33 Centaur
To arrive at the truth in all things, we ought always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.
St Ignatius de Loyola, Spiritual Exercises
2+2 (God willing) = 4
Medieval equation1
'In addition to papism, the Reverend probably suspected [the parrot] of latent femaleness' (Kingsolver, 1999, 71). Papism aside – because it is something to be taken for granted in the context of the pictures to be discussed and of the novel that inspired them – Barbara Kingsolver's parrot, Methuselah, combines two suspect traits which are defining concerns in Paula Rego's depiction of femaleness: a penchant for profanity, and resilient longevity.
'I have always been a literary painter, thank goodness, like all the decent painters.' Walter Sickert's quip, quoted by Virginia Woolf (Woolf, 1992, 36), sets him in the ranks of an increasingly depleted group of artists to which belong Paula Rego, and also R. B. Kitaj, with whom analogies have already been drawn. In 1997–98 Paula Rego used The Sin of Father Amaro, a novel by the nineteenth-century Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós, as the point of departure for a series of paintings that incorporated all the preoccupations considered in the previous chapters (nationality, gender, religion), and whose referent, more markedly even than in previous work, was Portugal past and present.2
Before proceeding to a brief account of Eça de Queirós's novel, and to a consideration of the works themselves, I should like to discuss briefly some analogies and differences in Eça's and Rego's respective nineteenth-and twentieth-century aesthetic positions. Paula Rego is one of the most literary painters working in this country today. With increasing frequency her work begins with a prior set narrative or literary text, but her relationship to that text, as she herself acknowledges, is a disrespectful one, which seeks to destabilise games and hierarchies. In her own words, 'I always want to turn things on their heads, to upset the established order, to change heroines and idiots. If the story is "given", I take liberties with it, to make it conform to my own experiences, and to be outrageous. At the same time as loving the stories I want to undermine them, like wanting to harm the person you love' (quoted in McEwen, 1997, 138). The stories she tells in painting, therefore, stories recounted, as Marina Warner puts it, 'from a place ... generally overlooked, the female child's' (Warner, 1994, 8), and with the intent of anarchy, are as much profanities uttered against the 'master text' – the literary text – as they are against the metatext, the status quo against which she deploys her sacrilegious imagination.
33 Centaur
Commenting upon some of the early work of the 1960s, Germaine Greer contends that paintings such as Centaur (figure 33) are both flatteringly imitative pastiches of Picasso and the Catalan Primitives and biting satires on them, their motifs not so much quoted as snatched, for frighteningly outlandish purposes (Greer, 1988, 29).
This double-edged defiance, which flatters by allusion while simultaneously hijacking a master text, operates also with reference to Eça de Queirós's novel. The pivot of the relationship between text and canvas in this case is laughter, and more particularly differing modes of laughter.
Both Paula and Eça laugh with the intent of social critique. But Eça de Queirós laughed at what was bad in society in order to point the path to goodness; in other words, he laughed irreverently but with a missionary zeal and the objective of social and moral reform.3 Paula Rego's laughter carries a different resonance.
Marina Warner eerily talks of Paula's universe as 'a home that's become odd, prickly with desire, and echoing with someone's laughter' (Warner, 1994, 7). Less cryptically, Victor Willing observed that while Paula 'discovered early that humour can disarm the pompous and insincere', she also 'disappointed some admirers who wanted more, when she decided that some things are not a laughing matter' (Willing, 1988b, 273). Thus, what many critics have seen as Eça's great flaw as a writer – the inability to know when to stop laughing and begin weeping – does not find an echo in Rego's darker approach. In this artist, mirth is sometimes abruptly reined in, and can turn nasty with disconcerting suddenness, aiming not so much to reform as to wreak havoc.
But if Paula Rego is a hit-and-run artist, a changeling at the heart of the established order, she is also, and causally, a defensive one. Expressing the enduring desire to give fear a face through painting it, Victor Willing argues that she laughs at the characters in her stories in order 'to make them less dangerous'. The intent to tackle perceived threats, however, is carried as far as and then possibly a little further than is strictly necessary for defensive purposes, and, as Willing adds, it can entail 'a great deal of violence' perpetrated against those characters (Willing, 1971, 44).
While acknowledging the shared thematic territory between artist and writer in these pictures, therefore, it is necessary also to recognise the ground that separates them. In doing so, it may be helpful to consider Ernst van Alphen's distinction between the concepts of figurative and figural painting. The former refers to illustrative work whereas the latter deliberately does not imply 'a relationship between an object outside the painting [for example, in the text] and the figure in the painting that supposedly illustrates that object'. In the latter case, the figure in the painting 'is and refers only to itself' (Alphen, 1992, 28). I would suggest that in the case of the Father Amaro pastels, as well as with much of Paula Rego's painting, while the works ostensibly illustrate the text and even specific scenes in the text, the phenomenon with which we are dealing overall is a figural rather than a figurative performance, entailing in some cases no more than a superficial reference to the narrative, or simply continuity in the casting of protagonists. The text thus becomes the pretext for images whose links to it may in fact be tenuous. In Paula Rego, the pictorial responses to the set text differ from it, to varying degrees, in terms of what is thematically ventured. Whether dealing with fairy tales, nursery rhymes, eighteenth-century artists (Hogarth), nineteenth or twentieth-century writers (Eça de Queirós, Jean Genet, Blake Morrison), her paintings are in equal measure homages and challenges to beloved but flouted precursors. And the text, therefore, at times may act as no more than the catalyst for an elaborately choreographed performance stating that the apparent link between text and picture is, in fact, illusory. In these more extreme instances the images declare their independence from the written word to which they purport to refer. The picture as performance therefore enacts its separation from a text whose disconnection from that same picture leads to the creation of a universe with a disturbing otherness from the instigating narrative that actually is the point. Or one of the points. A point rendered all the more intriguing because of all the surface parallels that are allowed to endure.
The preoccupations that had haunted the paintings of previous decades might be said to lead directly to the point where we now are, namely a set of paintings triggered by Portugal's most resolutely anti-clerical novel, a text that considered a social reality in which truly there was no place for a woman. Or not, at least, for one who was not dead. Eça de Queirós published The Sin of Father Amaro in 1875 at a period when the conflict between the absolutist and liberal factions that had led to thirty years of civil war had somewhat, but not entirely, abated. A system of two-party rotation ensured political stability, albeit at the price of stagnation. The perceived threats of republicanism and atheism were kept at bay through the 1847 Concordat with the Vatican (a forerunner of Salazar's similar move in 1940), which guaranteed a union of church and anti-liberal state interests. The analogies between the nineteenth-century status quo which Eça satirised and Paula Rego's bête noire, the Estado Novo, are therefore striking, and almost certainly contributed to the attraction this novel held for her.
Briefly, the novel revolves around the figure of a Catholic priest, Father Amaro, newly appointed thanks to his influential contacts to the prosperous parish of Leiria, a small town in central Portugal. Amaro lodges with a middle-aged matron, S. Joaneira and her nubile daughter, Amelia, and quickly settles into a comfortable life in a clerical environment, shored up by the devout support of a number of beatas or pious women, who bowed to priestly authority in all matters. Amaro, forced into the priesthood by his childhood benefactress, the Marchioness of Alegros, whose maid his mother had been, finds satisfaction in the power his position gives him over his predominantly female flock, but is frustrated by the celibacy his vows require of him. The plot moves steadily towards his inevitable seduction of Amélia. After the humiliation of a poverty-stricken, orphaned childhood among servants, the hardships of the seminary and the daily degradation of being, as he sees it, a eunuch among men, Amaro rejoices in being leader of the pack. As priest in an ultra-Catholic society he rules in the name of God, church and state. Moreover, as her lover, and her confessor, he controls the heart and mind of the adoring Amélia, the flower of the congregation.
Amaro and Amélia enjoy their sexual encounters in the house of the sexton, which Amélia visits once or twice a week, ostensibly to pay charitable calls on the sexton's daughter, Totó, who is bedridden with tuberculosis. After a while, Amélia discovers that she is pregnant, and disaster threatens them. With the connivance of Amaro's superior and moral mentor, Canon Dias, and the grudging help of Dona Josefa, the latter's sanctimonious sister, it is contrived that when the pregnancy begins to show, Dias will take Amélia's mother (whose long-standing lover, in his turn, he is) away for their annual holiday while Amélia retreats with Dona Josefa, her godmother, to a remote country house. There she will give birth and discreetly dispose of the child before returning to her old life as if nothing had happened.
Things proceed smoothly enough up to a point, but Amélia dies in childbirth, an event which is concealed by the two priests, who tell the world in general and her mother in particular that she died of a sudden aneurism. One other event, perhaps the crucial one as regards the moral structure of the novel, remains to be told. To Amaro falls the task of disposing of the new-born infant whom he had wished stillborn. When it comes to making arrangements, Amaro faces a dilemma: his servant, Dionísia, her very name suggestive of amorality, offers him two choices: the first is a bona fide wet nurse who would rear the child with a reasonable guarantee of discretion, albeit in a country where sniggers about suspicious priests' 'nephews', 'nieces' and 'godchildren' sometimes, although not frequently, had been known to ruin a cleric's career. The other is a woman called Carlota, sinisterly known as a 'weaver of angels' (tecedeira de anjos) because no child placed under her care survived longer than a day or two, being dispatched instead as the locals ironically put it, to be an angel in heaven. Amaro wrestles briefly with his conscience but contracts Carlota, and when his son is born hands him over to the infanticidal nurse. When he hears the following day that Amélia has died of postpartum complications, he tries to rescue the child, only to find that it is already dead. The postscript to the initial inconsolable sorrow over Amélia and guilt over his murdered child is the spectacle of an unmistakeably prosperous Amaro ten years after these events. We learn that in the aftermath of Amélia's death, he was sent to an even better parish, where he now lives, untouched by previous scandal, wielding power in clerical circles still with an eye for the ladies, although now prudently only married ones, following the logic that in the event of pregnancy, 'whoever is the husband is the father' (Eça de Queirós, 2002, 342). As is almost always the case in Eça's writing, throughout the narrative but more emphatically so in these concluding pages, the personal is made political through the extrapolation from Amaro's moral decadence to that of the nation at large:
'The truth, gentlemen, is that foreigners envy us. And I'm not saying what I'm about to say merely to flatter, but, as long as we have priests like you worthy of respect, Portugal will maintain, with dignity, its place in Europe. Because faith, gentlemen, is the very basis of order.'
'Absolutely, Count, absolutely,' agreed the two priests warmly.
'Well, just look around you! What peace, what vigour, what prosperity!'
And he made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole of the Largo do Loreto, which, at that hour, at the close of a serene afternoon, contained the essence of city life. Empty carriages rode slowly by; women in twos tottered past, wearing false hair and high heels and displaying the anaemic pallor of a degenerate race; trotting by on a scrawny nag came a young man, the bearer of a famous name, still green about the gills from the previous night's drinking spree; on the benches in the square people lay sprawled in a state of torpor; an ox cart lurching along on its high wheels was like the symbol of an antiquated agricultural system dating back centuries; pimps swayed past, a cigarette clenched between their teeth; the odd bored bourgeois gentleman stood perusing advertisements for outmoded operettas; the haggard faces of workers seemed the very personification of moribund industries. And beneath the warm, splendid sky, this whole decrepit world moved sluggishly along past urchins selling tickets for the lottery or for a raffle and boys with plangent voices offering the latest issue of some almanac; they meandered indolently back and forth between two gloomy church façades and the long ranks of houses round the square where three pawnshop signs glinted in the sun and the entrances to four taverns beckoned blackly, and flowing out into the square were alleyways, squalid and dirty as open sewers, issuing from a neighbourhood steeped in prostitution and crime.
'Just look around you/said the Count. 'Just look at all this peace, prosperity and contentment. It's hardly surprising that we're the envy of Europe!'
And the man of state and the two men of religion stood in a row by the monument railings, heads held high, savouring the glorious certainty of their country's greatness, there, beside that statue, beneath the cold, bronze gaze of the old poet, erect and noble, with the broad shoulders of a mighty paladin, his epic poem in his heart, his sword grasped firmly in his hand, and surrounded by the chroniclers and heroic poets of the old country – a country for ever past, a memory almost forgotten! (Eça de Queirós, 2002, 469–70)
I will now begin to look at Paula Rego's Queirós' Amaro pictures, starting with The Company of Women (figure 34).
Paula's art teacher from her school days in Estoril was an Englishman called Patrick Sarsfield to whom, when she left, she gave a picture of a man lying drowned on a beach, the first and forerunner, as he was later to suggest, of the many male victims in her paintings (McEwen, 1997, 37–8). This early propensity may be said to connect to her depictions of childhood in painting, in a way that is particularly apposite in considering The Company of Women. Alberto de Lacerda has written of Paula Rego that she 'knows all about the ligaments of innocence twisted by perversity and oppression' (de Lacerda, 1978, 12), a description which adapts itself exactly to an early narrative flashback to the young Amaro in the novel:
Amaro was, as the servants put it, a 'bit of a namby-pamby'. He never played games and never ran about in the sun. When he accompanied the Marchioness on an afternoon stroll along the avenues of the estate, and she took the arm of Father Liset or of Freitas, her respectful administrator, he would walk by her side, silent and shy, fiddling clammily with the linings of his trouser pockets and feeling slightly afraid of the thick groves of trees and the lush, tall grasses.
