1 Jaime Martins Barata, God, Motherland, Family: A Trilogy of National Education
Patriotism is not enough.
Edith Cavell
Is there another plot?
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
Always historicize!
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious
It dawned on me that here were people who had spent their lives re-connecting pictures to the worlds from which they came.
R. B. Kitaj
This is a book about love. It is about 'doing harm to those one loves'.1 Under patriarchy it is probably true that gender power and privilege come with a price tag, namely the possibility that a significant proportion of men must be married to women who do not love them. 'Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want' (Austen, [1813] 1991, 163). In Pride and Prejudice, the much-quoted words of Charlotte Lucas give accurate expression to a wider situation with implications for supposed true-love matches not only in the novel – Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, Jane and Mr Bingley – but far beyond its boundaries. If women depend upon their men for social significance, status, visibility and even subsistence, it follows that, on the part of the woman, the imperatives of need (to be financially kept) and want (love, desire) become at best impossible to disentangle, while at worst the latter acts as a threadbare euphemism for the former. Angela Carter put it pithily, if brutally: 'the marriage bed is a particularly delusive refuge from the world because all wives of necessity fuck by contract' (Carter, 1987, 9). Contracts of employment, on the whole, do not specify the requirement of loving one's boss. And what happens, furthermore, when even the simulacrum of love breaks down, and the subaltern rebels? The turning of the worm is another definition of revolution, and it is partly the subject of the essays that follow. This is a book about love. It is also about reversals in love, with all the multiplicity of meanings that such an expression entails.
In the words of one of her exegetes, Paula Rego enters the Great Tradition of art by the back door, and once there lays down repeated visual statements concerning a binary world whose territorial lines are demarcated by the battle of the sexes (Rosengarten, 1999a, 6). In this pictorial universe, whose referent is realpolitik patriarchy, sexual politics sets the agenda. The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton stated, with some recklessness, that 'the soul of woman is not concerned with history' (Guitton, 1951, 221): 'the truth is that woman is nearer to the human than man, so easily estranged from what is human ... One of the missions of woman, after that of generation, is to reconcile man to man and to disappear. She does not herself perform those deeds which transform history, but she is the hidden foundation for them' (Guitton, 1951, 228). This view, belied by the intensity with which Catholicism has deemed it necessary to deny the female historical role from Eve onwards, neglects also a vast world of experience which historiography has only recently begun to uncover. If a woman's home is her castle, in one form or another 'history has intruded upon the household and disrupted its traditional order' (Armstrong, 1996, 157), but the reverse also applies. The family as cornerstone of the social fabric has itself the power to change from homely to that unheimlich (unhomely, uncanny) state in which Freud detected the potential for psychic – and arguably political – anarchy (Freud, 1919, 335–76). Working from the standpoint of the 'counterhistorian' – which, as will be argued, is the position reproduced in a visual medium by Paula Rego – Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt write as follows:
To mainstream historians, gender relations had appeared too stable and universal for historical analysis ... The feminist historian denied its naturalness by subjecting it to historical analysis ... to show that gender relations, despite the endurance of male domination, only appear to stand outside of the historical processes ... Feminist counterhistorians raised a metahistorical question: What was it that made phenomena 'historical,' and why did so much 'culture' fail to qualify? (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2000, 59)
In Paula Rego, as her observers have often remarked, and as the well-known feminist aphorism would have it, the personal always becomes political: 'public and private are not separate but intersective' (Lowder Newton, 1989, 156). More unusually, however, as will be argued in the course of this book, the political is translated back into the immediately accessible vocabulary of the personal: history is paraphrased in images drawn from domestic life, and national politics finds expression through the familiar lexicon of interpersonal relations. The thoroughfare between the personal and the political, therefore, becomes a two-way system, in the context of which one term is easily exchanged for the other and back again.
Much has been written about the tension, in Paula Rego's life and work, between external conformity and internal revolt, about the struggle between outward good manners and the inward drive towards an iconoclasm which sometimes borders on the profane (McEwen, 1997, 17, 36). Germaine Greer discerns this struggle in what she terms the 'effort to present a violent and subversive personal vision in acceptable decorative terms' (Greer, 1988, 29), and Paula Rego herself, in conversation with John McEwen, talks about hiding in 'childish guises – or female guises. Little girl, pretty girl, attractive woman', and the concomitant 'flight into story telling', or painting 'to fight injustice' (McEwen, 1997, 17). Typically, however, her description of concealment behind infantile masks, whether in life or in painting, presents itself as a deliberately transparent smokescreen, designed to let us know that that is precisely what it is. We know she knows we know she is lying, since seldom in the aesthetic recording of childhood has any artist in the visual or written arts so repeatedly depicted infancy as completely and utterly devoid of innocence. It has been suggested that her recent work is more akin to the work she did as a student at the Slade School of Art in London in the early 1950s than anything in between (McEwen, 1997, 52). If so, this return to what might be termed her artistic infancy, her aesthetic beginnings, is surely, in a roundabout way, also the return to the savage lapsarian childhood which Freud accurately described as the very opposite of innocence, rather immoral, anarchic and incestuous (Freud, 1905, 1916–17), a place from which she tells a series of uneasy and ugly truths in painting.
For Ana Marques Gastão, Paula Rego is an artist who works with constant awareness that 'our trajectory on Earth is always and irremediably violent' (Marques Gastão, 2001, 59). Paula Rego herself has talked in interviews about the preponderance in her work of 'secrets, lies, hypocrisy, deceit, intrigue and survival' and states unnervingly that 'these things happen all the time', (Kent, 1998, 14). 'I am interested in reproducing violence ... I refer to violence in pictures, in photography, not direct violence against people. But when you do violence within a painting, you are not sorry. In painting everything is allowed!' (Macedo, 1999, 12). For Agustina Bessa-Luís, in Rego's paintings usually 'there is a white flag in someone's hand, but the bloodbaths are more engrossing' (Rego and Bessa-Luís, 2001, 106). The woman who as a child told her cousin stories so horrific that she herself was too scared to finish them, the painter who has stated that she paints 'to give terror a face' (McEwen, 1997, 40, 72), the artist who in a recent interview claimed that her greatest fear to this day is the dark (Paula Rego, 1997), may paint to exorcise fear, but she also paints with a perverse desire to frighten her viewers. If, as Alberto de Lacerda argues, Paula Rego is absolutely 'honest in displaying her innermost world for what it is, good or bad', laying 'her subconscious bare ... naked' (quoted in McEwen, 1997, 76), or if, as Germaine Greer suggests, she 'breathes the dangerous air of the region where ... painting refuses to grow up and become discreet, self-knowing, genital and selfpleasuring' (Greer, 1988, 29), I would argue that her honesty, recklessness and refusal, all tend towards the same objective: namely, the desacralisation of a series of received expectations and assumptions, whether moral, psychological, political or national, hinging on definitions of childishness, innocence and purity which she vandalises and exposes as illusory. She exposes guilt endemic to the appearance of respectability, and in Marina Warner's words, counts herself 'among the commonplace and the disregarded, by the side of the beast, not the beauty' (Warner, 1994, 8). In so doing, however, she also deliberately renders problematic standard and seemingly straightforward dualities of good and evil, weakness and strength, victimisation and oppression. In Victor Willing's words, 'all the time, in Paula's pictorial dramas things are going wrong [but] the accumulating disasters somehow add up to a survival' (Willing, 1983a, 272), and for another critic, in the same vein, she startles us by forcing upon us the moment when 'in a compelling domestic world ... the banal suddenly slips into the peculiar, and our vile bodies become oddly liberating' (Morton, 2001, 107).
