49 Domenico Veneziano, The Annunciation
Renoir ... is supposed to have said that he painted his paintings with his prick.
Bridget Riley, 'The Hermaphrodite'
Thus I learned to battle the canvas, to come to know it as a being resisting my wish (dream), and to bend it forcibly to this wish. At first it stands there like a pure chaste virgin ... and then comes the wilful brush which first here, then there, gradually conquers it with all the energy peculiar to it, like a European colonist.
Kandinsky
Mignonne, allon voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit declose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,
A point perdu cette vesprée,
Les plis de sa robe pourprée,
Et son teint au vostre pareii.
Pierre de Ronsard
In James Cameron's film of 1984, The Terminator, we are treated to a futuristic rendition of the Nativity with assorted complications. A cyborg-a humanoid computer-travels from the future to the diegetic present to kill Sarah Connor, a woman who, at an unspecified but prophesied date, will give birth to a child as yet to be conceived. The child, John Connor (a good Irish-Catholic name which shares the same initials as Jesus Christ)1, will live to be the saviour of humanity against the cyborgs that in the near future are due to take over the planet. Hot in pursuit of the cyborg is Kyle Reese, an envoy of those future humans and a friend of Connor's, dispatched by Connor himself to prevent the murder, and to ensure that the would-be mother survives and brings forth the necessary saviour. He does more than that, and in fact impregnates her with the foretold child. The film develops into a straightforward plot of quest and struggle, pitting brains against brute force, orderly civilisation against the unbridled techno-elemental, good against evil. In the course of it, the search for the woman to be slaughtered becomes merely a pretext for the real business of males-human and otherwise-killing each other in the name of promoting their respective lineages. Good achieves a qualified victory (the cyborg is defeated but-given the existence of at least one film sequel-there are plenty more where he came from), albeit, in true Gospel fashion, only at the price of a sacrificial male death. Reese, whose persona-beyond the figure of knight in shining armour in aid of damsels in distress-had combined the triple role of God (father of a saviour), guardian angel (of unborn children) and St Joseph (his son will bear his mother's rather than his father's surname, and therefore paternity appears to be a by-proxy affair), dies, leaving us with one surviving heroine and the promise of a living hero in the future. There is of course an important difference between these two. A bird in the hand is clearly always better than two in the air, and the survival chances of the two sexes at the end of the film seem unequal: on the one hand a resilient heroine who at the very last abandons dependence upon ineffectual protectors, and takes it upon herself to destroy the cyborg. And on the other hand, a dead hero and a promising but however yet unborn son.
This scenario encapsulates much that is relevant to the themes of male death, female survival and self-destructive male lineages, discussed in previous chapters. In The Terminator, in a reversal of the Father Amaro and indeed of the Gospel texts, a son sends his future father to his death in order to save himself/his interests, and males engage in mutual destruction (man against cyborg in a cross-species echo of clergymen against secular masculinity-Amaro versus Joao Eduardo-in The Sin of Father Amaro). The results, nonetheless, are not dissimilar, tending towards the effect of gender disloyalty among males and mutually forsaking relatives: God and his son on the cross, Connor and his sacrificed father in different time dimensions, humanity against the cyborgs which we presume are its highest-tech offspring. The Terminator's themes of nativity and infanticide, salvation and perdition, moreover, are particularly akin to the central issues to be raised in the following discussion on the analysis of images, which, like that film, are also ruled in equal measure by intertextual allusion (to prior traditions-whether theological or aesthetic) and by terror.
I shall be considering a series of ten pastels produced from fourteen sketches over a period of approximately six months, between July 1998 and February 1999. As so often in Paula Rego's work, only more directly so in this case, her images are rooted in a pre-existing context whose nuances inform the resulting pictures, and are central to their meaning. The motivation behind these particular works was a political event in Portugal, namely the referendum on abortion which took place on 28 June 1998, in the aftermath of legislation seeking to liberalise the existing abortion law. The effect of the referendum, details surrounding which will be outlined presently, was to bring about the suspension of the law for the purpose of its subsequent reconsideration by Parliament. This essay will seek to place the pastels, which almost unprecedentedly for this artist remain untitled, within the context of the political upheaval surrounding the referendum, as well as within the wider scenario of debates on abortion worldwide.
In an interview given in the year of the abortion pastels, and with reference to these works, Paula Rego said that to her death never signifies redemption. 'Death means you die. That is all' (quoted in Marques Gastao, 1999, 44). Her work throughout the decades, as discussed before in relation to paintings such as The Maids (plate 1), Girl with Chickens (figure 41) and The Coop (figure 45), has repeatedly manifested the inability or unwillingness-idiosyncratic within the canon of Western art-to cast the woman as victim. This identifying hallmark becomes more noticeable in those cases in which she departs from an originating text (Genet's The Maids, Eça de Queirós's The Sin of Father Amaro) whose plot centres around the death of a female. It is curious that, having opted for these plots, the artist circumvents the primary driving force of the narrative: in The Maids by casting a man in drag in the role of the female murder victim, and in The Sin of Father Amaro, even more tortuously, by emphasising survival and revenge where the text depicts the woman's defeat. In the abortion series to be discussed now, her female protagonists come arguably closer than ever before to surrendering to adverse circumstances. The bloodshed of the abortion room appears to highlight their pain rather than the death of the discarded foetuses, bringing maternal rather than filial suffering to the fore. Matres dolorosae prioritised over deposed sons. Ultimately, however, none of these female figures is actually dead, and the depicted trauma becomes itself the encoded script for a moral battle fought and perhaps won. A battle, as the subsequent argument will elaborate, whose contenders may not after all be the obvious ones of unwilling mother versus aborted foetus, but instead a gallery of women, girls and unborn children pitted against the customary enemies of church and state in Rego's unquiet universe.
What emerges from the abortion polemic that gave rise to these pictures is the enduring impact of Catholic influence on national politics in post revolution democracy in Portugal. I would like to begin by elaborating upon aspects of the Catholic Church's long-standing intervention in public affairs (specifically sexual politics) in general, and in Portugal in particular.
Referring to Machiavelli's principle of morality without scruples, within which the basis for success is that might is right, Lloyd Cole contends that this concept accurately describes the impact of the Catholic Church in countries where it exercises significant control over the population, and over its reproductive-including contraceptive-practices (Cole, 1992, 51). Janet Hadley gives a lucid account of how the abortion controversy has set the agenda for wider national politics at various times, and in some cases more or less constantly, in countries such as Ireland, Poland, Germany and the United States. In March 1993 a gynaecologist, David Gunn, was killed by pro-life activists2 outside his Florida abortion clinic, and since then the violence in the USA has escalated with further killings. Two years later, in March 1995, and regardless of pressure from some sectors of the Catholic faithful who distanced themselves from the 'vengeful Old Testament mentality' of 'extremists who have hijacked the American pro-life movement' (Hadley, 1996,153), the Pope issued his eleventh encyclical, Evangelium vitae ('Gospel of life'). In it he urged all Catholics to consider themselves under a 'grave and clear obligation' to join non-violent anti-abortion protests. 'The Pope's message came within inches of endorsing anti-abortion militancy as a religious duty and the mainstream lobbyists fretted that it would whip up the fanatics to further image-damaging antics' (Hadley, 1996, 154).
Not surprisingly, then, both before and after the papal encyclical, antiabortion Catholic thought, as well as the extremist factions of the anti-abortion lobby outside Catholicism, have continued to equate abortion with genocide and with the euthanasia practices of the Nazis against the physically and mentally handicapped. In this context, some writers have come to see the opposition to abortion as operating in tandem with an implicit declaration of wider sexual-political import (control over the bodies and roles of women), and one which furthermore entails a theological/doctrinal dimension. This refers primarily to the Christian/Catholic view that the reproductive function is the paramount role of women, ordained as either a punishment (childbirth in pain as atonement for Eve's original sin) or as a privilege (the emulation of the Virgin Mary as Holy Mother). In either case, motherhood emerges as neither a choice nor an option, but rather as a divinely ordained imposition.
In Genesis, God admonishes Eve that as punishment for her disobedience 'I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee' (Genesis 3:16). In this passage, woman's criminality, her maternity, and her subjection to the male are neatly linked together and transmitted in perpetuity to all womankind. To all womankind, that is, until the advent of Mary, whose redemptory being had the power if not fully to cleanse, at least to set a good example to her fellow women. Her all-embracing purity beautifies even Eve's sin, which it transforms into a Felix Culpa, a Fall now blessed for having made Mary's own idolised existence necessary (Warner, 1985, 60-1). Childbirth, and more specifically the pain it entails, was the punishment for the woman's greater culpability in original sin. Both the womb and the child in it were stained by that act: 'Woman was womb and womb was evil' (Warner, 1985, 57), therefore woman was evil too. That syllogism endured until the advent of a Marian worship whose essence too was maternity, but now a hallowed, purifying maternity to which other women could aspire, while, however, paradoxically, being conscious that as sinners they could never replicate it.
Under Vatican doctrinal ruling, Mary stands to this day as the exception to the human and female plight in two respects: she is exempt from original sin and she achieved motherhood while retaining her virginity, or, as the hymn would have it, 'Mother and Maiden was never none but she,/Well may such a lady Godde's mother be.'3 At an abstract level, therefore, she represents a philosophically and emotionally insurmountable problem for women: she is held up as that which they ought to strive to be while being admonished that, being different from her in those two respects, they can never even approximate her privileged status (Warner, 1985, 337). And at a more pragmatic level she has become the vehicle for the promotion of a series of political and ideological interests which relied upon the reproductive subjection of women as one of its central tenets:
In Catholic countries above all, from Italy to Latin America ... women are subjugated to the ideal of maternity ...
The natural order for the female sex is ordained as motherhood and, through motherhood, domestic dominion. The idea that a woman might direct matters in her own right as an independent individual is not even entertained. In Catholic societies, such a state of affairs is general, and finds approval in the religion's chief female figure (Warner, 1985, 284, 289).
