2 Salazar Vomiting the Homeland
Is that love you're making?
Arthur Osborne, Is That Love You're Making?
The discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [meant that] what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great transports of rage. It was time for all these figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were. No doubt they were condemned all the same; but they were listened to; and if regular sexuality happened to be questioned once again, it was through a reflux movement, originating in these peripheral sexualities.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
'The death ... of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover' (Poe, 1951, 982). Poe's eulogy of the dead woman as Muse encapsulates a centuries-long tradition – from Dante, Petrarch and Camões through Dickens, Herculano, and Tolstoy to contemporary veneration of vanished icons (Marilyn Monroe, Diana, Princess of Wales) – of worship of the deceased beloved at least partly because deceased. Commenting on Paula Rego's 1997–98 series based on the nineteenth-century Portuguese novel by Eça de Queirós, The Sin of Father Amaro (plates 11-15, figures 34-35, 37-38, 40-41, 45, 47), Ruth Rosengarten draws a contrast between Rego's empowered rendition of the female protagonist and the version given by her literary precursor, whose 'corpse becomes the visible sign of a Christian morality that silences female desire' (Rosengarten, 1999a, 24). In the analysis that follows in this chapter and chapter 2 of paintings from the ten years that preceded the Father Amaro series, I shall pay particular attention to the ways in which the standardised roles of wife, mother, nurturer and ministering angel, as extensions of that Christian morality, are revised in Paula Rego. I shall also remark upon the resulting effects as regards the gender, class and racial assignation of the roles of victim/corpse and killer/survivor in the work of a painter in whose vision, almost invariably, the results counter expectation.
2 Salazar Vomiting the Homeland
I will begin, however, by considering three paintings from the 1960s which, as much by virtue of their titles as by their visual effect (whose semantic accessibility largely depends on those titles), allude to the Salazar political regime which was at its height at the time of their creation. Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (figure 2), When We Used to Have a House in the Country (figure 3) and Iberian Dawn (figure 4) all variously, but with uniform antagonism, address cornerstones of the regime through the person, symbolism and policies of its leader. In Salazar Vomiting the Homeland, the image of the man which Salazar's propaganda machinery cultivated, namely that of the ascetic and monastic hermit wedded to the nation and to his job, is replaced by that of a greedy, vampiric, quasi-cannibalistic spectre disgorging the nation upon which presumably he had previously banqueted.
Paula Rego's painting of i960 begs many questions concerning the regime to which it alludes: why would Salazar wish or need to vomit a motherland with which supposedly he was at one? Which aspects of the motherland are here being ejected? Is the need to do so, whether successful or not, a denunciation of the gap between theory (a motherland and its leader, united in proud isolation) and practice (the dissenting world of realpolitik)? Why does the motherland make its leader sick? Is the relationship, after all, not that of a groom and his willingly submissive bride, but rather that of a virus weakening its host?
3 When We Used to Have a House in the Country
The same ambiguity appears to operate in other works of the same period, including the two mentioned above.
The title of Iberian Dawn, echoing, as it does, quasi-fascist refrains of hyperbolic nationalism ('tomorrow belongs to me'),1 draws out the lampooning figures of various protagonists (the horizontal one on the left, the one in the centre and the large one on the right), each apparently engaged in the same retching behaviour as the Salazar figure in the painting of the preceding year. The balsamic golden tones of half of the picture (signalling the birth of a new day and presumably of a new nation), which take up almost exactly half of the surface area of the picture, contrast with the dismal, sickly grey of the other half. And more crucially, the rising sun of the eponymous Iberian dawn, paradoxically, is located within the grey segment.
The same grey tone is picked up by one critic as being one of the signifying elements in When We Used to Have a House in the Country (Rosengarten, 1997, 44–6) – whose title refers ironically to the colonies as the country cottage of the nation – and operates here as an indictment of the Portuguese colonial undertaking:
[This work] has implicit in it at the level of an absent secondary proposition, an acerbic criticism of Portuguese colonialism. What vision could be more critical of the history of Portuguese colonialism than this figuration, in visceral and depressing colours, giving, in a panoramic sweep of the horizontal scene, the simultaneity of the divergent destinies of coloniser and colonised? (Rosengarten, 1997, 44–6)
In the period spanning the decade from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, Paula Rego abandoned the cut-and-paste method of figures drawn, painted, cut out and collaged, moving instead into a more naturalistic, figurative mode. This retained the narrative element of her previous production, even emphasising it because of the greater transparency which the naturalistic method imposed upon meaning. Many of the paintings of this new phase, including the untitled Girl and Dog series (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22) and most of the paintings on family themes (plates 9-10, figures 23-24, 26-28, 30-32), opted for a foregrounding of the personal over the political, whilst nonetheless retaining, through allusion, a national-political content beyond the family and sexual politics that inform them. On occasion, however, in the course of the 1990s, Rego returned to subjects which gave priority to the political and colonial/race/class concerns of earlier works.
4 Iberian Dawn
In the first image I shall analyse in detail here, The Fitting (figure 5), a mother witnesses the fitting of her daughter's ball gown by a kneeling seamstress.
The relative scale of the figures, and the strategic play between foreground and background, as so often in Paula Rego, is both perplexing and illuminating. The young daughter looms large in a billowing dress which, it has been suggested, hides many secrets (Rosengarten, 1997, 82). Her mother, although the smallest figure of the three, dominates by her stance of authority, her fiery (demonic) red hair and her quasi-clerical or militaristic attire, similar in some of its associations to that of the godmother in The Bullfighter's Godmother (figure 30), another challenging female figure to be discussed in chapter 2. In the foreground, but disempowered by her subservient posture and class status, is the seamstress.
The interplay of relations is equivocal, and the demarcation of respective positions of power is mutually contradictory: the mother, by virtue of her family and class, here may be the self-evident figure of domestic authority, but her relatively small size cancels this out, up to a point. In a move of further contradictory implications, however, her costume – a female version of either a priest's gown or a soldier's uniform – may signal either the apeing of church and/or state authority, or alternatively the intent to transgress outside the sphere of domestic female rule, and the attempt to occupy a masculine landscape of publicly exercised power. The daughter's status, albeit imposing by virtue of her size, is limited by her youth and presumed filial obedience to the mother, from whom the dress, however, contradictorily and rebelliously hides secrets. She is, additionally, her mother's potential successor in the dynamics of class power that place her over the kneeling seamstress, who, however, confusingly, may be about to pull the (class) rug from under her feet, or to strip the shirt (dress) off her back, in a revolutionary gesture which lays claim to class demanding the rights due to her class. A revolutionary act, therefore, which would also go some way towards explaining the seamstress's disproportionately large stature, in comparison with that of her current mistress.
5 The Fitting
This atmosphere of potential threat with its blurred demarcations of power is enhanced by the attenuated ghostly figures painted on the wardrobe door, and by the disproportionately small child reclining in a lifeless position in the armchair. And a final puzzle is introduced by the half-visible poster of a Spanish flamenco dancer on the wall behind the wooden counter. The Spanish note introduces ambiguity through the allusion to two possible and mutually contradictory lines of interpretation.
The least challenging is that of the introduction of a schmaltzy, folkloric would-be-exoticism. Spain had been, for ten centuries, the enemy against which Portugal pitted itself in its determination to remain independent. This peninsular neighbour, however, and more to the point, Franco's fascist Spain, was the only destination outside Portugal to which Salazar ever travelled, including the African colonies which he never visited. Spain alone, therefore, and almost for the first time in the history of the two countries which have traditionally existed inimically back to back, enjoyed the privilege of non-foreign status in the eyes of the Portuguese leader, the only territory outside national borders, contact with which was not deemed to defile the 'proudly alone' purity of the Estado Novo. Spanish artifacts, and in particular the gawdy flamenco dolls which were many little Portuguese girls' most treasured possession, were a condoned intrusion of acceptable pluriculturalism within the insularity and homogeneity of censored national life. The flamenco poster, therefore, might on the one hand allude to the regime's acceptance of a controllable foreign intrusion which shored up the unity of Portuguese-Spanish fascist brotherhood.
On the other hand, however, it might signify the operation of a dangerous underground resistance. In the Iberian peninsula, flamenco dancing and culture carry implications which extend beyond the crude tourist diet of tame apolitical exoticism. Flamenco is the music and dance of the Andalusian Gypsies, or Flamencos, and it had its roots in Gypsy, Andalusian, Arabic and Spanish-Jewish folksong. The religious heterodoxy introduced by these origins, some of which have provoked religious persecution since the Middle Ages, are further confirmed by the usual positioning of the practitioners of flamenco (which also included outcast Christians) on the fringes of social acceptability. The themes of flamenco music and dance tend to be those of despair, love, religion and death, the key concept in flamenco being the duende, which is the surrender by the dancer to absolute emotion. Flamenco, therefore, in its untamed version, becomes both the release of the unbridled self and the art form par excellence of the outsider, precisely those elements of society marginalised in Portugal and Spain by a conflation of social, religious and political imperatives. Their interests would have stood in exact antithesis to the emotionally corseted, religiously orthodox and politically oppressive tenets of the Salazar regime.
It is fitting, therefore, that the flamenco poster in this painting, potentially a sign of the dangerous slide away from convention at many levels, should figure marginally, placed at the side, in the background, half-hidden and guillotined along both its horizontal and vertical axes, by the wooden sideboard and the edge of the painting respectively. Its attenuated presence, however, through a typical Rego sleight of hand, is countered by two factors: the eye-catching red of the dress and veil of the dancer; and, more worryingly, the species-likeness between it and the unusual, anachronistic, flowing gown whose fitting is in question here. The estrangement and heterodoxy signalled by the flamenco association, therfore not only lie beyond the centre of the stage (in the doubly peripheral shape of a foreign figure in a picture within a picture), but, more threateningly, have managed to get inside it and are integral to it. The association with the dress worn by the daughter of the house makes flamenco an intrinsic part of the very status quo that rejected it, and its agency pervades the cycle of generations through the figure of the daughter of the house, whose secrets forever hidden under that suspicious dress continue to invite speculation.