He became increasingly fearful. He could only sleep with a nightlight burning and with his bed drawn up near that of an old nursemaid. The maids feminised him; they thought him pretty and would encourage him to nestle amongst them; they would tickle him and smother him in kisses, and he would roll in their skirts, brushing against their bodies, uttering little contented shrieks. Sometimes, when the Marchioness went out, they would dress him up as a woman, all the while hooting with laughter; and he, with his languid manner and voluptuous eyes, would abandon himself to them, half-naked, his face flushed. The maids also made use of him in their intrigues with each other: Amaro became their bearer of tales. He became a gossip and a liar. (Eça de Queirós, 2002, 25–6)
34 The Company of Women
It is this early Amaro, the child as father of the man, that Paula Rego focuses on in this picture. She has explained that in certain of the images and specifically in this one she chose to use an adult male model to represent the child. In this way, I would argue, not only are Amaro's early childhood propensities depicted as translating exactly into the adult man, but moreover, by a reverse (and perverse) process, the adult man is emasculated and infantilised back to the early position of disempowered infancy, which here represents him clinging doggedly – doggily – to the capacious skirts of the serving maids.
Beyond the flashbacks to childhood, the body of the novel concentrates on the adult Amaro, the priest who despotically demands from Amélia, and to a lesser extent from the devout old women that surround him, absolute submission to his will and desires. Eça deterministically traced this autocratic impetus back to that early childhood disempowerment at the hands of a series of controlling women: the mother who denied him a father, the Marchioness who made him a priest, the servants who alternately teased and mollycoddled him, and the Virgin Mary who, in his seminary days, figured prominently in his adolescent fantasies:
In his bed, late at night, he would toss and turn, unable to sleep, and in his deepest imaginings and dreams, he would burn with desire for Woman, like a silent, red-hot coal.
In his cell there was an image of the Virgin crowned with stars and standing on a sphere, gazing up at the immortal light, while trampling a serpent underfoot.
Amaro would turn to her, as if to a refuge, and would say a Hail Mary; but when he lay looking at the lithograph, he would forget all about the holiness of the Virgin and would see before him merely a pretty blonde girl; he would sigh adoringly; he would cast lubricious glances at her as he undressed; in his curiosity he would even imagine himself lifting the chaste folds of the image's blue tunic to reveal shapely forms, white flesh. Then it seemed to him that he could see the eyes of the Tempter glinting in the darkness of the room, and he would carefully sprinkle his bed with holy water, but he never dared reveal these ecstasies in the confessional on Sundays. (Eça de Queirós, 2002, 32)
But while in the novel Eça consigns Amaro's childish disempowerment to an explanatory flashback, Paula Rego gives it prominence here and elsewhere, in her depiction of this melancholic and then murderous man-child.
The mirror which appears in this as well as in other pictures in this series (The Ambassador of Jesus, figure 37; The Coop, figure 45; Mother, plate 12) will be important to this reading. A considerable amount has been written about the use of mirrors in paintings. Norman Bryson for example has suggested that 'what the mirror ... within a picture introduce[s] is the idea of a radical disjunction' (Bryson, 1990, 152), a separation of states or terms deployed within the same painting. To this one might add that a mirror can also be said to render viewpoints and interpretations relative – by adding an alternative angle of perception – and to shatter the viewers' illusion of a unified objective reality ('what I think I see is what is in fact there') by offering an alternative view, one that contains differences. In the case of The Company of Women, as I shall go on to argue, and reverting to Bryson's terminology, the disjunction introduced is a distinction between the present self outside the mirror and the childhood self reflected in it, the latter representing that which the adult self longs to see, while being debarred from doing so. In the mirror paintings in this series (for example, Mother, plate 12), Amaro never looks directly into the mirror. Paula Rego has suggested that she uses mirrors in order to provide the illusion of space while avoiding giving the characters the benefit of windows, a remark that suggests their punitive enclosure in claustrophobic spaces. Writing on the subject of The Policeman's Daughter (figure 32), John McEwen discusses the notion of windows which are open but offer no view and no means of escape (McEwen, 1997, 167). As alluded to in earlier chapters in connection with Time: Past and Present (figure 8) and The Policeman's Daughter, the solipsistic mirror which turns the gaze upon the self, much like the door or window without a prospect, bears relevance both to an individual (psychological) and to a national (historical) plight, conjured up by Eça in nineteenth-century Portugal and by Paula's post-dictatorship work in the twentieth. In the course of this chapter I shall contend that the mirror with a single view (the self), and the window with a restricted view of the sea or with no view (The Policeman's Daughter, figure 32; Mother, plate 12), both represent knives turned in historical and political wounds. For now, however, I should like to argue that, at the level of individual psychic concerns, a mirror can be defined as the stage upon which the narcissistic plot of self-love and self-searching is enacted. The mirror reflects the self caught in the vortex of a self-destructive narcissistic gaze.
If, as Paula Rego suggested, the adult man in The Company of Women (figure 34) represents the lost child, the mirror into which he wishes to gaze represents the narcissistic pull which in Amaro will remain unsatisfied, and which itself alludes to a more basic, primeval desire. Following Freud, the Oedipal son fears castration by the father as retaliation for his incestuous desire for the mother, and resolves this crisis by relinquishing the latter and identifying with the punitive male parent. In this way he gains entry into the sphere of empowered masculinity, while retaining a repressed longing for the mother whose loss was the price paid for the privilege of becoming a man (male). The vacuum opened by the loss of the mother, however, can lead to the pathological route of narcissism, a feeling which is sought and used as a means of filling the void created by abandoning the beloved female parent. The man who gazes into the mirror, or, as may be the case here, longs to see but is cruelly denied his own reflection, is the arrested Oedipal son, whose filial detachment from the mother has been only imperfectly achieved. That dilemma is given brutal iconographic expression in The Cell (figure 35).
For the adult but still narcissistic Amaro, orphaned at an early age, his destiny controlled by the old Marchioness, and alternately bullied and spoilt by her maid servants, Amélia represents one of two possibilities. First and more straightforwardly in the novel she is the woman whose submission in the face of his despotic love pours balm on his wounded Oedipal ego:
From that very first morning in Esguelhas' house, she had abandoned herself to him absolutely and entirely, body, soul, will and emotions: there was not a hair on her head, not an idea, however small, in her mind that did not belong to Father Amaro .. She lived with her eyes fixed on him, in a state of animal obedience; she only looked away and down when he spoke or when the moment came to unbutton her dress. Amaro took prodigious pleasure in this domination; it was a revenge for a whole past life of dependencies – his uncle's house, the seminary, the white salon of the Conde de Ribamar. His entire existence as a priest was one long humble bow that wearied his soul ... . As a priest, he spent his days praising, adoring and offering up incense to God, and now he too was the God of that creature who feared him and who regularly offered up her devotions to him. For her, at least, he was handsome, and better than any count or duke, and as worthy of a mitre as the wisest of men. (Eça de Queirós, 2002, 312–13)
35 The Cell
Second, and this is one of the ways in which Paula Rego's vision so audaciously asserts what Eça chose to understate, Amélia is also in Amaro's eyes a secular rendering of Mary, a virgin he sinfully deflowers and a Holy Mother whom as an adolescent he had dreamed of possessing in incest and profanity.
In a later scene in the novel Amaro goes one step further, by wrapping Amélia in a cloak taken from a statue of the Virgin and initiating sex with her while she is wearing it:
And so it was that, one morning, he showed her the cloak of Our Lady that had arrived only days before, a present from a rich devotee in Ourém. Amélia thought it wonderful. It was made of blue satin embroidered with stars to represent the sky, and blazing forth from its centre was an exquisitely worked golden heart surrounded by golden roses. Amaro unfolded the cloak and held it up to the window, so that the heavy embroidery caught the light ...
He placed it over her shoulders and fastened the engraved silver clasp over her breast. Then with a smile of devout, ardent pleasure, he stood back to admire her as she stood wrapped in the cloak, frozen and afraid ...
Amaro said in stammering, rapturous tones: 'Oh, my love, you're even lovelier than Our Lady!' ...
Amaro came up behind her, folded his arms over her chest and clasped her to him, then he leaned over and placed his lips on hers in a long, silent kiss. Amélia closed her eyes and her head fell back, heavy with desire. Amaro's lips remained avidly pressed to hers, sucking out her soul. Her breathing quickened, her legs shook, and with a moan she fainted on Amaro's shoulder, pale and overwhelmed with pleasure. (Eça de Queirós, 2002, 320–2)
In an author whose obsession with incest is notorious – all of his most important novels deal with it, whether real (between cousins, between brother and sister) or symbolic (between Amaro as priest and spiritual father and Amélia as his daughter in the parish flock) – mother–son incest nonetheless remained taboo.4
Eça may have shied away from it as the most emotive version of this interdiction, but Paula Rego's less hesitant scalpel lays it bare for us with an added sacrilegious flavour and appallingly little restraint. In The Cell we contemplate not only sex with the mother, but sex with the Virgin Mary, humanity's Mother, as well as masturbatory sex, which by definition is narcissistic sex without issue clearly not for procreation.
This picture corresponds partly to the episode already referred to in the novel, in the course of which Amaro, while a young seminarist, fantasises sexually about the Virgin Mary. The scene is depicted by Paula Rego with a profanity magnified in various ways. Amaro, the adolescent again portrayed as a mature man, lies on a bed in a suspicious posture. Let us hear the artist herself: 'He is deeply lonely and is masturbating. I am sorry for him, but he ought not to take advantage of Our Lady' (Marques Gastão, 1999, 44). The effigy of the Virgin concealed under the bed presumably acts as the fetishising accessory to the forbidden act of masturbation. The composition breaks a breathtaking number of taboos. First the religious taboo of sex with, or à propos of, the Virgin Mary. Second, the universal interdiction of desire for the mother, and, even worse here, a Holy Mother and a virginal one at that. Third, the gender betrayal entailed in the abandonment of masculinity (because if masculinity is the status attained post-Oedipally by the son who successfully jettisons desire for the mother in favour of identification with the father – and, in the case of a priest, with God the Father – that trajectory is here reversed by this foetal, contumacious, womb-driven, mother-desiring son). And fourth, the desecration of the familial, domestic space which traditionally is the realm of the mother (and of this Holy Mother). If, as Mieke Bal (1990, 515) argues, the figure of the woman set in a domestic interior constitutes a genre within which the household becomes a female affair and men are intruders (for example in the seventeenth-century Dutch school of ter Borch, de Hooch and Vermeer, figure 36), Rego here reverses that generic expectation.
Instead she depicts an empty space from which the woman has decamped, leaving in her place the simulacrum of a fleshless effigy, as well as a space which is cell-like yet not monastic (because sexually defiled), not homely but unheimlich (Freud, 1919, 335–76).
In this picture Amaro is simultaneously an adult man and a foetal presence. He both lies and does not lie (because the bed separates them), on top of the effigy of the Virgin, She in her turn is positioned as the obliging receptacle for his sexual and emotional outpourings, but paradoxically also as the unattainable object of desire whose maternal lap is rendered inaccessible by the concrete mass of the bed. The bed as obstacle may itself be a further reference to the novel, in the course of which Amaro's escalation of the seduction strategy destined to bring Amélia to his bed is partially conducted through the intermediary (and barrier) of the confessional, which physically separates them by means of a wooden partition.
36 Johannes Vermeer, A Lady Writing
Paula Rego's rendering of Amaro's standard Oedipal relationship to a variety of mothers and lovers, holy and secular (his biological mother, the Virgin Mary, the maid servants, the Marchioness, Amélia wrapped in the Virgin's cloak), lends itself also to a post-Freudian reading. According to the various reformulations of writers such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow, in parallel to the Oedipal castration conflict with the father and the final identification with him by the son, there operates a much more fundamental and instinctive need for escape from the mother (Chodorow, 1979; Dinnerstein, 1987; Kristeva, 1974). According to Dinnerstein the psychic dominion of the father becomes apparent as in fact the less ominous alternative to being subsumed into the body of the mother, and it is therefore preferable to the danger the mother represents.