Warner goes on to elaborate upon how propaganda of this sort, and the conflicts it throws up, extend well outside the sphere of theological debate and into realpolitik:
In 1974 Pope Paul VI, sensitive to a new mood among Catholic women, attempted to represent [Mary] as the steely champion of the oppressed and a woman of action and resolve. She should not be thought of, he wrote, 'as a mother exclusively concerned with her own divine Son, but rather as a woman whose action helped to strengthen the apostolic community's faith in Christ'. (Warner, 1985, 338)
When Pope Paul VI held up Mary as the New Woman, the model for all Christians, he expressed this impossibly divided aim without irony, in the immemorial manner of his predecessors. The Virgin is to be emulated as 'the disciple who builds up the earthly and temporal city while a diligent pilgrim towards the heavenly and eternal city'. (Warner, 1985, 337)
Earlier dictates of this sort, as we have seen, were put to use in Portugal by the propaganda machinery of the Estado Novo. Their effect, however, outlasted the fall of the regime, as demonstrated by the nature of the polemic that came to surround the abortion referendum a quarter of a century later. Before moving on to this, it may be interesting to note the analogies between the censorship apparatus of dictatorship in Salazar's Portugal and analogous regimes on one hand, and the older tradition of univocal papal pronunciation on the other. The latter dates back to the establishment by Pius IX of the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870, and has found confirmation in a series of subsequent Vatican utterances. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Pius X instigated a campaign which culminated in the enforcement of an anti-modernist oath imposed upon all Catholic ordinands. Its intention was to curtail intellectual attempts by theologians to reconcile Catholic beliefs with science, democracy and an objective account of history:
[The anti-modernist oath] involved assent to all papal teaching, both as to content and as to the 'sense' in which the Vatican meant it to be understood. Such internal assent went beyond anything dreamt up even by Stalin or the worst imaginings of George Orwell. The oath survives to this day in a new but similarly encompassing formula taken by Catholic ordinands, seminary teachers and Catholic university theologians. The pernicious result of Pius X's campaign was the shackling of free and imaginative Catholic thinking, discussion and writing for the next fifty years. (Cornwell, 1998, 23)
In the 1950s a number of attempts were made to break away from the crackdown implemented by Pius X, but Pius XII-'Hitler's Pope'-reaffirmed the policy of censorship, as well as the doctrine of papal infallibility. In an encyclical entitled 'Of Human Nature' he decreed that once the Pope has pronounced on a topic of faith or morals, all discussion must end among theologians. This was subsequently reinforced by Pope John Paul II, who pronounced that an utterance made by him precluded all further discussion on that subject. This move debarred even his papal successors from reopening the debates in question (Cornwell, 1998, 23). These notoriously included women's issues such as the ordination of women priests, contraception and abortion, which have been the subject of four papal encyclicals in recent years. 'Supported by this "spiritual" authority, fascism and neofascism organised the reactionary mentality, not only of the individual, but of women, under the form of the authoritarian family. This leads to a definition of the character structure of the petit bourgeois social strata ... which from the Italy of 1922, the Germany of 1933 to the Chile of Pinochet, draw out the potential of the counter-revolution: in the Woman/mother, Woman/hearth, Woman/Fatherland' (Macciocchi, 1979, 74).
Portugal under Salazar's Concordat enforced one of the strictest abortion laws in the Western world. Abortion was illegal and punishable with a term of prison, decriminalisation applying only in the case of proven danger to the life of the mother or severe malformation of the foetus, in which case a conference of medical practitioners might decide upon an illegal but nonprosecuted abortion.
In 1984, ten years after the revolution that ushered in democracy, the law was changed to legalise abortion in three specific circumstances: up to twelve weeks (and in some cases with no established upper limit) in the case of danger to the life or irreversible damage to the health of the mother; up to sixteen weeks in the case of incurable illness or malformation of the foetus; and up to twelve weeks if the pregnancy was the result of rape. In every case the abortion was to be carried out by a doctor in a recognised medical establishment. The new law, like the old one, recognised a doctor's right to object on grounds of conscience, and punished abortion in all other circumstances by two to eight years' imprisonment (Comissão para a Igualdade e Para os Direitos das Mulheres/Presidência do Conselho de Ministros, 1995,146-7).
Some facts and figures may be pertinent here. In 1976 in Portugal, the incidence of maternal deaths per 100,000 of live births was 44.5 and the number of illegal abortions was roughly estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 per year, abortion constituting the third most common cause of maternal death. By the beginning of the 1990s the effects of the liberalising law of 1984 began to translate into a dramatic decrease in maternal deaths from 44.5 to 8.4 per 100,000 live births. And in 1991 the numbers of illegal abortions were reduced from around 100,000-200,000 to around 20,000-22,000. The figures, however, continued to give cause for alarm: in 1995, almost 8000 babies were born to teenage mothers while some figures suggested that only 30 per cent of women of childbearing age attended family planning clinics and only 60 per cent practised contraception of any kind. For those seeking family planning advice in the late 1990s, waiting times could be as long as eight months (Rosendo, 1998,56-7).
An attempt at further liberalising the law by introducing abortion on demand up to ten weeks was rejected by Parliament at the beginning of 1997, but a motion by the JS (Juventude Socialista or Socialist Youth) and the PCP (the Portuguese Communist Party) led to its inclusion in the agenda of the following year's parliamentary debate. The proposed law was interpreted by many as being of an anti-punitive rather than liberalising tendency (Ferreira, 1998, 11), and it was approved in 1998, but a referendum on it was immediately requested by a coalition of Catholic and centre-right factions. Although under Portuguese law it is unconstitutional to hold a referendum on a law already approved by Parliament, the then Socialist government agreed to it. Although clearly opposed to the law, the Catholic Church was divided on the issue of whether it is feasible to hold a referendum on the right to be born, as well as on the advice to be given to the faithful on the matter of voting.
The referendum was set to take place on 28 June 1998, and debate on the matter occupied press time and newspaper column inches in the preceding months. Public, political and religious opinion was divided. The country's bishops, for example, offered advice and injunctions that ranged from the opinion that it is impossible to hold a referendum on the right to be born, to advice on voting against the law but without the threat of excommunication, to the more extreme option of ipso facto excommunication for anyone who voted in favour of liberalisation. Interestingly, Don Jose Policarpo, the Patriarch of Lisbon and therefore the highest prelate in the land, announced that he would not be offering any advice on this matter to the faithful of his diocese. In an official pronouncement to be delivered to all parish priests, he stated that while 'abortion under any circumstances is an attempt against life ... the stance of the Catholic Church does not incline towards criminalising the woman' (Policarpo, 1998, 6). Maria Jose Mauperrin noted that on the Sunday preceding the referendum, the tone set in masses up and down the country was varied, running the full gamut from admonitions of hellfire to absolute silence on the matter (Mauperrin, 1998, 79). The overwhelming weight of Catholic authority nonetheless urged the faithful with greater or lesser force and greater or lesser threats to vote against liberalisation in the referendum.
In the event the result was a deadlock. Only a disappointing 31.94 per cent of the electorate voted (2,711,712 voters), a fact which some opinion writers interpreted as signalling not lack of interest but instead a vestigial ('to be on the safe side') fear of excommunication on the part of would-be proliberalisation voters. Of those who voted, 49.08 per cent or 1,308,631 people voted in favour of liberalisation. By the tiniest margin of just over one per cent the no vote won, with 50.92 per cent (1,357,914 votes) opting against the liberalising option. In view of the inconclusiveness of the result, it was decided to resubmit the law to Parliament for further consideration at a later date. The matter remains unresolved at the time of publication.4
One final fact may offer food for thought. In the debate leading up to the referendum, a survey of medical opinion found that a significant number of the doctors questioned indicated that even were the law to be supported by the referendum or otherwise upheld, they themselves would neither offer abortions in their hospitals or surgeries, nor allocate funds for its implementation, suggesting that considerable problems remain as regards making the law a practical reality for Portuguese women (Rosendo, 1998, 58-64).
The Carnation Revolution of April 1974 had re-established democracy in Portugal, opened the way for massive and rapid changes in women's living and working conditions, and specifically abolished Salazar's Concordat with the Vatican. The events surrounding the referendum on abortion, however, made clear the extent to which, almost a quarter of a century later, religious influence and traditional attitudes concerning women and motherhood still endure. Politically and clerically enforced maternity is still a reality in Portugal, and Paula Rego's Untitled (silenced) works speak loudly about the problems that prevail under the current status quo.
Her attacks on the alliance of church and state and the undemocratic consequences of their collusion, both under Salazar and subsequently, reached a pitch in 1998-99 with this series of pastels painted in response to the referendum of the year before. In these, more directly even than in previous works, she addresses herself to the enduring power of Catholicism over lives, minds and, more to the point, politics, in post-Salazar Portugal under a democratic Socialist government. And with appalling appropriateness, at the heart of it lies that issue of motherhood, which as a shared lynchpin, brought together Socialism and Catholicism-otherwise antithetical in any given area of debate. 'I know what I am talking about. I know about those things. I saw the wretchedness of the women of Ericeira [in Portugal, where Rego's family had a house], [The pictures] are about things which we must continue to do in secret, as ever in Portugal. But it is better than not doing them!' (Pinharanda, 1999, 3).
Here is a conundrum. A gun holds six bullets. Playing Russian roulette with one bullet in the cartridge offers a one-in-six possibility of dying. Until antibiotics became widely available to combat infection in the second half of the twentieth century, an estimated one woman in every three or four, depending on the statistical source, died in childbirth. Sometimes it was worse: according to one source, for example, 'in the French province of Lombardy in one year no single woman survived childbirth' (Rich, 1992, 151). It follows that historically and until as recently as fifty years ago, it was safer to play Russian roulette than to bear a child.
The implications of this for family dynamics were not negligible. Prior to the advent of contraceptives, antibiotics and routine medical hygiene, every time a woman had sex, she contemplated pregnancy and death. One woman in every three or four in the general population gestated inside her own body her potential if involuntary killer; one man in every three or four lived out the larger part of his adulthood conscious of having exacted sexual pleasure at the price of another's death. A significant proportion of the population lived in the awareness of having attained life at the price of that of another', and that other, one's mother. For a girl the atonement for this involuntary matricide might lie in the subsequent surrender of her life in her turn to a reproductive imperative, patriarchal and patrilinear in many of its aspects. For a boy the original unintended kin slaying became an additional factor in a complex conglomeration of psychic phenomena which together constitute the male dread and guilt of being of woman born.