Victor Willing also remarked upon the fundamental role of the theme of domination in Rego's work: parental domination of children, state control over individuals, personalities in the thrall of passion, conscience gripped by guilt (Willing, 1997, 34). The outcome is usually violent, and its underlying drive frequently gender based. It is an understanding of gender aggression as a propelling force that will offer me a point of entry into a body of work which, however, clearly gestures towards a political arena far beyond interpersonal psycho-dynamics or sexual politics.
In Paula Rego, an artist resident in Britain since the age of seventeen,2 but to her own understanding always and viscerally Portuguese in theme as well as in pictorial feel, the history and recent politics of her country of birth often provide the narratives that inform her work. 'My paintings have never been about anything else' (Pinharanda, 1999, 3); 'I am Portuguese. I live in London, I like living in London, but I am Portuguese' (Rodrigues da Silva, 1998, 11).
While it is clearly beyond dispute that her paintings, with their striking images and literary bases, have increasingly communicated with audiences beyond the Portuguese world, an understanding of certain recurring Portuguese themes brings a fresh understanding to any critical reading of her work. And in considering the fundamental component of Portuguese identity in this artist's work, it is vital to understand its polemical edge, since it compels a revised assessment of certain sacred cows in Portugal's past and present. In works such as the untitled Girl and Dog series of the 1980s (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22), the Family paintings also of the 1980s (plates 9-10, figures 23-24, 26-28, 30-32), The Sin of Father Amaro pastels of 1997–98 (plates 11-15, figures 34-35, 37-38, 40-41, 45, 47) and the untitled series on abortion of 1998–99 (plates 16-21, figures 50, 60, 72-74, 76-79), what is going on, beyond the immediate themes of sexuality and gender antagonism, are reflections on the political past and present of her land of birth, in two of its key historical moments: the period of the maritime discoveries and empire-building in the sixteenth century and the forty-year dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo (New State) in the twentieth century. The latter is largely regarded in Portugal as an unfortunate but thoroughly overcome political lapse; the former is still the focus of an unreflective nostalgia for days of lost greatness. In her work, as we shall see, Paula Rego questions the conviction that dictatorship (or at least the oppressive mindset to which it gave rise) is no longer a factor in Portuguese national life. She also works with a deep-rooted scepticism towards the supposition which, to this day, overwhelmingly rules historical thinking in Portugal, that maritime and imperial adventure defined the nation's days of glory.3 In 1950, at the height of the dictatorship and not long before Rego left Portugal, the great Portuguese poet Miguel Torga, who in 1939 had been imprisoned by the political regime for sedition, wrote the following poem, entitled 'Motherland':
I knew the definition in my childhood.
But time erased
The lines which on the map of memory
The teacher's cane had engraved.
Now
I know only how to love
A stretch of land
Embroidered with waves. (Torga, [1st ed. 1950] 1992, 131)
In a move familiar to those acquainted with his writing, Torga succeeds in wrongfooting a national identity prescribed by diktat (the teacher's cane), transforming it instead into a more anarchic, diffuse concept, demarcated by fluid (here literally watery) boundaries of love and devoid of jingoistic allegiance. The juxtaposition of authority (despotic teachers, patriotic preachings, nationalist declarations) against a stance which rejects them operates through a discourse which, almost as a by-product, also alters the priorities of that nation-speak: the sea, which has defined Portuguese national identity for the past five centuries, in Torga becomes at best nice, but not necessary (and elsewhere in his work, at worst, a national liability), the peripheral embroidery stitched on second thoughts upon a land which itself is given telluric primacy. Similar and associated sleights of hand are identified in the reading that follows as the hallmarks of Paula Rego's work throughout her life, whereby she contests the rankings of identity and authority within issues of nationhood, gender and family, and thus radically rewrites national memory.
The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without the help of an inventory. (Gramsci, 1971, 324)
Rego keeps history at the centre of the themes underpinning her work while simultaneously effecting that two-way translation outlined earlier, whereby the remote historical process becomes available through the transformative medium of day-to-day human relations. Thus, to name but two examples, the revenge exacted upon autocratic rules of government finds articulation through the image of the unmanned, attacked and invisible father that institutionally represents the former in The Policeman's Daughter (1987, figure 32), while church intervention in sexual behaviour finds expression through the private drama of schoolgirl abortions in the 1998–99 pastels (plates 16-21, figures 50, 60, 72-74, 76-79).
The rendering of political imperatives in familiar, because familial, shape becomes all the easier in light of the propensity of the two historical moments identified above to have recourse, for their own propaganda purposes, to metaphors of family life as the means of delivering to the nation a workable image of itself and its rulers. For more than four decades, and from almost her earliest work, Paula Rego has drawn on the dictatorship of Salazar, and what has been described as its 'chauvinistic rhetoric' (Rosengarten, 1997, 44) for her themes. Paintings of the 1960s such as Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (figure 2), When We Used to Have a House in the Country (figure 3) and Iberian Dawn (figure 4), albeit in the contentually more cryptic manner of her earlier cut-and-paste works, offer – not least through their titles – a savage critique of the regime which was then in its last decade.
The term 'chauvinistic rhetoric' neatly encapsulates the regime's political credo in which the perpetuation of gender difference was the basic fabric of its proposed brave new world. A full understanding of the battle on many fronts that is Paula Rego's work requires at least a sketchy understanding of the complex political and ideological palette into which she has been dipping her brush for over forty years. Its key components include politics (fascism), religion (Catholicism) and gender (patriarchy). The readings that follow will contend that as far as this artist is concerned, and as demonstrated by recent themed series such as The Sin of Father Amaro (plates 11-15, figures 34-35, 37-38, 40-42, 45, 47) and the abortion pastels (plates 16-21, figures 50, 60, 72-74, 76-79), the toppling of the Estado Novo regime in 1974 does not appear to have laid the political ghost of fascism to rest. In what follows I shall concern myself primarily with paintings from the last two decades and to themes that refer to national and cultural events in Portugal in the twentieth century. The backdrop of history, however, invites reflection also upon sixteenth-century Portuguese imperialism. A brief overview will therefore be offered now of those key historical events that continue to contribute to Rego's understanding of her country, and the country's understanding of itself.
