Most Popular White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
Parrot's Eye: a portrait by Manet and two by T. S. Eliot
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2006 by Frances Dickey
T. S. Eliot's little-known sonnet "On a Portrait" (1909) describes a painting by Edouard Manet from 1866, Woman with a Parrot. The significance of this connection has not been examined, nor has the further association of Manet's painting with Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady," another portrait of a woman with a parrot. These poems examine the peculiar inscrutability that observers of Manet's portrait have long remarked. Eliot's poems consider two possible meanings for the blank look on her face: either she is concealing her thoughts from us, or she is mentally absent. While "On a Portrait" considers both possibilities, "Portrait of a Lady" pursues the implications of the second interpretation, suggesting that selfhood or subjectivity is not predicated on a private interiority but on "parroting" the formulae of social interaction. Following Manet, Eliot links flatness--painterly and psychological--with meaningless imitation. All three "portraits" entertain a conception of subjectivity based on reflection and imitation rather than inwardness and originality.
Although Eliot's connection with Manet has been neglected, (1) recent criticism in general has emphasized the nineteenth-century figures that influenced Eliot early in his career rather than the more historically remote ones (such as Donne and Dante) that he publicly avowed. In a recent article Ronald Bush identifies Eliot's ties to decadence as one of the primary areas of interest in Eliot studies, particularly with respect to the poet's sexuality (Ann Ardis, Colleen Lamos, Cassandra Laity). This renewal of attention to Eliot's nineteenth-century context owes much to Carol Christ's work on his use of Victorian genres; of special relevance to this essay, she has linked Eliot's representation of women to the nineteenth-century poetic mode of female portraiture as practiced by Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, and Swinburne. ("Gender" 23). Swinburne is the primary presence in Eliot's Advocate poems from 1908 to January 1909, and this is especially true of "On a Portrait," one of the last poems Eliot wrote before his momentous encounter with Laforgue, which began when he received a copy of Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Poetry for Christmas in 1908. Eliot's imitation of Swinburne and Tennyson is a stylistic feature of this poem and also very likely the source of some of its thematic anxiety about parrots.
Eliot's primary inspiration for his sonnet, however, was Edouard Manet's Woman with a Parrot rather than a work of literature. According to a letter from Eliot's college friend William Tinckom-Fernandez to Harford Powel Jr. (Powel Sr., presumably his father, had been on the Advocate editorial board at the same time as Eliot), he wrote the poem after seeing a reproduction of Manet's painting in a book on French impressionism (Powel 90). (2) It is not at all surprising that Eliot would have been struck by Manet's work, in view of the apprenticeship to Laforgue, and then to Laforgue's master Baudelaire, that he took up almost immediately after he composed this poem. Baudelaire was also Manet's master, in the sense that the poet's treatment of modern urban life gave the painter much of his subject matter (Reff, Manet and Modern Paris 13)--as also happened with Eliot. What is surprising is that Eliot's appreciation of Manet predated the influence of the French poets on his sensibility. In fact, it may have prepared the way for it.
Many critics now credit Manet as the first modernist painter, although he composed his major canvases in the 1860s and 70s and did not even regard himself as a member of the impressionists; they called him rather their "father." Clement Greenberg influentially claimed that Manet's modernism lay in his rejection of the illusion of depth:
Manet's paintings became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the
frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were
painted.... Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition
painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting
oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else. (194-95)
Fredric Jameson identifies flatness as the preeminent characteristic of postmodernism, in literature and psychology as well as visual art (9). Jameson's analysis, though it overlooks the strong modernist aesthetic of surface (materiality), indicates a new intensification, or perhaps the endpoint, of the 150-year ascendancy of this aesthetic, of which Manet's work marks the beginning.
Michael Fried has explained the apparent flatness of Manet's canvases by placing them in the context of a historical dynamic between the compositional conventions of absorption and theatricality. In a series of books on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting (Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot; Courbet's Realism; and Manet's Modernism), Fried examines the deployment of absorption, a set of compositional techniques by which a painter aims to eliminate the beholder's consciousness of himself as facing the painting. This convention, which is linked to realism, predominated in French painting from the middle of the eighteenth century through the 1860s, when Manet definitively challenged it with what we now identify as his modernist flatness (Manet's Modernism 17). In figure painting, absorption is achieved by representing people engaged in activities that require concentration: reading, writing, praying, listening, studying, thinking, playing, and even sleeping. This device is intended to draw the beholder into the painting and, ideally, to produce inward contemplation similar to the activity depicted. In the eighteenth century, absorption competed with and replaced an older aesthetic of theatricality, in which figures in the painting seemed conscious of being beheld (Courbet's Realism 6-8). Manet moved painting back in the direction of theatricality, preferring frontal poses in which the figure faces the beholder, as in Woman with a Parrot (Manet's Modernism 21, 280-82, passim).Yet, like others of his generation, he continued to resist the theatrical modes of the eighteenth century. He experimented with ways of acknowledging what Fried calls the truth about painting (that the canvas faces its beholder) without making his figures appear conscious of being seen. These experiments in "facingness" and "strikingness" produced the effect of flatness that would lead eventually to abstraction in the twentieth century, but also lead to the peculiar look of absence that Manet's contemporaries always complained about on the faces of his models (344). (3) They seem neither absorbed nor conscious of us.