In an article titled 'The Hermaphrodite', which is, overall, unsympathetic to the notion that feminism can contribute in any significant way to an understanding of female auteurship in art, Bridget Riley wrote that 'in the act of love, physical differentiation establishes polarities which when resolved, lead in principle to the birth of a child' (Riley, 1971, 82). Departing from a premise whose implications almost diametrically oppose Riley, in one of the essays in Literature and Evil Georges Bataille argued that sexuality and reproduction, entailing as they do the transformation of the single into the multiple, the giving of one's body to the making of an other, imply not immortality but death, as the loss of the self in its uniqueness (Bataille, 1985, 13-31). God may succeed in being both single and infinite, but in the realm of the human the transition from one to many may signal dissolution (Schimmel, 1993,13-14). Never more so, possibly, than in the multiplication act from one to two, or one to many, inherent at the heart of unwilling motherhood. By the same rationale, the patriarchal dictate of obligatory conjugal and maternal surrender to selflessness would make abortion a route (albeit a drastic one) towards the restoration of the self in its former whole(some)ness. A nineteenth-century report on 'Observations on Some of the Causes of Infanticide' quoted the following statement by an obstetrician:
I have known a married woman, a highly educated, and in other points of view most estimable person, when warned of the risk of miscarriage from the course of life she was pursuing, to make light of the danger, and even express the hope that such a result might follow. Every practitioner of obstetric medicine must have met with similar instances and will be prepared to believe that there is some foundation for the stories floating in society, of married ladies whenever they find themselves pregnant, habitually beginning to take exercise, on foot or on horseback, to an extent unusual at other times, and thus making themselves abort. The enormous frequency of abortions cannot be explained purely by natural causes. (Greaves, 1976, 160-1)
In the course of the analysis that follows of Paula Rego's abortion pastels, it may be worth bearing in mind the fact that the very choice of theme offends against long-standing preferences in the tradition of the visual arts in the West.
49 Domenico Veneziano, The Annunciation
'Birth has almost everywhere been celebrated in painting. The Nativity has been a symbol of gladness, not only because of its sacral significance, but because of its human meaning-"joy that a man is born into the world". Abortion, in contrast, has rarely been the subject of art. Unlike other forms of death, abortion has not been seen by painters as a release, a sacrifice, or a victory. Characteristically it has stood for sterility, futility, and absurdity' (Noonan, 1976,135).
Abortion, then, stands not only in opposition to generic as well as specific love (for one's sexual partner, for one's unborn child), but in a theological and therefore implicitly moral-sense as the exact antithesis of the initiatory and iconographic moment of the Annunciation (figures 6 and 49).5
And whereas the latter, much-depicted, moment signifies a new beginning, a world without end, abortion declares untimely closure for the child if not for the mother (for whom it might after all signal the possibility of a fresh start). Be that as it may, abortion, while being the act which contravenes the 'joy that a man is born into the world', carries a significance that extends well beyond the stigma of sterility, futility or absurdity At the secular level, the nipping in the bud of that specifically male birth ('a man born into the world') interrupts the continuity of lineages of blood, name, masculinity, property and power. And at the sacral level it indicates the heresy of a theological trajectory leading from God the Father to his divine/human progeny, a trajectory whose culmination is not a Sacred Son, alive and immortal, but a dead foetus inside a bucketful of blood.
Abortion in the biblical context of holy births must also be seen to be the source of these Rego pictures, indicating as they do Catholic intervention in a secular legislative debate. As such, both it and the pictures in question evoke three concepts excised from any biblical wish-list of desirability. First, a reinstated emphasis on the post-lapsarian labour(ious) childbirth of Eve in place of the blessed one of Mary which ideally overrode it. Second, fruitless travail with no child at the end, rather than redemptory birth. Third, and associated with the latter, the issue (meaning here both offspring and outcome) of the abortion crime (blood and gore), rather than a sacred issue (the pure fruit of divinely anointed loins, namely a Holy Child). Moreover, as discussed throughout the preceding chapters, in a Catholic context theological concerns invariably entail political ramifications. Let us listen to Macciocchi again on the subject of another European politician whose views, like Hitler's, Salazar found overall simpatico:
'Coffins and cradles' is not just one of the obsessions of Mussolini's prose, it is also the theme of his speeches and the slogans he addressed to women. In the hysteria of an exaggerated birth-rate women were made to copulate, like rabbits, with the manGod. ... It was [Mussolini] who first launched the demographic campaign and he who dictated the first of the ten female commandments: Give Birth: 'There is strength in numbers'. (Macciocchi, 1979, 70)
Macciocchi refers to 'the emotional plague of fascism' that spreads through 'art epidemic of familialism' and sees 'women crucified by continual procreation, as well as subjected to patriarchal authority in their capacity as mothers, wives or daughters' (Macciocchi, 1979, 73). She depicts the collusion of interests of state, church and patriarchy under fascism, and through the operations of what she calls 'the authoritarian family', to the effect that 'women belong to the community: the nation is identified with the mother, the mother with the family, and the state is an amassed heap of separate families' (Macciochi, 1979, 73). For Hitler in Mem Kiimpf, the most important duty of men and women was to perpetuate the (racially pure) human species.
It is the nobility of this mission of the sexes which is the origin of the natural and specific gifts of providence. Our task is higher ... the final goal of genuinely organic and logical evolution is the foundation of the family. It is the smallest unity, but also the most important structure of the state. (Quoted in Macciocchi, 1979, 73)6
Not surprisingly, then, Paula Rego herself, stepping into the fray both with her 1998 abortion pastels and following the controversy in Portugal over the 2002 abortion trial mentioned previously (see note 4), links female pain surrounding the problem of illegal abortion (and, by implication, contemporary democratic Portugal) to a dictatorial past after all, it would seem, not yet overcome:
The [abortion] series was born from my indignation. ... It is unbelievable that women who have an abortion should be considered criminals. It reminds me of the past. ... I cannot abide the idea of blame in relation to this act. What each woman suffers in having to do it is enough. But all this stems from Portugal's totalitarian past, from women dressed up in aprons, baking cakes like good housewives. In democratic Portugal today there is still a subtle form of oppression. ... The question of abortion is part of all that violent context. (Quoted in Marques Gastão, 2002, 40, my italics)
The topic of abortion, therefore, sets off resonances so disturbing (and in some political contexts accusations so seditious), that they may explain how rarely it is translated into canonical visual images, both past and contemporary. When, as in the images in question here, the subject is taken up and developed, its wider implications may open up other disruptive avenues of thought.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes that 'men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. The surveyor of the woman in herself is male; the surveyed female. Thus, she turns herself into an object' (Berger, 1972, 47). As has been frequently pointed out in existing scholarship, the term erotic means erotic for men, and 'the imagery of sexual delight or provocation has always been created about women for men's enjoyment, by men' (Nochlin, 1973, 9). By and for men, but also with a pedagogical intent whose target may be the other sex:
The nude in her passivity and impotence, is addressed to women as much as to men. Far from being merely an entertainment for males, the nude, as a genre, is one of many cultural phenomena that teaches women to see themselves through male eyes and in terms of dominating male interest. While it sanctions and reinforces in men the identification of virility with domination, it holds up to women self-images in which even sexual self-expression is prohibited. As ideology, the nude shapes our awareness of our deepest human instincts in terms of domination and submission so that the supremacy of the male 'I' prevails on that most fundamental level of experience. (Duncan, 1988, 62-3)
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-belooked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. (Mulvey, 1975,11)
Laura Mulvey famously elaborated on these points with reference to scopophilia, the arousal of pleasure in cinematic viewing, in what are by now canonical essays. These writers raise a series of issues which may be pertinent in relation to Paula Rego's abortion pastels. First, in many of these images, as is so often the case with this artist, the import of the gaze projected out of the picture's plane by its subject is equivocal. In the majority of cases in this series, the protagonist's gaze, if not her body, is averted from the viewer. With reference to Rembrandt's Bathsheba in her Bath (1654), another compositionally ambiguous painting, Mieke Bal (1990, 515) maintains that the woman's unwillingness to communicate with the viewer makes the latter's moral position problematic, as does the story alluded to by the picture's title.
In a contrary move, in several of the abortion pastels (Untitled n. 1, plate 16; Untitled n. 8, plate 17; Untitled triptych c, figure 50) the female protagonist stares straight back at the viewer.
The effect, however, may copy the averted gaze of other images in establishing the emotional rejection of the spectator. In these cases, the direct gaze emanating from the picture plane establishes a mood of active control rather than passive self-exposure to external contemplation. In either case, it does not collude in any form of audience complicity. Instead, this declaration on the part of the protagonist of what must be seen, at the very least, as awareness of a voyeuristic eye focused on her can be extended to an act of defiance. This is all the more startling in view of the theme of the pictures, each of which depicts a woman either having an abortion performed on her or doing it herself, or immediately pre-or post-abortion, in short involved in an act that presupposes clandestinity and shame, rather than brazenness. If, as Alice N. Benston would have it, viewers can be hostile to being placed in the position of voyeur, the decision to do so here neatly reverses the tables as to who has a guilty conscience and who knows it (Benston, 1988, 356). Compositional decisions such as the posture or direction of gaze of the pictorial subject in this way feed into a sexual-political dimension: first, through the overturning of aesthetic conventions regarding the portrayal of gazed-upon but ungazing female subjects, nude or not. No longer here, it would appear, are women to be looked at without themselves looking. And second, as will be discussed at length presently, through the polemical dialogue set up with socio-moral and legal (specifically Portuguese) attitudes concerning the onus of guilt, sinfulness and criminality generally heaped on a woman or girl (age will become an issue in this argument) engaged in the act of abortion.