The Portuguese overseas empire was built up in the wake of the nation's maritime discoveries from the fifteenth century onwards, and extended as far as Japan to the east, Brazil to the west and included large chunks of eastern and western Africa to the south. It was lost in three waves. By the end of the seventeenth century, most of the territories in the East Indies had been lost to other European powers. Brazil declared independence in 1822, and the African colonies finally gained independence in 1975, after the collapse of the Estado Novo regime in 1974. The economic policy that brought Salazar to power in the early 1930s and underwrote his political longevity was based on the creation of national revenue from the resources of the nation's colonies in Africa, namely Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and S Tomé and Príncipe. The Estado Novo dictatorship lasted from 1932 to 1974, for most of that period under the rule of Salazar himself, who only relinquished power for reasons of health in 1968, two years before his death. Salazar had come to power initially as minister of finance in 1928, with a brief to restore the Portuguese economy, which had declined severely during the preceding century, due to political agitation at home and territorial losses abroad. Salazar accepted the post on condition he be granted absolute control over other ministries, as well as general government income and expenditure, and in 1932 he became President of the Council of Ministers (prime minister), with dictatorial powers. He proceeded to put in place the full machinery of dictatorship, including a single-party political structure, persecution of ideological and political dissent, a massive apparatus of censorship over the press as well as all other printed matter, and a political police directly answerable to himself. He also went on to implement a remodelling of the nation's identity according to well-defined lines, following his vision of a motherland dedicated to the tenets of family life, Catholicism, obedient citizenship and subordination to the rule of a dictatorship.
As a young man, Salazar had studied for the priesthood and even took minor orders before leaving the seminary to study law and economics at Coimbra University His earliest public declarations in the 1920s revealed his dream of one day becoming the prime minister of an absolutist monarchy. By the time he entered political life in earnest in 1926, these views had been somewhat revised in light of the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. His overarching plan for the nation involved a declared anti-democratic intent based on a pyramidal power structure: state authority, underwritten although not in any sense controlled by the Catholic Church, was to oversee all areas of national life. To this effect the Estado Novo regime signed a Concordat with the Vatican in 1940. The habit of official or quasi-official alliances between church and state in Portugal dated back even earlier than a previous 1847 Concordat with the Vatican. Ever since Henry the Navigator dreamed of maritime expansion as a solution to the restrictions of Portugal's political geography in the early fifteenth century, a dream which turned out to be impelled as much by imperial aggression and mercantile greed as by humanist curiosity, the Catholic Church in Portugal, albeit with some unease, had participated in the enterprise. The net balance of advantage and disadvantage (the advantage of new heathen worlds to proselytise, the disadvantage of the damage which expanding scientific knowledge and ensuing scepticism might do to clerical authority) was sized up by the church and found to be positive. Since at least the Renaissance, therefore, the church in Portugal has variously sought and gained the support first of an absolutist monarchy ruling by divine right and later of various autocratic systems of government including, for almost half the twentieth century, the dictatorship of Salazar.
Whether with the aim of persecuting Jews and heretics at home and converting the Infidel abroad from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, or smoking out liberalism and republicanism in the nineteenth century, on socialism and atheism in the twentieth, the Catholic Church has always found willing bed-fellows in the authoritarian extremes of government in Portugal. The role of Catholicism in the life of the nation has haunted Paula Rego's work from the start, and, as we shall see, remains a recurring preoccupation to date.
Salazar's all-embracing blueprint for the nation set down hierarchical structures captained in decreasing order of importance by God and the prime minister, and then by the male citizen, husband and father, as benevolent bailiffs of national stability and well-being. Under the Estado Novo, the citizen was deemed to owe obedience to state and church, and the family was seen as the fabric of social stability, with a rigid structure defined by its internal configurations of power: the husband and father was the head of the family (chefe de família4) and was authorised, both on a legal and quasi-legal basis, to exact obedience from his subaltern female relatives and children.
The family as the basis for obedient participation in this superstructure operated both at a practical and a metaphorical level. Thus, the strength of Salazar's economic policies, which succeeded in restoring Portugal's balance of payments and in strengthening his political power base, involved a redefinition of Portuguese colonial policy in Africa. To this purpose the tightening of legal controls through a new constitution included a series of Colonial Acts and went hand in hand with a vast propaganda drive that deployed strong family symbolism. Through the efforts of a well-oiled propaganda machine, Portugal emerged as the self-styled mother of its willingly obedient overseas offspring, no longer, after 1951, to be known as colonies but instead as 'overseas provinces' (Newitt, 1995, 437). In this context it may be relevant to note that Salazar's image, as constructed by António Ferro, his propaganda minister from 1933 onwards, prioritised his mission as the father and saviour of the nation and restorer of its lost imperial glories. Ferro's propaganda tapped into popular myth, and particularly into an open wound in the nation's history. Portugal's empire had begun to disintegrate even during its expansion in the sixteenth century, and this unravelling was encapsulated by one event in particular, which itself came to enshrine the nation's nostalgia for past achievements, enduring into actuality. In 1578, the young king, Don Sebastião, led a military campaign to recover and consolidate Portuguese possessions in agriculturally rich areas of North Africa. The campaign ended in the defeat at Alcácer Quibir, and the king himself died, but his body was not recovered. Don Sebastião was unmarried and the heir to the throne was an elderly uncle who, as a cardinal of the Catholic Church, could not marry and beget an heir. Next in line to the throne was Philip II of Spain, and therefore, two years after Alcácer Quibir and more than 400 years after independence, the political nightmare of the Portuguese became a reality. The country fell under the dominion of Spain, a situation the avoidance of which had virtually defined the nation's political life since independence from that country in 1143. Spanish rule lasted for sixty years and came to be regarded as the darkest period in Portuguese history Partly for this reason, Don Sebastião's unproven death gave rise to what is, to this day the most potent national legend in Portugal: as the country chafed under Spanish occupation, the belief grew that the monarch, who became known as 'The Desired King', had not died and would return one misty morning, riding out of the sea to save the country from foreign rule and to restore its former glory. Sebastianismo, as the phenomenon came to be known, endures as the metaphor for national nostalgia and imperial longing in important aspects of the nation's cultural life. It characterises despair for a lost golden age and a quasi-messianic hope for its restoration. As such it continued to be an enduring marker of Portuguese national identity, continuing well beyond any feasible hope of Sebastião's return. It is currently manifested by the nation's continuing and unreflecting celebration of the age of empire.