Contrary to mainstream Freudian thought, certain schools of revisionist object-relations psychoanalysis reinstate the maternal as the focus of analysis. Dinnerstein and Chodorow argue that in a culture in which the care of children falls almost exclusively to the woman, the mother is simultaneously the first love, the first witness and the first source of frustration for the child. The mother allays hunger, tiredness, pain, boredom and fear. Or fails to do these things. She is the source of all that is good and all that is bad in the sensory world of the infant, and is experienced by it as the source of absolute power over life and death, a fact which determines the nature of relations between the sexes in adulthood. According to this understanding, the post-Oedipal mother becomes the entity who must of necessity be confronted and discarded by a son who, according to Simone de Beauvoir, will define himself as an independent being through his rebellion against her (Beauvoir, 1988, 501–42), or by means of her elimination. Paradoxically, and to complicate matters, for the grown son, furthermore, the mother under patriarchy comes to be seen as the representative of a sex who is disenfranchised from power, a sex, which luckily, is not his own, and from which he must separate himself.5
The development of masculine identity, therefore, and the integration of the ego are seen to depend upon a process of painful separation from the mother, which paradoxically goes hand in hand with an enduring if contradictory desire for return to amniotic fusion in the maternal womb. That fusion, however, can only be achieved at the price of abandoning all that was achieved when the Oedipal son abandoned desire for the mother in exchange for entry into the empowered masculine realm of the father. The mother signifies regression to lack of autonomy, the loss of post-Oedipal individuation. The return to her and to the state of pre-identity she represents, therefore, signals both a danger to the self and a crime against the Law of the Father. The punishment is a loss of separation which, however, paradoxically, may also appear as the paradisiacal recovery of lost unity with the maternal body in infancy.
The mother, therefore, is everything and nothing, literally the be-all and end-all of the son who loves her but must abandon her, only to find sometimes, as is the case with Amaro, that he can never fully do so. Her impact is necessarily threefold, encompassing as it does the good mother–bad mother–powerless mother triad, and her effect upon the filial psyche is equally blurred. Paula Rego's portrayal of this ambivalence is achieved through the unsettling images of a taciturn Amélia/Mary, and her impact upon Amaro, in pictures such as The Ambassador of Jesus (figure 37), Mother (plate 12) and Amélia's Dream (plate 13). And the resulting disquiet is commensurate with a similar ambiguity in the portrayal of Amaro himself. In The Cell (figure 35), he appears simultaneously as a grown man and a foetus-like child, and the desecration perpetrated against this Sacred Mother, as well as all other mothers, is both the act of a child denied his sexual wish and the violation of a woman by a responsible adult. But what Paula Rego taps into here, furthermore, is the compounded defiance not just of the mother but of the father whose sexual chattel is defiled by the contumacious Oedipal son. The sexual possession of any mother, let alone a Holy one, Bride of God and Mother of that God's Son, must have seemed the iconoclastic equivalent of vindictively killing several birds (a maternal one, a paternal one, a religious one – and by association a political one) with one stone, through the fulfilment of the lapse into Oedipal desire.
The figure of the man who could not or would not grow up is not new in the artist's work. In this group of pictures, as in her earlier Peter Pan series, Paula Rego deals with a maternally fixated, mother-loving, mother-hating and mother-raping, Oedipally arrested son unable or unwilling to exchange the mother for the father, Mary for God, or Amelia for the Pope (in this case papal intransigence regarding priestly celibacy). More importantly, she emphasises not the quaint but rather the murky implications of that masculine refusal to grow up. If what the mirror reflects back at the narcissistic son is the regression unleashed by the inability to accept the loss of the mother, it is not surprising that in these pictures Amaro can never allow himself to gaze into that maternal abyss which for him, and for men in general, encompasses both delight and death. In this twisted, pathological spiral of the desiring and hating mother–son encounter, we find truly enacted the maxim according to which Paula Rego defined certain works of art as being underpinned by the theme of intended harm done to those one loves most.
In Eça's novel, part of Amaro's seduction strategy involves the brainwashing of Amélia with doctrines supporting the quasi-divine status of priests as temporal delegates of the divine will: 'Then he would dazzle her with venerable quotations: St Clement, who called the priest "the earthly God": eloquent St John Chrysostom, who said that "the priest is the ambassador who brings orders from God'" (315). The next image I wish to consider, The Ambassador of Jesus (figure 37), refers to the scene in the novel, quoted above, in the course of which Amaro meets Amélia in the sacristy and dresses her in the cloak of the Virgin (320–2).
In that passage of extraordinary eroticism, both become aroused by Amélia's impersonation of the Virgin, but the ultimate profanity (sex on the floor of the church with the Virgin, or at least with a woman wearing her clothing) is cut short when Amélia snaps out of her swoon, in terror at the sin she has committed. Paula Rego's picture, staged in front of a mirror in which once again we see Amaro's reflection, but he himself does not, appears to concentrate on Amélia's moment of recoil, bypassing any preliminary delight. As ever, in Rego, pain without pleasure and even punishment without an actual crime appears to be the fate of the male.
In the novel, as already described, Amaro is an orphan who lost his father and was brought up among women (his biological mother, who also dies young, the Marchioness who finances his education, the servants who cosset him), only to be brutally separated from them at puberty and confined in the all-male world of the seminary, where the only female presence is the fetishistic picture of the Virgin. This transition from all-enveloping femininity in early childhood to absolute separation from it upon entering the masculine world of God the Father will leave Amaro forever prey to post-Oedipal bereavement and ensuing narcissism. This is partly, but only partly, assuaged when, upon arrival in Leiria, he settles into his lodgings with Amélia and S. Joaneira, 'with good food, a soft mattress and the sweet company of women' (81). For Amaro, henceforward, the perfect woman will always need to combine in herself those lost childhood mothers as well as the desired Virgin of his puberty. She must be simultaneously virgin, whore and mother. Amélia represents this conflation, standing in as she does for the Virgin upon whom she models herself and in whose cloak he wraps her, the object of desire who supplies him with illicit sex, the mother who administers home comforts to him and later (albeit more problematically), the mother of his own son. She is therefore the woman who grants him the possibility of satisfying various fantasies concerning both the nature of the ideal woman and his own status, the latter requiring the synthesis of the three mutually exclusive images of himself to which he subscribes: God (or husband) of the Virgin, lover (or seducer) of his object of desire, and little boy (or son) of a mother figure who, however, will be punished by death when she betrays him by conceiving a rival child, namely his own son.
37 The Ambassador of Jesus
Amélia, the parishioner and spiritual daughter whom in moments of passion he calls filha (literally 'daughter' in Portuguese but translatable into English as a term of endearment such as 'baby'), is therefore the daughter, the mother, the lover and the Virgin. In all these roles, however, his agency upon her is a sullying one: he sullies the spiritual daughter whose weakness he abuses, the mother he incestuously desires, the lover he kills through a lethal pregnancy and the Virgin Mother he deflowers, kisses, makes love to or uses as an aid to masturbation. Thus in the scene in the sacristy, as depicted in The Ambassador of ]esus, a series of religious, social and blood taboos is simultaneously broken. The desecration is emphasised in two ways: in the backdrop to the profane event we discern scenes alluding first to the domesticity (the woman peeling vegetables) into which Amaro was made welcome by S. Joaneira (another mother or motherly woman whom he betrays by seducing her daughter); and second to the innocence which Amélia once possessed but later loses under his influence (as epitomised by the little girl on the chair playing with her doll).
Be that as it may, this picture presents us first and foremost with the negating moment in which Amaro, the representative (ambassador) upon earth of God the Father and God the Son, in polluting the Daughter (child), the Bride (as represented by the white dress worn by Amélia here), and the Mother (symbolised by the Holy Mother's blue cloak), encounters not paradisiacal pleasure but rejection. The sexual bliss that would have been the justifiable prize in exchange for which he gives his soul is replaced by denial, as indicated by the outstretched arm with which Amélia keeps him at a distance. In the novel, the aftermath of Amelia's horror at the outrage they have jointly perpetrated against the Virgin's sanctity is her refusal to make love the same day, thus denying her despotic father–lover his sexual rights, and the little boy his Oedipal wish. In Rego's picture, the reaction to the paternal or priestly hand on her forehead and the libidinous one on her thigh (echoes of the policeman's daughter's raping/ministering hands, figure 32) goes one step beyond sexual rejection. Her posture mirrors that of the angel above her head (which prefigures that in Angel, plate 15, also in this series) and acts as an implied exorcism.
In Paula Rego's vision, the transgression against God the Father implied in the attempted abduction of the Bride and Mother by a priest who has betrayed his vows signals the disintegration of masculine solidarity across secular and divine lines. Amaro breaks ranks, but this betrayal does not even gain the filial/Oedipal/sexual pay-off for which it would have been worthwhile risking damnation. The mirror into which he cannot, or forgets to, look, reflects back at us, if not at him, the regressive image of the motherless and mother-loving child who will never find compensation for that earlier maternal loss: not through narcissism and self-love (he does not look in the mirror and can never truly love himself), nor through the abandonment of the mother in favour of a wholehearted identification with the father; nor even by rebelling for good and all against that father (God the Father) and resigning from masculinity and the priesthood in favour of an Oedipal return to the maternal feminine, which, in any case, ultimately, in this picture, rejects him.
For Amaro, a repressed man arid reluctant priest, women in general and Amélia in particular will remain endlessly problematic: the mother who
38 Girl with Gladioli and Religious Figures
died and left him, the godmother who castrated him by making him a priest, the servants who both loved and taunted him, and, most of all, Amélia who loves yet rejects him, and who moreover brings the wheel full circle by dying like his own mother. Problematic though the female sex proves to be, however, the murder of the child whose birth has killed Amélia, explicit in the novel and implicit in pictures such as The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (figure 47), to be discussed presently, reinstates a Freudian scenario of inimical fathers and sons at war with each other, counterproductive to the interests of patriarchy. In killing the son who is a man's passport to immortality, Amaro destroys both himself and arguably the divinity he represents on earth. This emphasis, both in the novel and in the pictures, ultimately emphasises the fragility of patriarchal bastions whose endurance surely depends on the Darwinian urge for continuity and on the solidarity of males – both divine and secular – united within the established order.
39 Crivelli's Garden (left panel)
Instead, Amaro burns his boats, and severs his ties with God by breaking his celibacy vows. In Girl with Gladioli and Religious Figures (figure 38) the woman or women for whose sake he does this – Amélia in her various guises as mother, daughter, Virgin and lover – metamorphose into something both unfathomable and dangerous.
Paula Rego described this picture as a depiction of Amélia (standing in the foreground wearing white bloomers) as a living shrine or reliquary, incarnating in her bosom, to which her left hand points, the relics and redemptive potential of other unspecified saints. This artist's excursions into the subjects of sainthood and hagiography, most famously in the mural of Crivelli's Garden (figure 39) in the National Gallery in London, disclose an idiosyncratic approach to received wisdom, not only regarding what are seen to be the significant events and standard interpretations of the lives of saints, but, more disturbingly, regarding who exactly, constitutes a saint.
Thus in Crivelli's Garden, which ostensibly presents us with a gallery of female saints, there appear, side by side with the uncontroversial figures of the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth and St Catherine, the figures of women who might be more immediately associated with examples of female evil, denounced by the Holy Church since time immemorial. We notice for example the figures of two unusual saints: Mary Magdalene and St Margaret. Although these women are not controversial in themselves, in an interview about these panels, Paula Rego emphasised the less orthodox facets, such as the legend that St Margaret was swallowed by the Devil and later burst out of his stomach, thus becoming the patron saint of women in labour (McEwen, 1997, 258). The choice of a semi-demonic eruption rather than a virgin birth as role model for prospective mothers must seem at the very least unexpected. Nonetheless, Mary Magdalene and St Margaret, respectively a prostitute who became a saint and a saint who became an iconic mother but who, confusingly, subsequently befriends the Devil who swallowed her, are outdone in hagiographic eccentricity by the remaining figures of Judith, the assassin of her suitor Holofernes, whose head is here held in a bag, and Delilah, the betrayer of Samson, both notable examples of female treachery (or, in another reading, resourcefulness), but in any case improbable saints.
Against the background of such idiosyncratic interpretations of sanctity, Amélia, a reliquary enshrined in living flesh, can be understood as a vehicle of Regoesque alterity. In her case, as in that of Judith and Delilah, holiness is seen to be seriously askew: the woman who in Amaro's rogue perception is the representative of Mary is a Virgin who allows herself to be penetrated by a man, and a mother who surrenders her child to infanticide. In doing so, she undermines both the untouchability of the Marian ideal and the omnipotence of God the Father, so that the son to whom she gives birth, albeit begotten by his priestly envoy on earth, is shown to differ from the original Holy Child in two crucial ways: he is both tainted by original sin (due to the circumstances of his conception) and mortal (since he dies), both of course traits that Christ could never possess.
