Further, they make women’s work even more devalued, after a fashion, as expensive gadgets are now seen as something essential to work that isn’t compensated.
All of the archetypes McCormack discusses suffer from a form of violence, but violence is baked into the definition of the Maiden and the Damsel in Distress. The violence, or at least the threat of it, *is* the distress. The Maiden or Damsel is frequently raped or about to be, and if she isn’t, likely dead. (If the reader immediately thought “...a fate worse than death” after the word “rape”, that might be the best demonstration of the archetype.)
The Rape of Europa by Titian is perhaps the most famous example of this archetype. In the myth, Europa is a princess in Asia Minor, little more than a child, when she’s kidnapped by Zeus as a bull. One of the first things I noticed when I saw the painting was how *womanly*, how adult, Titian’s Europa was. However, she is just as helpless as a child, and in fact the painting features on-lookers who don’t seem motivated to protect the princess from what must look to them like a wild animal. They are bystanders, as casually observing a kidnapping as many do acts of violence now.
I’ll take a brief detour to Calasso’s Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony because he does a very good job explaining some of the tension in this myth, which I’m sure McCormack would nod along to. Before there was Europa in Asia Minor, there was Io in Greece, the nymph who was the daughter of a powerful river god who did not want his daughter consorting with Zeus. He as well was married to Hera, who was famously jealous (as one might expect the goddess of marriage to be when monogamous marriage was being dishonored). His solution was to turn Io into a cow, whom he then let Hera torment, first with the giant Argus, then with a gadfly that chased Io all the way to Egypt, where she finally found relief.
There, Io became a queen and then a goddess, and had Zeus’ son Ephaphus. He and Memphis, another daughter of a river god, had a daughter named Libya, and from her relationship with Poseidon (which we can only imagine was slightly less dramatic than one would have been with Zeus), she became the mother of, among others, Agenor, who was the father of...Europa.
That is the myth, and while we may have much to say about what it means to be the daughter of a river god, the symmetry of the story was enough to make me raise my eyebrows even at the age of ten. Calasso’s theory is that both myths are a record of tit-for-tat kidnapping, or perhaps a trade in human bounty. It is also impossible to ignore the imperialism and nativism of the story. Io and her descendant/mirror Europa are the transmissions of empire, but they are also hapless victims whose only solace are their children. The best hope for the Damsel in Distress is to survive long enough to become the mother of someone who might avenge them. By my reckoning, that is cold comfort.
McCormack’s final archetype is The Monstrous Woman, and part of her monstrosity is that at times she embodies or rejects the other three archetypes all at once. She is the ultimate “mess” of a woman because she is her own person. She is Lilith, who refuses to allow Adam the privileges in marriage he assumes should be his. She is the Sphinx, the woman who not only talks back to men, but tests their comprehension. (And, boy, would Oedipus have been well-served to figure out what her presence in front of him was warning him of.) She is Medusa, the snake-headed monster who freezes men in fear...But before that, she was the Libyan serpent goddess Anatha, and before that the triple goddess Neith, who combined the attributes of Medusa, her foe Athena, and Athena’s mother, Metis. She is, of course, The Witch, so threatening to the patriarchy that she embodies the temptress and the crone.
If a monster is a creature that combines characteristics in ways that don’t hew to an easy performance of gender roles, maybe we are all monsters. Patriarchy’s answer is to divide us up into the other three archetypes and, because they are so artificial, demand that we stick to those proscribed roles, or else.
The most chilling thing McCormack points out about art criticism and criticism in general is that it is the culmination of the attempt to understand, know, and own. It is common to discuss analysis of a work of art—or a person—as a “dissection” of its meaning, and especially if we find it worthy, to “absorb” it. There is an inherent violence in that language, and McCormack questions whether the act of knowing can itself be a violation at times. This would especially be the case when that act is extended to people. As a woman who isn’t white, I have many memories of people peering too closely to try to “understand” what I am; as much as I and others like me want to be “seen”, we don’t want to be taken apart, and many of us have had the same instinctive defensive mechanism to pull back when someone tries to push too far in.
We come full circle back to the contradictions of modernity and the special madness of those who live in it, particularly those first generations. Perhaps it wasn’t just that they couldn’t escape the cognitive disconnect of the hypocrisies of Enlightenment alongside the material advantages only slave labor could provide; perhaps it was because they were regularly confronted with the exercises of violence on the Other, something that artists’ consciences in particular were unable to ignore.
The madness persists until it is confronted and the source of it is destroyed. I write this as my country is in the middle of a slow-rolling coup, and people who learned about the Holocaust and agreed it was wrong are justifying why Trump and his lieutenants are different from the dictators who came before. We see what we want to see, we ignore or disregard facts that are inconvenient, and we employ a laser-focus on what we want to see to avoid being uncomfortable.
To answer the question I posed in the beginning, Modernity is a comfortable lie that those of us who deserve material comforts can have them without the suffering of anyone who doesn’t deserve it. It is a magic wand that makes possible the belief that our ideals alone can make possible our prosperity. It is a fairy tale for adults. It is a special kind of madness, and it is in a constant state of unraveling.
Deb in the City
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