It was this Sebastianic longing which Antonio Ferro exploited, by presenting Salazar to the nation as its saviour and restorer of economic and imperial (now colonial) fortunes. First as the only journalist over a long period who succeeded in persuading Salazar to be interviewed, and then as the head of the National Secretariat of Propaganda from 1933, he promoted an image of the elusive leader as a monastic figure: like Don Sebastião himself, a celibate wedded to his job as well as to his country, and ever labouring to bedeck this bride with suitably glorious achievements. Let us hear his description of Salazar's first eruption into national political life, in a text entitled 'First Appearance':
This is the 6th of June 1926, and we are at Amadora. The atmosphere is electric with the joy of recent victory. Never before was this aerodrome so packed, so throbbing with hope. There is a coming and going of soldiers, officers, fraternising civilians staring at the trees, the houses, the very earth they are walking on, just as though their Portugal reborn was all fresh to them. There is a blazing sky, a merciless sun. Our spring is a thing to be reckoned with, and as there was once a Napoleon and a 'General Winter,' so we can have our 'Brigadier Spring.' ... Salazar was Minister for a mere matter of days, but just long enough to have left a faint trail of hope. In all the changes in the situation, in the swift ups-and-downs of those first months of the dictatorship, one would hear from time to time the cry: 'If Salazar would come – if only they would bring him!' But there was no answer. There was only the silence, the romantic silence of Coimbra, which gives the outline of the city, when one sees it from the carriage window of a train, something of the air of a framed picture. One would have said that already the image of Dr Oliveira Salazar had become almost a dream, just a memory like the 'Desired'. And then it happened. A wave of revolution still in being brought him again to the Terreiro do Paço, to the Ministry of Finance. (Ferro, 1939, 111–13, italics mine)
The tone and vocabulary of Ferro's hagiographic text both implicitly and explicitly evoke a Sebastianic longing, as expressed for example in Fernando Pessoa's poem of the same period:
What voice floats on the sound of waves
Which is not the sea's?
A voice that speaks to us,
But if we listen it fades,
For having been heard.
And if, in slumbering,
Unawares we listen,
It brings us hope
And, like a sleepy child,
We smile, while sleeping.
They are the happy islands,
Lands out of place,
Where the king lives and waits.
But if we waken,
The voice fades, only sea remains.
(Pessoa, 1979, 85–6, italics mine)
Ferro's propaganda, in particular his presentation of Salazar's supposedly ascetic lifestyle, was extraordinarily successful, both at home and abroad. In the long term, however, Salazar's economic policy uncannily repeated the single greatest mistake of Portuguese imperial policy between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, by placing all the nation's eggs into the colonial basket. The loss of territories in the East Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of Brazil in the nineteenth, left the nation in the grip of an economic deficit which was almost impossible to redress, and with an imperilled economy which Salazar had been brought to power to restore. It is curious, therefore, that while successfully fulfilling this brief in the short term, he did so by means which proved to be myopic in the medium and long term.
The colonies which had underpinned the regime's economic success, and therefore its political viability, paradoxically turned out to be also the principal factor in its downfall. One of the principal causes of the eventual unpopularity of the regime, from 1961 onwards, was the outbreak of a war of independence in Angola, followed shortly after by Guinea-Bissau (1963) and Mozambique (1964). From 1961 onwards, therefore, colonial interests could only be sustained at the price of a costly and bloody war on three fronts. Up to 50 per cent of the nation's annual revenue was channelled into military activity in Africa, with much loss of life. The ensuing hostility in Portugal contributed in considerable measure to the downfall of the regime on 25 April 1974, six years after Salazar himself had relinquished power on health grounds, and four years after his death. A year after the restoration of democracy, the colonies gained independence. The loss of what, for half a century, had been virtually the sole source of revenue for the nation entailed economic as well as demographic consequences which to this day keep Portugal at the bottom of the economic league in the European Union.
Returning now to the propaganda metaphors drawn upon by the Estado Novo regime, for use within and outside the family, João Medina shows how the modus operandi of familial ideology was encapsulated in a series of seven paintings entitled Salazar's Lesson, created for display in every classroom of every school throughout Portugal and its colonies (Medina, 1999, 209–28).5 The painter, Jaime Martins Barata, was one of the regime's apparatchiks, responsible for much of the fascist-flavoured art produced during Salazar's rule on book covers, posters, postage stamps and murals. One picture in this series, in particular, entitled God, Motherland, Family: A Trilogy of National Education (figure 1), bespoke the Salazarista global vision outlined above: a nation – and empire – of obedient women and happy peasants, monitored by an invisible God, whose earthly delegates were the prime minister himself and his deputy within the cellular infrastructure of the family, namely the husband and father. Salazar himself outlined the trinity of God, Nation and Family in all its unassailability:
1 Jaime Martins Barata, God, Motherland, Family: A Trilogy of National Education
We don't argue about God and virtue; we don't argue about the Motherland and its history; we don't argue about authority and its prestige; we don't argue about the family and its morality; we don't argue about the glory of work and about the duty to work. (Quoted in Medina, 1999, 215)
'In the Family, the head is the Father; at School, the head is the Teacher; in the nation, the head is the Government' (Primary School Year 4 Reading Book, 1961, 108). The following texts come from reading books issued in the 1960s and early 1970s by the Ministry of National Education, as obligatory literacy practice for children at various levels of primary education. The title of the first reading lesson for the third year of primary school was 'The Motherland':
Son, do you know what is the Motherland?
The Motherland is the place where we were born, the place where our parents and many generations of Portuguese people like us were born.
All the sacred territory which ... so many heroes defended with their blood or expanded at the sacrifice of their lives, all that is our Motherland. It is the land in which those heroes lived and now rest, side by side with saints and wise men, writers and artists of genius. The Nation is the mother of us all – those who have departed, those of us who still live and those who will follow us. ...
The Motherland is the blessed soil of all Portugal, with its islands in the Atlantic (the Azores and Madeira, Cape Verde, S. Tomé and Príncipe [...] and our lands on both coasts of Africa, India, Macao, faraway Timor.
On this side of the seas and across them is our blessed Motherland, all the territories upon which, under the shadow of our flag, the sweet word Mother! is uttered in the beautiful Portuguese language [...] (Ministério da Educação Nacional, n.d., 5–6)
And the following passage explains also the (filial) duties owed to the Head of State:
Our Motherland is a large family composed of all the Portuguese peoples, without distinction of place or race.
Like all families, it too has a head who fittingly rules it and represents it – the Head of State, who at present is known as the President of the Republic.
