23 Pregnant Rabbit Telling Her Parents
It is only once those levels of culture (the material world of the domestic, women's anxiety-producing power as mothers, household managers, and silent participants in enterprise) are actively explored that women's contribution to culture ... can be taken adequately into account. It is only once this taking into account begins that any historicism can produce something more than history as usual.
Judith Lowder Newton, 'History as Usual? Feminism and the "New Historicism'"
In 1986, approximately around the time that Paula Rego began to work on her paintings based on the theme of the family, Pope John Paul II stated that 'as the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live' (John Paul II, 1986, 11). A statement with which, curiously, Paula Rego would probably agree. This chapter will consider family (and hence national) dynamics in the paintings of the second half of the 1980s.
One of Paula Rego's reviewers has suggested that any number of her works might use as a caption the title of Raymond Carver's novella, What we talk about when we talk about love. He further comments that her work, 'bulletins from the front line in the sex wars', involves the realisation that while 'quite a lot of male art explores the way in which men can be attracted to women while at the same time fearing and/or disliking them, these pictures involve something close to a reversal of that' (Lanchester, 1998, A5). Prior to the Girl and Dog paintings (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22), the move away from the eliptical allusiveness of animals who represented ambivalently loved relatives had already achieved expression in earlier works of the beginning of the 1980s, such as for example Pregnant Rabbit Telling Her Parents (figure 23), Red Monkey Beats His Wife (figure 32) and Wife Cuts Off Red Monkey's Tail (figure 26), all of 1981. Purely within its own terms and quite apart from possible autobiographical references which some critics have opted to foreground in these and subsequent works of the 1980s, a painting such as Pregnant Rabbit speaks eloquently of dysfunctionality in the family, and therefore, I would argue, by extension in the nation.
In Salazar's isolationist blueprint for national life, one-party political hegemony and homogeneity sought echoes in the formula of the hierarchical happy family, within which difference or deviance from established parameters was as much to be discouraged as was ideological pluralism outside it in the nation at large. That formula, and those parameters, included, as already described, narrow roles ascribed according to the criterion of gender. For women the options were either single and virgin, or wife and mother.
23 Pregnant Rabbit Telling Her Parents
In Pregnant Rabbit Telling Her Parents (figure 23), however, deviation from the established norm is clearly of the essence.
The title sets the ground for such a reading by the suggestion that the pregnancy will be unwelcome, presumably because unauthorised by marriage. The parents, a cat and a dog, are sketched with economical brushstrokes, but the mother's expression, at least, clearly bespeaks consternation. The father, moreover, is comically depicted smoking the hackneyed cigar conventionally shared with prospective sons-in-law after parental approval for the marriage has been granted. Here, however, the cigar is presumably being smoked after the revelation that there is to be no son-in-law, merely illegitimate offspring. The rabbit's parents, therefore, will be disgraced by a daughter whose alienation from their own moral values is underlined by the fact that she belongs to a different species.
More to the point, if the rabbit's species differs from that of her parents, they, too, are themselves from different (and mutually antagonistic) sectors of the animal kingdom, (cat and dog). Reproductive insularity (marrying a member of one's 'tribe') might be said to be a reflection within the family of the state isolationism outside it. And by the same token, the implications of rupture with prescribed insularity or endogamy, as represented threefold within this curious family unit, range wide: what is in question here, other than the rabbit's illicit fecundity (unmarried motherhood), is a generational repetition of transgressive reproduction, stretching back at the very least to the parents. The latter, being as they are a cat and a dog, each committed the sin of marrying the enemy, resulting in the production of an alien child, a rabbit, and a rebellious one to boot. Intercourse between enemies (cat and dog) itself carries at least two further implications: first, a break away from the fiction of the homogeneous and united family as a bulwark of social stability And second, the dangerous consequences, for any monolithic regime, of the act of sleeping with the enemy, behaviour likely to give rise to alliances outside the interests of the status quo. Exogamy ad absurdum, as here, is the symbolic lowering of the drawbridge which might lead the way to the infiltration of outsiderishness and difference.
If in Pregnant Rabbit the exogamy of cat and dog couplings disrupts the imperative of Salazarista insularity, the same theme is pushed into the dangerous carnival of irreverent slapstick in the Red Monkey mini-series, which includes two images to be discussed here: Red Monkey Beats His Wife (figure 24) and Wife Cuts Off Red Monkey's Tail (figure 26).
The Red Monkey's colour is perplexing with regard to a protagonist whose salient traits (masculine authoritarianism and wife-battering) place him otherwise well within the mainstream of the social order he emblematises. Red, on the other hand, under Salazarismo, was seen as a colour of such powerful communist associations that the very word, for example in otherwise anodyne book and film titles, could lead to automatic censorship by the state machinery. Here, therefore, it introduces an element of paradox through its association with a protagonist who otherwise appears to be almost grotesquely living up to the regime's requirements for patriarchal enforcement of wifely obedience. The monkey's attack on a wife who in another picture proves herself capable of violent insurrection would fit easily within the Estado Novo's boundaries of justifiable husbandly force. But on the other hand the colour red-of Satanic as well as communist associations-is possibly part of an authorial act designed to deconstruct the husband's standing, and the social conventions that acquit his actions, through a colour association to demonic and politically dissident tendencies built into this otherwise orthodox representative of the status quo. This move, on the part of the artist, would thus entail a double measure of contentiousness by lining up the interests of Catholicism (as the declared ally of state and patriarchal interests) on the side of the devil (the violent husband figure) and, deconstructively, of the political tendencies (communism) which it otherwise proscribed.