The dark figure seated beside Amélia in figure 38, described by Paula Rego as an assistant, seems to be presenting her to the viewer – 'behold the handmaid of the Lord' – but in this deviant fiat, the envoy of God is transformed through her clothing and facial expression into an Angel of Darkness. The background features an enigmatic tableau involving a saint (as indicated by her halo) hovering in the air, and a little girl who, ambiguously, is either holding her aloft or dragging her down to earth, in other words, either propelling her into the otherness of a witch-like sainthood (since it is usually witches, not saints, who fly through the air), or keeping her down in a secular, earthly dimension which blocks her ascension into orthodox spirituality (assumption into heaven). Either scenario is problematic and the disquiet is emphasised by another aspect of the composition, Isabel Pires de Lima draws our attention to the absence of feet in the flying figure, feet, she notes, usually being an important anatomic feature in Paula Rego, and whose absence here she interprets as facilitating the ascension of what she takes to be a wingless angel (Pires de Lima, 2001, 10). The little girl's posture does indeed have the effect of appearing to cut off the aerial figure's feet, an effect which, however, in itself might carry other equally ambiguous meanings: on the one hand the lopping off of inconvenient clay feet as a means of safeguarding the newly acquired spirituality of the other woman; and on the other a female version (with advantage again to the woman) of the decapitation of Holofernes and St John the Baptist by Judith and Salome respectively.
In addition, the child who holds the saint in a wrestler's grip wears the blue mantle of the Virgin (Pires de Lima, 2001, 25), and may in her turn be threatened with suffocation at the hands of the air-borne figure who appears to be pulling the mantle down over her head with some force. According to religious iconography, the traditional wearer of blue veils is Mary, but she appears here, paradoxically, both as a Madonna run amok and as the victim of behaviour which, other interpretations aside, evokes that Woolfian act of killing angels referred to in the previous chapter. The image thus reconfigures the figure of a Holy Mother who is in equal measure anarchic and vulnerable, but either way eludes reassuring categories. In this context, too, it is worth noting that the two figures in the upper left-hand corner lie partly outside the picture plane and frame, a compositional decision that suggests a leaking of pictorial anarchy into the established order of the outside world.6 The final blow delivered by this powerful picture, in connection with which the artist used the terms 'true and false angels', is the positioning in the foreground of a pot of flowers: not the lilies habitual to Marian iconography, but instead gladioli. In themselves gladioli would not be an unusual choice of symbol in a religious setting, given that they are flowers commonly used to adorn the altars of Portuguese churches. In the context of the pictorial narrative, however, the red flowers appear suspiciously like flames. And if they are the flames of hell, their representation here enlists them in the service of this coven of dubious women who only perfunctorily trouble to masquerade as saints. One of Paula Rego's favoured ploys in the game of cat and mouse that she repeatedly plays with her viewers through the agency of her protagonists can again be seen to be under way: we know that they know that we know that they are not what they pretend to be.
The picture of Amélia as a living reliquary represents the moment of rupture, the turning point which opened the way to a series of new possibilities with a gender agenda. These will be explored in the five pictures that follow, beginning with Lying (figure 40).
This picture does not refer to any specific moment in the novel itself but it might be linked to a vignette which takes place shortly after Amaro moves into lodgings with Amélia and her mother. The instant attraction each feels for the other reaches a pitch every night when Amaro, in his downstairs room, is aroused by the sounds of Amélia undressing and dropping her heavy skirts on the floor in the bedroom above. This arousal, brought about by the fantasy of a woman who at that point is still an unattainable virgin, connects back to the depiction of Amaro in The Cell (figure 35), masturbating over the image of that other Virgin who is Amélia's patron saint and was her predecessor in his fantasies. The special relationship that prevails in the novel between Amélia and the Virgin, linking them in a maternal/filial bond, introduces once again the dimension of incest into the relationship between Amaro and Mary/Amélia. He lusts after the Virgin's pet daughter, as he had once lusted after her (and his) Holy Mother. While Amaro longs silently for Amélia, she, in her turn, makes secret visits to his downstairs quarters when he is not there, kisses his pillow, collects the hairs from his comb and fantasises about a confused relationship, in the course of which she imagines herself kneeling at his feet in the confessional and embracing him as a lover in bed. Their unspoken love is brought into the open one afternoon when Amaro meets her out walking, and in the course of the walk kisses her. Amélia runs away, overcome by emotions, and later, reliving the many times when, alone in her room, she has despaired of his love, sends a profane prayer up to heaven: 'Our Lady of Sorrows, my protectress, please make him love me!' (112).
40 Lying
Paula Rego has said more than once that this work is a depiction of Amélia as a liar. A liar, or perhaps a hypocrite, but in any case controversial, since if the above reference to the novel is correct, it depicts one virgin begging another for the fulfilment of her sacrilegious desire for the man of the cloth who will relieve her of that burdensome virginity. The paradox is reproduced visually: Amélia prays for the consummation of her desires.
1 The Maids
2 Abracadabra
3 Two Girls and a Dog
4 In the Garden
5 Untitled b
6 Untitled c
7 Untitled d
8 Untitled g
9 The Cadet and His Sister
10 The Family
11 Looking Out.
12 Mother
13 Amélia's Dream
14 In the Wilderness
15 Angel
16 Untitled n. 1
17 Untitled n. 8
18 Untitled n. 6
19 Untitled n. 3
20 Untitled n. 7
21 Untitled n. 2
22 Love
Her posture is both genuflectory and sexually inviting, the open legs contradicting the semiotics of the hands united in prayer. Her dress, the bridal gown of a virgin who wishes to cease being one, is the same dress worn in The Company of Women (figure 34), by one of the servants who are surrogate (but not real) mothers to Amaro and in The Ambassador of Jesus by Amélia herself, who stands as understudy for the Virgin Mary (figure 37). Furthermore, the dress is offset by the butch boots she wears on her feet, which bring into question the costume's maidenly symbolism. The boots trample on the standard expectations of femininity which the virginal white dress had sought to sustain. Thus the significance of this dress worn by servants (handmaidens), virgin brides and Holy Mothers is invalidated, and the three faces of woman are transformed by the aggressive footwear, reviving instead the agency of aggressive or neglectful womanhood from Amaro's childhood onwards: the taunting servants, the departed mother, the castrating godmother, and the ambivalent beloved who on occasion appears to fear the Virgin's wrath more than she loves him (figure 37).
Amélia's immodest open-legged posture with the dress pulled over her thighs links this picture to the image of Totó, open-legged on a bed and not wearing a dress at all, in Girl with Chickens (figure 41).
In the novel, Totó is the daughter of the sexton in whose house Amaro and Amélia meet and have sex. Totó, who is in the last stages of tuberculosis, is the pretext offered to the world for Amélia's visits, ostensibly intended to teach the sick girl the catechism and thence the path to salvation before she dies. Ironically, we are told that the visits are planned to number seven a month, in reference to the Virgin Mary's seven lessons (328)7 Amélia's routine with Totó, performed with increasing perfunctoriness, involves hurriedly placing a volume of The Lives of Saints in her hands, prior to sneaking upstairs to the bedroom with Amaro. The differences and similarities between Amélia and Totó, in the novel and in these pictures respectively, reveal Paula Rego's extensive rewriting of her source texts, and her observation of their moral contradictions.
In the novel, intentionally or not, Eça contrasts Amélia's splendid health and buxom body with Totó's unwholesome and repulsive emaciation. One lies on the bed downstairs dying while the other lies on the bed upstairs being pleasured by her lover. Female representations by male authors in the Western literary canon tend to divide women into two broad categories: angel and monster or whore. The angel woman is modelled upon the cultural icon of the Virgin Mary: she is the dispenser of salvation to others but has no story of her own to tell. She is selfless and pure, self-sacrificial and chaste, self-effacing and silent. She is the daughter, mother, wife and sister of men, spirit rather than flesh, but as such is also one of the living dead. If alive, she is fragile, sick or dying. If dead, she is lyrically mourned.
The monster woman or whore is the counterpoint of the angel woman: she encapsulates all that the angel woman cannot do or be, and also, conveniently, all the female danger that must be brought under control by patriarchy, through consignment into a containing category. She personifies
41 Girl With Chickens
sexuality and the rule of self, autonomy and voice, independence, rebellion and self-affirmation. 'The monster woman, threatening to replace her angelic sister, embodies intransigent female autonomy and thus represents both the author's power to allay "his" anxieties by calling their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and, simultaneously, the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained "place" and thus generates a story that "gets away" from its author' (Gilbert and Cuban 1984, 28). 'As the Other, woman comes to represent the contingency of life, life that is made to be destroyed. "It is the horror of his own carnal contingence ... which man projects upon [woman]"' (Gilbert and Gubar, 1984, 34). The tidy and soothing compartmentalisation of women into reassuring either/or categories, however, frequently gives way in writing and in art of male authorship to the uneasy suspicion that in fact, behind every angelic façade there might lurk a monster woman waiting to escape. It is the confusion between categories, therefore, rather than anything inherent in either category itself, which emerges as the real threat to be either confronted, undone, or, if you are Paula Rego, nurtured to its full wicked potential.
In Girl with Chickens the implied counterpoint to the supposedly tubercular Totó is Amélia, a healthy girl for whom the former is a dark avatar. In fact, in the picture, though not necessarily in the novel, Amélia acts in absentia as Totó's partner in crime, and together they unsettle the stability of either/or definitions of womanhood. The model chosen to pose for Totó, oddly, was a dancer, and the healthy musculature which one associates with this physically demanding profession is painstakingly reproduced here, in the depiction of a character who in the original text was essentially wasting away with consumption, both physical and moral. Paula Rego thus dissolves the boundaries that separate the emaciation of disease from the leanness of energetic bodily exertion, and in doing so radically alters also what Totó stood for in Eça's tortuous vision. In the novel Totó is an object of compassion, but a repulsive one, pitiful yet loathsome. She is both the cover-up for Amaro's and Amélia's meetings and the person who denounces their affair to Canon Dias. Totó operates both as enabler of their passion's consummation and the obstacle to its unalloyed delight, terrifying Amélia by calling her a bitch and barking at her as the latter slips upstairs into her lover's arms.8 Furthermore, as the person who denounces the real purpose of Amélia's visits, in an attempt to put an end to the liaison, Totó arguably becomes the guardian of social, sexual and religious morality; but as the woman who herself desires Amaro – when he comes near her she sniffs at him with the animal heat of which she accuses Amélia – and as the acolyte of the lascivious Dias, she becomes associated not with morality but with the hypocritical appearance of it, as upheld by the clerics and pious women of the community.
Totó, furthermore, both as herself in this picture, and through the supposed contrast (but in fact unsettling resemblance) she bears to Amélia in the novel (both women desire Amaro, both die iconographically similar deaths), disturbingly dissolves a series of angel–whore boundaries normally left alone. In Rego's rendering, Totó, previously imprinted on our minds by Eça as the repulsive consumptive plunging to an ugly death, emerges as a solid, potentially desirable young woman: naked, nubile, available and ready, she sits rather than lies on the bed, not because she is sick but because she is not. The ostentatiously disagreeable instrument of a brutish and mendacious morality in the novel (the denouncer of Amaro and Amélia to a priest more corrupt even than they themselves), she is here translated into the visual icon of that (im)morality, but she appears also as the image of an in-yourface female sexuality which that same morality abhors but into which it has willy-nilly metamorphosed. Thus, as the novel's Totó, she exposes and castigates Amaro's and Amélia's lust, but as the modified Totó of this picture, she contradictorily, and perturbingly, reclaims the terrain and proclaims the rights of her own sexual desire, with considerable fanfare.
In Paula Rego's interpretation, the tubercular Totó becomes the diametric opposite of her blueprint sister-in-suffering, Camille Gautier, the Lady of the Camelias. While the latter is spiritualised by illness from sexy prostitute into asexual angel, Totó, whether lying feverishly in her literary bed or sexily in its visual representation here, becomes obsessed with carnal passion and with Amaro as the oxymoronic sacerdotal embodiment of the desirable:
The priest waited on the threshold, his hands in his pockets, bored and embarrassed by the paralysed girl's shining eyes, which never left him for a moment, penetrating him, exploring his body with ardour and astonishment, eyes that seemed even larger and more brilliant in her dark face, so gaunt that her cheekbones were clearly visible beneath the skin. (307)
In the novel, therefore, Totó contravenes the acceptable parameters of angelically suffering beauty, being neither beautiful nor angelic. And in the picture, Paula Rego pushes the boundaries of outrage in the opposite direction, by making her not sick but sexy. In Eça's text Totó and Amélia are absolute opposites, yet obscurely akin: the former is repulsive while technically conforming to established tenets of female desirability, since she is a dying virgin. The latter is attractive while deviating from the orthodoxy of these tenets, since she is healthy and also sexually active outside marriage. If we probe the details of this antithesis, however, the boundary that separates each from the other appears more precarious than even Eça himself might have cared to acknowledge. Each woman in different ways is lustful, unchaste, sinful and set for a premature death. In terms of both moral essence and destiny, they are sisters under the skin, and only circumstantially different from one another: Totó is sick while Amélia is healthy, but the latter not for long; Totó is ugly while Amélia is beautiful, but the latter also not for long. When she clambers into her deathbed at the end, damp with the colossal strain of labour, and lies 'motionless, her arms stiff, her clenched fists a dark purple colour, and her face ... the same colour, only darker' (447), her looks replicate the dying Totó's, 'prostrated by fever, in sheets wet from her constant sweating' (335). Each, furthermore, juxtaposed against the other, illustrates the uncomfortable truth that the only thing that separates Totó, the sick virgin, from Amélia, the healthy slut, is not virtue, or lack of it, but the fact that while both desire the same man, one is desired by him while the other is not. And in the end, in any case, both are abandoned by him. Each, as she lies in death, no longer distinctive as either angel or whore, dissolves into the alter ego who shares her plight.