The link between this picture and The Maids (plate 1) is class, and specifically the working or underclass, as constituted in the former painting by the seamstress, and in the latter by the eponymous servants.
The inspiration for this work, Jean Genet's play of the same title (Les Bonnes, 1967) introduces the theme of the overthrow and murder of master, or in this case mistress, by slave. The picture has recourse to discrete but identifiable period and historical-political markers that again substantiate the awareness of Salazar's regime as an enduring preoccupation for Rego. The first of these markers is the 1940s-style dress of the mistress of the house, which makes a reappearance in other paintings of the 1980s, such as The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9), to be discussed in chapter 2. In The Maids, the mistress about to be murdered, who in fact looks like a man in the most perfunctory drag, as suggested by Rego herself (McEwen, 1997, 163; I shall return to the significance of drag in connection with other pictures), sports the Bryl-creemed haircut of the archetypal 1940s matinée idol. The undecided shadow on the upper lip suggests the fashionable pencil moustache of the same period, a period which was, of course, in Portugal, the hagiographic heyday of the Estado Novo. Period and location are also suggested in other more specifically Portuguese ways. The open-plan living-room-cum-open-veranda, for example, dovetails with the presence of the black maid to suggest the colonial setting already discussed in connection with When We Used to Have a House in the Country (figure 3). And the colonial effect is further enhanced by the hibiscus flower in a glass on the dressing table, one of the spoils of colonial life. In this context, the inapproriately warm Prince-of-Wales check suit and thick tights worn by the mistress introduce a dislocation that indicates the eminent failure on the part of the European motherland to adapt and go native.
The picture, particularly when elucidated by the Genet reference, conveys an atmosphere of menace. Visually, the vocabulary of threat ranges from the obvious to the camouflaged. At first glance we are struck by the figure of the blonde little girl, whose colouring situates her firmly on the European side of the equation, and who is being at the very least restrained or possibly having the life squeezed out of her by one of the maids. This gesture was to be repeated in Paula Rego's subsequent work, to more or less ambivalent effect, for example in some of the Girl and Dog pictures to be discussed next (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22) and in The Family (plate 10). In The Maids, the next generation of masters and mistresses is summarily dealt with through this act, while the black maid concerns herself with the current mistress, presumably the mother of the little girl. The threat of the black-mammy-turned-murderess of her masters and her masters' children is a familiar trope in the cultural imagination of slave economies and colonial powers (Christian, 1985, 181–215), and in Paula Rego it will resurface in the context of the Girl and Dog series (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22). In The Maids the black servant holds no weapon, but her left hand suggestively reaches for something inside a skirt pocket, More eloquently, however, her right hand appears to be positioning the rather bovine mistress's thick neck, much as one would adjust that of an ox being readied for slaughter (or that of an aristocrat for the guillotine). The shadowy silhouettes of branches outside mirror the grasping hands of the maids, the latter a motif which will be repeated in subsequent paintings (Untitled b, plate 5; Untitled c, plate 6; Untitled d, plate 7; Untitled e, figure 21; Untitled f, figure 22; Departure, figure 28; The Cadet and His Sister, plate 9).
6 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Annunciation (Ance Ancilla Domini!)
The picture features two other intriguing elements. The first, the lily artistically displayed on a side-table, is almost certainly ironic. This flower, which will reappear in other paintings, carries known connotations of virginity and purity, as well as established associations with the genre of the Annunciation (figure 6).
More to the point here, however, are its links to Jesus at the Last Judgement in Christian art. A lily in Christ's mouth or on either side of his face, in conjunction with a sword, symbolizes mercy in judgement (Hall, 1991, 192–3; Becker, 1994, 178), a reference almost certainly paradoxical in connection with the Rego picture, alluding as it does to summary executions: both of those perhaps guilty of class crimes (the mistress), and those who might become so in the future (the little girl).
The second and final figure concerning which I will speculate here is that of the shadowy boar in the foreground, in the bottom right-hand corner. The boar or pig is a complex and sometimes contradictory symbol in art. Its negative connotations are multifarious and also apposite to the colonial indictment arguably intended by this and other paintings: the pig is a symbol of intemperance and gluttony because of its habit of rooting about in the dirt, a behaviour possibly coterminous with indiscriminate imperial pillaging. The flipside of this coin is the wild boar's ennobling symbolism in the Christian art of the Middle Ages, as a representative of the warrior and priestly classes (who above all were implicated in European imperial expansion), and even as a symbol of Christ (Becker, 1994, 233), in whose name, of course, proselytising to heathens overseas was justified. These latter associations, therefore, link this animal to the military and missionary dimensions of European imperial and colonial enterprise between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.
Both the pig and the boar carry other conflicting connotations, namely those of favoured sacrificial animal versus unclean, untouchable and even demonic creature. But of greater, and possibly more perverse, interest here is the boar's significance within the context of the medieval theory of the four temperaments. Medieval physiology saw the body as governed by four humours, which, according to their relative distribution and intensity, determined temperament, disposition and health. The humours, their associated temperaments and somatic conditions were also seen to bear an affinity with the four elements and with four animals whose natures they shared, as follows (Becker, 1994, 233):
| Phlegm | Phlegmatic | Lamb | Water |
| Blood | Sanguine | Ape | Air |
| Bile | Choleric | Lion | Fire |
| Black bile | Melancholic | Pig | Earth |
The pig is the animal associated with melancholy, which, in its turn, is identified with an introspective, intellectual and artistic temperament (Becker, 1994, 233). The cryptic pig in Paula Rego's picture, therefore, lends itself to an alternative (and antithetical) interpretation, not now as the avatar of imperial, colonial or dictatorial greed, but, on the contrary, as the overseeing demiurgic presence of the creative artist. It is relevant, therefore, to listen to the artist herself on the subject of this animal: 'I always wanted to do a pig it used to be my favourite animal: soft, but at the same time with those prickly hairs ... The pig eats its young. It is a pleasant animal to look at ... ' (Paula Rego quoted in Rodrigues da Silva, 1998, 9). The 'pleasant animal' which eats its young is the favourite animal of an artist who some years later was to paint somewhat worrying family scenes, and here it may stand as the artist's alter ego, the sole moral authority defining the nature of a violent crime which, here, she apparently not only condones, but brings into being, imagistically and creatively, as the author of this painting. The judgemental yet anarchic presence of the artist in animal form will make a return in In the Garden (plate 4).
7 The First Mass in Brazil
The colonial theme has been reiterated by Paula Rego throughout her work. One of the most interesting manifestations of this, Mother (plate 12), will be discussed in chapter 3. Elsewhere (Lisboa, forthcoming) I have discussed other important instances of this preoccupation, such as The First Mass in Brazil (figure 7).
And another example is to be found in one of her better-known paintings, Time: Past and Present (figure 8).
This is one of the artist's most complex and symbolically charged works, not least because of its large dimension and the deployment across the vast expanse of canvas of a multitude of crowded symbols and narratives, jostling with each other for centrality or simply for space. An elderly (possibly retired) sailor sits at home, surrounded by memorabilia from his travels and by representatives of the next generation. The pageant of history unfolds, including both family history (his young relatives) and national concerns (as betokened by various items to be discussed in detail). The title of the picture invites us to consider the theme of past and present time. What arguably speaks loudest in it, however, is the uncertainty of the future, in light of the past. At a personal level the future seems assured by the cycle of generations represented by the old man, the equally old woman, and three children who are presumably their grandchildren. Even glossing over the noticeable omission of the intermediate generation (a father and a mother – a phenomenon which, as regards the absent youngish male, is repeated to significant effect in The Dance (figure 27), discussed later), the future heralded by the children is not clear cut. The little girl in the background stands against an empty landscape, which presumably, given her grandfather's calling, ought to be a beach with the sea spreading to the horizon, but is in fact merely an empty expanse of sand that might equally be a desert.
8 Time: Past and Present
The sea metamorphosed into wasteland, as signifier of either national loss or national comeuppance, is a frequent presence in Paula Rego (see for example the discussion of In the Wilderness, plate 14, in chapter 3). Outside the iconography of Don Sebastião – the king who crossed the water but lost his life, and in the process reduced national life to a metaphorical desert – Rego, as will be seen, engages antagonistically, throughout her work, with the maritime adventures of the motherland. Her reasons may be grounded in sound non-nostalgic historical common sense. In the aftermath of the revolution of 25 April 1974, which in turn led to the independence of the African colonies in 1975 – as had been the case following the loss of the East Indian territories in the seventeenth century and of Brazil in 1822 – Portugal experienced a period of economic collapse and social instability. Post-1975, one million people (the so-called and much-resented retornados, or returnees) left the former colonies in less than two years, and flooded a country with a population of eight million, an almost non-existent welfare infrastructure and a democracy undergoing teething difficulties. Since then, the national landscape has been on many counts unremittingly dismal, despite the obvious rewards of restored democracy and political freedom. Not surprisingly, then, the future for this erstwhile seaborne empire might with reason have been depicted in the early 1990s as the empty wasteland, or the room without a view which we contemplate in Time: Past and Present.