This reading is reinforced by another component of the image. As the title states, the Red Monkey is striking his wife, who holds their child in her arms. Behind him lurks a genuflecting figure with a dark faceless mass for a head and hands piously linked in prayer. It is tempting to construe the many contradictions built into this image into a coherent indictment of the destructiveness-but also self-destructiveness-of the political order which Paula Rego attacked, and continues to attack, long after its demise. Here we have a monkey whose colour, as stated, possibly dissociates him from the right-wing ideologies to which we suspect he would otherwise subscribe as an autocratic paterfamilias. Behind him (literally and metaphorically) stand the powers of the faceless but ubiquitous state and church, the latter two conflated into a single body, presumably an allusion to the 1940 Concordat. In a further complication that parallels that of the colour red in a fascist body, the representative of the established order here attacks the Madonna and Child emblems theoretically revered by that same order, as well as potentially, at a personal level, destroying the representative of the next generation, who is his own and therefore the establishment's son and heir. In either case, the deed is witnessed by the kneeling figure whose presence contributes to the composition's identification as a simulacrum of the standard iconography either of the Nativity (figure 25), or of the Adoration of the Madonna and Child (figure 62), or even of the Pieta (figure 63).
24 Red Monkey Beats His Wife
The killing of another son and heir by a representative of church and state will be a central theme of the Father Amaro series discussed in chapter 3 (plates 11-15, figures 34-35, 37-38, 40-41, 45, 47). In the Red Monkey series, the dimension of marital aggression becomes apparent in the following picture, as does the continued identification of the eponymous figure with the configurations of power already outlined. In Wife Cuts Off Red Monkey's Tail, the wife, now in her turn faceless (a frequent attribute of autocratic power in Paula Rego), stands with a gigantic pair of scissors in her hands, from which she casually lets drop her husband's severed tail (figure 26).
25 Lorenzo Lotto, The Nativity
The latter, red, tumescent and erect in the previous picture, is here the opposite: green (decaying), deflated and limp. The monkey is gripped by projectile vomiting, recalling that other famous picture of 1960, and thus he becomes associated, through this bodily misadventure, with Salazar, the eponymous protagonist of the earlier painting. More emphatically even than in the image of two decades before, the monkey surrenders to an absolute loss of somatic self-control, symbolised by vomiting in public. And finally, to the right, behind the wife, in a position that echoes the faceless praying figure of the previous picture, is an ambiguous black and white shape, cut in half by the edge of the picture, a formal reiteration of the dismemberment inflicted by the wife on her husband.
Attacks on males by their female relatives are at the heart of my analysis of a series of seven paintings which I refer to as the Family series. They include The Dance (figure 27), Departure (figure 28), The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9), The Bullfighter's Godmother (figure 30), The Soldier's Daughter (figure 31), The Policeman's Daughter (figure 32) and The Family (plate 10), in this rather than in chronological order.
26 Wife Cuts Off Red Monkey's Tail
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing each to each
I do not think that they will sing to me.
(Eliot, 1948, 13–14)
As individual perverseness wreaks havoc with the ideal family in Paula Rego, so, too, the traces of Portugal's imperial promenades on foreign beaches are reduced to the faintest of palimpsests, both historically and in this artist's map of memory. The Dance (figure 27), one of Paula Rego's best-known pictures, has attracted a number of interpretations, including John McEwen's biographically oriented reading (McEwen, 1997, 168) and Fiona Bradley's meditation on the relations between the male and female protagonists (Bradley, 1997,19).1
As with all the other family images to be discussed here, I should like to argue that in this seemingly happy or, as footnoted, perhaps elegiac picture, Paula Rego is in part also exploring the recurring political preoccupations already discussed at some length. In doing so she creates inside the familial sphere an arena for debating how the personal and the collective are mutually enmeshed, through the workings of the ideological superstructure of the state's colonial policy.
27 The Dance
The Dance presents the romantic but also cosy setting of what appears to be a village hop. Judging by the clothes of the protagonists, it is taking place on a summer night on a beach against a background of sea and cliffs. History (or at least family history, but the two will become entwined) is introduced into the painting by the cycle of generations represented: the foetus still in litem inside its mother's body, the little girl, four young women and a middle-aged or elderly one, as well as two young men. Already at this point, however, we are struck by a numerical gender imbalance, made obvious because there is a shortage of men for the women to dance with. It is interesting to note that, in an echo of the redundancy of absent or incapacitated males in the Girl and Dog pictures (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22), women here dance with each other, with self-sufficient light-heartedness. Be that as it may, it is at this juncture that the combination of protagonists and background symbolism interface to turn a village affair into a national concern.
The scarcity of men, in particular of mature and elderly men (the very youngest generation of males is potentially present in the shape of the child yet unborn), suggests the death or at least the departure of adult males before they can take their place as village elders. In Portugal, this dearth of men has been primarily associated with one specific aspect of national life, namely the sea voyages (across that water which here acts as the background to the events of the dance) which, whether during the period of maritime discovery and of empire-building in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or during the waves of economic emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or because of the colonial wars in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, or simply in the context of the life of a fishing nation, made the absence of young and middle-aged men a national reality, and made widespread bereavement a collective problem.
Salt-laden sea, how much of your salt
Is tears of Portugal!
For us to cross you, how many sons have kept
Vigil in vain, and mothers wept!
Lived as old maids how many brides-to-be
Till death, that you might be ours, sea!