In Eça's novel both women end up first ugly (in other words Platonically indicted, since according to this formula surface disfigurement signals inner sinfulness), and then dead. In an audacious countermove, however, Paula Rego lays claim to an artistic licence that becomes tantamount to a declaration of power over life and death – and over the original text – and resuscitates both women. It is the un-Christlike and unchristian Totó ('she died impenitent', 370), and the avenging, unputdownable Amélia of subsequent pictures, rather than their dead textual precursors, who dominate this series of pastels. They appear here newly endowed with looks and sex appeal, as well as the power which these entail. And a sex appeal which in the case of Totó is all the more perturbing for its androgynous allure, since this ready and willing Totó, arranging herself on the bed to elicit passion rather than compassion, could conceivably – by virtue of her androgyny – seduce a variety of appetites, including a lesbianism reminiscent of the boot-wearing, dykish Amélia in Lying, from whom now no boundary separates her. Like with like, since birds of a feather, after all, do sometimes stick together.
I would now like to consider Looking Out (plate 11)
This picture refers to a specific event in the novel. Before seducing Amélia for the first time, Amaro disposes of her fiancé, João Eduardo, a good if dull young man whom Amélia had previously strung along for want of a better suitor. João Eduardo is discredited by Amaro and his fellow priests in complicated circumstances, and is driven out of Leiria, leaving Amaro in possession of the field. When Amélia becomes pregnant, Amaro and Dias hastily try to find and bring him back with a view to patching up the projected marriage and casting the mantle of marital respectability over the pregnancy ('he who is the husband is the father', 342). João Eduardo, however, is not to be found, requiring a fall-back plan to be put in motion. Amélia is dispatched to the remote country house at Ricoça with her censorious godmother, who plagues her with recriminations for the rest of her pregnancy. Her only consolation lies in the ministrations of Abbé Ferrão, an elderly saintly man who is the only honourable priest in the novel. He slowy attempts to steer her away from her sexual obsession with Amaro and into more godly ways, while nonetheless taking into account her passionate nature: 'poor Amélia's flesh was very lovely and very weak; it would not be wise to frighten her with such lofty sacrifices; she was all woman and so she should remain' (410). Ferrão understands Amélia's carnal needs, knows that any possibility of future respectability for her must include the pleasures of the flesh within a lawful union and plans to attempt a rapprochement with João Eduardo, now back in Leiria and resident in the neighbourhood of RicoÇa. At an earlier point, Amélia had considered marrying João Eduardo and bearing him a child (which, confusingly, at this pre-pregnancy stage is envisaged as the child of the husband yet resembling the lover), while continuing the affair with Amaro.
Outside, the wind was blowing hard, and the rain, coldly lashing the windowpanes, awoke in her an appetite for comfort, a good fire, a husband by her side, a little baby boy sleeping in the cradle – because the child was sure to be a boy and he would be called Carlos and would have Father Amaro's dark eyes. Ah, Father Amaro! Once she was married, she would doubtless meet Father Amaro again. And then an idea pierced her whole being, made her sit up suddenly and forced her instinctively to seek out the dark of the window to hide her flaming cheeks. No, not that! That would be terrible! But the idea took implacable hold of her like a very strong arm simultaneously suffocating her and inflicting on her the most delicious pain. And then her old love, which spite and necessity had driven down into the depths of her soul, burst forth and flooded through her. (170)
Ah, so they would have to separate like this, in silence, for ever. But why should they separate? she thought. Once she was married, she could still see Father Amaro. And the same idea returned, surreptitiously this time, and in such an honest guise that it did not alarm her: Father Amaro could be her confessor; he was the one person in all Christendom who could best guide her soul, her will, her conscience; there would be between them a constant, delicious exchange of confidences, of sweet admonishments; every Saturday, she would go to confession to receive in the light of his eyes and in the sound of his words a portion of happiness; and that would be chaste, exciting and to the glory of God.
She felt rather pleased with the impression, which she could not quite define, of an existence in which the flesh would receive its legitimate satisfactions, and in which her soul would enjoy the charms of an amorous devotion. Everything would turn out well after all. And soon she was sleeping peacefully, dreaming that she was in her house, with her husband, and that she was sitting on Father Amaro's knees, playing cards with her old friends, to the great contentment of the entire Cathedral. (172)
When she falls pregnant by Amaro, her fantasies remain more or less unchanged, bar the requirement of foisting another man's child on an unsuspecting husband:
And suddenly throwing her arms around his neck, with the old passion of their happy times together, she murmured: 'I will always be yours. Even after I am married.'
Amaro grasped her hands passionately: 'Do you swear?'
'I swear.'
'On the sacred host?'
'I swear on the sacred host, I swear by Our Lady!'
'Whenever you can?'
'Yes!'
'Oh, Amélia, oh, my love! I would not exchange you for a queen!' (354)
There is some evidence that this scenario might still be on her mind after she gives her approval to Ferrão's plan, since she has sex with Amaro on at least one occasion after she has agreed to the idea of reconciliation with João Eduardo In the novel, in any case, Ferrão's benevolent plotting comes to nothing when Amélia dies in childbirth. In the weeks prior to her death, however, she seeks solace from her godmother's recriminations by standing at the window waiting for the newly prosperous João Eduardo to ride by on his mare:
She would spend as long as she could now standing at the window, immaculately dressed from the waist up, which is all that could be seen from the road, and all grubby petticoats from the waist down. She was waiting for João Eduardo, the Morgado's children and the lackey; and every now and then she had the pleasure of seeing them go trotting past, as they were borne along by the easy pace of their expensive mounts. (429)
Looking Out refers to the spectacle of Amélia dressed up to the nines from the waist up but slovenly and scruffy from the waist down. As usual in Paula Rego, however, the image is characterised by reversals of expectation in both composition and theme. In earlier paintings the female figures were characterised by exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics, such as the female artist's huge child-bearing hips in Joseph's Dream (1990, figure 42), also noticeable in Lying (figure 40) and Looking Out (plate 11).
Whether what is in question is the begetting of a painting or a child, the large buttocks are further accentuated by ample skirts in paintings such as The Fitting (figure 5), Joseph's Dream (figure 42) and The Ambassador of Jesus (figure 37), and they evoke a female engendering power which however, given the areas of unorthodoxy raised elsewhere in these paintings, does not support their interpretation as conventional exaltations of sacred maternity. Womanly curves and flowing garments of various kinds lead instead, from earlier paintings of female form and dress, to the sullied, slovenly Amélia of Looking Out.
42 Joseph's Dream
Anatomy, however, and clothing are not the only link between works such as Looking Out (plate 11) and Joseph's Dream (figure 42). In the latter, the artist's wide hips represent her reproductive fertility as a metaphor for artistic production, while the feminine duty of maternity is confined to the theme of her painting (an Annunciation), on a canvas which will also entrap the image of the slumbering (outwitted, cuckolded) Joseph. In this painting, therefore, control over creation (the life of a child, the composition of an image) is neither man's (he sleeps, is old and variously impotent) nor God's (except within the irrelevant because unreal realm of the depicted Annunciation in the painting within the painting). Instead, the monopoly over the act of begetting falls to the female artist alone, as the possessor of capacious child-bearing hips and an indomitable creative streak. Similarly, in Looking Out (plate 11), Amélia's anatomy, indicative of fertility and conducive to an easy birth, might be said to compensate for her doomed maternity in the novel, while the direction of her gaze signals her capacity to conjure up a soothing mental image (future married respectability), achieved through the contemplation of yet another male model: in this case not the sleeping Joseph of Joseph's Dream, but the equally oblivious João Eduardo riding by her window on his horse.
In both paintings the canonical assumption of a voyeuristic male gaze is destabilised by the female characters. Each in their different way is a woman who not only controls the prerogative of looking, but moreover transforms visual fact into artifact, and into a prospect determined above all by her own requirements. In both paintings it is the woman's gaze that controls, first what we see (Joseph's Dream, figure 42); second what we are not allowed to see (Looking Out, plate 11, in which Amélia's view from the window is concealed from us; we can imagine it but do not actually glimpse it); and third what will be selected and recorded for posterity (the artist's painting in the former, Amélia's socially acceptable future life in the latter).
In Looking Out, moreover, the interaction of power and powerlessness involved in gazing or being gazed at (which here reverses the habitual gender parameters) entails further complexities. Amélia's project for social redemption – the face-saving exercise of marriage to João Eduardo, which might be described as the aesthetic solution to the problem (literally making things look good) – does not in fact come to fruition in the novel, since she dies before it can. However, the moment which is captured in this picture radically rewrites the textual reality of Eça's plot by casting the invisible João Eduardo as the puppet of the scheming Amélia, just as the fat old Joseph and the moment of Annunciation by masculine (divine) decree become putty in the hands of the preying female demiurge.
The classic arrangement of beautiful female model and empowered male artist in command of both the image he produces and the woman he reproduces is therefore consciously reversed by Paula Rego in both these works, as well as in the later Martha, Mary and Magdalene of 1999 (figure 43).
With regard to Joseph's Dream (figure 42) the artist had observed that she 'wanted to do a girl drawing a man very much, because this role reversal is interesting. She's getting power from doing this' (quoted in McEwen, 1997, 195). The paint that issues from the female artist's brush, and the fantasy of an opportunistic adulterous marriage that Amélia weaves, become analogous because equally controlling and subversive. Each in a different way usurps the traditional male claim to voice and choice.
43 Martha, Mary and Magdalene
Returning to the question of gaze and view, in Paula Rego's picture Amélia not only sees what we do not (the view from the window), but she also controls what everyone else sees. In other words, she sets the stage or composes the picture like an artist and imposes it, or her interpretation of it, in the manner of a quasi-divine utterance, upon the viewers. These include, first, the implied audience within the picture – namely João Eduardo – who is only allowed to see her dressed upper body, and who does not himself merit actual representation within the picture; second, whoever might be in the room with her, presented with a view of her backside; and third, us, the implied viewers. The last two categories of viewer do not signify, as indicated by the fact that neither we nor they warrant a glance from her, nor the trouble of dressing up either for our benefit or theirs. Thus João Eduardo may be deceived both in the short and long term (respectively by what he is permitted to see now, as he rides by, and by the marriage he may be drawn into in the future); but the further implications of this picture as regards the remaining viewers, also carry a radical impact which extends well beyond the parameters of the composition. Both the visual (as opposed to textual) Amélia and her creator appear here to be in cahoots to flaunt in the face of the onlookers (Amaro who visits her, God who sees everything, the viewers who cherish the illusion of sharing that divine prerogative, the canon of art which has enshrined gender conflict at the heart of traditional rules of composition and the patriarchal status quo upon which that canon rests) her metaphorically and actually dishevelled, accusatory bottom half. Accusatory because the latter, of course, is among other things the locus of her illicitly fruitful womb and of the genitalia in whose damnation they (Amaro, God, patriarchy) and we (students, producers and consumers of art) thus became jointly complicit. The attribution of moral blame in the context of viewer participation will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, with reference to the abortion pastels. Here, its diversion away from Amélia, who might be said to emerge as the prosecutor of a series of defendants that include us, leads me away from matters of composition and perception and into consideration of further aspects arising from the subject matter, in a picture which clearly also carries a significant sexual-political and theological dimension.
Amélia transgresses against social, religious and sexual interdictions when, as an unmarried girl, she has sex with the priest who in that capacity represents also God the Father and her own spiritual father. As if this were not bad enough, in the novel she subsequently rejects Amaro, God's delegate on earth, for the imagined calmer delights of wedded orthodoxy, and in the picture turns her slovenly back on him. In this way, she aims to cuckold her lover-priest-father-God with the St Joseph figure of the dedicated João Eduardo, who, in true Josephian manner, as hoped by her and Ferrão, might agree to foster another man's (priest's or God's) child. Both Amaro, whom she betrays in her heart, and João Eduardo, whose restricted view – in all senses of the word – she masterminds, are thus disempowered by her, as are God, represented by Amaro, and the patriarchal order which João Eduardo symbolises, as hypothetical husband-to-be. When Amélia proposes to reverse the Gospel plot by cuckolding God and Amaro with St Joseph, while still saddling the latter with the former's son, she defies literally both heaven and earth, God and man, biblical and societal codes. And it is this defiance for which – in the novel but nowhere discernibly in Paula Rego – she pays with death, that is foregrounded in the possible next move of this figure, who at any moment might lift up her rumpled skirt and moon at them and us. It is the absence of punishment for Amélia, in this and every other of Paula Rego's Father Amaro series (in particular The Coop, figure 45), which prompts an investigation of the reversal of moral stakes that separates the canvas from the text.