Outside, where the sea might have been expected to be, there is nothing. And inside are found the actors and props in what, to all effects, is a historical script. Apart from the small girl outlined against the void of the oceanless landscape beyond the door, the picture includes two other children: a baby in a cradle, wearing an expression of fear on its face, and a small girl, sitting at a low table, ostensibly writing on a piece of paper which, however, is blank. The ominous symbolism of the up-and-coming generation faced with an empty future, which might be said to represent the end of national history as traditionally understood, reverberates back to the old man, sitting idly in a chair, over the back of which is draped the waterproof oilskin of past sea journeys. This beached sailor is himself the anthropomorphic rendition of the traveller's trophies arranged around the room, including the hippopotamus statuette – a token, presumably, of exotic African destinations – and, more significantly, the model ship, whose style, diminutive scale and exile on dry land speak loudly of obsolete imperial undertakings. This ship is a forerunner of a similar one, discussed in chapter 3 in connection with Mother (plate 12). And finally, still on the theme of former sailing heroes and beached ships, and as if to add insult to injury, we speculate on the figure of a small doll in the shape of a sailor boy, presiding over man and ship. By means of infantilisation, or mummification, the saga of the Discoveries hereby receives yet another blow.
The other components of the picture are more cryptic. On the walls hang pictures and statuettes. The pictures are dominated by religious and diasporic themes connected to the imperatives of the maritime enterprise: a praying woman (symbol both of the religious faith underpinning the proselytising impetus for the maritime discoveries and of the woman left behind by adventuring males), an angel (indicating the heavenly reward for national heroes) and a St Sebastian (the namesake of the doomed king whose defeat put an end to it all). The pictures are all sombre and melancholic. A careful reading of the relevant legend tells us that St Sebastian, depicted almost exclusively in the pose given here, pierced with arrows, in fact survived this ordeal, but might be said in one reading to typify (not unlike the Portuguese Don Sebastiao) a man who tempted luck once too often. After this punishment, exacted by the Roman authorities for his declaration of Christian faith, he was nursed back to health but returned to confront the Roman emperor, Diocletian. His defiance led him to be clubbed to death and his body being thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, the main sewer in Rome (Hall, 1991, 276–7). If to risk death once is a misfortune, to do it twice is carelessness. And the same maxim may be applied with a vengeance to a Portuguese propensity to lose not two but three empires, in India, Brazil and Africa successively.
In Time: Past and Present, the largest picture-within-a-picture is that of the angel in flight. This figure, referred to above in fairly orthodox terms, may however carry a more enigmatic significance. Its overall colour, in tones of red and black, impresses the viewer as demonic rather than paradisiacal, and, furthermore, it is split from top to bottom by a crack in the wood panel, which divides both the picture and the angel in two. The fracture, compounded by the disturbing colour tones, invites further speculation. The duality introduced by the crack, for example, might be seen to gesture towards a variety of heterodox (and heretical) religious schisms and Manichean tendencies, which unleashed widespread religious persecution through Europe in the Middle Ages. And religious heresy, transposed into a twentieth-century Portuguese context, translates as an attack against the church, one of the foundation stones of the Estado Novo, and therefore, obliquely, against the regime itself.
Finally, I wish to consider the small figure of the mermaid, centre top, next to the painting depicting an ambiguous servant or nun figure with two children. The mermaid, a mythical sea creature that lures sailors to perdition, clearly stands outside Christian acceptability, in antithesis to the nuns, saints and angels of the rest of the interior decor (passim the possible unorthodox associations of the latter, as will be seen in a much later picture, Angel, plate 15). The mermaid, therefore, acts at the very least as a direct (rather than cryptic) threat both to religious orthodoxy and to the sea-going policy which in the fifteenth century redrew the lines of national history for the next five centuries. The pagan menace of a creature that leads astray conquering, empire-building navigators compounds all the elements of dangerous, non-Marian female sexuality, religious heterodoxy and anti-imperialist political dissent which ran counter to the rule of historical government that Paula Rego has in her line of fire.
History, then, in this artist's vision, is driven by a multifaceted understanding of political management and mismanagement, in the context of which anarchy is always close to the surface, waiting to come to the fore. This may be the tenor of the anti-Trinitarian triptych, History I, History II and History III (figure 9), in which the staidness of the official version surrenders to carnivalesque frenzy, and is irreparably wrong-footed by it.
9 History I, History II and History III
In this tripartite précis of history, both individual and collective action (the demarcation between the two becomes blurred) are recreated as a nightmare of rape and pillage, utterly divorced from any possible presentation as wise, noble or epic.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that in the very same year, Paula Rego began to paint a group of works that would emerge as the Girl and Dog series (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22). Over the following two years she returned repeatedly to the same theme, and what transpires is the beginning of a project still ongoing, in which the political is deciphered into the vocabulary of the personal, the familial, the amorous and the sexual, and in which the resurgence of the repressed, leading to anarchy, is rendered anthropormophic and gendered in the female.
In The Maids (plate 1), as already observed, the death-bound mistress appeared to be a man in drag, down to the beefy shoulders, muscled legs, masculine 1940s haircut and pencil moustache. In what follows, I shall be arguing that Paula Rego insistently, and ever more explicitly from the mid 1980s onwards, cast the male in her pictures as the victim of a variety of murderous female impulses. The urge to do so has required her, on occasion, to transsexualise the protagonists of the literary texts which she takes as her departure points: for example, in 1997–98, in the nineteenth-century novel, The Sin of Father Amaro, in which, as will be discussed in chapter 3, gender assignations of power and powerlessness are reversed, thus empowering the woman (sometimes androgynously or even masculinely portrayed – Lying, figure 40; Girl With Chickens, figure 41) at the expense of any number of male clerical erstwhile persecutors in skirts. The same strategy had operated previously, in The Maids, where the murder of a female mistress prescribed by the original text is both respected and subverted: respected, since a murder does take place, and subverted, because in the end, as with the later Father Amaro pictures, Rego cannot bring herself to cast a woman in the victim's role, and does so only deceptively, through the device of dressing a man in female clothing. The deception, however, is left deliberately rudimentary, enabling us to discern the victimised male underneath the deliberately crude disguise.
Perfunctory disguises, intended to allow the viewer to penetrate the reality they camouflage, are central to the paintings to be discussed in the next section, whose subject is the metamorphosis from man to dog.
At the end of the 1980s Paula Rego painted a series of disturbing works revolving around the theme of covert kin slaying. These will be discussed inchapter 2. Studies in the field of criminology seem to show that serial killers often begin their criminal careers with episodic animal mutilation (Felthous, 1980, 169–77; Goleman, 1991). If so, how appropriate that Rego's themes, which became significantly more violent from the 1980s onwards, should crystallize in that decade into the serial abuse inflicted on a number of beleaguered dogs by a variety of scary girls.
The terms 'hospitality' (that which one provides within one's home) and 'hospital' or 'hospice' (the place where one goes when one is sick and sometimes to die) share a common etymology in Latin. For Paula Rego, as remarked earlier, homeliness has a disquieting habit of turning unheimlich. Home and home comforts become unwholesome, yielding not healing and health, but instead pain and death. With reference to the Girl and Dog series (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 21-22), Agustina Bessa-Luís wrote as follows:
The girls play with the dog as if it were a child. They bathe it, feed it, shave it as if it were a man, the dog is a man whom one pretends to serve in order to dominate him through servitude. The game consists of turning servitude into power. The dog, what does a dog signify? The guardian who patrols, grunts, threatens, warns of the presence of strangers, or in other words, man. It is necessary to treat him with respect, spoil him, utter words of enchantment, such as Abracadabra, dress him, heal him, lull him into sleep until he becomes harmless and it is possible to go to him on tiptoe and strangle him. The girls with the dog are part of a revelation about the [whole oeuvre], a statement with regard to art. (Rego and Bessa-Luís, 2001, 16, italics mine)
In an interview with John Tusa, Paula Rego explains that 'painting something about Vic' (Victor Willing, her husband) was the motivation behind the Girl and Dog series. Asked whether the paintings had a reference to his illness and death from multiple sclerosis in 1988, she replied: 'Yes. It was so embarrassing because it's such a personal thing. You can't do it directly, you have to find a way around it' (Tusa, 2001, 10). This statement, illuminated by a later remark in the same interview ('my work is about revenge, always, always'), brings us back in a neat circle to the impetus to do harm to those one loves most, quoted in the opening remarks to this book. Be that as it may, in Paula Rego, in the end, and to quote Griselda Pollock, 'biography can never be a substitute for history' (Pollock, 1999, 107), and what may begin as a motif rooted in personal experience is quickly amplified into a wider political concern, here that of a more disseminated gender enmity. The weakened dog, in need of nursing but in peril of being put down instead, may be generic man's but is clearly not woman's best friend. It becomes 'a way of saying the unsayable' (Greer, 1988, 33); a displaced object of transference and the target of an aggression whose modus operandi is the simulacrum of a variety of stereotypical female nurturing roles, maternal, wifely, sisterly or filial. Thus the acts of nursing, feeding and shaving are transmuted into preludes to murder. The same process would find a more literal translation in paintings later on in that decade, so that in retrospect, the dogs in the Girl and Dog series are only slightly enigmatic alter egos of a gallery of castrated monkeys (Wife Cuts Off Red Monkey's Tail, figure 26), emasculated wolves (Two Girls and a Dog, plate 3) and, more blatantly, eviscerated canine protagonists (Amélia's Dream, plate 13). Together, they are the chorus line in a performance that ends in bloodshed closer to home, within the artist's own species and within everyone's symbolic family, in images such as The Bullfighter's Godmother (figure 30), The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9), The Family (plate 10) and The Policeman's Daughter (figure 32).