Was it worthwhile? It is worthwhile, all,
If the soul is not too small.
Whoever means to sail beyond the Cape
Must double sorrow, no escape.
Peril and abyss has God to the sea given
And yet made it the mirror of heaven.
(Pessoa, 1992, 71)
Fernando Pessoa's famous poem, half-lament, half-jingoistic exhortation to further efforts, expresses the ambivalence of a nation whose self-declared moments of historical glory in the age of its empire came at a human cost that was never fully accepted, and in the end was sufficiently resented to topple a government. That turnaround in political fate, the moment when the colonial enterprise that had shored up national economic stability in the twentieth century was deemed not worth the bloodshed and political repression at home and abroad, is cryptically alluded to elsewhere in this picture. In the darkened background on top of a low cliff that overlooks the ocean stands a fortress. Portuguese fortresses of this nature still pepper the coasts of West and East Africa and are found the length of Southeast Asia, the last vestiges of Portugal's military and commercial presence during five centuries. More to the point, they are also to be found along Portuguese coastlines, the most famous being that at Caxias, which the one in this picture strongly resembles. Caxias, some five miles outside Lisbon on the Estoril coast, was the most infamous of Salazar's jails, where political prisoners were kept, often without trial, and tortured. It still figures in the Portuguese imagination as one of the emblems of a regime whose other defining characteristic was its attempt to construct a third overseas empire in Africa. Sea and fort, therefore, inscribe the process of history-but in either case observed clearly and with few illusions-within the themes of village and family in what has largely been regarded as simply a melancholy, or even happy, picture. In this reading, however, it appears undeniably tainted by bereavement. But the final and most disturbing note is struck, with typical Regoesque perverseness, through the depiction of women who, in view of the oblique political symbolism, ought to be wretched at the loss of their men, but are not. The same thought-provoking light-heartedness will reappear in other paintings in this series.
28 Departure
A shared thematic thread links The Dance to Departure (figure 28).
In Departure a girl, possibly a sister, brushes her brother's hair prior to the eponymous act.2 He sits and she stands on a terrace overlooking the sea, against a background of high ramparts headed not now by a fortress, but by residential houses, in Paula Rego the locus delicti of family life with a twist. Beside the two protagonists, on the ground, is an old-fashioned trunk, presumably the young man's, with his coat draped across it. The symbols of departure set against the background seascape may be argued to carry the same ocean-bound/imperial/colonial connotations of other Rego pictures. Here, however, the sense of poignancy is enhanced by the coffin-shape of the trunk, to which the coat adds either a quasi-funereal ritual draping, or, alternatively, the impression of a fallen body.
Auspices of a doomed national imperative, however, be it economic migration or empire-building, are once again paraphrased through a means of death much closer to home. Although the implement the girl holds in her right hand is a harmless comb, the otherwise far-fetched uneasiness which the position of the left hand elicits when an analogy is drawn with the maid's hand on her mistress's neck in The Maids (plate 1), or the girls' hands in Untitled b, Untitled d, Untitled e and Untitled f (plates 5, 7; figure 21 and 22), is reinforced by bloodstains faintly visible here on the girl's apron. These stains reflect the red discolouration on the ground at her feet, which also raises disturbing possibilities. Combing hair is not an activity generally known to produce much blood. In this picture, therefore, in an echo of the Girl and Dog pictures, grooming and killing, love and murder (kin slaying), run over each other's boundaries, not for the first or last time in this artist's work.
The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9) picks up a motif that will reappear over the following decade, namely that of men being dressed by women (The Family, plate 10; Mother, plate 12), possibly in an echo of those earlier dogs being simultaneously tended and emasculated.
It casts a young soldier being readied, possibly for war, by his sister. He gazes at the backdrop of an avenue lined by cypresses which stretches into the distance. She kneels at his feet and ties his bootlaces, but succeeds, while in this genuflecting, ministering stance, in retaining a commanding position in the picture, in contrast to her more slightly-built brother whose face, unlike hers, is seen only in profile. Beside her on the ground, are her handbag and gloves, the latter set at an angle that echoes that pattern of grasping hands (The Maids, plate 1; Departure, figure 28; Untitled b, plate 5; Untitled d, plate 7, Untitled e, figure 21, Untitled f, figure 22), mirrored also in the tulip shapes on the cloth and skirt of Untitled c, plate 6 and Untitled f, figure 22).
In small scale in the foreground left-hand corner is a cockerel, and it is tempting once again to work from the small but significant detail to the more obvious larger ones, since the cockerel provides the starting point for a conflation of the personal and the collective. In Portuguese legend the Barcelos cockerel, named after the town associated with it, was a bird-shaped metal weathervane, which, at a time of national peril in the Middle Ages, miraculously came to life and sang to give warning of an impending invasion by the Spanish. The Portuguese army, though outnumbered, emerged victorious, and to this day painted wooden or clay Barcelos cockerels can be bought in souvenir shops, tourist outlets and markets all over Portugal.
The cockerel, therefore, in contrast as we shall see to cypress trees, indicates battle against the odds culminating in victory, and inserts national concerns as a significant subject matter into this painting of family history. War, here signalled by the soldier's presence, thus ceases to be a background detail and becomes central to this joint depiction of family and nation.
29 Snow White Plaiting With Her Father's Trophies
I will digress briefly here to note that some attention has been focused in the past on the theme of incest in Paula Rego, in paintings such as Snow White Playing With Her Father's Trophies (figure 29), The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9), The Soldier's Daughter (figure 31), The Policeman's Daughter (figure 32) and The Family (plate 10) (Rosengarten, 1999a, 24).
