From Gloria Brame, who is practically doing my job for me.
Date and origin unknown, sadly. Note the Orientalist artifacts: Persian rugs, anklets, turban, arm bracelets, the servant-mistress relationship indicated by their positions, the direct sightlines. I’m curious where the black woman came from and how she ended up in a photographer’s studio somewhere in Europe.
You could see it as a take on Manet’s Olympia, though in this case the black woman’s sexuality is not completely erased.
One of the most popular works of sculpture of the 19th century was Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave, circa 1843.
To forestall any shock and dismay over the statue’s nudity, Powers helpfully included a pamphlet explaining how his work was to be interpreted, a short narrative sketch of virtue-in-distress.
Powers astutely explained, in the pamphlet that accompained his statue on its American tour in 1847, that his slave’s nudity was not her fault: she had been divested of her clothes by the lustful and impious Turks who put her on the auction block; thus her unwilling nakedness signified the purest form of the Ideal, the triumph of Christian virtue over sin. This sales pitch, aimed point-blank at Puritan sensibilities, worked so well that American Clergymen urged their congregations to go and see The Greek Slave.”
The humor magazine Punch has always been in touch with the British middle class psyche, and and it made a perhaps unwittingly clever satire of the sculpture when it ran a cartoon entitled, The Virginian Slave. Remember, the original statue and its replicas and miniatures were created when slavery was in full bloom in the American South, and people who demonstrated their sensitivity by clucking over The Greek Slave’s virtue-in-distress couldn’t care too much about the actual slaves across the Atlantic.
Now, was this an example of “unconscious pornography”, that the Victorian American and British viewers needed a pious gloss to gaze upon a naked woman in chains without guilt? Or did they really look it in a different way than us cynical moderns? Or can the image be viewed in multiple ways?
I’m a little influenced by Harold Bloom’s idea of strong and weak misreading, or misprision. It could be that BDSM pornography is a misreading of earlier genres like the novel of sensibility and the Gothic.
I found an extensive archive of essays and images related to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a key abolitionist text.
One thing that surprised me is that, after reading Robin Wood’s account of the sexualized images used in abolitionist writing, the hundreds of images in the archive, from 1852 to 1930, most of them were not at all sexual. There are many depictions of key scenes in the novel (e.g. Tom rescuing Eva from drowing, Eva and Tom together, Eliza’s dramatic flight across the ice floes) but very little in the way of beatings. I don’t know if this is a preference of those who edit the archive, or a representative sampling of the period.
However, there was a notable exception.
George Cruikshank was one of the most famous book illustrators in Victorian England. The twelve “original illustrations” in this turn-of-the-century edition were originally drawn in 1852, for one of the many pirated British editions of Stowe’s novel. At that time they were even more influential than the pictures Billings drew for Jewett’s editions in shaping the way readers around the world “saw” the novel’s characters and events.
As you can see, this scene (which I think is meant to represent the fatal beating of Prue) is the most graphic depiction of punishment in the archive, far more so than any depiction of Tom’s fatal beating at the end of the novel. The woman is young, shapely, lighter in skin color than the man beating her, and positioned just so that one of her breasts is visible. She’s probably supposed to be a mulatto, and could be read as “white”.
I guess this means that the pornographic interpretations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are in the minority, one of many re-interpretations of the work.
Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siecle Culture Oxford University Press, 1986.
Dijkstra’s book is an overview of art from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, exploring the recurring themes of artists largely forgotten today. Back then, paintings were an art form viewed by the general public in salons and exhibitions, and having great controversy for their content. In the author’s analysis, there were recurring themes of gender, class and race tangled together in art.
The mid-nineteenth century, circa 1850, saw woman as the “household nun”, the passive vessel where the warrior-merchant man kept his soul for safekeeping. Artists painted sappy sentimental images of mothers and children, nymphs with broken backs languishing in the woods, etc. Around 1870, when the first generation raised under these ideals had matured (and when decadents like Rachile and Sacher-Masoch and Bram Stoker and Flaubert wrote), they took their disappointment in their mothers and wives failing to live up to that ideal as inspiration to portray women as monsters: bestial, materialistic, lustful, full of low cunning, primitive, a snare to trap man on his path to spiritual apotheosis and transcendance of the material. Dualistic thinking combined with garbled Darwin and Schopenhauer.
The cultural leaders of the years around 1900 much preferred the depiction of a simple world of dualistic absolutes, of easily identifiable abject household nuns and monstrous devil-women juxtaposed with godlike imperial males and pitiful effeminate victims. (Pg.393)
It’s not surprising to me that the author explores themes that eventually became staples of BDSM imagery: Orientalist slave women, domineering men, an early examples of forniphilia, the amazon, the temptress, the woman-as-animal, the vampire. Dijkstra goes a little overboard, apparently suggesting that even innocuous images are informed by sexism and racism, or that any juxtaposition of woman and animal in the same painting was understood to be an allusion to full on bestiality. Masochist paintings and novels prompt him to go into a convoluted theory in purple prose about masochists as “executioner’s assistants”.