50 Untitled triptych
Berger's and Mulvey's essays open up a wealth of questions concerning the matter of pleasure in viewing, a debate over which, in any case, much ink has been spilt, resulting in a polarisation of views as to whether or not the transformative qualities of painting minimise or annul the work's ideological burden (in the case for example of female nudes, Elderfield, 1995, 7-51). At stake, among other issues, is the all-important question of a distinction, or lack of it, between high and low art, aestheticism and titillation, pleasure and perversion. A joke in dubious taste but from a distinguished provenance (attributed to George Bernard Shaw), may illustrate this point: a man asks a woman at a party to sleep with him in exchange for payment of one million pounds. After some hesitation she accepts. He changes his offer and asks her to sleep with him for one pound. Outraged, she asks what he takes her for. His reply: 'We know what you are. We are just haggling about the price.' Other than the matter of purchase price, is there a fundamental difference between girly-mag-type centrefolds on the one hand (figures 51 and 52), and canonical high art on the other (figures 53, 54 and 55)?7
From a different slant, is there a significant difference between Renoir's or Picasso's young girls (Blonde Bather, figure 56; Dora Maar, figure 57) and the standard and only slightly more titillating models of men's magazines? What separates Renoir's or Romney's little demoiselles (figure 58; figure 59) from erotic nudes such as Boucher's Nude on a Sofa: Portrait of Louise O'Murphy (figure 55) or Renoir's Blonde Bather (figure 56), who may be sexy but also have undoubtedly childish facial features ('at the time when Boucher painted his picture ... Louise O'Murphy [confusingly either Louis XV's mistress, or that mistress's younger sister, depending on which scholar one believes] was scarcely more than a child,' Brunei, 1986, 42)? And what distinguishes all these from a Paula Rego uniformed schoolgirl who happens to be in the painful throes of abortion (Untitled n. 4, figure 60)?
51 Untitled
More to the point, what, if anything, differentiates the various target viewers of these images, or the nature of their pleasure? Clearly there are great differences. But there may also be a more worrying similarity, which refers to areas of ambiguous gratification, paedophilia not excluded:
The more pornographic writing [art] acquires the techniques of real literature, of real art, the more deeply subversive it is likely to be in that the more likely it is to affect the reader's perceptions of the world. ...
A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of the current relations between the sexes ... Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture .... (Carter, 1987,19-20)
52 Untitled
Feminist art theory has drawn upon concepts developed in other branches of cultural theory to explore the ramifications of erotic interaction between the sexes in the visual arts. Lise Vogel, for example, uses as her departure point the well-established debate on duality in the portrayal of women in art (virgin versus whore, queen versus slave, Madonna versus Fury), which she takes to be 'simple projections of "human" (i.e. male) fears and fantasies' (Vogel, 1988, 46), while Carol Duncan argues along similar lines that 'the modern art that we have learned to recognize and respond to as erotic is frequently about the power and supremacy of men over women':
The erotic imaginations of modern male artists-the famous and the forgotten, the formal innovators and the followers-re-enact in hundreds of particular variations a remarkably limited set of fantasies. Time and again, the male confronts the female nude as an adversary whose independent existence as a physical or spiritual being must be assimilated to male needs, converted to abstractions, enfeebled, or destroyed. So often do such works invite fantasies of male conquest (or fantasies that justify male domination) that the subjugation of the female will appear to be one of the primary motives of modern erotic art.
... The equation of female sexual experience with surrender and victimisation is so familiar in what our culture designates as erotic art and so sanctioned by both popular and high cultural traditions, that one hardly stops to think it odd. (Duncan, 1988, 59-60, my italics)
53 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Source
Griselda Pollock contends that
'[a]rt is where the meeting of the social and the subjective is rhetorically represented to us. ... What we are doing as feminists is naming those implicit connections between the most intimate and the most social, between power and the body, between sexuality and violence. Images of sexual intimidation are central to this problem and thus to a critique of canonical representation' (Pollock, 1999,103).
And Paula Rego, herself, has argued that even apparently commonplace sexuality may include a dimension of violation (and therefore violence), and that in the sphere of sex 'there are the bosses and those who obey' (quoted in Marques Gastao, 2002, 40). Following a rationale which will acquire particular relevance with regard to Rego's abortion pastels, Duncan goes on to argue that this project of domination includes the requirement of female pain as underwriting rather than contradicting the promise of male gratification. With reference to Michelangelo, Ingres, Courbet, Renoir, Matisse, Delacroix, Munch, Klimt, Moreau and many other old and new masters, she discusses the wealth in the visual arts of images of monstrous women, the dread of whom reflects projected male feelings of inferiority. More numerous even than these harridans, portrayed fearfully by male artists and-much less frequently and, one suspects, with different feelings by women painters (figure 61)-I would now suggest, are the antidotes to these nightmarish females: the multitudes of blessed madonnas (figure 62) matres dolorosae (figure 63), or, and more to the point, suffering heroines: 'slaves, murder victims, women in terror, under attack, betrayed, in chains, abandoned or abducted' (Duncan, 1988, 60; figure 64; figure 65).
54 Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus
Their pain becomes the warranty of their controllability by the opposite sex. I would like to argue that the idealisation of variously suffering women who are the victims, handmaidens or more crucially mothers of a series of lordly males is not devoid of complexity, since for a woman to be a mother she must either be the Virgin Mary or she must have had sex like Eve, and suffer for it. In other words she must be either not really a woman but rather 'young, her body hairless, her flesh buoyant, [devoid of] a sexual organ' (Greer, 1985, 57)-in short, virginal and infantilised-or alternatively she must be a whore, and if so, both visible and punishable as such. And since, as we know, with one single exception women cannot be both virgins and mothers, a mother (Eve) must also by definition be always part-whore.8
Other instances of the adumbration of what technically are mutually exclusive categories of representation offer viewers-against-the-grain a welcoming foothold. Feminist art criticism has debated with considerable inspiration the conflation of, for example, the two separate genres of pregnancy and nudity in the nude by artists such as Paula Modersohn-Becker and Käthe Kollwitz (Betterton, 1996). If, as Rosemary Betterton would have it, '[f]or both artists, the "maternal nude" was one means by which they could address issues of their own sexual and creative identity at a time when the roles of artist and mother were viewed as irreconcilable' (Betterton, 1996, 175), an analogous process of the deployment of counter-intuitive category pairings might be said to be at work in Paula Rego's gallery of fully clothed, mockerotic abortion girls. Trouble begins to arise in this neatly dichotomous painterly paradise of maidens and sluts when, as is the case here, the woman who has clearly lapsed and sinned, and who moreover is about to compound the sin of fornication with the crime of abortion, carries not the accoutrements of the whore but rather all the hallmarks of the coltish or half-grown, newly fledged, hairless and untouched girl-child (Untitled n. 4, figure 60), sometimes still wearing her school uniform (Untitled n. 6, plate 18).
55 François Boucher, Nude on a Sofa (Louise O'Murphy)
If the production of art has traditionally presupposed the presence of a male viewer and the requirement of male gratification, Paula Rego, rather than turning the tables on that tradition in a variety of possible, straightforward feminist ways (for example, by addressing herself to an implied female audience, as much of her work has been held to do) may be playing precisely on those two time-honoured assumptions: first, an assumed male gaze; and second, one which, following Duncan, is gratified by scenes of female pain. The attempted resolution of these two matters gains complexity, furthermore, as one considers the nature, posture and identity of the female subject. As regards posture, a cursory glance suggest that pictures such as for example Untitled n. 3 (plate 19), Untitled n. 4 (figure 60), Untitled n. 6 (plate 18), Untitled n. 7 (plate 20) and the first panel of the Untitled triptych (figure 50) reproduce the standard reclining pose of any number of eroticised painters' models throughout the centuries of visual art (figure 66; figure 67; figure 68).
56 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Blonde Bather
In fact, however, a closer look renders this initial impression and the reflex of erotic response problematic: Rego's models are not women but girls, and their posture is not one of sensual invitation but overwhelming pain.
In the case of the abortion images, spectator gratification was partially blocked from the start by the lack of nudity. But more crucially, pleasure-the male viewer's-and pain-the girlish models'-(or, to put it differently, cause and effect), become dangerously indistinct, suggesting two things: first, a fact which has also conventionally been seen as a moral imperative, and which canonical art presupposes while euphemistically sweeping it under the carpet, namely that for women, sexual delight carries a potential sting in the tail, and may have to be purchased at a high price; and second, the fact that for the male viewer, that pain is part of the point and underpins the pleasure.
57 Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar
The blurring of categories of enjoyment and pain, in the context of both Rego's pictures and well-known images in the canon (Untitled n. 2, plate 21 in relation to Degas, Nude Woman Drying Her Left Foot, figure 69; Untitled n. 3, plate 19; Untitled n. 7, plate 20 and Untitled sketch 3, figure 78 in relation to Kitaj, The Yellow Hat, figure 709), draws attention to other sorts of potential ambivalence: the blurring of categories of childbirth (consecrated) and abortion (condemned); the unidentifiable process through which the two become indistinct (figure 71); the confusion between the hallowed maternal anguish of innumerable matres dolorosae or Pietas sorrowing for dead sons (figure 63) in (supposed) contrast with that of would-be mothers responsible for deeds (abortions) atoned by criminal tears (Untitled n. 10, figure 72); perpetuity (life) and closure (termination of life); fruitful and fruitless labour.
I would argue that in these images such distinctions are kept deliberately ambivalent and therefore enduringly preoccupying. Were it not for the conspicuous absence of babies, the referents for some of these pictures could be straightforward scenes of births or somewhat graphic Nativities (Untitled triptych b, figure 50; Untitled n. 1, plate 16).
Alternatively, some might also be mistaken for representations of an invitation to male penetration (Untitled triptych b, figure 50; Untitled sketch 7, figure 73; Untitled sketch 9, figure 74).
58 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Girl with a Hoop
However, they refer instead to female anguish without fruit and possibly also to sexual coercion of various kinds (rape, abuse, incest, abusive sexual relationships between grown men and young girls), all giving rise to unwanted pregnancies. They may signal furthermore male pleasure derived at the price of this anguish (the sexual act that led to the pregnancy) as well as from the contemplation of the anguish itself (as depicted in its visual representation). Angela Carter coined the term 'moral pornography' for material which albeit conventionally pornographic might, by its very nature, render explicit and therefore accuse certain aspects of pleasure exacted at the price of pain within the arena of gender conflict:
The sexual act in pornography exists as a metaphor for what people do to one another, often in the cruellest sense ... .
And all such literature has the potential to force the reader to assess his relation to his own sexuality, which is to say to his own primary being, through the mediation of the image or the text. This is true for women also, perhaps especially so, as soon as we realise the way pornography reinforces the archetypes of her negativity and that it does so simply because most pornography remains in the service of the status quo. ...