Paula Rego is sometimes assumed to be a woman's painter. The thesis defended here and in greater depth in the next chapter argues that in fact an important aspect of her work involves a trap sprung on male viewers lured and then castigated by the compositions she deploys as part of a one-woman battle of the sexes. Looking Out, a prime example of this process, emphasises the artist's manipulation of her viewers (for which here read male viewers) as being both acknowledged and implicated in, yet paradoxically disenfranchised from, the pictorial narrative. Female bodies in pictures traditionally presupposed a male viewer and his pleasure. The target spectator of this particular picture, however, finds himself lured by the superficial pleasures of the image, a process exaggerated in the pictures to be discussed in chapter 4. In fact, however, he is trapped between the worst of both worlds, in the dubiously moral position of the Peeping Tom, from whom, however, all titillation value is brutally snatched. Just as the conventional pleasures of viewing appear set to get under way, the female protagonist gains control of the viewer's perception and redefines the rules of the game. In Looking Out, she alone inhabits a room with a view. The spectator is restricted to viewing that which is habitually concealed or overlooked: we see not a face looking out of a window – which is the usual pictorial arrangement of any number of canonical paintings (figure 44) – but rather the backside and nether parts which that face implies, but which we tend to forget are also there.
44 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Two Women at a Window
Both in Looking Out (plate 11) and differently in The Coop (figure 45), what we view is what customarily takes place out of sight, in habitually unvisited rooms. Like Bluebeard's wife, we are allowed entry, up to a point. What remains unclear, however, are the terms according to which we are allowed to retain control of the situation and to participate in the dangerous cacophony of the artist's unholy mirth.
In a discussion of The Coop Paula Rego stated that she saw a link between it and a longstanding tradition of iconography on the subject of Saint Anne and the birth of the Virgin. If there is such a link between this painting and that religious subject matter, the thread must surely be as tenuous as that between the standard beatific Annunciations of any number of paintings in the last seven centuries (figures 6 and 49) and Rego's own of 1981 (figure 46), in which, according to John McEwen, she emphasises Mary's panic upon being told the glad tidings by the archangel Gabriel (McEwen, 1997, 99),
The scene in The Coop depicts the episode in the novel in the course of which Amélia gives birth and dies, although in Eça, unlike in this busy setting, the only other people present are the midwife, the doctor, and at the very end the priest, who administers the last rites. In a discussion of this piece Paula Rego said it represented a symbolic hen coop in which all the females are pregnant. A collective pregnancy can arguably be read in two by
45 The Coop
no means mutually exclusive ways: first, the mimetic pregnancies of the other women may be interpreted as being in solidarity with Amélia's, here repeating the notion of a coven of women (saints, witches or whores) bonded by a common pursuit. And second, it might be interpreted as an act of purposeful heresy: the birth of the Son of God to a virgin has been seen theologically to be a unique and unrepeatable event, miraculous and therefore impossible to replicate (Rotman, 1987, 57–78). Amélia's enthronement by Amaro as a Marian substitute, on the occasion when, both in the novel and in The Ambassador of Jesus (figure 37), he dressed her in the cloak of the Virgin and declared her to be an improvement on the original ('even lovelier than Our Lady', 321) had already lent itself to interpretation as an act of usurpation of the Virgin Mary's exalted status. Amélia's impregnation by God's legate compounds the offence, by laying further claim to the Virgin's role as Mother of the only true God. The conflation of Amélia and Mary in The Ambassador of Jesus (figure 37) – one is the other, Amélia in Mary's clothing, one lapsed and one tenacious virgin – moves into another dimension in The Coop, through the notion that these multiple pregnancies are the chorus to Amélia's already blasphemous pseudo-Marian motherhood. All together, they must be seen to render the original miracle commonplace through facile multiple (therefore heretical) imitations, in the context of what the author describes in the catalogue text as 'a women's mafia' (Rego, 1998).
46 The Annunciation
And just as the coven of gestating females can be said to look back to the reliquary of female saints in Girl with Gladioli and Religious Figures (figure 38), as well as to their grouping in Crivelli's Garden (figure 39) so, too, the disturbing otherness of the nature of sainthood put forward by those two works is taken up again and made more explicit here. Thus deviant sainthood in Girl with Gladioli topples over into unabashed voodoo9 represented here by the hung chicken and the aborted foetus in the lap of the midwife.10 The voodoo cockerel is both linked to and separate from the two Christian animals in this image, namely the lamb (a Paschal symbol) and the dove (the incarnation of the Holy Ghost). What links them is their connection to resurrections of various sorts (eternal life in the hereafter in the case of the lamb and the dove, or a return as the living dead in the case of the voodoo cockerel). But while within the orthodoxy of Christianity life after death heralds the promise of ecstatic continuity, the walking dead of voodoo tales are the stuff of horror, signifying everlasting restlessness and torment for themselves and others. In the game of blurred boundaries between life and death, then, what's sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander. On the other hand, the unrest of the living dead might be said in one interpretation to be like the state of limbo, which is where the unbaptised aborted foetuses, and stillborn or murdered children of Christianity, are suspended ad infinitum. Worrying differences, therefore, give way to even more worrying affinities between positions that would be expected to be antithetical. The Coop rewrites Eça's novel in many ways, including omitting any hint of impending death for Amélia, in an echo of the thriving Totó in Girl With Chickens (figure 41). Paula Rego's previously mentioned unwillingness to portray women as victims results very literally in pictures of health, portraits of women who are, in the most concrete sense, fighting fit, with all the threat that that implies. These are very much unorthodox resurrections, within an eccentric universe in which dead angels surrender space to their more resilient avatars, and voodoo beasts tower over their Christ-like counterparts within a profane cosmogony.
The heretical elements in this picture are numerous. First, the reference to mysticism and religious practice (voodoo), here seen as variously threatening (because different, 'other' and uncontrolled), opens up glimpses into paths of faith parallel to a Christianity whose symbols (the dove and the lamb) are given not exclusive but merely comparable status to those of voodoo magic (the dead chicken and the aborted foetus). Second, the imagery deployed indicates a series of profane possibilities: the stillborn foetus on the midwife's lap, a step further in outrage from Amélia's (and, because of their twinned status, Mary's) dead child in the novel, in Paula Rego's vision has not even achieved the fruition of the original live birth. As such, and even more blatantly than in Eça, the aborted baby gestures towards a heretical void, and the absence of the Father and his Son from a world where the all-abounding plenitude of God as incarnated in his human offspring is replaced by a miscarriage or an induced abortion, brought about by a Satanic runaway Virgin. This counterfeit Madonna looks back to the dubious saints and biblical heroines of Crivelli's Garden (figure 39). And her miscarrying deed opens the way for the abortion theme of the works that followed the Father Amaro series. Be that as it may, back in The Coop it becomes significant that in this birthing room we see neither the living fruit of the birth in question (son of Amaro, Son of God), nor a female death. What we do see, on the other hand, is an ostentatiously different scene: a surviving mother, against the backdrop of a heretical voodoo practice, within a room full of women, in which God, His Son and His priestly delegate are conspicuous by their absence. In this context it is also interesting to consider that what is depicted in Paula Rego's picture is what imaginatively (in a female world) goes on in a situation such as childbirth, when the authoritative males – priests, doctors and authors – are not present.11 In Eça's novel, neither the reader nor the author is granted entry to the labour room. Even the priest is reluctant to venture (and to allow God, as symbolised by the holy sacraments) into a space where the female drama of childbirth is being played out. In the novel Abbé Ferrão argues that, as a priest, he can only enter the room of a woman about to give birth in order to help her die. This stricture acquires particular force in the case of a woman about to give birth to the child of another priest who, as God's understudy on earth, seduced her in the guise and clothing of the Virgin Mary, thus casting her into the untenable dual role of Mother of God and lover of God's supposedly celibate priest. But whereas in the novel Ferrão and God at the last are permitted to approach Amélia's deathbed, in Paula Rego's much cosier hen party, their entry is debarred, but, more to the point, unnecessary, since Amélia will not die, and they themselves are obliterated from the narrative. Furthermore, what is also brought to the fore by this absence and this presence (the absence of God and of the wholesome Saviour child, the presence of the latter's devilish foetal avatar), is what in the novel emerges as the appalling paradox of a moral imperative which leads Amaro to murder his son in order not to offend social decorum. The aborted foetus or murdered newborn child of the Rego picture forces a confrontation with contingencies which in the novel are apparently rejected though nonetheless brought into play by the very fact of that denial, namely the possibility, touched upon and swiftly brushed aside by the two priests (paladins, it is to be assumed, of the rights of the unborn child), of giving Amélia a drug to induce a convenient abortion: '"You don't want someone to give the girl some drug to finish her off, do you?" Amaro shrugged, impatient with such a ridiculous idea. The Canon was obviously raving' (342).
More chilling, in light of the events that follow, is the comment made by Amaro: 'The best thing, Father, would be for the child to be born dead!' (366), and Dias's reply, which can be seen with hindsight to foretell the appearance of the murderous nanny: 'Hmm, another little angel' (366). Ironically and tragically, what must be seen as the lesser crime of abortion – the 'ridiculous idea' which Amaro would not contemplate – opens the way to the aggravated one of infanticide, that macabre 'weaving' of an angel for God. An angel, or a tapestry, or a picture. This picture, now reassembled as the indictment of a series of fathers, heavenly or otherwise, is here tried in absentia. Paula Rego called this piece a room full of witches. In the remaining pictures in this series, their malevolence may prove sufficient to exact vengeance for a variety of crimes both individual and collective, self-evident and obscure, covered up by the establishment and exposed through an anarchic onslaught.
I will move on now, therefore, to that moment, ever preoccupying in Paula Rego, when the move from the individual to the collective acquires national and institutional specificity. The focus of the reading of the remaining paintings in the current series links them closely to some of the works of the previous decades, through their historical and political motifs. Beginning with The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (figure 47) and following the exegetic opportunity offered by the title of the picture, in the Gospel tradition the Holy Family were forced to escape from Judaea to avoid the wrath of King Herod, who had ordered the massacre of the innocents in order to thwart the prophecy of a new king of the Jews (Matthew 2:13–15).
47 The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
This picture's connection to the Gospel allows further semantic ramifications, such as a link to the originating novel, as refracted through the cast – Amaro, Amélia and the child – which preserves thematic continuity. Compositionally, and in terms of that casting, the image speaks volumes not only because of what it makes possible but also because it makes clear what was never possible. In a Catholic, family-driven, church-bound, father-revering, godly nation, there cannot be much greater blasphemy than the multiple attributions of the man in this picture. Its import also leads further, so that in a move that by now has become typical of this artist, the reverberations of the ancient Judaean setting extend beyond it, as far as twentieth-century Portugal. Let us see.
In the earlier discussion of The Cell (figure 35) it was argued that although the masturbatory act desecrated the figure of the mother, whether Holy or otherwise, it struck out even more strongly against paternal and patriarchal insecurity in the face of recidivist Oedipal sons who persist in preferring the mother to the father. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt provides another twist to this tale. Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, whose work has been previously discussed, argues that under fascism the leader represented a potent pope, and in that shape, figured the unconscious sexual imagery which encouraged women to 'invest some of their desires in fascism' (Macciocchi, 1976, 128). With reference to her work, Jane Caplan elaborates that
It's crucial to her conception of the close identity betweeen left and feminist revolutionary politics that Macciocchi interprets this role of the fascist Leader as sexually exploitative of both women and men: the Leader symbolically castrates all men, in the act of expropriating the sexual capacity of women ... 'On the sexual plane, as I have frequently stressed, fascism is not just the castration of women, but the castration of men: in fascism, sexuality like wealth belongs to an oligarchy of the powerful. The masses are expropriated.' (Caplan, 1979, 62)
In Eça's novel, indeed, the antagonism between clerical and non-clerical males – namely Amaro and Amélia's rejected fiancé, João Eduardo – is couched in terms of a sexual rivalry which involves both priest and God, in cahoots against secular man. Thus, Amaro justifies to himself his persecution of João Eduardo in the following soliloquy:
He was not her father or her guardian, but he was her parish priest, her shepherd, and if he did not save her from that heretical fate through his grave counsel and through the influence of her mother and her friends, he would be like someone who, asked to tend another's sheep, cruelly opens the gate to the wolf. No, Amélia could not possibly marry that atheist!
And, at that hope, his heart beat fast with excitement. No, the other man would not have her. Just as he was about to take legal possession of that waist, those breasts, those eyes, of Amélia herself, he, the parish priest, was there to declare: Back, you scum! This woman belongs to God!
And he would take great care to guide Amélia to salvation ... .
It was not a plot to take her away from her fiancé, good heavens, no; his motives (and he said this out loud the better to convince himself) were honest and pure; it was his holy duty to drag her back from Hell; he did not want her for himself, he wanted her for God! True, his interests as a lover did coincide with his duties, but even if she were squint-eyed, ugly and stupid, he would still, in the service of Heaven, go to Rua da Misericórdia and unmask Senhor João Eduardo as a slanderer and an atheist!