A lot of ground remains to be covered on this topic, not just in connection with these pictures, but with others such as the Father Amaro series, for the purpose of which Paula Rego drew upon an author, Eça de Queirós, who returned repeatedly to incest as a central theme in his best-known novels. For the purposes of the current discussion, however, I shall consider incest abstractly rather than with any sexual specificity, as the behaviour through which clearly defined rules of familial interaction are subverted within the very terms of their prescriptions, in order to deconstruct them. Thus, if family love was one of the proclaimed linchpins of the Salazar regime, it is at the very least perverse to extrapolate the concept of familial love up to a point (incest) beyond which the fabric of society itself is threatened. The approved concept of love for one's kin, when taken to excess, undermines that which, in a less extreme rendition, it purportedly shored up. And so incest tampers with the notion that although in well-adjusted communities family members love each other, they clearly must do so only up to a point. The implications of this, moreover, clearly extend beyond the confines of the family. Within an authoritarian state, the distinction of categories becomes arguably more important than in democratic regimes, since they govern the general process whereby individuals, entities and behaviour are classified and either authorised or excluded by the established order. Incest, therefore, the behaviour which with absolute literalness brings together what ought to be kept apart, is a crime in itself, but it is also the thin end of the wedge: other than undermining at a very specific level the family metaphor for the happy state, its transgression against rules of sexual intercourse (specifically the mutual exclusivity of consanguinity and sex) gestures also to the wider dissolution of set boundaries between other categories, as prescribed in a variety of ideological and state desiderata. Incest thus comes to act as the metaphor for more abstract considerations regarding the dissolution of categories-good and evil, morality and immorality, right and wrong-whose mutual exclusion becomes blurred or relative.
If The Cadet and His Sister is a painting about the motherland as much as about the family, the theme of incest, which following Rego's lead a number of critics have detected in it (McEwen, 1997, 167), may be a way of noting a general dysfunctionality which is extrapolated from the level of consanguinity to its metaphorical counterpart in national life (Portugal and her rebellious colonial children, within the context of a war fought on another continent by young soldiers). 'Incest leads nowhere. His future is destroyed' (Rego, quoted in McEwen, 1997,167).
A reference to incest here would therefore recite once again the drama of an imperilled motherland, whose Salazarista corporate image, based on the linchpin of the Utopian happy family, is exposed as false. In this context, the background setting becomes all-important. The cypresses lining the avenue are traditionally planted in Portuguese cemeteries, and their prime association is with death. Their presence, therefore, as well as speaking for itself, also illuminates what can now be interpreted as a graveyard with white stone walls and benches. Or, in other words, a less than auspicious setting for a young soldier about to go to war. It is eerily apposite that the cypress avenue upon which his gaze is focused seems to lead nowhere.
The sister, whose tender attentions, as suggested previously, arguably become sinister in the light of other paintings of men being tended by their female relatives, is here dressed in clothes which are blood red, one step beyond the discreetly blood-stained apron of the previous picture. The clothes, moreover, together with the militaristic red beret, imply further possibilities. Military-style female clothing had already been put to service in earlier paintings, such as the mother's suit in The Fitting (figure 5), discussed in the previous chapter. Another point for consideration in The Cadet and His Sister is the symbolism of red, which, as outlined previously, was a colour of political (communist) and religious (satanic) infamy in the ultra-Catholic Estado Novo. Red, other than its left-wing and diabolic connotations, was also the colour of the carnations symbolically associated with the revolution that brought down the Estado Novo. The revolution took the form of a coup by army officers whom this woman's militaristic beret may possibly recall, as does her relation to the young soldier. And young soldiers, as already stated previously, were the canon fodder whose deaths in the colonial wars initially sowed the seeds of discontent with the political regime and so paved the way for the 1974 revolution.
The female protagonist's clothes provoke one further association. Her suit corresponds to the fashion of the late 1930s and early 1940s, made visually iconic in Britain, where Paula Rego lives, but also in Portugal, where she was brought up, by many war-time films, usually of British and American origin.3 The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise and consolidation of fascism in Europe. They were also the decades of Salazar's drive to dictatorial power and the period in which, as discussed previously, his plans for a society in many ways analogous to Hitler's Germany were laid down. The fashion displayed here is therefore double-edged: by laying down period markers referring to the Second World War, it evokes a conflict which Hitler's enemies won and which his sympathisers symbolically lost, including Salazar, however neutral his official stance may have been. This period marker of fashion therefore emphasises the war-time sympathies and true leanings of the Estado Novo. And a tangential effect of this is the possibly circuitous but tenable notion that if in the 1940s Salazar's political inclinations led him to identify with a genocidal government and with an unholy German war, his own war of the 1960s and 1970s is here tarred with the same brush
In The Cadet and His Sister, a woman sends off her close male relative to war and, potentially, to his death. If this particular Portuguese war was fought for a morally untenable cause, its gender effects in this picture may nonetheless entail a liberating impact not dissimilar to that temporarily achieved for women by the Second World War. When the cat is away the mice are free to play, or to usurp the rights and privileges (including power dressing) habitually the monopoly of the man. The same theme is repeated in the next two pictures, The Bullfighter's Godmother (figure 30) and The Soldier's Daughter (figure 31).