Throughout her painting career Paula Rego has returned with some insistence to the issue of cross-dressing, drag or disguises of various natures: the men in women's clothing in The Maids (plate 1), The Company of Women (figure 34), and Mother (plate 12), or the female figure in soldier's fatigues in The Interrogator's Garden (figure 10).2
And while in The Maids the supposedly female murder victim is replaced by a man, in the Girl and Dog series, painted between 1986 and 1987, the man in his turn is substituted by a dog. Paula Rego has stated in the past that in her view dogs are noble, vital and vigorous creatures, and that to reach their status is fortunate (interview with Judith Collins, 1997, 125). The caveat to this statement, typically devious on the part of this artist, is that she was referring to a series of paintings called Dog Women (Dog Woman, figure 11), painted much later, in 1994.
In these works, indeed, the Dog Women in question are vigorous, athletic, but also defiant, irreverent and even threatening. This is clearly not the case with the male dogs of the earlier Girl and Dog series (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22), which, as Ruth Rosengarten has observed, are passive, docile, sickly or downright invalid (Rosengarten, 1997, 68). And elsewhere the artist has commented that in her view the dog is the animal that most closely resembles man, in the same breath reminiscing with perilous frankness about a dog she owned as a child, which was very small, whom she didn't like very much and which 'had suicidal tendencies, and used to jump out of high windows' (Rodrigues da Silva, 1998, 9). Did he jump or was he pushed?
In this earlier Girl and Dog series, the dog cast as the avatar of the man, whose best friend traditionally he is, is clearly imperilled at the hands of a series of perfidious little girls, who variously handle and manhandle (or womanhandle) it, pin it down, feed it, shave it and taunt it, sexually or otherwise. The idealised Portuguese woman of the Salazarista vision may have been the selfless wife and mother, but these little girls, the mothers of future Rego women, whose viciousness to dogs (Amelia's Dream, plate 13) and men alike (The Family, plate 10) leaves little to the imagination, are the preoccupying antithesis of that ideal.
10 The Interrogator's Garden
The dog is proverbially associated with faithful obedience to its master, a trait which may be carried to abject lengths. In traditional iconography this animal, ironically in view of the gender antagonism explicit in the Rego pictures, is often the symbol of a good marriage (Becker, 1994, 84–5). In portraiture, for example, if sitting at the feet of a woman, or in her lap, it signifies marital fidelity, or in the case of a widow, faithfulness to her husband's memory (Hall, 1991, 105). If Paula Rego is drawing upon these allusions, however, one is tempted to see her gesture as ironic, when deployed, as it is here, in a series of paintings where the nurturing/wifely/maternal roles contain a level of ambiguity that easily translates into murderous intent. The vindictiveness with which the animals are treated, therefore, also invokes the contempt which makes it common in nearly all cultures to use 'dog' as an insulting epithet (Becker, 1994, 84). In this series, I shall be arguing, man's best friend and here his alter ego, obedient to his authority and unquestioning of it, is castigated by the artist for that very identification, faithfulness and obedience. And it is castigated precisely in the context of those hallowed domestic and nurturing female activities of feeding, grooming and caressing, which perversely, in these images cross a thin dividing line into the antithetical intent of aggression. The result, one might say, is a gallery of bitchy girls and their dogs, embroiled within a game of cat and mouse.
11 Dog Woman
I will begin with consideration of Abracadabra (plate 2), the picture in this series which, irrespective of actual chronology, appears to me to be an initiatory image.
'Abracadabra', as every child knows, is the word which, in fairy tales, triggers the moment of transformation, and the leap from established reality into a parallel universe of magic. After the word is uttered, in fantasy narratives as well as in this painting, the status quo is never the same again. In this particular picture, especially when contrasted with others of the same series, nothing much has yet happened to the dog. But it will, as indicated by some of the implied metamorphoses in other images, in particular Two Girls and a Dog (plate 3), with which, in my view, Abracadabra bears particular affinity.
Abracadabra depicts a dog sitting on its haunches between two girls, with one leg lifted in the air. In view of images to come, it is possible that the dog is exposing its belly in a posture of placation but also of ill-advised vulnerability. One of the girls holds her arms as if cradling something, although she holds nothing in them. Her posture heralds the nurturing stance of several of the other pictures in this series, and carries eerie echoes also of a Madonna and Child, or, as the case may be here, an empty-armed Madonna without a child. The theme of motherhood ending in a void, and of Madonnas without issue, will be debated in detail in chapter 4 in the context of the abortion pastels of 1998–99 (plates 16-21, figures 50, 60, 72-74, 76-79). The other girl is depicted holding up both arms in an invocatory or hieratic gesture that presumably alludes to the title.
Two other elements draw the viewers' attention. First, the touchstone of this series – which, following our argument, is gender and love cast in an antagonistic mould – is ushered in by the hearts worn by the hieratic girl, not on her sleeve but rather as trophies, in the manner of scalps extracted in war, on the hem of her dress. In this picture, therefore, sexual politics are played out in the realm of the personal, the domestic and the amorous or conjugal, and set roles are reversed with considerable fanfare. This intention is trumpeted by the second call upon our exegetic curiosity, the flowers lying discarded to no apparent purpose on the ground. In both art and poetry the flower figures above all as a symbol of femininity or feminine beauty, and, in its receptive relation to the sun and the rain, it stands as a symbol of passive acquiescence and humility (Becker, 1994, 115), both qualities being of course defining traits in received perceptions of selfless womanhood. Differently coloured flowers stand for different things (white for death or innocence, blue for dreams and mysteries, etc), but here we are treated to the display of a broad spectrum of colours, signifying possibly Everyflower, or Everywoman, but certainly not Everyman. Or is it Everyman, after all? The flower in still lifes symbolises the evanescence of human life (Hall, 1991, 126), and, because of its transience it is also sometimes associated with the souls of the dead (Becker, 1994, 115). Bearing in mind the relative postures of the protagonists of these pictures – the soft-bellied dog, the girl crushing a bed of flowers from which the discarded ones have also presumably originated – the memento mori of flower buds prematurely plucked is presumably to be heeded by the dog, rather than the girls. She loves me, she loves me not. ... Whether the answer to this question is yes or no, abuse and violence may well be the outcome for the object of these girlish affections.
The title, Abracadabra, suggests metamorphosis or change, and begs the question what exactly it is that this particular dog will change into. In parallel with that question, which subsequent pictures of incapacitated dogs amply elucidate, the next picture which I wish to consider invites an altogether different kind of query, namely, what it is that the dog might have changed from?
In Two Girls and a Dog (plate 3), one of the later pictures in the series, we contemplate the same cast of protagonists, with the addition of two important components, which, however, with a deviousness that echoes the apparent unimportance of the flamenco poster in The Fitting (figure 5), and which would be repeated in subsequent works (the diminutive soldier and mater dolorosa figures in The Soldier's Daughter, figure 31, the negligible cockerel in The Cadet and His Sister, plate 9), remain in the background, ostensibly as filler details or decor. In Two Girls and a Dog, these components are the figures of a wolf-like dog and the silhouette of a man. I will return to these presently.
In this picture a dog is seemingly being shod by two girls: one who restrains his efforts at resistance, while the other forces a curious pair of slippers back to front on to his hind paws. The first thing that strikes us about this image is the use of force, much more explicit than in Abracadabra (plate 2). Here, the trajectory from masculine/canine power to powerlessness bespeaks much more explicitly the violence entailed in that progression, or regression. The slippers being forced on to the dog's feet are of a curious type, furry like an animal's paws, but shaped like human feet with toes. They signal the half-achieved metamorphosis either from man to beast or vice versa. The direction of change remains unclear, but in either case it is problematic for two reasons: first, because it signposts the imposition, clearly unwelcome to the dog, of a self which is not his own (since he is literally being forced to step into someone else's shoes), and second, the fact that the shoes are back to front alludes, with comic but also tragic literalness, to impaired progress along a route that appears to be going nowhere fast.
Regression is incorporated into the picture, not merely along the dimension of space (footwear that walks backwards), but, even more importantly, of time. The wolf in the background may represent the prehistoric ancestor of the excessively domesticated or even abused animal in the foreground. Outside and subsequent to Roman worship of the wolf, from the Middle Ages onwards this animal became associated with evil, greed and heresy (Hall, 1991, 343). The wolf, the villain of any number of children's tales, is in many ways a true embodiment of the outlawed and dangerous Other. Christian symbolism, for example, addresses primarily the wolf–lamb dyad that respectively casts the lamb as the symbol of the Christian faithful and the wolf as the embodiment of demonic interests (Becker, 1994, 331–2). More to the point as regards this picture, dogs have sometimes been depicted attacking wolves (Hall, 1991, 343) (for example in some Dominican paintings, possibly as an illustration of fighting the enemy within the self)3. Clearly, in the Paula Rego picture, an added dimension of complexity comes into play, since the wolf as the representative of unorthodoxy, but here in any case already tamed into the domesticated victim-status of a dog, is further weakened by the two girls who, assuming a socially atypical female guise of violence, reopen hostilities between the dominant culture and the outsider, willingly take on the latter role, and make the wolf redundant. And the agenda which is set down is furthermore declared to engage with human gender issues, by way of the association established between the wolf (and therefore the dog) and the man in the background. Let us see.
The wild, and presumably free, antecedents alluded to by the figure of a wolf, which however is here seen as irrelevant because comparatively small, set in the background and marginal to the narrative of the picture, thus emphasise the current bondage of its modern descendant, the dog. Analogous conjectures may apply also to the figure of the ambiguous man in a skirt, whose compromised status in the painting is more or less equivalent to the wolf, or possibly even more attenuated, since the wolf might be said to carry greater visual impact than the man, due to its striking eyes, contrasting with the facelessness (and therefore anonymity) of the shadowy human figure. In Paula Rego, the weakening effect upon men of dressing in drag has already been observed. Be that as it may, both the wolf (now evolutionarily obsolete, because 'civilised' and domesticated into a dog) and the eunuch-like skirted man4 (whose thunder is stolen in all respects – size, visibility, location – by the two girls in the foreground) are peripheral, both compositionally and thematically, and illustrate both their own and each other's redundancy in a picture where girls are undoubtedly on top.