It is fair to say that, when pornography serves ... to reinforce the prevailing system of values and ideas in a given society, it is tolerated; and when it does not, it is banned. ...
59 George Romney, Miss Juliana Willoughby
When pornography abandons its quality of existential solitude and moves out of the kitsch area of timeless, placeless fantasy and into the real world, then it loses its function of safety valve. It begins to comment on real relations in the real world. ...
Arid that is because sexual relations between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and, if described explicitly, will form a critique of those relations. (Carter, 1987,17-20)
Paula Rego's pictures, both in this series and previously, draw upon some of the concepts outlined by Carter above, by foregrounding the insidious aspect of pain at the heart of the pleasure principle, or the inextricability of the two, at stake in canonical art (plate 22).
Her abortion images are travesties as well as sometimes simply straightforward exaggerations of a variety of standard iconographic positions and compositions (annunciations, nativities, reclining nudes, sexual frolics), and as such set off a tripartite reaction. First, they lure the viewer into a mood of expectant gratification (as encouraged by the superficial similarity between these images (Untitled n. 3, plate 19; Untitled n. 4, figure 60; Untitled n. 6, plate 18; Untitled n. 7, plate 20) and the standard reclining lovelies of Boucher (figure 66), Ingres (figure 67), Gaugin (figure 68), or of almost any famous painter of the female figure).
60 Untitled n. 4
Second, and contrarily, the appeal becomes quickly mingled with the shocking realisation of the subject matter involved. Third, and perversely, it is possible that this afterthought of quasi-Aristotelian fear and pity, which technically ought to lead to the purification of catharsis (Aristotle, 1985, 49-51) in its turn may give way to the titillation and frisson of perverse and perverted pleasure originating in someone else's pain. And this pleasure in its turn may trigger a renewed questioning of one's moral position as viewer, and of the nature of pleasure to be derived from much canonical art, an important component of which has traditionally been pain, and the master-slave relationship between male viewer and female victim.
Indifference to, or non-recognition of an established power structure, combined with careless provocation (sexual and otherwise), has always been an element that goes beyond the irreverent in Paula Rego's art (Target, figure 75). Do it to me if you dare.
61 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes
Obliviousness of danger to self or an absolute lack of concern regarding desecrating the established rules of others, as illustrated by an unwillingness to communicate with the viewer, discussed earlier in connection with the subject of the averted gaze, carries further implications. In the abortion pastels, on the part of the girl protagonists there appears to prevail an unsettling indifference and/or hostility to the viewer (Untitled n. 1, plate 16; Untitled triptych c, figure 50).
In another context Alice N. Benston identifies an intent on the part of certain artists to appeal 'to male anxiety, since this insistently female world implies the avoidance, even the lack of necessity of a male presence' (Benston, 1988, 356). It is a commonplace of human relations that indifference may be more unsettling than enmity. And therefore, the absence of a child (through expulsion from the womb) acquires further relevance in the context of male anxieties about masculine dispensability. Psychoanalytically, the child represents for the woman a substitute penis that soothes her castration complex and penis envy. If so, it follows that the voluntary termination of pregnancy arguably conveys a lack of interest or refusal to acknowledge the significance of the phallus and its symbolic association with gender power. Thus, the act which refuses the male his progeny contests also his existential relevance. Some of Paula Rego's protagonists, by virtue of their deliberate obliviousness (looking at the viewer without seemingly registering his presence as in any way significant), may work to create in the latter the effect, identified by Alice N. Benston, of hostility at being put in the position of voyeur. It may also create anxiety 'since this insistently female world implies the avoidance, even the lack of necessity of a male presence' (Benston, 1988, 356). And the Holy Ghost (the über-impregnator and intangible representative of all fathers, in the masculinist narrative of engendering), now becomes by association also representative of the inconsequential or literally ghostly viewer in these Nativity images with a slant. While being treated as negligible, however, all remain simultaneously and paradoxically implicated in the sin or crime in hand. More of this later.
62 Raphael, The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna
Be that as it may, the effect of Paula Rego's pictures is to foreground the process that draws in the implied male gaze while also placing its owner (and the art tradition from which he hails, and which has trained his vision) in a very dubious moral position. After all, it may be that the difference between the languid, fully grown beauties or the winsome children of the art canon on the one hand, and its own raped maidens or these Regoesque girls in pain on the other, is quantitative rather than qualitative.
63 Moretto da Brescia, Pietà
Clearly there is nothing more innocent (or is there?) than the pleasure given and received from the contemplation of a Renoir child or a naked infantine Botticelli cherub. Less clearly, what kind of man, citizen or moral being would the implied male viewer be who was sexually and aesthetically gratified by the pain of pregnant schoolgirls forced into clandestine abortions? A sadist? A paedophile? An alter ego of the impregnator of under-age schoolgirls such as those featured in Untitled n. 4 (figure 60), Untitled n. 6 (plate 18) and all three panels of the Untitled triptych (figure 50)?
The implied threat of female sexuality, let alone deviant (because, as here, infantile or juvenile) female sexuality, is therefore overshadowed in these pictures by two other factors: first, the male sexual behaviour that results in the pregnancies of young girls and adolescents; and second, the moral ramifications of a habit of viewing that delights in the contemplation of these disturbing child brides10 and in the bloody aftermath of their seduction.
Feminist art theory in its incipient formulations trod much the same path as other areas of feminist cultural theory. For Judith Barry and Sandy FlittermanLewis, for example, 'a radical feminist art would include an understanding of how women are constituted through social practices in culture':
64 Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia
Once it is understood how women are consumed in this society it would be possible to create an aesthetics designed to subvert the consumption of women, thus avoiding the pitfalls of a politically progessive art which depicts women in the same forms as the dominant culture. (Barry and Flitterman-Lewis, 1988, 88)
In a deconstructive move, such art would seek to 'play on the contradictions that inform patriarchy itself' so that the images of women arising from it would not be 'accepted as an already produced given' but would rather be 'constructed in and through the work itself' (Barry and Flitterman-Lewis, 1988, 94). Where abortion is concerned, this demarcation between what has been and what might be imagistically possible, and the tracing of the dividing line between the two positions, which is also the dividing line between the old orthodoxy and an emerging space of aesthetic feminist dissent, instigate a neat comparison between Rego's abortion pictures and other images on the same theme, stemming from a radically different position. A representative specimen of the latter would be for example footage from Bernard Nathanson's notorious film, The Silent Scream, which purported to show what an abortion is like from the twelve-week-old foetus's position. In a move that clearly highlights the objective, for anti-abortion discourse, of shifting attention and concern from the woman to the foetus, the film is designed and speeded up to suggest pain and avoidance of the aborting cannula on the part of a foetus which, at twelve weeks, lacks most of the neurological apparatus involved in our experience of pain. The accompanying voice-over, in which, in Susan Faludi's words, 'the truly silent cast member is the mother', describes the foetus as a child 'in intrauterine exile', who is 'bricked in, as it were, behind what seemed an impenetrable wall of flesh, muscle, bone and blood' (Faludi, 1991,459)-The pregnant woman is described as the foetus's 'place of residence', and after abortion as 'a bombed-out shell', 'a haunted house where the tragic death of a child took place' (Faludi, 1991, 459). 'The aim is to talk up the foetus ... As they say in Hollywood, accuracy is not the point; it is the atmosphere that counts' (Hadley, 1996, 149). The result locks the mother and child into a deadly conflict of interests. Hadley comments that the power of imagery to make a point has been much more successfully deployed by anti-abortionists than pro-abortionists:
65 Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
Defenders of abortion rights-with little other than the bloody coat-hanger image to remind us of the bad old days of illegal abortions-are utterly routed by the tiny feet or the manipulated trembling of the Silent Scream foetus. ... Ours is a culture of pictures. Seeing is believing. Every newspaper editor and television news producer knows that however powerful words may be-recalling the grisly squalor of illegal abortion and its links with every kind of racketeering-it is to pictures, and above all to images that move, that people respond. No words are needed to accompany pictures of little mangled legs, hacked arms, crushed skulls. Award-winning commercials director Tony Kaye shot graphic footage of fetuses for a feature film about abortion and commented: 'When you see those fetuses, it is pretty much game, set and match as far as I am concerned.' (Hadley, 1996, 150)
66 François Boucher, Danaë Receiving the Golden Shown
In light of this, where do Paula Rego's abortion pictures fit in? At one level, they fit into an agenda of blurring boundaries, since each of her solitary female subjects, ostentatiously alone in an empty room and presumably cut adrift from world of moral certainties by her abortion, is not in fact a woman, but, with two exceptions, a child or an adolescent. The exceptions are n. 9 (figure 77), who, bearing in mind her apparent age is probably the actual abortionist, and, less clearly, n. 8 (plate 17), who appears slightly older than the rest of the subjects. Even the latter, however, fits easily into one of three categories of female subject I would identify in this set of pictures. For the sake of short-hand classification these categories will be referred to as the schoolgirl, the servant girl and the debutante. The categories are loosely based on the impression of their age and social status deduced from their clothing. The name of the game, for all three types, is alienation from power. The servant girl's social status might be said to label her disenfranchised by default (n. 1, plate 16; n. 10, figure 72).11 She is that economically deprived girl whom the pro-choice literature describes as being forced to resort to cheap, illegal and therefore unsafe abortions rather than expensive, illegal but safe ones (Kenny, 1986,298). The same label of disempowerment can be applied to the schoolgirl (n, 4, figure 60; n. 6, plate 18; and Triptych, figure 50), whose childish status is reinforced by wearing a school uniform that classifies her as under the power of others (adults in general, but specifically parents, step-parents or teachers, and, more to the point, her impregnator, who might in fact have been a parent, step-parent or teacher). And, for this purpose, the same may be asserted about the debutante, so classified here largely by virtue of the type of dress worn, which in these pictures is reminiscent of the standard outfit for a particular kind of American Hollywoodesque school graduation prom (n. 3, plate 19; n. 5, figure 76; n. 8, plate 17).
67 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque
The debutante is the girl who, as the very word indicates, stands on the brink or beginning (in French début) of life and womanhood, having just left school. And the servant girl signals the hard life which, but for the grace of money, the debutante would be forced to embark upon, should the abortion of her illicit pregnancy fail to restore her to middle-class respectability.