In The Bullfighter's Godmother (1990–91), the two protagonists stand in a bare, monastic room, presumably his, as the godmother puts the finishing touches to her charge's bullfighting outfit. A young girl sits in a chair with the bullfighter's traditional cape draped over her knees, falling on to the floor. The room is windowless and, although spacious, dark and claustrophobic.4 Its shadows have an ominous character, which potentially reiterates the motif of a last farewell. And this is emphasised by the brownish red the colour of the cape, chair and waistband, somewhat like dried blood, which is almost the only other colour in the room, and which acts as the omen for the violent death a bullfighter might be expected to suffer. The atmosphere of foreboding is accentuated by the black clothes of the godmother (black, in Portugal, being traditionally reserved exclusively for mourning), and specifically by the black tie usually worn by men, but here by the young girl, as a mark of bereavement.
30 The Bullfighter's Godmother
The role of godparent in a Catholic country such as Portugal is that of appointed conduit of godliness, religion, tradition and citizenship. His or her task is to guarantee that the godchild is raised in the Catholic faith, which in Portugal, during the years of dictatorship, was shorthand also for raising a properly conformist son or daughter for the state. This particular godmother is associated also with the tradition of bullfighting, which in the Iberian context is the purest distillation of masculine values. The art of bullfighting-and it is as an art that this pursuit is understood nationally-pays homage to the values of religion and patriotism, as well as to the quintessential male attribute of courage in the face of death. Under the Estado Novo, as we have seen, all three were particularly valued as constituting the backbone of a country in which, according to the conjoined decrees of church, state and patriarchy, men were men and women were women. In bullfighting men are brought together, as in battle, as comrades or gladiators, pitted not against each other but against the bull which is the common (and identifiably different) adversary. Through bullfighting, hombridade, male solidarity against a categorised Other, is reaffirmed for the greater good of the nation.
31 The Soldier's Daughter
In this boys-only club Paula Rego's painting strikes a dissonant note. What is in question here is not God the Father-the summit of that pyramidal structure of male values which bullfighting shores up-but a godmother. The latter thus emerges as the usurper of masculine concerns, rights and duties. The female figure stands tall, taller than the man whom, moreover, standing in relation to him as she does (in loco parentis), she thus doubly infantilises. She is hieratic and spectral, and wears ominous garments of bereavement which seem to improperly anticipate (or look forward to) a death foretold. And if she is sending him to his death, her pastoral role, inappropriate in any case-given that she is not a man but a woman-constitutes not so much a generational handing down of tradition, but its premature nipping in the bud, since this young man's honourable career will end almost before it has begun.
In any case the godmother, by virtue of being a mother and not a father, inevitably jolts the process whereby heritage, tradition, nationhood and authority are typically passed down from God via political rulers, to husbands, fathers and sons, conventionally bypassing the subaltern female sex. In this picture, instead, both tradition and the right to its transmission (analogous to Adam's Genesiacal monopoly over naming the world) are hijacked by the godmother, who, moreover, in handing them down to the next generation of young males, simultaneously anoints and damns the emblematic youth portrayed here. When Jehovah created the world, including of course Portugal as God's own country, the achievement was commemorated by the fiat that there be light. Appropriately enough, in this doom-laden room, the sources of light are on the whole mysterious, apart from the free-standing table lamp, whose radiance, however, is veiled by a black shade. The latter clearly would be more suitable to a satanic rite than in the prelude to a bullfight, that most orthodox of Portuguese rites of honour.
Light and dark, and their semantic ramifications, are also of the essence in The Soldier's Daughter (figure 31).
Once again I will begin with an analysis of two figures who, although set in the foreground, have their impact at first glance reduced to secondary status by virtue of their miniature scale, yet later reinstated within the broader significance of the image. They are a departing soldier with his pack slung over his shoulder, and a faceless woman, veiled and kneeling with hands linked in prayer or lamentation, in the archetypal posture of the mater dolorosa. The effect of their diminutive stature is compounded by their positions within dark corners of the painting, a move which heightens the contrast with the much larger and sunlit figure of the central protagonist.
The scenario conjured up by these two figures is clearly that of the archetypal 'men must work and women must weep' plot, which is however comprehensively given the lie by the other components of the painting. These involve the central figure of a girl, presumably the daughter of the title, busy plucking a dead goose. She sits under a broad arch but in sunlight, against a background of buildings and a ramp which possibly leads to the sea but which is blocked by a closed gate. At first glance, the girl is engaged in a suitably feminine task: preparing the bird for a meal that will feed the family. Other components of the picture, however, beg the question as to whose goose is about to be cooked. The answer seems to be clear, in view of the fact that we are dealing again with the tale of a departing soldier, presumably bound for war.
The inauspiciousness of his departure seems to be emphasised by the fact that he is not using the obvious exit, up the steps, through the gate, out to sea, sun and military glory, but is rather descending an ill-defined path into a darkness haunted by weeping spectres (the kneeling woman), alluding to the Underworld. Perhaps for this reason his size is disproportionately small, in a literal rendition of the act of his death or disappearance.
More than the question as to who is dead or dying (man or goose), the painting also invites questions as to who is doing the killing. If the soldier is to die in battle, or has already done so, a fact which would give his diminishing presence here the status of a visiting ghost, his obvious killers would be the military enemy. However, it is also possible to argue that the national interests which dispatched him into battle are equally responsible for his death.