And reassured by that argument, he went to bed happy. (192)
Be that as it may, in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt Paula Rego's insinuation of grounds for masculine disquiet in the face of an enemy within the ranks goes further even than the spectacle of males locking horns over a desirable female, and moves into the detection of a deeper self-destructive impetus at the heart of the status quo. Let us see.
The title of this complex picture refers to the Gospel tradition. But if it refers also to the novel, the man in it must be Amaro. Amaro as a Catholic priest under vows of celibacy is supposed to be spiritual father to all but biological father to none. His tragedy as man and priest is to be condemned never to hold his own son in his arms, which however he does, both in this picture and in the novel, as the sinner that he is. The novel furthermore tells us that shortly after that first and only moment in which he holds his son, after the birth, Amaro will deliver him to death (or, in the first version of the novel, kill him with his own hands). Fathers, and indeed other human beings – whether as representatives of a paternal God, or as morally and legally conditioned social beings, or as patriarchal defenders of their bloodline, or as Darwinian creatures driven by the imperatives of selfish genes, or as followers of the fourth commandment – ought not to extinguish their progeny, but Amaro, most unnaturally, will do so here. Furthermore, if the picture refers to the Gospel story of the flight into Egypt, Amaro here represents also St Joseph, who in Catholic hagiography is the patron saint of fathers, and whose saint's day is also celebrated in Portugal as Fathers' Day. That abnegated loving father, however, is overshadowed here by his alter ego, Amaro, a hellish infanticidal progenitor. And in the context of the flight into Egypt, infanticidal fathers trigger associations with Herod, and beyond him with murderous rulers or fathers of their people, be they popes, kings, statesmen or even God himself, or all of them rolled into one. In an earlier version of the novel, as mentioned, Amaro drowns his son with his own hands, a plot decision which was changed in the third version, in which the murder was delegated to the killer nanny. In dramatic terms the earlier version probably worked better, since it culminated with a priest murdering his own son in a grotesque simulacrum of the baptism ceremony he had been anointed to perform. On the other hand, the fact that in the third version of the novel his hands are technically clean of the crime while his guilt remains nonetheless unquestionable, brings to light the moral implications of indirect blame: if Amaro, while not having committed the infanticide himself, is clearly responsible for it, so too, by association, are the massed powers of the various institutions which he represents, and which support him, cover up for him and endow him with authority. Both the man and the establishment whose creature he is thus became tarred with the same brush. In the Rego version, the disproportionate size of the priest in relation to the baby in his arms seems to reinstate the earlier version of an act of murder by the father, and accentuates the guilt of kin slaying.12 That same stature, however, suggests that what we view here is not a man but an icon, a human being who synecdochically represents a greater institutional whole.
The more cryptic images arid compositional aspects of the picture also potentially give rise to heterodoxy. I refer here to the nature and size of the baby on his lap and the doll in the background, who imply the consideration of aspects of Catholic orthodoxy which these figures contravene in two ways. First, the picture depicts a scene forbidden under Catholicism, namely, a happy family life for a priest in reality vowed to celibacy. The second point refers to the problem presented by the concept of ghosts. The existence of ghosts is not admitted in Catholic doctrine. After death one's soul conventionally goes either to heaven or to hell, or, in the case of an unbaptised child, to limbo. In the novel, Amaro and Amélia never held their child in their arms together. Amaro briefly fantasises about it, before handing his son over to his death. In fact the child is taken from his mother's bed and delivered to Amaro, and by him to the nurse who will kill it. Amaro and Amélia also never see each other again, since Amélia herself dies immediately afterwards. This picture, therefore, depicting as it does the tender threesome of a family that never was, is both cruel and variously contumacious.
If this family tableau could have had no basis in reality (and moreover does not take place in the novel), in the picture it must be seen to represent either a dream or a ghost story involving the spectral return of Amélia and the infant. But ghosts conventionally only return to haunt those that murdered them. And if this picture refers not only to a murderous (Father) Amaro but also to the Holy Father – the Pope that in the novel Amaro dreamed of becoming – and beyond him to Joseph, patron saint of fathers, to Salazar and Herod, fathers of their peoples, and to God, father of them all, these male figures, human and divine, stand indicted together under the same charge of collusion in each others' infanticidal crimes.13 As suggested before, the association between Amaro (the man), the Pope (God's vicar on earth), Joseph (the saint), Herod (the king), Salazar (the statesman) and God (the deity) would also explain Amaro's colossal stature, out of all proportion to the scale of the other human figures, namely Amélia (here seen kneeling, possibly in unsuccessful plea to gods and earthly rulers for her child's life), the child itself and the enigmatic Barbie-doll-like angel in the background. The doll conjures up a further association with the voodoo doll in The Coop (figure 45), symbol of another infant death on yet another ungentle lap. And that fact introduces the final paradox which this picture brings to light.
The artist who in 1960 offered us Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (figure 2) here charts the self-defeating modus operandi of a covenant of patriarchs, fathers, priests and statesmen, the counterproductive consequence of whose deeds is the rupture of their own bloodline. In a country and a creed where fathers, rulers, priests and gods loom so large and their sons (and daughters) so small, the outcome, not surprisingly, is a deconstructive contingency: namely the death of the Sacred Son at the hands of a short-sighted father, who thereby cancels out his own bid for blood continuity and his ticket to immortality. In the next image to be discussed, emblematic figures of power are transposed to the wider representation of the nation itself.
In The Company of Women (figure 34) Paula Rego had rehearsed the plot of a man who fell prey to narcissism and lost his soul. In Mother (plate 12) she recasts the plight of a nation with the same problem. The man is denied salvation because he is a bad priest, citizen, son and father and the nation because it carved out a sea-borne empire but lost its way. The two, man and nation, are further linked since Amaro is a man who regressively longs for a return to the watery, aquatic cosiness of the maternal womb, just as the nation he represents longs to resurrect in unspecified ways those oceanic maritime adventures that once brought it an empire. In either case, what Paula Rego seems to be driving at with some relish is that you can't go home again.
Rego's onslaughts against Atlantic expansionism fall within a time-honoured tradition in Portuguese cultural life. Throughout the centuries, anti-imperialist warnings were issued by some of Portugal's most reputed writers, artists and historians. Figures such as Gil Vicente, Luís de Camões, Alexandre Herculano, Almeida Garrett and Oliveira Martins argued with varying degrees of bitterness the dangers of failing to construct a solid economy at home, independent of revenue from imperial possessions abroad. For all the reverence in which they are held culturally, they remained curiously unheard politically.
Paula Rego's Mother (plate 12) reawakens many of the reverberations of the 1980s, contributing to a corpus of paintings which place the work of this artist within that tradition of patriotic dissent. Of all the pictures in the Father Amaro series, this one holds the most tenuous links with the novel. In the course of the analysis that follows, however, it may be worth noting that Eça de Queirós, following in the footsteps of his precursors mentioned above, belonged to a small group of late nineteenth-century Portuguese intellectuals who strongly condemned Portugal's colonially-based economic policy. The link between this picture and the novel, therefore, may be somewhat tortuous but is nonetheless valid. The shared leitmotif is the condemnation of empire on the part of both writer and artist, and the attempt to promote the merits of staying home.
At the emotional, as well as geometric, centre of the image sits the eponymous white shell which Paula Rego has said represents Portugal, the motherland. It is indeed altogether proper that the image chosen to represent a nation which for five centuries defined itself first realistically and then nostalgically as a sea-borne empire should be a sea-shell. As ever in Paula Rego, however, twisted perversity underlies apparently straightforward symbolism, first, because shells, though beautiful, are part of the detritus left on the beach when the sea – or empire – has come and gone. The shell therefore becomes the clever turning of the knife in the perennial wound of this beached post-colonial motherland, currently as grounded as the tiny boat, whose minute scale emphasises that to which it has been reduced: a knick-knack forgotten on a chair, rather than the unstoppable fifteenth-century vessel of the Portuguese maritime discoveries, carving paths, in Camões's famous words, 'through oceans none had sailed before' (Camões, 1950, 86). In Mother, the theme of ships and sailors forced into early retirement carries echoes of a similar admonition in Time: Past and Present (figure 8). Both share an undertone of cruelty in depicting the plight of former heroes and conquerors. In Mother the shell in question is prickly, a motherland possibly offended and poised to retaliate against her mismanaging sons and the policies deployed in her name to such disastrous historical effect. The punishment, and its form, are rather toothsome: Amaro, half-naked man but also disrobed priest, represents the secular and spiritual concerns which in Portugal joined in unholy alliances what ought to have remained separate spheres of influence. He is surrounded by three women who seem ethnically to represent the former Portuguese empire: a black one in the centre, possibly representing the African possessions which Portugal held on to the longest; an Indian one on the left, representing her territories in the East, the first to be lost; and a white one kneeling on the right, representing perhaps Portugal itself, brought to its knees by the ruinous aftermath of its maritime adventures. Brazil, which, famously if inaccurately, has pride of place in the international popular imagination as the Utopian racial synthesis of all three (black, white and Indian – albeit here American Indian14 rather than East Indian), is absent from this configuration. And in the middle of this worrying trinity stands Amaro himself, naked from the waist up, wearing a skirt from the waist down, and being dressed by the women. The implications of men being groomed by women in circumstances which thoroughly emasculate them had already been rehearsed, as we have seen, in paintings such as the Girl and Dog series (plates 2-8, figures 14-16, 19, 21-22), The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9), The Policeman's Daughter (figure 32) and The Family (plate 10). The skirt Amaro wears here is the same garment that he wore in The Company of Women (figure 34), in which the grown man stands in for the maternally arrested little boy and vice versa. As in the former picture, here too an important role is played by the mirror. Amaro dresses in what resembles a eunuch's outfit but is unable to look into the mirror or to find – in his manifold capacities as man, boy, priest and state dignitary – either his lost self or the image of the prickly, angry motherland, looking instead, with recidivist Sebastianic nostalgia, to the representatives of the lost colonial past.
Art theory, in ways analogous to film theory, has suggested that the male nude in the Western aesthetic tradition is usually depicted in ways which emphasise the man's control over his own body (for example through focusing on it in action rather than in repose, and on its purposefully built-up musculature).15 The female nude, in contrast, is generally presented as the object of voyeuristic, presumed male contemplation. Here, however, Amaro is himself the object of a threefold gaze: ours, of course, those of the women, and, more perversely, that of the mirror into which he himself does not look, but which reflects him. In the mirror image, moreover, he is absolutely naked, since in what the reflection makes available to view not even the effeminising skirt is hinted at. The effect is that of a somewhat bowed-down Amaro. The mirror, site of that Freudian narcissistic love that seeks to substitute the self for the lost mother, and which here, like the camera, does not lie, is that into which one looks when one is caught up in the maelstrom of the self, narcissistically directed inwardly, rather than able to look outward, onward and forward (for example post-colonially). What it reflects back at the viewer is the plight of the man but also of the nation, through the metonymic agency of that pathetic little boat on the chair, against the backdrop of a window which ought to have had a view of the sea, but does not. Here, then, is the comeuppance of those against whom the betrayed, wrathful motherland, and, shadowing her, numerous sidelined mothers, raise their prickly hackles.
The final three pictures rework imperial and religious themes somewhat more obliquely. In conversation, Paula Rego has suggested that Amélia's Dream (plate 13) was inspired by a flashback in the novel describing Amélia's adolescent passion for a young man, Agostinho, whom she meets on a seaside holiday and by whom she is almost seduced in a pine forest by the sea.
48 Dancing Ostriches from Disney's "Fantasi
At the end of the holiday Agostinho moves on and later marries into money, leaving Amélia temporarily broken-hearted. In the catalogue to the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1998 Paula Rego writes that 'in a pine forest by the sea, Amélia comes upon two women eviscerating a dog. They release a vulture. She does not want to join in' (Rego, 1998).
This picture, one of the last in this series to be painted, is one of Rego's most self-referential works, reflecting back upon formal as well as thematic propositions earlier in the artist's career. Thus the dog being matter-of-factly disembowelled is clearly the unhappy descendant of the endangered animals in the Girl and Dog series of a decade earlier, and is proportionally disconnected from the self-assured Dog Women of the mid 1990s, with whom the former are clearly contrasted (figures 11 and 82).
The eviscerating damsels of Amélia's Dream are themselves salvaged from earlier sketches for the Dancing Ostriches series of the mid 1990s (figure 48).