In a proper family, the head, who is the father, has to be loved, respected and obeyed by his children. So too, in a nation conscious of its duties, the Head has to be esteemed and honoured by its citizens.
To pay homage to our Head of State, to bestow upon him the honours owed to the high office he fills, is therefore a duty of loyalty to the motherland, which we are duty bound to love and serve.
So, children, if on any occasion His Excellency, the President of the Republic walks past you, or you find yourselves in his presence, salute him with respect, because in him you will behold the Supreme Head of the Nation to which you have the honour to belong, the Head of the great Portuguese Family. (Ministério da Educação Nacional, n.d., 174)
I will conclude this section with a brief outline of some of the ways in which the Estado Nuovo's regime, in all its nationalist insularity and intolerance of political or ideological pluralism (as proclaimed by Salazar's own slogans – 'a nation proudly alone', and 'nothing against the Nation, all for the Nation'), worked specifically to the detriment of women.
In many ways, the rationale underpinning Salazar's overall intent was not specifically Portuguese. The collusion of domestic ideology and social paternalism is an old story, and has meant that almost globally and throughout time, there have been 'two ways of seeing the world that might be read as having significant political implications':
Upper and middle-class men look for the extension of familial hierarchy into the public sphere and middle-class women do not ... Elite men sought to control women's independence as well as the independence of the working class in imagining the world as a patriarchal family with themselves at the head. (Lowder Newton, 1989, 161)
Male monopoly over the public sphere (with its potential for power and heroics as well as abstract endeavour) consigned women to the limitations of domestic agency, which meant that 'women were trapped in immanence while men could heroically struggle for transcendence, for the personal glory that comes with sacrifice and valour' (Benjamin, 1986, 79). In countries of a Catholic leaning, such as Portugal, clearly, the gender apportioning of immanence and transcendence required some intellectual flexibility on the part of an ideological edifice which also, conversely, operated on the basis of a conventional double standard that demanded from women an asexual spirituality not required of the earthier male.
Be that as it may, and returning again to specific Portuguese concerns, a fair amount has been written about the conditions of suffocating oppression experienced generally, but particularly by women, under the Estado Novo (Flunser Pimentel, 2000; Sadlier, 1989; Tavares, 2000). In 1940, as mentioned above, the interests of the church and state were officially conjoined through the signing of the Concordat with the Vatican, which authorised, among other things, the state's intention to pressure women to emulate the conventional presentation of the Virgin Mary as the only acceptable model of femininity In Jessica Benjamin's words, 'the idealization of motherhood, which can be traced through popular culture to ... anti-feminist ... cultural politics, can be seen ... to naturalize woman's desexualization and lack of agency in the world' (Benjamin, 1986, 85). Under the Estado Novo, domesticity, chastity, obedience and submission to the husband as official head of the family – and through him to Salazar as Head of State, and to God as Universal Father – were all officially propounded in ministerial decrees.
The Salazarista blueprint for national life was partly modelled on Hitler's Germany, which laid down the formula that prescribed to women the concerns of Kinder, Kücher, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), to the exclusion of all else. The domestic arrangements envisaged entailed the subordination of the obedient housewife and mother to a benevolent yet authoritative father-figure, enforced through legislation on marriage, divorce and the right to work. Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi offers an important analysis of women's acquiescence to fascism in various European countries in the 1930s and 1940s (Macciocchi, 1979). Her insights bear strong relevance to an understanding of the social order that Paula Rego had to contend with and on which she continues to meditate. Jane Caplan, commenting on Macciocchi's work, discusses the latter's argument that fascist movements enlist women's loyalty by 'addressing them in an ideological-sexual language with which they are already familiar through the "discourses" of bourgeois Christian ideology':
In abstract terms, this is to say that the system of signs and unconscious representations which constitute the 'law' of patriarchy is invoked in fascist ideology, in such a way that women are drawn into a particularly supportive relation with fascist regimes. (Caplan, 1999, 61)
This would include for example the promotion of abnegated motherhood, which with threefold utility serves the interests of patriarchy (sons for fathers), Christianity/Catholicism (Mariological purity) and the state (soldiers for the fatherland's/motherland's armies). In Caplan's words,
If you are taken in by the Catholic Church's adulation of the Virgin Mary, you will also be open to address as fascism's fertile Mother; if the Holy Family is an ideal relation in your eyes, you will be readily incorporated in the fascist family. Thus the originality of fascism is not the content of its ideology, but the use it makes of pre-existent ideology which is already deeply inscribed in the unconscious, Macciocchi is saying that you can't talk about fascism unless you are also prepared to discuss patriarchy. [She] locates the originality of fascism not in any capacity to generate a new ideology, but in its conjunctural transformation and recombination of what already exists. (Caplan, 1979, 62)
Macciocchi quotes Hitler's remark that 'in politics, it is necessary to have the support of women, because the men will follow spontaneously' (Macciocchi, 1979, 69). The enlisting of the female constituency's obedience was a view also built into Salazar's grand plan. The importance attached by him to the promotion of family values, crucial in themselves, but even more so as linchpins of social stability, was emphasised repeatedly in the course of interviews and speeches throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s:
When we refer to the family what we have in mind is the home; and when we speak of the home we mean its moral environment and its function as an independent economic unit which both consumes and produces. Women's work outside the family sphere disintegrates home life, separates its different members, and makes them strangers to each other ... Life in common disappears; the work of educating the children suffers and families become smaller ... We consider that it is the man who should labour and maintain the family and we say that the work of the married woman outside her home, and, similarly that of the spinster who is a member of the family, should not be encouraged. (Salazar, 1939, 161–2)
And elsewhere, in similar vein:
How could I break the wave of feminine independence which is coming over the world? Women show such a need for freedom, such a frenzy for the pleasures of life. They don't understand that happiness is reached through renunciation, rather than enjoyment ... The great nations should set an example by confining women to their homes. But these great nations seem oblivious to the fact that the solid family structure cannot exist where the wife's activity is outside the home. And so the evil spreads and each day becomes more dangerous. What can I do, I myself, in Portugal? I know only too well, alas, that all my efforts to bring women back to older ways of living have remained practically useless! (Quoted in Sadlier, 1989, 3)
Salazar was too modest about his own achievements. These statements, made in the context of a Catholicism which Paula Rego has described as 'scary' and 'ridden with guilt' (McEwen, 1997, 27), were prefigured by the shadowy spectre of a Marian worship which simultaneously served the patriarchal interests of the state and the theological necessities of the church.6
This outline offers a glimpse into the backdrop to Paula Rego's life and the political and ideological set-up she left behind when she moved to Britain in 1951, only to return and do battle with it repeatedly in her work. In the words of one of her most perceptive observers, her painting is full of 'a profound revolt, moral, social and political', and stands as 'a female assertion opposing the chauvinism of an ironic, dismissive, oppressive society' (de Lacerda, 1978, 12). Then and now. Her work of the last forty years has been structured by strong narratives whose obsessive linchpin is survival. And survival, too, must have been what was originally on her father's mind when he urged her, aged seventeen, to leave Portugal because it was no place for a woman (quoted in McEwen, 1997, 44). This indictment has found a constant corroboration in Rego's work. In her work, however, paradoxically – and, as will be argued, in a mood of retribution – the ability to survive tends to be the monopoly of the female, while failure to do so pertains to the male, both at an individual level and publicly in the predominantly masculine institutions of church, state and the patriarchal family.