Furthermore, back home, matters are even less transparent. The daughter, who at first glance appears obediently to fulfil her part of the bargain in the traditional division of labour (men fight, women nurture; men kill, women breed), may here be seen to be blurring those boundaries. She sports inappropriately festive flowers in her hair, an intertextual allusion to the accessories of her other, more rampantly dangerous female counterparts in In the Garden, plate 4, Snare, figure 16 and Prey, figure 20, and her grip on the goose is unforgiving. Presumably she has already been responsible for wringing its neck, which in echo of the Red Monkey's tail in an earlier picture (figure 26) is now broken and limp, and she grasps the goose in a mariner that emphasises its annihilation. The goose furthermore has not simply died; in death it is subjected to further mutilation by plucking, with resonances of the shaved dog and tonsured brother in Untitled g (plate 8) and Departure (figure 28) respectively. And in view of this, the place in the sun attained by this young girl accrues further significance.
The goose has long-standing mythical associations with love and fidelity, and in some traditions was thought to be homologous with the swan, itself linked to feminine beauty and the virtues of helplessness, sacrifice and submissiveness, as identified in the cultural icon of the Virgin Mary (Becker, 1994,130): 'behold the handmaid of the Lord' (Luke 1:38). The fact that those qualities are here depicted as having been slaughtered by the hands of a young girl recalls-even in terms of the mental picture which the verbal tirade evokes and Rego's image makes literal-Virginia Woolf's notorious exhortation to women to discard the chains of stereotyped femininity and domestic confinement by symbolically murdering (specifically, and of particular relevance to this picture, strangling) 'the angel in the house':
I discovered that if I was going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her-you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it-in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others ... And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words ... Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: 'My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender, flatter; deceive; use all the wiles and arts of your sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own' ... And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself ... I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her ... I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing ... She died hard ... Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer. (Woolf, 1943,150–1, italics mine)
'Women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been "killed" into art ... . [Until quite recently] the female imagination has perceived itself, as it were, through a glass darkly' (Gilbert and Gubar, 1984, 17). The goose/swan who represents that Marian ideal meets its death in Rego's picture at the hands of an unangelic daughter. She sits clutching the victim of her crime, disloyally adorned in celebratory red flowers, at the moment of yet another death, which is that of her departing father. The demise of the father and the resurgence of the angel-killer may also be tortuously evoked through other mythical reverberations emanating from the symbol of the swan. Let us see.
Most notoriously in Greek mythology the swan was the disguise adopted by Zeus in order to rape Leda, as depicted in any number of canonical images in the history of art and literature.5 That gesture of masculine and divine despotism, which encapsulated the claim of a godly droit de seigneur, had issue. Leda gave birth to twin girls, Helen and Clytemnestra, each of whom would in a different way be responsible for the deaths of important men. Helen's adultery and elopement led to carnage at the siege of Troy (Achilles, Paris, Hector, Ajax), but had even wider, indirect repercussions. One of the key figures in the Trojan War was her brother-in-law, Agammemnon, Menelaus's brother and Clytemnestra's husband. Agammemnon, as is well known, set off for Troy to fulfil his duty to his brother of mutual alliance in war, and sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia, for the sake of a favourable wind. At the end of the Trojan War, Agammemnon was murdered by Clytemnestra in revenge for their daughter's death.
The rape of Leda by that original swan, whose Regoesque avatar has his own actions nipped in the bud, in the original myth sets off a chain of events made memorable in the Homeric epics and in the tragedies that enshrine the earliest development of Western culture. The tenor of these stories, seen from one angle, is the pitting of man against woman, or husband against wife, in betrayal and death, and the unleashing of conflicts at home and abroad. In the course of these, some women admittedly die (Iphigenia, Clytemnestra), but enough survive and escape with impunity (Helen, Medea), to gloat ad infinitum on their unpunished crimes. The story of female criminality allowed to go scot-free was immortalised by the tranquil words of Helen in The Odyssey and Medea's light-hearted goodbyes in Euripides's play. Back in Sparta with her lawful husband after the fall of Troy, whose destruction she provoked, Helen encounters Telemachus, son of Odysseus, on a mission to seek news of his father who has failed to return from Troy. On this potentially embarrassing occasion, she serenely refers to her past Trojan self as the 'shameless creature that I was' (Homer, 1984, 68). More scandalously even, after the murder of her own children as retaliation for her husband's betrayal, Medea orders an annual feast by means of which the people of Corinth (but not she herself) will solemnise and 'expiate this impious murder'. As for herself, 'I myself will go to Athens' (the seat of masculine justice) 'to make my home' (Euripides, 1989, line 84). Helen's understatement regarding the consequences of her actions, and Medea's absolute evasion of retribution, tacitly acquit women of those actions that bring down male civilisations, an outcome which is also a favoured motif in Paula Rego.
This returns us to The Soldier's Daughter, and to this particular death. Here too hallowed domesticity slips into an imminent bloodbath. The girl and the dead goose (or swan, who rather than doing the raping is itself being 'plucked') sit in isolation. They are entirely alone, since the soldier and the weeping woman appear to exist in a different dimension, as attested by their alien size and different lighting. The girl is partly sheltered by an arch, but with no indication of an intent to conceal herself, and although the perspective is unclear, her actions may be partially overlooked from the white building, whose windows, however, are blank. If, in the parlance of the detective novel, we ask who was the last person to see this goose alive, in the absence of any obvious witnesses, the accusing finger points back to this apparent criminal, who, as is so often the case in Paula Rego, appears serenely at ease in the scene of her crime.
The next picture, The Policeman's Daughter (1987, figure 32), also bears a title that places it explicitly within the realm of the familial and the domestic.