It’s not that Dijkstra is wrong, it’s that he’s a modernist: his texts have one meaning. If one allows for irony or humor or subversion or fantasy when creating or viewing images, many different stories emerge. The story of Judith and Holofernes can be an instance of female heroism, instead of just a woman consuming the spiritual essence of man to fill her own moral and intellectual vacuum. Dijkstra’s final example is the biblical tale of Salome, which in Oscar Wilde’s version is the conflict of the spiritual/speaking and hearing/man versus the material/seeing and being seen/woman, but remember that in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of the play, Wilde himself is caricatured as Salome’s manipulative mother, Herodias.
Dijkstra has one theme only: man’s sublimated hatred towards woman, which ultimately limits his analysis. He leaves out how people find solutions in fantasy to problems, how symbols that can be monstrous to one viewer or one time can be heroic to another viewer or another time. His book covers the period which I consider the very early roots of the BDSM subculture, circa 1870, the publication date of Venus in Furs and also soon after the first spate of fetishist letters in Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.
I’ve already identified the connection between BDSM imagery and late 19th century Orientalism in books and paintings. I’m currently reading Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity, about depictions of the feminine in late 19th century art. This introduced me to the softcore, Orientalist work of Ernest Normand.
Normand’s work hits the high points of this genre: slave women of various races on nude display before the sale, Orientalist kitsch artifacts such as fans and a sphinx, that kind of thing. Such paintings were displayed in major exhibitions and smaller reproductions were, I think, widely available.
I found the image above on a page about an art show in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, called Orientalism & Ephemera.
Orientalism & Ephemera thus explores the attraction and presence of the East within our everyday experience. For many artists, this awareness presents a way to counter the violence of today’s conflicts. Much of our contemporary cultural exchange is in response to the repeated and boundless violence of the politics of empire-building projects, which attempt to colonize the spatial, disempower the colonized, and destroy cultures. In Orientalism, Said addressed the Orient, not as a threatening other but as “an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (Said 1978). By focusing on ephemeral artifacts, souvenirs, pamphlets, postcards, catalogues, travel and commercial items, documents and photographs, the exhibition I have organized reflects a certain closeness and offers an alternative space from which to consider the innumerable manifestations of orientalism within our everyday culture.
The list given above should include “pornography”. The example of emphemera provided, an undated advertisement for a book, is a classic example of the “anthro-porn” genre, of National Geographic nudes and mondo films. (I could write a book on the overlap of documentary and pornography alone.)
Obviously, the art in the above ad is much cruder than Normand’s technically skilled painting. The woman to the left seems an afterthought, as if to deflect the implications of male-on-male torture, and the way the man on the right is holding the right conveys the sexual implications with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The documentary context puts the reader in the position of the civilized man (presumably) observing the “weird rites” and congratulating ourselves on how advanced we are.
Normand’s high art of Bondage and the low art of “The book of Torture” are both based on Orientalism, the use of what is today the Middle East as an arena for fantasies that unacceptable. The Orientalist view looks outward from the civilized world of industrial, Christian Europe to the rest of the world, but also back in time, to an imagined primordial fantasy where men were men and women were chattel, where social Darwinism had free reign. It was a rejection of liberal society in fantasy.
Such imagery is still published in the 20th century. Witness:
Silent Porn Star pointed me at an interview with a woman artist who created some of the covers for Weird Tales in the 1930s, Margaret Brundage.
As kinky as these and other covers were (check out Dian Hanson’s books on post-WWII men’s magazines), they seem to have been created by people who had no particular kinkiness to them.
Everts: Do you recall the most controversial Weird Tales cover?
Brundage: We had one issue [the September, 1933 issue] that sold out! It was the story of a very vicious female, getting a-hold of the heroine and tying her up and beating her. Well, the public apparently thought it was flagellation and the entire issue sold out. They could have used a couple of thousand extra.
Everts: Did you choose that scene to illustrate?
Brundage: You see, I would submit about three different pencil sketches. And they would make the selection of the one I was to do in color. Once in a while I would suggest a little color in my sketches, but most of the time [pause] well, they were very rough. And yes, they chose the scene. I didn’t. Having read the story, the thought of flagellation never entered my head. I don’t think it had theirs either. But it turned out that way.
…
Everts: What inspiration did you use for the exotic covers, the clothing, the monsters?
Brundage: In almost every instance, just off the top of my head.
…
Everts: Were you ever asked to start covering your nudes a bit?
Brundage: I was never asked to, no. One funny thing did happen. One of the authors — well, Weird Tales asked me to make larger and larger breasts — larger than I would have liked to — well, one cover, one of the authors wrote in and said that things were getting a little bit out of line. And even for an old expert like him, the size of the breastwork was getting a little too large.
So, a magazine with two scantily clad beautiful women, one holding a whip, on the cover, and the public “thought” it was about flagellation?