The metaphorical dance in question here, it would appear, takes place on the grave of the dog. The symbolism of the vulture which erupts from his ripped-up insides is cryptic. A vulture is a scavenging beast which feeds off dead (possibly murdered) bodies, and therefore stands as the signpost for that murder, as well as the metaphor for its confession. Here, the dog is at first glance the victim of a murder perpetrated by the two ostrich women. But the vulture that bursts out of him may be the testimony of his own earlier hidden crime. A deathbed confession? A confession extracted under torture? Neither would be inappropriate in the context of a set of images such as these, saturated in equal measure by the manoeuvres of organised Catholicism and their visual demolition. And if this reading is correct, the nature of the crime can be easily conjectured, both from earlier narratives and in light of the dog's habitual position in Rego's private bestiary as the representative of a masculinity upon which female figures repeatedly wreak revenge. The women themselves, moreover, performing as they do the dual role of confessors and executioners, allude to the proclivities of the Inquisition in past centuries, although clearly reversing gender roles which tended to cast men as the witch-hunters and women as the hunted. The link to a broader historical framework is here strengthened by the accompanying catalogue text and by the phantasmagorical backdrop in the image. 'In a pine forest by the sea' evokes an echo of national beginnings which lead vertiginously from this picture to the dysphoric end of empire discussed with reference to Mother. Pine forests are linked in the Portuguese imagination to the thirteenth-century king, Don Dinis, who vastly developed Portugal's medieval economy through agricultural policies that included creating vast pine tree plantations in central and northern Portugal. Don Dinis, known as 'The Farmer King', has been famously described as 'the sower of ship seed' (Pessoa, 1992, 27). His afforestation policy produced the timber from which, two centuries later, the caravelas, the ships of the navigators, would be built. Those trees, however, the rustle of whose needles 'is the sound of that future sea' (Pessoa, 1979,31), in Rego's composition are as attenuated as the invisible sea at whose edge, according to her, they grow, and to which historically they reach out. Both sea and trees, therefore, as the objective correlatives of the maritime adventure, become figments of a female imagination that only admits to their existence in order to emphasise their insignificance. Since she wrote the text for the catalogue, we can take the artist's word for it that they figure in the picture. But their presence in fact appears to be confined to that text, with all the implications that entails, bearing in mind the liberties this artist is prone to take with textual, including possibly associations her own.
In the background of the picture, instead of the trees and sea which are the caretaker symbols of the imperial adventure (and the site of Amélia's near-seduction by Agostinho, Amaro's precursor in love and desertion), we glimpse two spectral figures. They are voices from the artist's past, two belated ostrich women, just discernible in their trademark black tutus, the chorus in a picture of bacchantes making merry on the ruins of a variety of defeated male dreams. In this picture, as in Departure (figure 28), The Cadet and His Sister (plate 9) and The Soldier's Daughter (figure 31), it is clearly no longer the case that men must work while women must weep. And towering above the overall composition stands the figure of Amélia in a little girl's dress and hair ribbon but with aggressively clenched fists, who, we are told, 'does not want to join in' but looks on nonetheless. Just following orders?
In the Wilderness (plate 14) offers us another seascape populated not by conquering heroic males but instead by a solitary woman. The title suggests that she is claiming the role of Jesus Christ, the Son of God who is both Everyman and like no other man. The female figure is Amelia who, according to the catalogue, is praying for help. The title of the picture refers us to the passage in the Gospels in which we read that Jesus, having been recognised by God as his son ('this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased', Matthew 3:17) is Ted up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil' (Matthew 4:1). He emerges triumphant from his forty-day ordeal to be acclaimed as the Son of God but also as the Son of Man.
Aside from the implications of a gender swap sacrilegious in its own right, and more emphatically even than in pictures such as Time: Past and Present (figure 8) and Mother (plate 12), the picture deploys a wild, untamed sea, free of men and ships. The only splash of colour stems from the incongruous little pink pig lost in a greyness of overcast dreams. The significance of misty seascapes in a Portuguese context includes Don Sebastião, Portugal's version of the myth of the Once and Future King, outlined in the introduction. In the country's imagination, misty seaside dawns are above all the metonymical trigger for the nation's nostalgia: the disappearance of Don Sebastião at Alcácer Quibir, the ensuing Spanish occupation, and the hope of the king's return on a misty morning, to rescue the nation and restore it to its former power.
In Paula Rego's foggy seascape, however, the emptiness appears relentless and does not bode well for messianic returns. The nineteenth-century dress of the kneeling woman also invites comment. Portugal's imperial dreams, deflated in 1578 by the death of Don Sebastião, were revived in the 1880s in what became known as the project of the Pink Map. This referred to an intended territorial expansion in Southern Africa, aiming at bringing all the land (coloured in pink on the map) joining Mozambique in the east and Angola in the west under Portuguese control. These territorial ambitions led Portugal into conflict with Great Britain, in what became part of that century's scramble for Africa. In 1890 Britain issued Portugal with an ultimatum. The outcome, predictable in view of the former's industrial wealth and greater military war machine, was a climbdown on the part of the Portuguese, international humiliation abroad and an escalation of resentment against a weakened monarchy at home. The medium-term effect was severe popular discontent, leading to the assassination of the king and the heir to the throne in 1908 and the declaration of the Republic two years later. Following the British Ultimatum of 1890, Portugal's imperial ambitions were put on the back burner for the following four decades, until revived by Salazar. As an aside, and in view of the remarks that follow below regarding the role of the pink component in this picture, it is amusing to observe that Portugal's and Britain's irreconcilable expansionist ambitions at the turn of the nineteenth century extended to a claim over the colour pink in global maps.
In In the Wilderness the recumbent Amélia prays before a seascape which for the Portuguese in the end proved to be an empty dream, and from which men and pink maps (but not demythologising pink pigs) are excluded. To this effect, speculation arises about this farcical little animal, integrated into the picture because, according to the artist, 'it just happened to be lying around in the studio'. Quite so, and Sigmund Freud aside, for those wary of overinterpretation, a cigar sometimes is just a cigar. Nonetheless I will venture that, for all its incidental apparently meaningless quality, the pig here, as in The Maids, invites association with that animal's generic function as avatar of the artist and mouthpiece of authorial judgement. 'People have to work out their own story' (Lambirth, 1998,10).
After Christ's forty days in the wilderness, 'the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him' (Matthew, 4:11). Angel (plate 15), one of Paula Rego's most powerful works to date, is, in her own words, 'both guardian angel and avenging angel. Her mission is to protect and to avenge' (Rego, 1998).
In the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady
Today it is the Seven Sorrows, sheaf of swords.
I dreamt that my heart had turned to serpent:
I dragged it by the belly down long roads
To the world, non-sentient.
She, vibrant with steel, my Mother,
Raised it vertically from the soot
And clearsighted with tears
Holds it tenderly underfoot.
Thus perhaps the crushed snake
Embodies my poisoned thoughts:
And the pure remain, rose incarnate
Under her radical, detached foot.
Seven thunderbolts of love to the Untarnished; seven,
Like the branches of the candleholder
In the night, alive to evil undertaken
Impelling the executioner.
You, Heraldic Shield, conceal
This poem, or sorrow among the constellations,
The eighth arrow on the timeless snowy breast
For God's contemplation.
(Nemésio, 1989, 287)16
Vitorino Nemésio's poem, which revives former references to the seven dolours of Mary, dovetails beautifully with Rego's figuration of ruthless angelology.
'She carries the symbols of the Passion, the sword and the sponge. She has appeared and she has taken form and we don't know what comes next' (Rego, 1998). What indeed?
In conversation with Paula Rego at a stage when this picture was only sketched and destined to undergo considerable subsequent modifications, she said she intended to call it Amélia's Revenge. It is perhaps typical of this artist that an image of undiluted revenge should be translated into the concealing vocabulary of angelology, while in fact retaining all the menace of the original concept. The menace is twofold. First, gender antagonism (love turned to hatred, in an echo of the artist's admission of interested incomprehension of the Amélia of the novel: 'I find that curious: a woman who can love a man until the very end', Rodrigues da Silva, 1998, 10). And second, a threat as regards Catholic orthodoxy, since the ambiguously sexed angel of convention is here categorically female, but simultaneously conflated with the Christ of the Passion, which is traditionally the moment of his greatest divinity and greatest humanity. In that earlier conversation, Paula Rego suggested that this figure represents both Amélia herself and the angel which appears in her room after she dies. The angel bears the phallic sword that wounds and the sponge that soothes the pain of that wound. Its burden of symbolism therefore is both secular (Amélia) and celestial (angelic), both lacerating (the sword) and healing (the sponge). That sponge, moreover, as tradition tells us, was dipped in stinging vinegar intended for wiping over the bleeding sores. The Portuguese version of the phrase 'being cruel to be kind' translates literally as 'burning (or stinging) with a view to healing' (arder para curar). The angel bearing sword and sponge epitomises the requirement of being cruel in order to be kind. On the other hand, not inconceivably in the case of this artist, and as was the case with those mothering girls and wounded dogs of old, cause and effect may be reversed, with surface kindness masking intended cruelty. In this good cop/bad cop universe, angels have Janus faces, and may after all, modified picture titles notwithstanding, symbolise any number of unspecified retaliations. If so, Amélia's revenge might be provoked by a religion which from its inception has always been ready to blame the female of the species ('the woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat', Genesis 3:12). And the agent of that revenge, altogether properly, turns out to be a combination of the Fallen Angel and the Christ of the Passion dressed in drag.
1. My source for this is Leo Steinberg (1975), 311.
2. All translations from this text will refer to the translation by Margaret Jull Costa, The Crime of Father Amaro, London: Dedalus (2002). The translator opts to reinstate Eça's original term of 'crime' rather than 'sin', as elsewhere in prior translations and in Paula Rego's catalogue for this series.
3. With reference to Cousin Bazïlio, a novel published in 1878 while he was still working on revisions to the third version of The Sin of Father Amaro, Eça wrote the following Cousin Bazílio represents above all a small domestic tableau which will be very familiar to anyone acquainted with the Lisbon middle classes: the sentimental lady, uneducated and not even spiritual (because she is no longer really Christian; and as for the sanctions of justice, she is completely unaware of them), destroyed by romance, lyrical, her temperament overexcited by idleness and by the very objective of Peninsular marriage, which is lust, made nervous by lack of exercise or moral discipline, etc, etc – in short, the urban bourgeoise. On the other hand her lover – a cad without passion or any justification for his tyranny, who seeks nothing more than the vanity of an affair and love free of charge. Then we have the housemaid, full of secret rebellion against her condition and thirsty for revenge ... A society based on these premises is not on the path of truth. It is a duty to attack it... My ambition is to portray Portuguese society such as it has emerged from Constitutionalism since 1830 – and show it, as if in a mirror, what a sad nation they are, men and women both ... It is essential to needle the official world, the sentimental world, the literary world, the agricultural world, the superstitious world – and with all the respect due to institutions which are eternal, to destroy false interpretations and achievements as instituted by a rotten society.
Eça de Queirós, Letter to Teófilo Braga from Newcastle, 12 March 1878 in Obra Completa, vol. III, Porto: Lello & Irmão (1979), 517.
4. It was used in The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers (2000), which was only posthumously published, but reworked as the somewhat less sensitive theme of sibling incest in what was to become his greatest novel, The Maias.
5. Both Freud and to a greater extent post-Freudian revisionist psychoanalysis engage with the different trajectory followed by the female child. There is no scope here for a detailed discussion of those differences, given the primary concern of this argument regarding the pre-and post-Oedipal son.
6. I am grateful to Jan Gilbert for this suggestion, made in the course of her MPhil work on Paula Rego.
7. See note 5 in the Introduction for details about the seven lessons of Mary as examples of empathy with another's suffering, as well as submissiveness and abnegation in the face of one's own suffering.
8. Both, therefore, one a bitch, and one a woman who barks, become associated with other controversial dog women elsewhere in Rego's work (figures 11 and 82).
9. Paula Rego has said in conversations about this picture that she sees the chicken and the doll as implements of voodoo.
10. In a conversation about this painting, Paula Rego referred to the doll as an aborted foetus. In the accompanying text to the catalogue, she describes it as representing a birth. Either way, if Eça's novel is the source, the birth results in the immediate death of the child at the hands of the killer nurse. The preoccupations with births without living issue in this series, in some ways foreshadows the theme of abortion in the works of the following year.
11. In this context it is interesting to refer to Adrienne Rich's account of the increase in the incidence of puerperal fever and maternal deaths when birth management moved from the control of midwives into that of male doctors who would preside over births while simultaneously treating infectious patients in the same ward.
12. In interview with Ana Marques Gastão (1999,44), Paula Rego argues that 'Eça was right to change the text, delivering the child to the asphyxiator in order to let her do what he is incapable of doing for himself/Here, Rego seems to see Amaro's inability to kill his son not as a sign of vestigial goodness but rather of cowardice, in line with the rest of his character.
13. I am grateful to Hilary Owen, who first drew my attention to the physical resemblance between Amaro and Salazar. The similarity is also mentioned in Isabel Pires de Lima (2001), 13.
14. The term American Indian is used here in a historical context. It relates to the fifteenth-century belief that India could be reached by circumnavigating the globe in the opposite direction to previous voyages, and that therefore it was a part of the Indies that had been reached when Christopher Columbus attempted this. The usage of the term is not intended to cause offence.
15. See for example the approach taken by the exhibition The Nude: A New Perspective, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, from 24 May to 3 September 1989.
16. I am grateful to Ana Marques Gastão for drawing my attention to this poem by Vitorino Nemésio.