All these models, therefore, represent figures whose lives as women have yet to begin (much as is the case with the foetus, for whom life, too, had not quite begun). They are either unequivocally children (the schoolgirl), or narrowly miss that status (the servant girl-because she is a bit too old, but more to the point, too poor to go to school-and the debutante-who has only recently left school). All of them, including the older ones, remain part of or uncomfortably close to a recently discarded infancy. In n. 8 (plate 17), for example, the extreme youthfulness of the subject is denoted by the childish (as opposed to provocative) gesture of pulling up her skirt absent-mindedly, as little girls do. The fact that the gesture here is made to avoid staining by blood spilt from the overturned bucket only renders the collision of childish mannerisms and adult problems the more shocking.
68 Paul Gauguin, Nevermore
And because these women are not women but girls, perturbingly, they fail to hold up their end of the binary structure which, were they in fact fully grown, would, according to the pronouncements of the anti-abortion lobby, place them on the criminal side of the equation, as adults empowered with decision over the life or death of the foetus. On the other side of the equation would be that absolutely vulnerable and fragile foetus, possibly doomed to termination at the hands of its evil, omnipotent mother. These pictorial protagonists tell instead a story which disturbingly eludes that facile casting, since while undeniably having abortions they are also simultaneously children, or as good as children, and so their condition reflects the more unequivocal world of adult power, and the possible abuse (or at least lack of protection) that culminated in these underage pregnancies. The ladder in Untitled n. 8 (plate 17) may signify the uneasy transition between those two worlds, since its ascent is potentially multi-layered and clearly gradualised or diffuse (many rungs on a ladder) rather than abrupt (from one defined state to another). It suggests that the transition from child to woman, from servant to mistress, from earth (Eve) to heaven (Mary), is always a moveable feast. All these stages, and the shift from one to another, however, are vulnerable and can be either cut short or brought forward by the decision to abort, since an abortion may variously kill the mother, maim her, induce barrenness, make possible a future marriage and legitimate offspring, help prolong a childhood otherwise interrupted by premature maternity, enforce untimely adulthood through life-changing trauma, dispose of the consequences of an embarrassing sexual lapse, criminalise that lapse, safeguard or disrupt psychic well-being, maintain respectability through disposal of a socially unacceptable conception, provoke social ostracism through discovery of the abortion, safeguard respectability or bring about moral (religious) condemnation.
69 Edgar Degas, Nude Woman Drying her Left Foot
In the context of the confusion between the categories of child and woman the buckets that feature in several of the pictures may refer to the issue of the abortion, but what they also establish is not the separation (enmity) of would-be mother and aborted child, but instead the eerily companionable isolation of the two: isolation in rooms that contain only them and from the rest of the world which excludes them. In what are deliberately ambiguous pre-or post-abortion scenes (it is unclear which), the only foetuses actually visible, tellingly, are the girls themselves, curled in foetal self-protection in several of the images (n. 4, figure 60; Triptych a, figure 50). And if so, what is depicted here, after all, is not a series of juxtapositions of bad mothers and offspring whose potential lives the former nipped in the bud, but instead repeated presentations of the theme of two lonely children: one unborn, the other unready to bear it.
The pictures also disrupt other expectations. The opponents of legal abortion, as made clear for example in the notorious 1994 case of the Irish fourteen-year-old child X prevented from travelling to England to obtain an abortion after having been raped, seldom seem prepared for the implications of criminalising abortion in such clearcut cases or for the problems of assigning blame and innocence (Hadley, 1996, 15-23). The stereotype of the abortionseeking woman that fits more easily with the requirements of the anti-abortion agenda is the feckless, reckless, promiscuous and immoral, unmarried or adulterous but in any case always adult woman (Kenny, 1986, 14). The antiabortion lobby assimilates less easily the dilemmas of severely deformed foetuses, endangered mothers, abused girls or victims of rape or incest. What Paula Rego appears to have done is to home in precisely on that unresolved impasse by depicting little girls and adolescents, females on the brink of their own life who here, willingly or unwillingly, become embroiled in the creation and destruction of someone else's. They are patriarchy's spoilt virgins, but what remains unclear is who exactly is guilty of the spoiling. Given the age of some of them, the blame, it is to be supposed, lies elsewhere than in their own post-lapsarian concupiscence.
70 R. B. Kitaj, The Yellow Hat
Returning to a biblical theme with a twist in the tail, in the usual composition of canonical Annunciation paintings (figures 6 and 49), Mary figures alone apart from the ghostly intangibility of the angel messenger who delivers her destiny. Her solitude or separateness (difference) underlines the exclusivity of her always sinless and now holy status, 'alone of all her sex', as the chosen mother of God's son.12 The cloistered setting and closed doors or gates (figure 49) reinforce this separateness through their allusion to her similarly unbreached hymen and impenetrable virginity. Her distinctiveness from the rest of womankind has been traditionally interpreted as a privilege ('blessed art thou among women'), and understood, as the prayer would have it, to arise out of her bond to the holy fruit of her loins. If abortion represents the brutal separation of the child from its mother's body-in echo of the expulsion of mortal sons from Eden and from the body of the Divine Father-the official Marian version reinstates the somatic as well as the emotional and spiritual unity of a reverse pairing: human parent and Divine Son. Or does it? The Portuguese writer Almeida Faria refers to the perturbed musings of St John the Evangelist and other fathers of the Church on the subject of the likely discomforts suffered by Jesus in the cramped conditions of his mother's womb:
71 Frida Kahlo, Birth or My Birth
In the text which he pondered until death, [the Augustinian hermit] meditated upon the discomfort and the crampedness of the womb in which Christ, like any other mortal, remained for nine months. He had recourse to the authority of St John the Evangelist, according to whom the Creator was in full possession of his understanding the entire time he awaited birth, and evokes the humility of the King of Kings in subjecting himself to the humidity, the darkness and the noise of the Virgin's entrails. (Almeida Faria, 1990, 70-1)
This unease, probably an echo of the old panic about being 'of woman born', lends another aspect to the Mary–Jesus pairing, eliciting as it does an impression of alienation or even rejection on the part of a son whose mother, for him, never signified more than a non-participant and uncomfortable empty vessel. And if so, the lonely Mary of the Annunciation (figures 6 and 49) may be blessed but is arguably not blissful.
72 Untitled n. 10
Rego's images offer a profane simulacrum (and contestation) of Mary's difference from all other females (let alone ones such as these), representing, as they do, girls who, like Mary, are absolutely on their own, in these cases in spaces stripped equally of objects, fellow human beings or even aloof angels. The pictures bear further affinities to the Marian condition of lofty isolation. In n. 5 (figure 76), for example, the girl is arranged on a table whose cloth renders it somewhat akin to a hospital stretcher but also to an altar. Her legs are supported by two stirrup-like chairs reminiscent of the footholds used in gynaecological examinations, but whose effect is also to immobilise her in the manner, for example, of a piece of church statuary.
These 'abortion damsels', therefore, both echo and elaborate upon the solitude of Mary in traditional Annunciations and general Christian iconography. Each figure appears alone but not blissfully so, an ambivalence which unusually but accurately echoes that of Mary (and Joseph) in the Gospels.13
73 Untitled (sketch 7)
And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.
And the angel came unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. ...
How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? (Luke 1:26-34, italics mine)
Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily. (Matthew 1:18-19, italics mine)14
If the Mary-Joseph and Mary-Jesus pairings lend themselves after all to interpretation as a demonstration of needs-must rather than beatific acceptance, Rego's abortion girls may be only a few steps beyond in their refusal of unsought motherhood.
Each one lies or sits without doctor or nurse, father or mother, but more to the point without her lover to accompany her in an abortion possibly but not necessarily self-induced. The onus of guilt in these pictures remains equally arguable, since each of these Portuguese (and therefore, in view of the existing law, criminal) recusants carries a complex message. Men (and God) may be present in the making of children, but women, it is implied, are left alone in that equally God-like (albeit anti-demiurgic) act of unmaking them. At first glance this situation implies a usurpatory and even heretical act on the part of the female, since it refers to a universe where God/man may have the power over life, but the potentially demonic woman exercises at least some control over death. There are however other implications inherent in the absence of the male beyond the act of impregnation. As Joanna Frueh succintly argues, 'the penis stands out, the vagina does not' (Frueh, 1988,161), so the penises implicated in these particular pregnancies, as well as being now conspicuous by their absence, also become culpable for both the former and the latter situations, i.e. for the pregnancies and their current absence. And the masculine impact (the power to fertilise the female), particularly in view of the obvious non-demonic status of the girls, may serve as the proclamation of a male right or achievement (perpetuity of blood and lineage), but becomes also the fact that makes possible their indictment. In a countermove to the anti-abortion propaganda that in Janet Hadley's words aims either to neglect or demonise the mother in order to 'talk up the foetus', these images may be said to talk up the
74 Untitled (sketch 9)
75 Target
76 Untitled n. 5
guilt, or at least the responsibility, of the willingly evanescent male who scored and ran.
The otherness of motherhood as implied in these pictures grows in importance as one continues to consider the theme. Maternity, whether religious or secular, and the quality of isolation discussed above, is one of the most enduring themes of traditional iconography, and it is ongoing in recent or contemporary figurative art of male and more particularly female artists, whether working within radical revisionist approaches or in more or less conventional form (Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Barbara Hepworth, Dorothea Tanning, Mary Kelly, Juanita McNeely and Frida Kahlo, figure 71).
The traditional art history establishment has alternately sacralised the theme, applauded its practitioners, and patronised or castigated revisionist thinkers.15 In contrast, Paula Rego's abortion series, as already suggested, makes the role of mothers problematic, since her women are not adults but girls. More to the point, however, these works are not about becoming or being a mother, but about not becoming one. Their theme is an act defined socially and sometimes legislatively as the unnatural and premature termination of the life-cycle, and as such stands coterminous with other forms of aggression such as castration, infanticide and homicide.