It’s weird that there’s a whip (technically a cat or flail) in the illustration, yet Brundage takes no responsibility for it. Neither does she put the responsibility for it on the magazine’s editors and publishers. It sounds like it just appeared there spontaneously. Maybe it did, in the sense that people do include things unconsciously in their art.
I suspect that these types of illustrations were an American manifestation of memes bubbling up from European erotica/porn, but also American illustration traditions as well. Maybe kink is a kind of strange attractor which keeps pulling minds toward it, even if they’ve never heard of it before. Pauline Reage claimed she had not read Sade before she wrote Story of O.
See Yankee Classic for a collection of Weird Tales covers.
Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults Harvard College, 1987.
The Villa of the Mysteries, and the mural sketched above, is an increasingly important part of the origins of BDSM, and I’m even thinking of using it for the cover illustration (should there ever be a cover.) But what is it? Was it religion or pornography or something else?
Morgan, David. Visual Piety: A history and theory of popular religious images University of California Press, 1998
Since I started this project, I’ve thought that Christian religious art depicting Christ and saints in positions of torment was a key element in the story. But I’ve yet to find a good book on the subject that explains the why of these images.
Morgan’s book is a good start on this. He links the late medieval practice of depicting a beaten, bloody Christ to the psychological practice of empathy. In this case, the believer practices piety by looking at the image of Christ (or a saint) and imagining him or her self in the same situation. Humanity suffers along with Christ, and reaches the divine. The suffering body is a route to the divine, or put another way, we suffer to reach beyond ourselves. God suffers as humans do.
About 2/3rds of the way through through Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory, I’m convinced that the imagery of Atlantic slavery is a very important aspect in the evolution of BDSM. There are many, many written and visual examples of slaves being beaten and otherwise tormented in abolitionist texts. Frequently, these images become an opportunity to depict the black female body nude or semi-nude in extremis.
For some time since I started this project, I’ve told people that BDSM, as we would recognize it, is a modern phenomenon. That is, it first appears in the 15th century, when writers outside the clergy start pondering why some men like to get whipped, and the Reformation gets underway. It didn’t exist before because the way culture viewed sexuality and play didn’t allow it.
I had anomalous data, of course, such as the story of Abelard and Heloise, who said he beat her out of love. I had planned on dismissing this as an isolated incident, and stuck to my thesis that kink is only about five centuries old.
As my research until now focussed on the 19th century, nothing came up that seriously challenged my assumption. But people kept insisting that it was older than that. Finally, the first book on Roman sexuality I got from the library (Roman Sex: 100 BC – AD 250, by John R. Clarke, 2003,Harry N. Abrams) forced me to junk all of that.
The Villa of the Mysteries is a large house in the preserved Roman city of Pompeii. Initially thought to be a brothel or temple because of the nude frescos on the walls, later archaeologists decided it was actually a private home and the art depicted a narrative about preparing young brides for marriage in the cult of Dionysius.
Reading the images from left to right around the room, the narrative starts with a woman in street clothes, then a mother with son, then a pregnant woman with a laurel crown carrying cakes, etc. The images are tranquil until a woman is startled; she draws away from something in surprise, her cape in violent motion over her.
The first image visible as a person enters the room is Dionysius sitting with his head almost in the lap of his lover Ariadne. To the right of them is an undressed woman kneeling before a large phallus in a basket, covered with purple cloth.
Up until this point, I didn’t view the images as sadomasochistic, but more as some kind of fertility rite. But then came the image that forced me to rethink everything.
Immediately to the right of the woman with the phallus in the basket is a standing female figure with dark wings. Clarke’s book identifies her as a “female demon.” Unlike the other female figures in the fresco, who are nude or in dresses, she wears boots or sandals, a knee length skirt and a belt of some kind. She’s dressed for fighting or something else athletic. Her right hand wields a cane or switch, in full backswing, apparently beating the next figure, on the other side of the room’s corner.
Here, a woman kneels, back and buttocks exposed, resting her face in the lap of another, clothed woman. After that, a nude woman dances with cymbals. The final image is a maidservant arranging a young woman’s hair in the style reserved for brides.
Although there are probably other interpretations to this work, the connection between sexual pleasure, physical pain, female grooming and fertility is clear to me. Beating is part of the process that includes ecstatic dancing, if not a prelude to it, and grooming before marriage. Bear in mind, this is a room in a private home, not a brothel or a temple, and the work may have been commissioned by and for the women of the home.
Until now, I had assumed that any cases of voluntary flagellation before the 15th century were primarily religious rituals, with sexuality component a secondary and disavowed aspect. The Mysteries Room fresco suggests that the two can’t be so neatly separated. The narrative shows flagellation as part of the marriage/fertility rite. I could argue that this shows erotic flagellation as part of a religious ritual performed once in a lifetime, and therefore isn’t a secular, recreational phenomenon like modern BDSM, but that would be a cop-out.
I have just begun to look at the Classical period, so I expect to find more items that suggest sadomaosochism goes back further than I thought.