Finally, the wolf carries one last association relevant to the reading of a possibly anti-imperial subtext in this artist's work. The she-wolf, who in legend suckled Romulus and Remus, became the symbol of Roman imperial power. And the latter – through the fasces, a Roman symbol of their rulers' power over the life and freedom of the people – became itself an iconographic reference of southern European (Italian) fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, in Portugal the influence of the Roman occupation of the Iberian peninsula is one of the recognised cultural bases of Portugal's history, including its imperial ambitions. Empires, however, Roman, Portuguese or other, eventually disintegrate, and rubbing salt in that particular wound has been a favoured theme for Paula Rego since her early cut-and-paste works of the 1960s. In this context also, therefore, the figure of a Roman wolf fallen upon hard times and demoted to the status of domestic dog acquires iconographic relevance. And through another cross-gender/cross-species/cross-dressing sleight of hand, when the female rendition of the symbol in question (the she-wolf of the original) changes sex and becomes male, power is lost. In Abracadabra the imperial lupine mother metamorphosed into male pet emphasises the decline of men and empires, through dwelling on the pain endured by a weakened canine male at the hands of an aggressive maternal figure.
If, much in the manner of the beleaguered dog, the man and the wolf are seen here as creatures on their way to extinction, or already extinct, their inbuilt fragility is reiterated by the last two components of the picture: first, the plucked daisy (once again, 'she loves me, she loves me not') which, much as in the previous picture, may at any moment suffer the insult added to injury of being gratuitously stepped on by a sturdy female foot. And second, the clay pitcher. A popular Portuguese proverb that says a pitcher taken to the fountain too often is bound to break (which is another way of warning against pushing one's luck too far) is here taken one step further by the destructive impulse of an artist unwilling to leave maliciously desirable breakages to the hands of fate: the hammer positioned next to this particular object (which figures also as a potential weapon of assault in Prey, figure 20) can only have one use, the anarchic annihilation of both pitcher and flower, in one fell swoop.
The next picture, In the Garden (plate 4), engages with themes of political significance beyond gender antagonism and sexual politics.
Once again we are faced with the same triple cast of two girls and a dog being restrained by one of them, with some appearance of discomfort on the part of the dog. The other components of the picture are an antagonistic gladiatorial pair consisting of a lion and an ape, a tiny escaping hare, and a towering cactus plant. The picture invites consideration of its geographic location which, as is often the case in Paula Rego, carries political suggestiveness. The ethnicity of the two girls is not entirely clear, but they might be black, a possibility which is ambiguously repeated in other paintings of the Girl and Dog series (for example Abracadabra, plate 2; Untitled b, c and d, plates 5, 6 and 7). The native habitat of the lion and also, though not exclusively, of the ape is Africa, and this is true too of the giant cactus which bears heart-shaped flowers nestling between vicious-looking spikes. If the heart shapes are the already established shorthand in these paintings for a personal, love/marriage dimension, with all its implied Regoesque dangers, the African allusion keeps that personal aspect chained to the wider concerns of national and specifically colonial politics. Let us begin with the figure of the ape. In Christian art and literature the ape is almost uniformly evil, representing heresy and paganism. An ape with an apple in its mouth signifies the Fall of Man (which, in the final analysis, as is well known, was in fact more readily attributed to Woman), and an ape, tied up by a chain symbolises the defeat of Satan. In the ape man recognised a baser image of himself, such that the former came to represent vice in general, or humanity gone astray (Hall, 1991, 20).
More curiously, however, from the Middle Ages onwards the ape, like the pig discussed previously, came to represent the activities of painting and sculpture (The Monkey Painter, figure 12, Red Monkey Drawing, figure 13).5
The artist's skill, being regarded as essentially imitative, became linked to this animal, which was also known for its miming abilities. The 'Ars simia Naturae' (Art apes Nature) aphorism resulted in frequent depictions of the artist as an ape engaged in painting a portrait, sometimes that of a woman (Hall, 1991, 22). What, therefore, are we to make of the monkey, a component that symbolically juxtaposes artistic practice with sinfulness, or even evil, in the work of a woman artist who depicts the cast-down victim as the animal most associated with loyalty to a (male) master, and with submission to that master's status quo?
The dog in In the Garden picture is forcibly held in the arms of a black girl, the claim to whose homeland (the African colonies) had been the basis of Portuguese imperial hegemony since the sixteenth century Here, noticeably, that iconic animal is clearly in paroxysms of pain. If every dog has its day, this is clearly not it for this particular beast, nor for the interests it represents. The latter are represented in absentia by the ambiguous streak of blue in the background, which might indicate the sky or alternatively the evanescent ocean of unspecified seaborne empires. The dog's pain may or may not derive from the actions of the hands ambiguously positioned near its backside, whose potentially violating intent foreshadows the intrusive hand of another young girl in The Policeman's Daughter (figure 32). Cradling arms and homely aprons notwithstanding, therefore, the dog's obvious suffering gives the lie to any notions of maternal nurturing. And it is perhaps for this reason that the hare, an established symbol of the earth-as-mother as well as of human fertility and maternity (Becker, 1994, 137–8), is depicted in diminutive scale, and about to exit the picture.
12 Pablo Picasso, The Monkey Painter
In the absence of a mother, or at least of an orthodox one, the dog may be in difficulties, but he is not alone. The third animal in this composition is the lion, engaged in a fight with the ape. The lion is traditionally the king of beasts, symbolising power as well as justice in masculine, conquering and Christian configurations (Becker, 1994, 179–80). The values and interests of God, King and Country (imperial or otherwise), as well as of patriarchy (the male lion as leader of the pack), are all embraced within the figure of this animal. In In the Garden (plate 4), however, we see a lion antagonistically challenged by that artist-ape, who, within the terms defined by the royal beast's imagery, symbolises evil, as do the girlish torturers of the dog, here depicted in his capacity as the lion's (man's) sidekick. More suspiciously, even, all this animosity is unleashed within a garden several apples short of an Eden, and whose vegetation, favouring spiky African cacti, is conspicuously lacking in trees either of Life or Knowledge. In this non-Edenic garden, girls, women, wives, female artists and even plants allusive of daughter-colonies mutiny against and seemingly overcome the great beasts of the jungle, here portrayed in various degrees of peril.
13 Red Monkey Drawing
The dog figures very small in the next painting, Looking Back (figure 14).
14 Looking Back
This picture involves what turns out to be an unholy female trinity of three girls, one sitting on a bed, one lying on it and one kneeling beside it The tiny dog crouches under the bed. McEwen has suggested, albeit rather coyly, that the girl sitting on the bed is masturbating (McEwen, 1997, 146). If so, the traditional set-up of a woman posed as object of voyeuristic titillation for both artist and intended audience (both conventionally male) is challenged here in various ways. First, the euphemism of sexual delectation provided by the self-offering canonical nudes of traditional Western art (figures 53-54, 66-68) is replaced by the blunter notion of exhibitionist (but aggressive rather than submissive) self-pleasuring. Second, the replacement of a single female nude by a set of fully clothed models (a forerunner of the abortion works of the 1990s, plates 16-21, figures 50, 60, 72-74, 76-79, all also fully clothed), curtails the more obvious and immediate source of voyeurist gratification. Third, the act of self-induced and self-sufficient pleasure absolutely excludes the requisite perk of male audience participation: as discussed in chapter 4, the active sexual engagement of the male spectator, in however sublimated or dislocated a form, is probably one of the requisite aspects involved in the pleasurable viewing of standard nudes, in high art as well as in girly magazines (figures 51-56). These expectations surrounding the conventional female nude, presupposing as they do more or less specific spectator fantasies about actual sex with the object under contemplation, are however contravened in the Rego picture through the male-excluding self-sufficiency implicit in an act of female masturbation which does not require the aid of a fetishistic masculine object, and which – in the absence of an obvious component of female nakedness – does not even permit the easy passive pleasure (for the male viewer) of other would-be masturbation images (for example Kitaj's The Yellow Hat, figure 70). And finally, the in-built, readymade and all-female audience (all-female, since the male dog is ostentatiously consigned under the bed and has no view of the proceedings), as well as precluding male viewer fantasies about sex with the aesthetic object, goes further and negates the very existence of a male audience, in any shape, form or state of excitement. The state of visual exclusion indicated by a dog under the bed extends to the obstruction of the clandestine, titillated male gaze, here denied its frisson.
The act of masturbation, which is the blatant statement of negation of an other, invites the partial participation of female spectators inside and outside the picture as partners in this transgression from which the male is excluded. The no-can-do, no-can-see token presence of the tiny dog also emphasises the animal's symbolic absence through exclusion from any degree of significant agency, animal power being claimed instead by the reclining girl wrapped in a furry blanket. The blanket achieves her partial metamorphosis into beast (half-animal, half-woman, a twin of another dangerous half-and-half female, namely the mermaid of Time: Past and Present), so that what is claimed here is a non-human status and the licence for ferocity which it entails. The girl's leonine features and mane-like hair associate her with the lion which in the previous picture provided a more orthodox masculine rendition.