I will digress here to refer to a piece of the Apocrypha which altogether appropriately ushers in an unseemly third element to the binary of Eve-Mary. In the Jewish Apocrypha Adam had a first wife, before Eve, by name Lilith. Lilith refused God's injunction that she submit to Adam and be his helpmate, and as a result was banished to the shores of the Dead Sea, where she dwells in a cave to this day, consorting with demons and devouring her male offspring in recidivist insurrection against her husband and his Creator (Gilbert and Gubar, 1984, 35; Kristeva, 1986, 140). The second spouse, as we know, fared little better, and while in Genesis both Adam and Eve underwent punishment together as a consequence of the latter's misdemeanour, Eve, and all her female successors, suffered further chastisement, specific to the female archculprit. These included menstruation, painful childbirth and breast-feeding, all of course preconditions or consequences of motherhood. If Lilith, like Amaro in Ega's first version of the novel, was guilty of hands-on infanticide, Eve was to blame for robbing her descendants of eternal life. The reinstatement of the apocryphal version transforms the binary Eve-Mary into a sacrilegious trinity weighted in favour of sinfulness (two against one, Lilith and Eve juxtaposed against Mary). And the maternal condition, as discussed already, had to wait for the advent of Mary in order to acquire a measure of redemption which, however, is confined to the Holy Virgin herself, excluding the rest of womankind as well as its offspring, children one and all of Eve and implicitly of Lilith also.
In the anti-abortion agenda, abortion including legal abortion, stands parallel to and indistinguishable from infanticide, both being implicitly condemned as acts of lese-majeste against the patriarchal imperative of male reproduction. When a foetus is aborted, it is not just the son of man but potentially the Son of God whose lifeblood is wantonly (and I use the term advisedly) shed. Abortion is the wrecking of the possibility of life. Castration is the wrecking of the possibility of pleasure. And murder (with infanticide as its most unnatural and abhorred rendition) is the wrecking of the possibility of continued life or of immortality. But all of these are merely premature wreckages, untimely anticipations of the death which in any case is inherent in the moment when, in the aftermath of Eve's sin, the mother, in giving life, bestows it as a finite gift without the promise of immortality. A life, in short, that is poisoned, initiated by a birth quantitatively but not qualitatively different from its deformed avatars of abortion, castration and murder, to which it is linked by a common ultimate dissolution. And at the origin of this horrible truth, whether she be murderous or simply maternal, we find the ambivalently loved mother. That mother may be the three-faced originator-Lillith, Eve and Mary-or the female parent whom psychoanalysis has propounded is dichotomously good and bad: both loved and loathed, but always present, albeit hurriedly discarded by her post-Oedipally panicked, yet still desirous sons. Whatever the case, she is always dangerous.
For Cassandra L. Langer, feminist revisionism in art must involve forms explicitly conscious of the oppression of women due to gender, an art that 'understands that women exist for the patriarchy: to propagate, to carry on the male name, and to assure a legitimate passage of the father's property and wealth to a designated heir' (Langer, 1988, 111). In artistic traditions, the dangerous, infanticidal mother finds expression more commonly through the metamorphosed (and therefore to some extent side-stepping) device of reference to biblical belles dames sans merci (Delilah, Salome, Judith, figure 61), who are not necessarily or primarily mothers, i.e. who are not principally feared in their maternal/annihilating capacities. Throughout the centuries refuge from the nightmare of murderous mothers has also been sought with greater success in the omnipresent, enduring and numerous (safety in numbers) depictions of the Virgin and Child in Western iconography (figure 62). The sheer numerical balance of pictures painted under the themes respectively of virgin and whore vastly and reassuringly favours good over bad mothers, with beatific madonnas and their earthly sidekicks (the wives and mothers of traditional portraiture) easily outnumbering all the other faces of womankind put together. Be that as it may, the timeless and distinct categories of Mary and Eve, virgin and whore, mother and killer are each in their own way reassuring, precisely because they remain clearly compartmentalised: complementary yet distinct, commensurate but absolutely separate, meaningfully antithetical. Because they are different and mutually exclusive, they enable the viewer to know what's what morally, and to cope with evil while enjoying goodness. It is the dissolution of the boundaries between the two opposites, and the ensuing possibility of a fusion of categories that poses the real threat to a status quo which depends on the continuing security provided by generally accepted definitions of black and white. And it is that threat which underpins the narrative process Paula Rego puts in motion in this series of pictures.
The triptych format, for example, traditionally narrates a biblical story, more specifically scenes from the birth and life of Jesus. The tripartite picture included in this abortion series (Triptych, figure 50), however, other than the provocation represented by the theme of abortion within a genre which conventionally indicates the birth of an immortal son, conveys also another event-child pregnancy-which is morally unspeakable and almost unutterable: something which words hardly can but these images do convey. More unconventionally, even, they direct the compassion of the viewer primarily to the mother aborting the child. In doing so, they challenge obedience to a conservative morality, namely that abortion is a crime or sin committed by the mother against her unborn child, and that she ought to suffer for it. The effect of the images, therefore, undermines definitions of what constitutes a crime warranting punishment, as well as the process of identifying who is automatically deemed guilty of it.
77 Untitled n. 9
Abortion may be the thematic antithesis of blessed motherhood, but in itself it need not pose a serious threat to an orthodoxy which after all has coped with equanimity with, and indeed wallowed pictorially and at length in, the representation of numerous biblical and historical murderesses. Paula Rego's pictures, however, as well as complicating the linear attribution of guilt to the girls themselves, issue further complexities within the debate in question. These surface in the only picture in this cycle whose subject is not a girl having an abortion (n. 9, figure 77).
The homely matron who has performed or is about to perform an abortion and currently wipes the basin presumably used to hold the dead foetus is a perfect representation, through her physical motherly presence and housewifely attributes (mopping up, cleaning), of everything that society condones in women. She could be anybody's mother, aunt, housekeeper, domestic servant, the very antithesis, in short, of the backstreet abortionist.16
Clearly, however, being an abortionist (and in Portugal, necessarily, a backstreet one) she contravenes all that is conventionally and socially acceptable. She does so first and most obviously by breaking the law. The implications of her transgression, however, reverberate further, since if she is a mother or mother-surrogate implicated in her daughter's abortion, parent and child become bonded here by a complicity which strengthens female familial attachments at the cost of interrupting the male generational imperative. Paradoxically, however, her actions also help to sweep under the carpet a forbidden unacceptable pregnancy, and therefore collude in maintaining the fiction of a God-fearing nation in which, theoretically, girls do not become pregnant before they become wives. Abortion, therefore, particularly if made possible by motherly figures such as this one, both defies and shores up the orthodoxy of a state-controlled female sexuality successfully contained within authorised marital boundaries. It defies state control because it helps to cover up illicit sexual behaviour; but it defends orthodoxy's apparent cohesion by helping to dispose of those illegitimate children who would be the embarrassing proof that, after all, in this, God's country, things are not always as they ought to be.
The figure in question represents a performance on the cusp between categories (good woman/bad woman, mother/abortionist, life-giver/lifetaker, madonna/whore, mater dolorosa/fallen woman). Paula Rego herself has described her as 'a good woman, a figure of goodness, she does what she can to help women. This one isn't bad' (Pinharanda, 1999, 3). Her actions simultaneously dissolve the boundary between prescribed and proscribed roles and behaviours (mother and abortionist, mother-hen or child murderer, mothering and murdering) and reaffirm it. They dissolve the boundary because the same figure simultaneously occupies both roles, thus denying their mutual exclusivity. And they reaffirm it because in Portugal many mothers worth their salt must have been and even now still must be occasionally forced to become unwilling accomplices in the backstreet abortions of their foetal grandchildren, so as to safeguard the respectability of their daughters in a society where, until recently, the usual label for an unmarried mother was that of whore. This complicity between mother and daughter, which helped to conceal and therefore granted immunity to the illicit sexual activities that led to the equally illicit pregnancy, paradoxically also colluded in perpetuating the fiction of a society in which girls were only ever good girls.
The motherly figure who goes along with, or even carries out, the abortion, therefore, simultaneously collaborates with and threatens the status quo. She is the accomplice in a crime which, however, upholds the rule of morality by concealing evidence of sexual misdemeanours whose results could fundamentally threaten the cohesion of the established order. The action of this Janus figure, cast in both roles simultaneously, thus literally kicks over the traces, erasing the demarcating lines which keep the categories (virgin and whore) separate. While erasing the boundary between the two, however, the mother/abortionist, paradoxically, also polices and preserves that moral line, which is the barrier that prevents her daughter's angelic status from slipping into its counterpart of fallen woman, and becoming indistinguishable from it. The denial or cover-up of female transgression, therefore, seems in the end to serve the interests of both the transgressor and the code transgressed, in a status quo that depended and still depends on believing-at its own convenience, and sometimes refraining from conceding even the benefit of the doubt-that women may hail from the loins of Eve, but on the whole seek to emulate the model of Mary.
In Portuguese folklore 'a grandmother is a mother twofold',17 a saying which encodes the notion of cumulative maternal love down the generations. A woman's grandchildren, according to this homely nugget of wisdom, may be twice as beloved by her as her own child. If so, however, Paula Rego once again plays disruptive games with her Portuguese heritage by presenting us with the figure of a grandmother who is the palimpsest of generations of women caught up in the paradox of helping to kill a grandchild in order to protect a child. The mother/grandmother is present by implication in several of the pictures: not only, although most obviously, in the matronly figure in n. 9 (figure 77) but more allusively in the shape of a variety of old-fashioned props which are the domestic debris of older generations of women: the olde-worlde china bowl in n. 1 (plate 16), the armchair in n. 2 (plate 21), n. 7 (plate 20), n. 10 (figure 72) and Triptych c (figure 50), the old-fashioned jug and basin in n. 2 (plate 21), and the motherly shawl draped over the armchair as though over a pair of plump and cosy shoulders in n. 6 (plate 18).
Ultimately, however, it is through the casting, dressing and the accessorizing of the girls having abortions that Rego plays her riskiest games. These children and adolescents, ill equipped to be mothers, indicate a maternal role which ought to have been far in the future, but which they can only reject here and now. However, in rejecting that hallowed female role, in some socio-political environments the only one available to a good woman, they do not lend themselves easily to recasting as the latter's counterpoint, namely the runaway madonna or fallen angel, demoness or hell hag. They are girls who ought not to become mothers because they are young enough themselves still to need a mother to take them to school in their school uniform (n. 4, figure 60; n. 6, plate 18; Triptych c, figure 50), or to help them dress for their first party (n. 8, plate 17). It may be true that of the many ways in which maternity has been portrayed in art, the image of idyllic (Marian) motherhood has endured most strongly. Paula Rego's recent work, whose context is Salazar's and post-referendum Portugal's ostentatious matriolatry, contravenes this by raising the possibility of a series of would-be maternities ruptured by betrayal and void.