In what follows I will concentrate on the period that spans the twenty years from 1980, with some reference to earlier works of the 1960s. This is the period that witnesses Rego's move away from her early cut-and-paste work, into a more naturalist narrative art. It is also the period in which the dimension of the personal and the familial infiltrated her political and ideologising preoccupation with Portuguese national life. One of the paradoxes of Paula Rego's work when looked at chronologically is that her confrontation with the patriarchal, clerical and political interests of pre-democracy Portugal became more intense in the decades following the advent of democracy in 1974; a time when historically, though not, it would seem, for the artist, the spectre of dictatorship in Portugal had been laid to rest. In the works of the 1980s, but even more so in those of the 1990s, including The Sin of Father Amaro series of pastels of 1997–98, to be discussed in chapter 3, and the abortion works of 1998–99, debated in chapter 4, rage appears to escalate in proportion to the continuing disappointment of political aspirations. The dawning realisation that in post-revolution Portugal many old habits endure has resulted in a mounting anger, which is revealed in some of her most startling works to date.
In reviewing the critical pursuit of interpretation, Frederic Jameson urged its practitioners always to historicise (Jameson, 1981, 9). With reference to R. B. Kitaj, a painter to whom, tantalisingly, Paula Rego is both akin and, ethically as well as emotionally, antithetical, David Peters Corbett emphasises precisely that drive to 'enter painting on the stage of history', thus 'breaching the boundaries which separate art and history' and connecting 'the painting with the world' (Corbett, 2000, 46–8). Corbett directs us to Virginia Woolf's statement that 'there is a zone of silence in the middle of every art. The artists themselves live in it' (Woolf, 1992, 17). Live in it, create it, but also fill it, by reinforcing the paths whereby art extends into the world, and vice versa. The inscription of the text (in this case the visual text) in history, which will be the method pursued here, indicates areas of theoretical debate which the reading that follows would like, if only briefly, to acknowledge. What is in question here is the long-standing polemic between New Historicists or Cultural Materialists on the one hand and Postmodern and Post-structuralist methodologists on the other.7 The theoretical material to be outlined now refers on the whole to literary texts. For the purpose of the debate under way here, however, the term 'text' is taken to apply also to visual images. The interpretative strategy employed in what follows situates itself within a New Historicist practice summed up by Jeremy Hawthorn as follows:
The particular reading strategies with which I am concerned are those which can be loosely termed 'historicist', those that are committed to the belief that literary works are most fruitfully read in the illuminating contexts of the historical forces which contributed to their birth and the historically conditioned and changing circumstances of their subsequent life. Such a project requires that one have some conception of the ways in which human beings relate to the past, the ways in which they trace the cunning passages of history and depict them in cunning passages of their own. (Hawthorn, 1996, 3)
If, in opposition to Derrida's notorious statement that 'there is nothing outside of the text' (Derrida, 1976, 158), a New Historicist method concerns itself with a context beyond the text, the further implications of this theoretical commitment will also need to counter the objection, which Post-structuralism and Postmodernism alike promote, that in historical as in critical reading, it is impossible to privilege one interpretation over another as being the truth of the event in question.8 For Lyotard, in his by-now enshrined formulation,
It is therefore impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. All we can do is gaze in wonder at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal species. (Lyotard, 1984, 26)
Norman Bryson sums up the Post-structuralist rejection of context in favour of intertextuality as a two-step process whereby the text was separated both from a reference to the real world and from its author (Bryson, 1988, 187) – and, by implication, according to some of its critics, from any social or political engagement pertaining to either. The textualist position, however, does not accept the accusation of political disconnection or irrelevance. Both Derrida and, with greater legitimacy, Foucault identify a political dimension to their relativisation of the concept of truth. Glossing over the important differences that separate them, both see a claim to a monopoly of truth as the historical legitimisation of oppression, torture and genocide, and a challenge to the existence of a single truth as resistance to oppression. In Catherine Belsey's words, the consciousness that no existing language single-handedly maps the world accurately 'is not the same as encouraging people to subscribe to whatever conviction comes into their heads, or inciting them to make things up. Nor is it to settle for believing them when they do. It is perfectly possible to recognise lies without entailing the possibility of telling the truth, least of all the whole truth.' (Belsey, 1996, 85–6).
The textualism/contextualism debate gives rise to two categories of problems that confront New Historicist critics and theorists who practise a return to the consideration of a historical backdrop to texts. On the one hand they must engage with the textualist claim which denies the possibility of a valid reframing of a text in history, by virtue of the inaccessibility of historical truth itself. For the textualists, history is itself just text, and any of a multitude of interpretations of any given event is as valid as any other. On the other hand, the New Historicists are obliged to counter a traditionalism within the discipline of history which does have faith in the possibility of linking historical accounts (historical discourse) to an objective reality, but excludes the possibility that a literary (or visual) text (which they see as a purely aesthetic phenomenon) might appeal effectively to historical truth. For Hawthorn, 'the first of these solutions trivializes literary [visual] texts along with all other texts; the second restores the importance of historical texts at the cost of again trivializing literary [visual] ones' (Hawthorn, 1996, 29). And the challenge that faces New Historicist critics, therefore, involves establishing the validity of literary (visual) texts as engaged in, and contributing to, the ongoing dialogue of history and politics. New Historicism must contend on the one hand with the traditional historian's contempt for the historical validity of literary/visual texts. And on the other hand it must dispose of or at least destabilise Postmodernist and Post-structuralist affirmations of absolute interpretative arbitrariness in texts (so that any interpretation of an event, such as, for the sake of polemical edge, 'the Holocaust never happened', becomes as valid as another, such as 'the Holocaust did happen').
Whether present in a formative or merely in an informative manner, to a greater or lesser degree, history (for which read broadly society, politics and ideology) – that 'uncircumventable phantom of history' which Deborah Lipstadt calls 'irrefutable' ('Slavery happened; so did the Black Plague and the Holocaust', Lipstadt, 1994, 21) and which Saul Friedlander defined as 'something irreducible which, for better or worse, I would still call reality' (Friedlander, 1992, 20) – lies at the root of the approach to be taken here, with regard to Paula Rego's admirably pamphleteering art.