As if it were necessary to labour the point, this particular female lion (rather than lioness, given her authoritative mane) carries a bird on her shoulder, in the style of the standard cartoon pirate with his parrot, thereby reaffirming the suggestion of usurped and transgressive power. Here, therefore, she is both an outlaw pirate and a she-lion, a female imbued with stereotypical male powers, and all the more dangerous by virtue of her unmasked femaleness.
The sexual taunt of do-it-yourself sex in Looking Back, rendering the male redundant as it does, is taken one step further in Girl Lifting Up Her Skirt to a Dog (figure 15).
Here the canine male is again brought into play merely as an aid to the ongoing female. The dog faces the girl with expectancy, but also with perplexed incomprehension, and there is no question here of male voyeuristic pleasure. His cocked ears and static tail indicate that he is waiting for her next move. Apart from the girl's provocative stance faced with her perplexed spectator, the rest of the picture also bespeaks aggressive sexuality The phallic mountain in the background reiterates a prowess of which the dog appears incapable, and echoes the girl's taunting challenge, as do the bloodred roses, another hackneyed symbol of sexuality, which here (as in Abracadabra, plate 2, Two Girls and a Dog, plate 3, as well as in Snare, figure 16) are scattered on the ground, ready to be trampled.
15 Girl Lifting Up Her Skirt to a Dog
The striped pattern on the girl's dress, which will reappear in a variety of forms in other paintings, carries semantic implications which allude to the stereotyped prison uniforms in story-book illustrations (Portugal), or to the attire of the standard comic-strip burglar (Britain). What remains both enigmatic and ostentatiously comprehensible, however, both in this and in other pictures, is who is the gaoler and who is the prisoner.
16 Snare
More striking even is the ambiguity conveyed by the position of the girl's hands, which lift the skirt in a gesture of sexual provocation, while in Snare (figure 16) and in The Little Murderess (figure 17), both of 1987, through strikingly similar arrangements, they enact respectively violence and murder by strangulation. Bodily harm and homicide (and I would argue that it is very much homicide, rather than the caninicide which is represented here) therefore become natural sequels to the sexual provocation of Looking Back, with which these pictures share a species similarity.
In Snare, indeed, a degree of sexual semantics, albeit less explicit than in Girl Lifting Up Her Skirt to a Dog, is nonetheless not out of the question. The unmistakable contrasting poses of power and powerlessness, again dominate in this picture, in which the gender allocation of the standard missionary position gives way to a girls-on-top reversal, or to the suggestion of the unorthodox male slave/female dominatrix bondage of sado-masochistic sex. Bondage, in any case, physical, sexual or otherwise, has already been brought into the equation by the title of the picture, and is apparent also in some of the untitled Girl and Dog paintings of the previous year, to be discussed presently.
17 The Little Murderess
In Snare the narrative of toppled power – male by female – is also multilayered. As in previous pictures, the image features red roses as indices of sexuality: one plucked and abandoned on the ground beside the helpless dog, who is equally about to be 'plucked', in the sexual sense of the term, by this unmaidenly maiden;6 while the other is triumphantly displayed as the head-dress or crowning glory of a girl who, eerily, in the midst of violence, has not a hair out of place.
The gendered reversal of fortunes is reinforced by the figures of the crab and the horse. By virtue of its shell, which protects it from the outside world, as well as its connection with water, the crab is associated with the womb (Becker, 1994, 69), or the desire to return to it. This impulse, in turn, is psychoanalytically associated with what, for want of a better expression, might be termed helpless mummy's boys. In Christian symbolism the crab is also linked to Christ and the Resurrection (Becker, 1994, 69). Here it provides also a political link and challenge to, or lampooning of, the Estado Now regime, whose interests, as referred to previously, were pragmatically united with the Catholic Church. Other than the identification of Salazar with the pseudo-messianic Don Sebastiao (whose inability to return from overseas and to right historical wrongs this overturned sea creature might also symbolise), the regime's propaganda machinery, as discussed, also drew on Christian iconography with the purpose of presenting Salazar as the would-be saviour of the nation in his own right. In Paula Rego, however, the upended Christlike crab, echoing the saying that charity begins at home, is clearly unable to set itself to rights, much less a nation and its wider troubles.
The crab here displays impotence rather than the gift of eternal life, and it finds an avatar in the harnessed horse at the bottom left-hand corner of the picture, which, much like the hare of In the Garden (plate 4), is literally, as well as figuratively, on its way out. The horse, habitually thought of as a chthonic or infernal creature, has traditionally been understood to harbour associations with life-giving, albeit dangerous, forces. Its strength can signify either unbridled impulsiveness or, if harnessed by reason, the bearer of world justice (the white steed of Christus triumphator, Becker, 1994, 145–6). As a symbol of youth, strength and sexuality, furthermore, the horse is the favoured mount of warring kings and noblemen (Becker, 1994, 145–6). It is also, and very much to the point here, the attribute of Europe (Europa), as one of the mythical Four Quarters of the World. The Four Quarters of the World, usually personified as female figures in the art of the Counter-Reformation (and therefore of an absolutist Catholicism), serve as a reminder of the worldwide spread of Catholicism, with Europe habitually in the foreground as the Queen of the World. Weapons and a horse allude to military victory (Hall, 1991, 129). In this Paula Rego image, however, the horse, which is neither glorious nor unbridled nor triumphant, is harnessed not to reason, but to a tame, domestic, demotive cart, and it is, furthermore, placed on a diminutive scale. The triumphant leadership it might have embodied, therefore, much like the upended Christlike qualities of the crab, appears here considerably, or even absolutely, enfeebled. And if the horse in one of its guises is Europe and her bellicose imperatives, which in a Portuguese context become imperial and colonial expansion, it is here caught in a plight analogous to that of the Christian crab, in the picture's countermanding symbolism.
Snare, as already argued, is linked to The Little Murderess (figure 17) through the move that turns sex into violence and which here crystallizes violence into actual murder.
The positioning of the girl's hands, reminiscent of an analogous compositional motif in The Maids (plate 1), will find later echoes in those of the sister grooming her brother in Departure (figure 28). The act of grooming in its turn is coterminous with a multiplicity of abusive and violating forms of behaviour in some of the Girl and Dog pictures still to be discussed (figure 19, plates 5-8, figures 21-22), as well as in later works such as The Family (plate 10), The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9) and The Policeman's Daughter (figure 32).
Although chronologically part of the Girl and Dog series, neither The Little Murderess nor Prey (figure 20), which will be considered presently, include either a dog or a man.
Both, however, fit thematically within the preoccupations of the series. The composition of The Little Murderess, elaborating on the title, centres on a young girl with a ligature stretched between her hands, poised to strike or having just struck against an invisible victim hidden in the wings, which is also where, in a time-honoured convention, the bloodiest acts of Greek tragedy take place. If this connection were not enough to elevate the girl to a meaningful status, her size and scale, defined as they are in proportion to the other objects in the picture (the chair, the pelican and the ox and cart in the background), would do so with greater literalness.
In this picture it is unclear whether the murder has taken or is about to take place, but whichever it is, the annihilation is in any case already so thoroughly achieved that the victim figures only in absentia, and is indicated metonymically by means of a pile of sacrificial white clothes scattered across the bed and floor.
The ox may throw some light on the murder, since its primary symbolic connotation casts it as a chosen sacrificial animal, and as an expression of contemptible (bovine) contentedness, as well as meekness in the teeth of an inauspicious fate (Hall, 1991, 231; Becker, 1994, 224). Even more revealing, however, is the presence of the pelican perched on a chair painted in the manner of a typical Portuguese arts-and-crafts object. The pelican, present elsewhere in Paula Rego (Sleeping, figure 18; possibly in Untitled a, figure 19; The Family, plate 10) elicits the folk memory of the self-sacrificial motif par excellence, the bird who pierced its own breast in order to feed its young with its blood.
This legend, however, was a later version of an earlier rendition. In it, the same bird plays the less laudable role of the killer of its ugly offspring, who three days later repents and revitalises them with blood from self-inflicted wounds (Becker, 3994, 230). In the Middle Ages this first version gave way to the later one, which itself becomes an allusion to Christ's sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection. Medieval fastidiousness, it would appear, recoiled from the possibility of the murderous mother, as well it might. The Medean echo of mothers turned killers, which is a paradigm of Eve and the Fall (loss of eternal life), was assiduously deleted by the medieval mentality, leading to the promotion of the Virgin Mary as the antidote to the shortcomings of humanity's First Mother. The Marian cult, as we have seen, was also encouraged in Portugal on an official basis, historically and to some extent to this day. And it is tackled head-on by Paula Rego, in her portrayals of young girls whose mock-maternal, murderous behaviour sets them off on an early path to violence. In this picture, the selfish and selfless pelican echoes the moral uncertainty of seemingly good mothers who may after all turn out to be atavistically bad.
Young girls are the mothers of the future, and the mother in Portugal, as we have seen, was the pivot for family and national ideology. She was simultaneously the lowest of the low in the power stakes of realpolitik, and the foundation stone of the edifice within which that realpolitik was exercised. If the mother were to run amok, that entire social edifice would collapse. In Prey (figure 20), more clearly even than in The Little Murderess, Paula Rego appears to treat us to the spectacle of that downfall.
18 Sleeping
Not uncommonly in the case of this artist, it helps to begin analysing a picture from the departure point of deceptively small and apparently unimportant details. This will be the case, for example, when we come to look at The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9) and The Soldier's Daughter (figure 31). In Prey, the title of the painting itself prompts us to do so, since the eponymous figure must be the bird caught between the jaws of the small fox in the background, in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. In European lore the fox is the villain of countless folktales, standing for slyness and cunning, and, in medieval art, for the Devil and his attributes, including lying, injustice, intemperance, greed and lust (Becker, 1994, 120). The fox, whose shadow is here projected upon a satanic red ground, grips between its teeth a bird that appears to be a dove, the iconic representation of no less than the Holy Spirit itself. The bloody encounter between the two animals lays down the battle lines between good and evil enacted by the picture's more prominent protagonists, in what may turn out to be a biblical but also a political allegory.