These images shirk sensationalism, and in doing so avoid the cheap thrills of heartwrenching dead foetuses or even of blood. The latter either does not feature at all in these pictures or at most appears as a discreet smear on the edge of a basin (n. 1, plate 16), even less obviously on a towel (n. 3, plate 19), in absentia (having just been wiped away, n. 9, figure 77), or obliquely via the reddish shades of dresses and surrounding objects (the bedspreads in n. 2, plate 21 and, akin to a river of blood, in n. 7, plate 20, the dresses in n. 5, figure 76 and n. 8, plate 17, the piece of cloth on the couch in n. 6, plate 18, the apron in n. 9, figure 77). The strategy resorted to here presents a countermove to the anti-abortion lobby's strategy of 'talking up the foetus' and instead refers our gaze, our fear and pity back to a gallery of young girls clearly unprepared to be mothers. Curiously in this series, unlike in previous works, colour is not used to convey violence. In fact the pencil sketches and etchings that preceded the pastels (for example Untitled (sketch 3), figure 78) are more harrowing and carry a much more brutal emotional load than the works in colour.
78 Untitled (sketch 3)
The postures in the pencil studies are more accentuated, the poses more dramatic, and the content more explicit. The impact of colour in the pastels, therefore, is never allowed to reinstate the compositional violence lost in the transition from sketch to pastel. In this context, it may be interesting to note also that some of the sketches included in the catalogue (such as for example sketch 3, figure 79 and sketch 9, figure 74), relatively unambiguous as regards the act of abortion or at least the pain involved in it, were never carried through into colour works, being instead left to speak for themselves. Ne plus ultra. To indulge in a semantic pun, the sketches, which are the progenitors of the colour pastels, speak even more clearly than their offspring of a violence in which both share as victims and culprits and sometimes of an outcome which does not reach (colour) fruition.
79 Untitled (sketch 8)
In a study of 7000 women between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-five, Wardell B. Pomeroy found that of the women who had had premarital intercourse and got pregnant, 74 per cent got married. He concluded that 'the wages of sin were marriage' (Pomeroy, 1970, 111), a point confirmed by Robert W. Laidlaw:
The prime leaders in religion in past times-and to a large degree up to the present-were those dedicated to a life of chastity. We have the statement from St Paul that it is better to marry than to burn, giving the idea that the sexual life is something in a secondary category; and I wonder whether we should not, with a greater understanding of what man's sexuality in general, and medicine and psychiatry in particular, have given us, come to the point of saying in loud, resounding tones, 'Sex is good,' and build a morality on that basis. (Laidlaw, 1970, 111)
This idiosyncratically articulated but possibly not uncommon viewpoint may lend support to the following remarks by the Protestant minister, Joseph F. Fletcher, on the subject of what the advocates of abortion term retrospective birth control:
Making babies is a good thing, but making love is too; ... we may and should make love, even though no baby is intended; and ... there ought to be no unintended and no unwanted babies. And the best way ... to make love without babies is to prevent their conception; and the next best way is to prevent fertility itself; and the least desirable way is to end the pregnancy already begun. But any of these methods is good if the good to be gained by their use is great enough to justify the means. (Fletcher, 1970, 93)
Under the punitive brand of Catholicism that haunts Paula Rego, abortion and infanticide become one and the same crime, although, as illustrated in E^a de Queiros's novel, while the former is steadfastly condemned, the latter may have benefited historically from a clerical blind eye. Nowadays, nonetheless, it is increasingly the case in the West, that, as Mary Kenny would have it, 'sex and babies have been separated' (Kenny, 1986, 25); recreation and procreation, as Hugh Hefner of Playboy fame would have it, are now accepted as two entirely different things. For Janet Hadley,
The contexts of abortion and of infanticide are totally different. 'Birth makes it possible for the infant to be granted equal basic rights without violating anyone else's basic rights.' Whereas inside a single human skin 'there is room for only one being with full and equal rights'. (Hadley, 1996, 62)
A measure of resolution may thus be thought to have been achieved by philosophy and theology, as well as in certain areas of medical science, as conveyed by the curiously poetic words of one embryologist:
Looking through the microscope at the physical structure of embryonic man, I see no heaven-bound chariot of the soul, but only a frail congeries of animal cells, fraught indeed with promise beyond all other embryonic creatures, but of necessity bound to grow and to organise itself as an animal if it is to be a man. Humbly employing such vision as may be granted to an embryologist, I declare my conviction that the spirit of man-all that makes him more than a beast and carries him onward with hope and sacrifice-comes not as a highborn tenant from afar but as a latent potentiality of the body. ... The spirit, with the body, must grow and differentiate, organising its inner self as it grows, strengthening itself by contact with the world, winning its title to glory by struggle and achievement. (Corner, 19 70, 14-15)
In the end the moral problems which surround claims for abortion on demand or its absolute condemnation may not soon nor easily be resolved in this debate whose theme is life but which paradoxically has sometimes been fought to the death. In the end, perhaps all that can be usefully achieved is the preservation of salutary uncertainty in an area where science, religion and ethics collide so virulently And it is that wary uncertainty which finds expression in Paula Rego's vision, in what perversely emerges as her most lyrical work to date on the least lyrical of topics.
Annunciations, births, abortions and depositions:18 ultimately these pictures-still lives (nature morte) - educate through confusion, by driving home the elusiveness of difference and the constant failure of categories to maintain distinctions, including those of good and evil. In the end, the only clear truth is that of pain. 'Ecce Femina. Behold the violence of [the] passion' (Pires de Lima, 2001, 10). In abortion rooms throughout the world, there is always a death, but sometimes two. Returning to my point of departure and to Paula Rego herself, 'death means you die. That is all' (interview with Marques Gastao, 1999, 44). In the end, the artist's own words articulate most eloquently the impossibility of ethical closure: 'Those who resort to abortion can do no more. I am not a moralist. I draw attention to suffering' (quoted in Marques Gastao, 1999, 45).
1. My thanks to Anthony Rudolf for drawing my attention to the coincidence of initials.
2. Anti-abortion activism in the United States may include but does not necessarily entail a Catholic component. Other Christian interests are predominantly involved.
3. See Eamon Duffy (1999) for a discussion of the failure of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) to soften Mary's image from her function as an example to womankind (albeit an impossible one to emulate) to that of object of love by reason of being God's mother.
4. As an update to this, on 18 January 2002 the trial was concluded of seventeen women and a nurse accused of performing abortions on them, in Maia, in Portugal. Of the seventeen women, charges were dropped against one, another had a four-month prison term commuted to a fine, and the remaining were acquitted for lack of evidence. The nurse was condemned to eight and a half years in prison.
5. I am grateful to Michael Brick for first suggesting this idea to me.
6. Macciocchi's quotations from Hitler are unreferenced and have proved elusive. It has been suggested to me that they may be composite quotes, grafted from different passages and derived from an Italian translation of Mein Kampf.
7. My attempts to obtain permission to reproduce images from magazines such as Playboy, FHM and Front met with refusal all round. I finally succeeded in obtaining permission to reproduce the images shown in figures 51 and 52, courtesy of Mr Serge Jacques. In the process I made another discovery of relevance to the phenomenon discussed here, relating to the blurring of boundaries between high-art nudes, erotica and pornography. I first came across Mr Jacques's photographs in a volume of his work published by Taschen, a publisher which specialises in the visual arts, and in publications covering the range of the three genres outlined above, in equal measure.
8. Mary's may not have been, in fact, the only claim to a virginal conception. See Rosalind Miles on the subject of similar claims with regard to the conceptions of Bud ha, Plato, Montezuma and Ghenghis Kahn (Miles, 1988, 98).
9. See for example Janet Wolff (2000) on Kitaj's cryptic female portraiture.
10. It may be interesting to bear in mind, in this context, that if the term 'virgin' meant, as some scholars have argued, either a very young girl who was however deemed to be marriageable, or a girl who became pregnant before her first menstruation appeared-in other words, before she could be officially judged to be a woman-the youthful Virgin Mary who has inspired so many painters, possibly impregnated before her pubescent state could be biologically ascertained, would therefore herself have been still a child.
11. In this context, Griselda Pollock's splendid study of the intersection of class and the psychodynamics of sexual choice in the constitution of objects of desire in Van Gogh's work may throw light on some of the nuances of the three categories outlined here, but in particular that of the servant girl (Pollock, 1999,41-63).
12. In the Gospels' rendering of the Annunciation, quoted below, Mary tellingly evinces initial reluctance to accept her fate (Luke 1:26-38), a reaction perhaps the less surprising bearing in mind what is known historically about the severity of the penalty (stoning) associated with crimes of female fornication and extra-marital pregnancy. And Joseph, too, experiences doubts about this event (Matthew 1:19).
13. After going to press, Paula Rego created a series of eight pastels of scenes from the life of the Virgin, including a Nativity in which the Virgin's posture almost exactly mirrors some of the abortion images, such as Triptych b (figure 50).
14. However, with reference to the earlier Joseph's Dream, Agustina Bessa-Luis remarks upon the exclusion of the sleeping male from the real business being enacted between Mary and the Annunciatory angel in the picture within the picture, and to which Joseph possibly prefers to remain oblivious. Rego and Bessa-Luis (2001), 12.
15. In Mary Cassatt's case, for example, 'her childlessness was pointed to by patriarchal explicators as the reason for her choice of theme. Implicit in this interpretation was the notion that she was compensating for not having fulfilled her "natural destiny" as wife and mother by painting a wished-for reality. This sort of insinuation, like the spectre of the lesbian, is meant to warn more "natural" women [against] following such examples' (Langer, 1988,124).
16. Paula Rego referred in interview to a drawing painted several years prior to the abortion referendum, which depicts a midwife performing an abortion, and to which she gave the title The Angel of Mercy (Marques Gastão, 2002,40).
17. The saying in Portuguese is 'uma avó é duas vezes mãe'.
18. Various writers have drawn attention to echoes of Christ's descent from the cross in her work. See for example Waldemar Januszczak (2001), 6-7.