New ways of inscribing art or literature into past history requires of course innovations in the technique of posing questions. I will interject here a personal anecdote. My five-year-old daughter is very fond of an anthology of Greek myths for children, and in particular of the story of the Minotaur. This is not surprising, since Greek mythology in general, and this tale in particular, involve much that is the standard fare of children's literature: specifically here, a wicked animal and a resourceful princess. She is particularly interested in the ball of thread which Ariadne gave to Theseus to facilitate his exit from the labyrinth. Less straightforwardly, however, and somewhat eccentrically, the most pressing aspect of her concern refers to speculation as to the colour of the thread. But on second thoughts, why not? Some of the most imaginative art historians in recent scholarship have taken to questioning the way in which, in Leo Steinberg's words – in a volume tellingly entitled Other Criteria – the art history establishment nurtures young scholars whose work is 'especially tame and conventional': 'we introduce them to the technology of research and teach them the proper set of questions to ask with respect to art' (Steinberg, 1975, 308). In much the same vein as Steinberg, and in a harsh critique of traditional art history's analytical methods, Stephen Bann contends that the relationship of painters to history in their work is a question which has so far hardly begun to be answered, and that this omission introduces a fatal flaw into much art history writing. Bann attributes this methodological weakness to two factors. First, the process whereby, in defining itself as a discipline, art history adopted a prejudice inherited from archive-based historians against 'the serious historic value of artistic representations of history'. Second, and causally related to this, a failure to ask interesting questions (Bann, 1984, 104). What colour was Ariadne's thread? Or, in a more serious vein, let us consider for example the fact that until the implementation of standard procedures such as hand washing by doctors (and later the advent of antibiotics) more human beings (women) died of post-partum infections than in all the world's wars put together. Which phenomenon is worthier of historical inquiry? The acquisition of basic habits of hygiene by physicians, or the territorial and religious conflicts of nations? The intellectually (and socially/politically) narrowing effects of a failure to ask new questions, whether in history, history of art or any other discipline, should not be underestimated. Bann's dismissal echoes the problem outlined above, regarding the Old Historicists' affirmation of the inadmissibility of visual or literary texts as historical evidence. Like traditional historiography, traditional history of art, too, to its detriment has tended to concentrate on the purely aesthetic dimension of art works.
Jürgen Habermas (1978), Frederic Jameson (1981), Elizabeth Bronfen (1989) and more specifically with reference to painting Mieke Bal (1990), have written about the master plans that have habitually colonised or erased the marginal. Bal focuses on 'the figure's function as a semiotic object, as a machine for generating meaning' (Bal, 1990, 516), and on the 'incoherent' detail which challenges the unified narrative in painting as a powerful ideological weapon. Following on from Bal, Naomi Schor (1987), to give but one example, has discussed at length the aesthetics of detail, as being possessed of a gender charge which, for Bal, demarcates the arena in which 'a battle over the marginality of women is fought' (Bal, 1990, 508). Throughout the reading that follows, close attention will be given to the impact of detail in some of Paula Rego's paintings. To give but one example, Bal's interpretation of details such as the spot of blood in Bathsheba's letter, in Rembrandt's Bathsheba at her Bath (1654), serves as her point of departure for the reattribution of cognisance of the crime, and the dislocation of blame for it from the man to the woman, in a manner which sets the image in opposition to the originating biblical text. This manoeuvre, with modifications, is also discernible, as will be discussed in particular in chapters 2, 3 and 4, in the way in which Paula Rego has recourse to familiar religious and national iconography (biblical references, folktales, maritime iconography, family metaphors) for the purpose of contesting the various aspects of received wisdom, social expectation and political unchangeability.
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt have pondered the ability of art either to contain or unleash 'the potentially disruptive energies of history' (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2000, 81). In what follows, I shall attempt to foreground the way in which gender interplay extends to a wider national dialectic but also, through a reverse process, the way in which history is telescoped back into the domestic arena. The interpretative practice to be followed will seek to emulate what I believe to be Paula Rego's own drive in painting: to recover repressed, unauthorised or untold stories, and to bring to light the mechanisms of overt and covert doctrines.
In so doing, I shall specifically attempt to identify the sleight of hand whereby this artist, in a manoeuvre familiar to those who have followed her work through four decades, conflates two seemingly mutually exclusive political events, ideological positions or historical moments (in this case Portugal under dictatorship and after the reinstatement of democracy), and instead renders explicit their uncomfortable shared territory. In the period of dictatorship, her work dissected the collusion of church and state in paintings that sought to pull the rug from under both. More controversially, I would wish to argue, in her post-revolution work, what comes under siege is the master narrative of a contemporary Portugal complacent about its nouveau-democratic status, whose disquieting proximity to, and affinities with, the recent dictatorial past she confronts. The cornerstone for this polemic conducted on two fronts, against the grands récits of Portuguese fascism and present-day democracy, is the connecting thread of themes such as love, sex, marriage, parenthood and abortion. The response to the dilemma thrown up by these fundamental experiences, exposes shared territory and denounces as fellow-travellers interests that ought to have been mutually exclusive political enemies.
What follows is a reading of pictures ranging over forty years, from a perspective which makes no attempt at engaging with the formal or painterly aspects of this artist's work. Two caveats become necessary at this point. First, what is attempted here is in no sense art history, in the traditional understanding or methodology of that discipline. That is an approach which, as a student of literature and history, I am not equipped to undertake. Instead, the argument to be developed seeks the inscription of art, this art, within the history that informs and motivates it. Or, to put it another way, the restoration of historical meaning to the works, such that history is made central to the art. The aim is to foreground the politicising dimensions of what I would argue are works eminently worthy of consideration within the ultra-orthodox category of History Painting while, paradoxically, seeking to introduce an interdisciplinary blurring of subject boundaries between art, history and politics. In Paula Rego's own words, 'a painting is not just colours and form, but also history. ... Paintings can be political' (Marques Gastão, 2002, 40).
The second caveat relates to the thorny issue of subjectivity in interpretation. The gauntlet has been picked up by any number of art theorists. Griselda Pollock, for example, discussing what she terms 'deviant readings' which coexist with generally accepted or market-driven (buyers') favoured inter-pretations, argues that 'which meaning will prevail ultimately depends upon the desire of the viewer' (Pollock, 1999, 112). She engages with Mieke Bal's (Bal, 1991) view of 'myth' (the cultural narratives – for example Bible stories, 'historical' vignettes – that inform many visual representations) as 'an empty screen onto which the user, viewer or reader projects', as active participant in the making of pictures or texts, and concurs with the latter that 'there is no story, just the tellings' (Pollock, 1999, 117).