A girl or young woman sits in a room by a paneless window without a view, alone except for a black cat, and polishes a man's boot, presumably that of the eponymous policeman and father. Light streams in through the window, but whether sun or moonlight is not clear. Ruth Rosengarten has detected in this work both sexual tension conducive to yet another reading of incest (the daughter's hand inside the father's phallic boot), and the metonymical allusion of that authoritarian boot to state authority. In this reading, therefore, familial (paternal) and political (state) authority become enmeshed (Rosengarten, 1997, 75). If so, however, the interweaving of masculinity and feminity, and of personal and collective interests, is far from simple.
Both in Portuguese and in English, Paula Rego's two languages, to clean someone's boots (or more specifically to lick them) signifies an almost abject submissiveness. In a specifically Portuguese context, and in a country in which, to this day, it is not uncommon for men to have their shoes
32 The Policeman's Daughter
polished by young boys in the street in exchange for a small payment (echoes of the kneeling seamstress in The Fitting, figure 5), there may also be a class factor inherent in being liberated from cleaning one's own footwear. Here the act possibly alludes to nothing more than filial conformity to female domestic duties that have traditionally facilitated masculine activity in the public sphere. Thus, the daughter polishing the boots-or boot-which is her father's badge of state-backed power, appears at first glance to submit to and collude with the premises of that hierarchical, divided, class-ridden, two-gender world.
Male power, like God's, therefore, is omnipresent in the shape of the father's boots, which represent him in absentia. Or is that in fact the case? In another possible reading, all that remains of the man in this enclosed place is in fact a void, his absence made conspicuous not by a pair of boots but rather by one useless, unmatched piece of footwear. A man wearing only one boot, clearly, will limp. This single boot, furthermore, carries all the implications of what is symbolically being done to it. Fiona Bradley refers the image of the arm, elbow-deep in the boot, and its powerful sexual charge, to Paula Rego's awareness of the controversy which surrounded Robert Mapplethorpe's ICA photography exhibition of the same year as the picture, and which included the image of an arm rammed up a man's anus (Bradley, 1997,22).6
If what is in question both in Mapplethorpe and in Paula Rego is anal Tape, and in Rego not now of a mythical female Leda but of an unnamed male-and, more to the point here, of a father-incest, then, the act which in the father-daughter modality habitually carries the added burden of paedophilia, here reverses the customary positions of brutality and helplessness. The standard distribution of gender positions of relative power and powerlessness, therefore, whether in the context of voluntary sex or forcible intercourse, is radically turned around in this picture, more clearly even than in the Girl and Dog images discussed in the previous chapter. And given the father's defining characteristic, namely his status as policeman, as laid down in the picture's title, it is not simply paternity in its domestic and familial guise which is compromised here, but beyond it a whole network of symbolic, metaphorical and signifying fathers: heads of state, rulers, fathers of the nation, priests and even God the Father himself. This leads to further complications. For example, if in Salazar's vision for the nation, men appeared as parents in many different paternalistic permutations (fathers of their daughters, of their wives, of their female parishioners, of their country and of its colonies), women, as discussed before, were acceptable not just primarily but exclusively as mothers and daughters, within the domestic confines of the home space. Paula Rego takes on this monolithic discourse on its own terms, and exposes the appalling fragility at the heart of paternalistically defined power. The boot being dutifully ministered to becomes also the hole or the anus into which a violating hand and a muscular female arm are brutally rammed, an enactment of the most humiliating sexual act performable upon a man. The submissive daughter, busily going about the domestic activities which sustain the father's career, becomes the raping demoness who breaks every last taboo, and who, disturbingly, does so while paradoxically continuing to fulfil the role of angel in the house. In Paula Rego, as will be discussed in chapter 3 with reference to The Ambassador of Jesus (figure 37), the right hand, conveniently, frequently does not know what the left hand is doing. In The Policeman's Daughter, while one hand rapes, the other hand ministers, in mockery of the maternal tactic of being cruel to be kind. Through the agency of this ministering daughter dressed in the generic white of adolescent communicants, young brides and novice nuns, a veneer of polish, thick or thin, is imposed upon unreconstructed masculinity, while at her hands extant regimes willy-nilly undergo assorted reforms.
The unconvincing innocence of the girl, in any case, is promptly given the lie by the black cat, a truly Regoesque index of ambivalence. The cat relates symbolically to the serpent in the tradition of Jewish Cabbal, and was imported into Christian lore with the same charge of evil. During the Middle Ages and enduringly in children's fairy tales, cats, and more particularly black ones, were considered to be witches' familiars, a symbol of the devil (Becker, 1994, 53), while in popular superstition they are the harbingers of bad luck.7 In this picture, therefore, the cat as devilish partner in crime of this disquieting policeman's daughter embodies a tripartite onslaught against patriarchy (the father), dictatorship (the policeman) and religion (God as the antithesis of Satan), which in Portuguese national life stand-and here fall-together.
I will conclude my consideration of this series of paintings with a work appropriately titled The Family (plate 10).
Critical approaches to this image have differed widely. John McEwen persevered in linking the final version to its initial wistful intent and original title (The Raising of Lazarus), which he connected to the artist's widowhood in 1988 (McEwen, 1997, 167–8). Ruth Rosengarten avoids biographical data, preferring to bring to this painting a reading that emphasises the antagonism of the two central female protagonists towards the helpless male (Rosengarten, 1997, 75). Rosengarten's approach dovetails with the points to be raised now, which also emphasise the aspect of force variously exerted against the man by a coven of three Shakesperian witches.