The imperilled dove sets the tone for yet another attack on the regalia of Catholicism and – following yet again the logic that my enemies' friends are my enemies too – its secular (politicised, state) associations. The religious
19 Untitled a
20 Prey
theme is further reiterated through the inclusion of the three figs situated discreetly in the shadow of the girls' bodies.
In Judaeo-Christian imagery figs carry an immediate association not with the fruit itself but with the leaves with which Adam and Eve covered their nakedness after the Fall. More to the point, given both the nature of the discussion under way here and the fact that we are presented with the fruit, rather than with the leaves, it is relevant to note that in the New Testament Jesus curses a fig tree to be fruitless as a condemnation of the Jewish people (Matthew 21:18–22; Becker, 1994, 111). In Christian art a withered fig tree came to symbolise the synagogue as a locus of religious heresy. Moreover, the fig tree sometimes replaces the apple tree as the Tree of Knowledge, and as the source of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. In Paula Rego, the charge of religious heresy tends to address itself to the ancestral Catholicism rather than Judaism. In this case, however, Judaism may be drawn upon in the presentation of fruit, which may act either as the ostentatious display of the shameful (but here shameless) forbidden fruit, or as the defiant yield of a tree supposedly cursed with Semitic barrenness, but nonetheless disobediently fruitful.
As is often the case in her painting, in Prey Paula Rego draws upon the device of disproportionate scale to make a point. In the absence of distant, perspectival points of reference that might justify the appearance of monumental size, the two girls stand as gigantic titanesses within a dwarfed world. They stand by and look down upon a building whose small scale is, it would appear, real, as opposed to being the effect of distance or angle. Because of this, and because of its compositional juxtaposition to the girls, the building appears to be marked as the target for an attack that would link it to the ensnared bird, possibly about to fall foul of a malicious foot or conveniently positioned hammer (analogous to that in Two Girls and a Dog, plate 3), the latter almost as big as the building. Since the building may be next in line for destruction, it is interesting to speculate on its function, which remains indeterminate from its appearance. It might fit into any one of several categories, including residential, religious or public. Or all these rolled into one. Much as Everyflower, previously discussed, this may be Everybuilding, the amorphous representation of any or all aspects of private and public existence. Be that as it may, its primary function here appears to be to foreground its own vulnerability. And whether dealing with a place of domestic, religious or governmental activity, the impending crushing of a site that houses any or all of these pursuits, gestures yet again to a direct attack against the status quo that anchors itself on them, and against the rule of illegitimate law which they underwrite.
The next six pictures to be considered are very much a series within this series. They are all tableaux rather than narratives, and with one minor exception, or possibly two, they include only two protagonists, the girl and dog central to the paintings in the foregone discussion. All six are scenes involving the nurturing of dogs by girls: spoonfeeding, offering a drink, shaving, caressing.
Beginning with Untitled b (plate 5), this image, together with Untitled c (plate 6), conveys the lowest level of aggression in the six. A woman offers a drink in a mug to a dog on her lap, whose mouth she may or may not be forcing open with her thumb.
The most contentious aspect, which is found in subsequent and more openly aggressive images, is the mariner in which the dog is stripped of both dog-like and adult human characteristics, thus becoming reduced to the status of a human infant whose salient defining trait, ominously, is helplessness. Upon closer inspection, however, other elements stand out. The woman appears to be black, which puts out another semantic feeler towards the anti-colonial intent of earlier works. In this context, a wealth of documentary and iconographic evidence, of civil rights and earlier abolitionist activism, sets up reverberations, creating an effect which is both poignant and menacing. The classic figure of the black mammy obliged to nurse the children of her white masters, possibly at the sacrifice of her own, which has found echoes in every colonial or apartheid regime, is, in its more sentimental or whitewashed renditions, a comic salt-of-the-earth character (Mammy in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin), whose image obfuscates the tragic reality of the mater dolorosa. In the latter capacity, however, the black mother of generations of enslaved or colonised sons is a mater dolorosa with the potential for demonic metamorphosis, all the way up to and including the insidious murder of those master-race children, or masters, or dog avatars. The latter, in their turn, in the Paula Rego version of this blueprint, are variously infantilised, made fragile and metaphorically or concretely manoeuvred into a soft-belly-uppermost position, prior to various forms of attack.
In Untitled b, the insinuation of doom is reinforced through recourse to a variety of compositional props, such as the lilies in the foreground. Lilies occasionally feature in Paula Rego's pictorial universe (in The Maids, plate 1, but most notably in a painting of the following decade, The First Mass in Brazil, figure 7, Lisboa, forthcoming). The lily carries a dual symbolic charge. It is a flower closely associated with death and funerals and thus sometimes acts as a memento mori in visual iconography. On the other hand it is the flower almost always wielded by the archangel Gabriel in pictures of the Annunciation (figure 6). Possibly for that reason, via a tortuous subliminal path (sexual impregnation transposed to virginal conception), as well as due to the shape of its pistil, this flower, in tandem with its associations of purity and innocence, also carries a strong phallic significance (Becker, 1994, 178).
Furthermore, the lily of the valley is also a medicinal plant used for a variety of ailments. Gerarde's Herbalist of 1633, for example, tells us that the uses of white lilies and lilies of the valley applied to weaknesses associated not with the state of infancy (as would obtain in the case of these babyish dogs), but with problems at the other end of the age spectrum, in other words the 'second childhood' of senescence: gout, inflammation of the eyes and loss of memory. Interestingly, ointments derived from this flower were also thought to alleviate specifically male problems: 'tumours and aposthumes of the privy members' and 'aposthumes in the flankes, coming of the venery and such like' (Gerarde, 1633, 191). The lily, therefore, addresses the ailments of males either sexually weakened or in their dotage. Moreover, and contrarily, it also bears relevance to the lives of sexually mature women (hence perhaps another link to the Annunciation): 'the water thereof distilled and drunke causeth easie and speedy deliverance, and expelleth the fecondine or afterburthen in most speedy manner' (Gerarde, 1633, 191). Painful childbirth was decreed in Genesis as the punishment which – in addition to the sanctions shared with Adam – befell the female sex alone, in the aftermath of Eve's disobedience ('in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children', Genesis 3:16). The lily, therefore, alluding as it does on the one hand either to male impotence or alternatively to promiscuous sex resulting in venereal disease, and on the other hand to female fecundity free of that Genesiacal pain, would appear to deliver a double whammy to the biblical supposition of aggravated female culpability: first because it relieves women from punitive labour pains, and second because it hounds men either with accusations of illicit lechery or with taunts of sexual disempowerment, both of which may be seen as the unmanly extrapolations of Adam's inability either to restrain or resist Eve. In addition, the lily which thus delivers sinful women from travail, by a symbolic sleight of hand appears to deliver them also from evil, since, being the flower connected with the Annunciation (and therefore with Mary's purity), it appears to address both female pain and blame, alleviating and acquitting all mothers from the consequences of Eve's original sin. In Paula Rego, however, the movement across categories (good and evil, pure and tainted) is never straightforward, involving instead a disquieting blurring of boundaries. Thus Mary's heralding lily might at first glance appear to pardon the actions of the potentially aggressive mother/murderer of Untitled b. Yet motherhood in this artist's work, always problematic, as will be discussed in subsequent chapters, already appears here to be at best a taunt and at worst a threat levelled against the helpless male. What is in question in Untitled b is no longer merely the do-it-yourself sex of Looking Back and Girl Lifting Up Her Skirt up to a Dog but, even more challengingly, do-it-yourself pregnancy, in light of male incapacity which the lily's therapeutic uses cruelly evoke. The reminder applies not only to any given generation of ageing men but also to rising generations of young males. Thus, if it would appear that, thanks to the lily, women other than Mary may also have pain-free deliveries of their baby sons, the same flower, in association with the dog on the lap – an equivocal conflation of infant, lover and patient – presages those newborn sons' future decline into gouty, blind and impotent old age. 'The man who used to be your little boy grew old' (Pessoa, 1979, 28).
Untitled c (plate 6) is the other painting in this series that at first glance displays little or no aggression on the part of the girl towards the dog.
A woman feeds a dog with a spoon, but stands beside him, rather than restricting him in any way. In context, the first note of warning is sounded by the woman's ethnicity, which here again appears to be black, with all the colonial implications previously elaborated upon. Other familiar echoes are the customary use of bestiary references, in this case an owl, as well as motifs which will recur in other paintings, namely flowers reminiscent of grasping hands and prison-bar patterns on garments and pieces of cloth.
The owl, as a nocturnal bird, is associated with darkness, sleep and death, and is seen in general as a bird of ill omen. Although more positively associated with wisdom or religious enlightenment, even these traits have a negative side (Becker, 1994, 223–4). The Bible, possibly because of an intrinsic suspicion regarding any attempt to breach divine monopoly of knowledge, counts it among the unclean animals, and in Christian symbolism it refers to Christ's death. Here the owl oversees proceedings from the background, perched on a trunk, pedestal or lectern (appropriately, in the case of the last object, given its preaching and/or studious connotations). Mysteriously, it appears to sport a pair of hybrid bat-like, albeit colourful, wings, the bat and owl being in any case animals which share a common symbolism. Like the owl, the bat is associated with night. Furthermore, it, too, was included in the biblical list of impurities, and its wings also refer to death. It has, moreover, additional links with vampirism against sleeping children and women, and blood-sucking associated with sexual violation. Because it lives in caves, which are the supposed entrances to the afterlife, the bat itself acquired the attributes of immortality; and because of its nocturnal habits as well as the fact that it sleeps upside down, it was sometimes accused of being an enemy of the natural order. Finally, because of its half-mammal, half-bird status, it has often stood for a symbol of ambiguity, alchemy or metamorphosis (Becker, 1994, 35–6).