In the case of Paula Rego, the dangers of 'anything goes' or of what Pollock terms 'the royal road to relativism' (Pollock, 1999, 119) may become more or less problematic with regard to different pictures. Some, such as The Sin of Father Amaro series and the untitled series on abortion, departing as they do from the reality of a pre-existing text or political event, offer firmer ground for interpretation. Others, such as the series on the family (plates 9-10, figs 23–24, 26–28, 30–32), discussed in chapter 2, may lead more easily to the undeniable danger of unfettered speculation. Addressing the problems raised by the latter, however, it is not only true to say that Rego's work appears to invite such speculation, but that, moreover, she herself has explicitly encouraged viewers to take liberties with it: 'when I finish the picture I usually have a pretty pat explanation for it. But that's only one way into the picture, because one hopes, once a person's looking into the picture, that other things will come out that I'm not even aware of ... ' (quoted in Tusa, 2001, 10). 'People have to work out their own story' (quoted in Lambirth, 1998, 10).
At the risk of sounding defensive about the risks of interpretation (or over-interpretation), I will compound her incitement to interpretative freedom by referring to Leo Steinberg's statement that 'though we all hope to reach objectively valid conclusions, this purpose is not served by disguising the subjectivity of interest, method and personal history which in fact conditions our work' (Steinberg, 1975, 309). 'How difficult it is to be oneself and to see nothing except what is visible', lamented Alberto Caeiro, heteronym of Portugal's great modernist poet, Fernando Pessoa (Caeiro, 1979, 50). 'I, thanks to having eyes only for seeing,/I see the absence of meaning in everything .../To be a thing is to be unsusceptible to interpretation .../Reality does not need me' (Caeiro, 1970, 79, 85). Caeiro's admirably consistent refusal to move poetically beyond the gaze towards interpretation seems to shun the trap of subjectivity, but this is not an option available to all. The problem, therefore, needs engaging with. For Steinberg, subjectivity, apart from the intrusion of the self into interpretation, is also a concept which he uses idiosyncratically to refer to intellectual contingencies that propitiate the particular aptness of a specific critical apparatus to a specific work ('the historical precondition for the rediscovery of the subject', Steinberg, 1975, 310). This may mean something as transparent as the felicitous marriage of a determinate brand of theory to a given practice, or as wayward yet fruitful as 'an error which discovers a continent' (Steinberg, 1975, 310). A suggestion all the more apposite in the context of a nation such as Portugal, which, to give but one example, discovered Brazil thanks to a fortuitous contingency of ill winds and navigational error.
My title to this introduction is taken from John Osborne's well-known play. The connection between an author not renowned for political correctness in matters of gender, and an artist who takes the opposite view with equal forcefulness, may well seem improbable. Nonetheless, to my mind, these connections exist, and are evoked by a shared concern that insistently pits the individual against a brutish collectivity which the former can destroy from within. In both Osborne and Rego, the traitor emerges as a patriot after a fashion, the mouthpiece for constructive destruction within an established order in need of radical refurbishment. Paula Rego's work has been described as 'an uncompromising reproach to the politics of control' and as 'underlining the frightening banality of human evil' (Morton, 2001, 108). If her output of the 1960s is set to an agenda of the need for change, the body of work that emerges from the 1980s onwards lends itself to interpretation as the rage for a lost opportunity in a country where arguably, in a pseudo-democratic new era, much remains unchanged. 'My raw material is [Portugal]. But when I return there is always a feeling of shock. As if everything was more clearly revealed' (quoted in Marques Gastão, 1999, 45).9
1. Paula Rego, quoted in McEwen (1997), 138.
2. She often represents Britain, as well as Portugal, in shows worldwide and has sometimes been included under the umbrella of the School of London. The latter, curiously, also counts among its numbers Raymond Mason (resident in Paris), Bill Jacklin (resident in New York), Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud (born in Berlin) amd R. B. Kitaj (born in the USA).
3. See for example her preoccupation with Salazarismo and its effects on the country in an interview with Ana Gabriela Macedo (1999), 12–13.
4. For details as to the quasi-official status of this title, see for example Darlene J. Sadlier (1989), 123 and A. H. de Oliveira Marques (1991), 151.
5. Salazar's lesson, therefore, is in fact composed of seven lessons. This might have been a reference to the seven lessons (or dolours) of the Virgin Mary, discussed in chapter 3. The sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the seven dolours of the Virgin (Feasts of the Seven) had as their object 'the spiritual martyrdom of the Mother of God and her compassion with the sufferings of her Divine Son'. The seven dolours were sorrow at the prophecy of Simeon, at the flight into Egypt, at having lost the Holy Child in Jerusalem, at meeting Jesus on his way to Calvary, at standing at the foot of the cross, at Jesus being taken from the cross, at the burial of Jesus (The Catholic Encyclopaedia, 1912, 151). Mary's abnegation and selflessness, if this is indeed the intended subtext of Salazar's lesson, might be intended to convey a double meaning: the leader's selfless devotion to the nation, and its citizens' obligation to accept with forbearance whatever might be required of them.
6. Darlene J. Sadlier offers a useful outline of a legal system that gave women the vote only belatedly, that stated in the 1933 Constitution that everyone was equal before the law 'except as regards women, the differences resulting from their nature and from the interests of the family', in which husbands could force their wives to return to the family home if they left it, and could also refuse them the necessary authorisation to work, hold a passport or a bank account. The imbalance of power within the family entailed also, of course, a double standard in sexual morality. Following the iconographic ideal of the Virgin Mary, female virginity prior to marriage was a quasi-official requisite. This desideratum was reinforced by governmental programmes such as for example the infamous 'Saint Anthony's day weddings', in accordance with which couples who married in a mass wedding ceremony on that saint's day, and were able to provide evidence of both poverty and the bride's virginity, were refunded by the state for the cost of the wedding and received household goods such as kitchen utensils and vacuum cleaners.
7. For the present purposes the difference between New Historicism and Cultural Materialism will not be debated with any degree of theoretical depth. For a discussion of these issues, consult Hawthorn (1996).
8. For a further discussion of this, consult for example Waugh (1992).
9. The relationship with all things Portuguese, as will be argued, is always tinged with ambivalence. Agustina Bessa-Luís talks about a telephone conversation with Paula Rego as follows: 'I heard Paula on the telephone and her voice displeased me. It had the same annoying and detached tone as that of Vieira da Silva [another prominent Portuguese painter who lived a large part of her life in France] when she spoke of Portuguese matters. A mixture of indifference and enthusiastic welcome, much as one would show to someone who was a guest, almost a stranger' (Rego and Bessa-Luís, 2001, 7).