The juxtaposition of the man with his two immediate antagonists, and the positioning of the latter's arms, refers us back to the postures of any number of girls and dogs in paintings discussed previously (Two Girls and a Dog, plate 3; In the Garden, plate 4; Untitled b, plate 5; Untitled d, plate 7; Untitled e, figure 21) and to the same themes of harassment, bodily harm and violent, untimely death. The stripe or crossbar pattern on the little girl's skirt also sets off echoes of past works (the prison-bar motif of the skirt pattern in Untitled b, plate 5; of the fence posts in Untitled c, plate 6; of the pattern on the bedspread in Untitled e, figure 21; of the playpen bars in Untitled f, figure 22), as does her position (reminiscent of the girls in Snare, figure 16 and Untitled g, plate 8), tauntingly standing between the legs of a man who, possible incest aside, is manifestly debarred from taking advantage of the possibilities raised by such provocation, due both to his invalidism and to the sheer force of restraint (the woman who holds him from behind). Whether standing between males' legs (The Family, plate 10) or holding them between theirs (Snare, figure 16; Untitled g, plate 8), therefore, in Paula Rego it always appears to be a case of girls on top. Compositionally, then, the way in which the juxtaposition of the protagonists in The Family evokes that of many of the girls and helpless dogs of earlier works lends force to Agustina Bessa-Luís's argument that the dogs in fact represent men (Rego and Bessa-Luís, 2001, 16), and Paula Rego's own statement that, in the case of the Girls and Dogs, she was 'painting something about Vic' (Tusa, 2000,10).
Be that as it may, sexually and otherwise, this male protagonist appears to have reached the end of the road, as indicated by the greenish pallor of his skin. The point is cruelly hammered home through antithesis, by way of the figure of the third female protagonist, a small girl whose piously joined hands contrast with her improbably pregnant body. Since biologically-given her apparent age of five or six-pregnancy is not a possibility, both it and the little girl herself, in her capacity as the youngest member of the cast, may be argued to represent the future: a future which she personifies, apart from being pregnant with it, in sharp contrast to the man, who clearly has none.
The little girl stands near a painted wooden oratory. One panel of the oratory depicts what appears to be an altogether proper scene of piety: Mary Magdalene stands by and watches as St Michael, in his habitual representation, slays the devil in the shape of a dragon. St Michael, other than the slayer of dragons, was also the saint who weighed up the souls of the dead (psychostasis), in order to measure their just deserts (Hall, 1991, 208), a role which may explain his connection here with Mary Magdalene, who in her turn is the embodiment of carefully balanced female sin and virtue. If Mary Magdalene, like Helen of Troy, represents the ambivalence evoked by a woman's sins left unpunished, the bottom wooden panel of the oratory offers another take on the battle between good and evil. This time it takes the shape of the affrontery entailed in expecting thanks for refraining from sin: the panel depicts La Fontaine's fable of the wolf and the stork. The wolf chokes on a piece of food and begs the stork to help. The stork does so by pulling out the piece of food with its long beak, and is offended when the wolf fails to thank it. The wolf retorts that its thanks were expressed by refraining from eating the stork.8 In Paula Rego's universe, criminals (usually female), like wolves, habitually go all the way, and when they hold back from full-blown criminality, it is a case of being thankful for small mercies. In this paradigmatic picture, in fact, the self-restraint of the wolf does not appear to find an echo in the 'real world' of the protagonists, two of whom appear to be on the verge of enforcing an untimely death upon a third. And yet again, as elsewhere in this artist (Time: Past and Present, figure 8; The Policeman's Daughter, figure 32; Mother, plate 12), the background to a scenario of juxtaposed dead-ends and unholy worlds without end is the vindictive desolation of a window with no view, an opening on to nothing.
1. The Dance was painted in 1988, the year that Rego's husband, Victor Willing, died. It features two young men who bear a strong resemblance to him, and for whom the couple's son may have been the model. The painting has more commonly been interpreted as an attempt at catharsis ('saying goodbye to Vic').
2. It has also been suggested to me that the girl's attire may indicate a lower-class status, such as that of servant rather than sister to the male protagonist. Whether the twin of past and future aggressive female relatives or of the murderous maids of a previous painting, the accessories pertaining to this figure, as argued now, make her menacing rather than nurturing.
3. Discussion of this painting at a conference gave rise to the view, which clearly would counter the argument being debated here, that the sister's dress might in fact be a long-skirted costume, situating the scene in the nineteenth rather than twentieth century.
4. With regard to a later picture, as discussed in chapter 3, Paula Rego discussed the desirability of sets using mirrors which increase the impression of space without however granting her protagonists the advantage of an open window for the same effect. In fact, in many of her paintings she either depicts windowless rooms, as here, or at best paints windows without a view (Time: Past and Present, figure 8; The Policeman's Daughter, figure 32; Mother, plate 12).
5. The theme of Leda and the swan has inspired painters and sculptors alike: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Soldani, Correggio, Bartolomeo Ammanati.
6. Paula Rego, however, does not acknowledge a link between Mapplethorpe's photograph and her own work. Sketches and studies for this image, indeed, do not present the hand inside the boot, but rather holding the outside of it in an enfolding gesture. I am grateful to Robert Hinde for pointing this out to me.
7. Alternately good and bad luck in Britain, bad luck in Portugal.
8. Details regarding both aspects of the oratory were obtained from a conversation with Paula Rego.