Bat and owl, therefore, both potential inhabitants of hell, here oversee a tableau of apparent innocence, but in which, in effect, the dog, as the representative of masculinity and of the status quo, is yet again enfeebled and incapacitated (like a blood-drained child or damsel), as well as being once again deprived of the traits of its species (it stands precariously on its hind legs like an inadequate human, and is fed like a baby or an incapable, sick or elderly person).
Three final components of the image contribute to the impression that all is not as anodyne as would initially appear in this set-up: the perspective of the garden path leading to the fence is distorted. At first glance it appears like an indeterminate toothed structure (somewhat like a serrated wheel, an open mandible seen in profile, or the lateral view of a vagina dentata), positioned as if ready either to bite or, given the angle of aperture, to swallow the dog whole. The dog himself is standing on a piece of cloth whose pattern here appears to be flowers (specifically tulips), but which, when repeated in a subsequent picture (Untitled f, figure 22), due to the variation of angle, more closely resembles either (hellish) flames or hands stretched out in pleading or in menace. And finally, in the background there is a wooden fence. The fence's posts are endowed with significance in the context of repeated patterns explicitly or implicitly reminiscent of prison bars that recur throughout this series of paintings (the playpen in Untitled f, figure 22, the pattern on the bedspread in Untitled e, figure 21, the pattern on the girl's shorts in Untitled g, plate 8, the stripes on the girl's dress in Untitled b, plate 5 and in Girl Lifting Up Her Skirt to a Dog, figure 15).
The next two pictures register less cryptically the theme of force and particularly of compulsory (institutional) care of the dog by the girl. In Untitled d (plate 7), less equivocally than in Untitled b (plate 5), the dog's posture – specifically his rigid back – clearly indicates unwillingness as the girl's thumb forces his mouth open.
The possible reference to the force-feeding of hunger-striking political prisoners here casts the dog (the representative of the status quo) as the victim of that same torture, thus reversing the tables in the confrontation of civil disobedience and dictatorship. This interpretation is reinforced by the girl's appearance: no Marian maternal figure she, her apparently African ethnic origin and ambiguous girlish-demonic air again place her on the dissident side of the equation that confronted the former Portuguese regime with colonial insurrection. Her rebellious status is pushed further towards the near-demonic by her hair-do, consisting of pigtails which stand up in the air like small horns, and by the changing (metamorphosing) sky behind her, whose half-calm, half-tempestuous aspect offers us a pictorial equivalent of her own indeterminate moral and political position (freedom fighter or terrorist, civil rights activist or criminal).
In the second force-feeding picture, Untitled e (figure 21), the relative positions of girl and dog are more or less ambiguous. She sits with the dog on her lap, holding a spoon in one hand and propping open his jaw with the other, while he attempts to turn away from her. The position of her arm is odd and unmaternal. It is twisted so as to avoid any appearance of supporting his back, conveying instead the impression of enforced bodily submission, and as such reinforces an interpretation of violence rather than nurturing. Yet again, it is unclear whether she is caring for the dog or attacking him, nursing or strangling him. The dog's colour, yellow for cowardice or hypochondria, emphasises his pusillanimous or at least disempowered status, which is reiterated by the other objects in the room: the pattern on the bedspread, again allusive of prison bars, and the chamberpot in the background, which reinforces the theme of incontinence or chronic illness.
The last two pictures in this series are linked through the focus on a vulnerable area of the dog's anatomy, namely its throat. In Untitled f (figure 22) a dog sits again in an anthropomorphic (and suppliant) position, balancing on his hindlegs, in what appears to be a playpen.
Although the playpen is open on one side, he remains confined within its perimeter. The only part of him that reaches outside it, although, it would appear, to no particular purpose, is his phallic tail. Facing him is a girl who holds up his jaw in her right hand, although it is unclear whether the intent behind her gesture or the next move of her left hand is that of caressing, feeding or slaying. The bars of the playpen reiterate the striped prison-bar pattern elsewhere, while her skirt and hat set off reverberations between images: the tulip/hand pattern on her skirt mirrors the shape of her left hand and also that pattern on the piece of cloth in Untitled c (plate 6), while the bat-like motif of the hat again evokes the symbolism of the owl in that same painting.
The last noteworthy component of this image, other than the skin colour reminiscent of other black protagonists, is the diminutive house in the background left-hand corner. The house, a twin of the vulnerable dwelling discussed in Prey (figure 20), prefigures a homeliness that gives way to the Freudian unheimlich or uncanny in these pictures. Its small size, and therefore vulnerability, highlights by association the similarly dwarfed status of the dog in relation to its caressing aggressor.
The last picture in this series is Untitled g (plate 8).
A young girl sits in what is sometimes known as a nursing chair, engaged not in breastfeeding but in shaving the dog on the face and neck, those areas habitually shaved by men. The dog is thus once again anthropomorphized. The grooming theme prefigures two paintings to be discussed in chapter 2, namely Departure (figure 28), and The Family (plate 10), in both of which the nurturing dimension coexists with something more menacing. In Untitled g, too, and particularly in view of the dog's gritted teeth, the girl's actions lend themselves to a dual interpretation of either shaving or throat-cutting.
21 Untitled e
The image, of course, begs an obvious question: if this is indeed a dog, why shave him? The attempt to answer that, as in the case of the anthropomorphic infantilisation discussed previously, once again provokes speculation on the abolition of the animal's canine traits, including here the shaved off fur and the two-legged posture, both of which result in a caricatured and ineffectual pseudo-humanity. Furthermore, the act of shaving stands as an attack on his dignity, since shaved dogs (usually poodles) tend to be both ridiculous and toy-like.
22 Untitled f
If this is not a dog but in fact a man, or man's representative in this series of paintings, his position as object rather than subject invites further questions. For example, under what circumstances is a man shaved by someone else, rather than shaving himself? Two of the possible answers to this question translate into antithetical formulae of masculine power and powerlessness respectively. First, this man/dog may be enjoying the privilege of being shaved by a (black) subaltern – a servant whose temptation to let grooming slide into murder (cutting his throat rather than shaving it) would always, in an imperial/colonial setting, carry the price tag of her own life or freedom.
Alternatively, a man may be shaved if for example he is an invalid or too disabled to do so for himself, a disability vindictively hypothesized and put into practice in previous images, which depicted services such as feeding or drinking. These, more clearly than shaving, are acts less likely to be performed by the subalterns of a powerful master than by the nurses of an enfeebled patient. In Untitled g, the more anodyne interpretation of a little boy at his mother's knee becomes doubly improbable, since young boys don't require shaving, and grown men who do tend not to kneel for that purpose before seated maternal figures.
The final unanswered enigma in the picture refers to the small black spectre in the top centre left of the painting, which, in an echo of the owl in Untitled c (plate 6), looks down on proceedings against a background of hellfire colours. As is the case with so many other Rego pictures, whatever the private significance of this figure, it provides an unnervingly coldblooded audience to the violence under way in the main narrative. The comical black spook thus becomes the avatar of the many matter-of-fact girlish spectators of (and therefore accessories to) numerous acts of violence in Paula Rego's universe.7
It was stated at the beginning of this chapter that recent criminological research on psychological profiling has revealed that serial killers often start by mutilating and killing animals. In Paula Rego's work of the last two decades, serially violent young female protagonists progress from attacks on dogs to crimes against humans, in particular in the family, both in its consanguineous and marital guises. As discussed in chapter 4, her late 1990s pastels on the theme of abortion may be said to extend the family agenda to relatives yet unborn. In the next chapter I shall consider the series of paintings on the subject of the family that spanned the 1980s.
1. This reference echoes the song in Cabaret, Bob Fosse's film of 1972. In the film the song acts as a paradigmatic referent signalling the rise of Nazism as embodied in the youth of the nation, and is itself an allusion to an actual song of the Hitler Youth in the 1930s.
2. The fact that this image used a female model in drag was mentioned by Paula Rego herself. In this picture, interestingly, the backstage work of dressing in drag is also disclosed through the background figure of a woman stepping into soldier's fatigues similar to those worn by the principal figure. I am grateful to Robert Hinde for suggesting this clarification, and for pointing out also the ostrich feather lying by the soldier's left boot. It is tempting to link this to those dangerous earlier ostrich women referred to in subsequent chapters.
3. The dog as defender of the Christian faith, attacks wolves as the symbols of heresy, and carries also echoes of the pun (based on the false etymology of Dominicani), of Dominican friars as the hounds of dog (Turner, 1996, 105–113). My thanks to Anthony Rudolf for pointing this out to me.
4. Paula Rego has sometimes painted men in skirts as in indicator of male weakness and peril, for example in The Sin of Father Amaro series (The Company of Women, figure 34, Mother, plate 12).
5. See for example Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's The Monkey Painter, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres. Picasso's example, shown here, curiously depicts a female monkey artist, as indicated by its original Spanish title, which uses the feminine version of the noun, La Mona Pintora.
6. Paula Rego often appears to play on the visual pun, and on the possible metaphorical implications of plucking (plucked flowers, plucked geese – in The Soldier's Daughter, figure 31, to be discussed in chapter 2), as alternative renditions of the theme of the weakening of the male (Samson shorn of his locks).
7. See for example Amélia's Dream (1998), which again picks up the theme of female violence against dog-men and its contemplation by girls.