Exhibitions 2000-2001
June 7 to July 2001
The Bride Wore Trousers
Cynthia Greig
 |
Stereograph [Reclining Venus]
[Captain Harville:]
"Let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories,
prose and verse. . . . I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment
on my side [of] the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book
in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy.
. . . But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
[Anne Elliot:] "Perhaps I shall. — Yes, yes, if you please,
no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us
in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher
a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove
any thing."
—Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1817
Her Story
If we discard conventional histories, all that is left are oral testimonies
and material artifacts, residual evidence that may or may not survive
the ravages of time (or the rages of spring cleaning). As Naomi Rosenblum
observes in A History of Women Photographers, "Unless kept
safe by spouses or descendants, women’s photographs often were discarded,
tucked away in the attic, or stored in a musty bin at the local historical
society."1 It is the fate of one such legacy, the oeuvre of Isabelle
Raymond (1844–?), which is recounted in Cynthia Greig’s body
of work The Bride Wore Trousers: The Life and Photographs of Isabelle
Raymond.
Cynthia Greig’s exhibition and published essay by the same title
is a two-fold endeavour dedicated to the rediscovery and promulgation
of an hitherto unknown 19th-century cross-dressing photographer, a rarity
sure to attract attention. 2 Greig’s involvement with Raymond’s
work evolved "out of years of collecting photos from the 19th century
at flea markets and antique shows. . . . I started out collecting images
of women and eventually started to come upon more ambiguous images, portraits
of androgynous individuals, where it was unclear if they were men or women."
3 A number of such undated
images attributed to Isabelle Raymond—who sometimes gave her name
as M. Claudet—are included in The Bride Wore Trousers as stereographs,
cartes-de-visite, or lantern slides. In many of them, the same man appears,
striking a range of poses; he is often nude, and at times assumes traditionally
feminine attitudes.
Greig’s essay, an outgrowth of the exhibition, presents the author’s
latest research. In her text, Greig offers evidence of an autobiographical
letter recounting the main events of Raymond’s life beginning in
her twenty-first year. According to this document and other sources, Raymond
"left Paris in an attempt to escape an arranged marriage. Legend
has it that she intentionally veiled her identity by dressing in men’s
fashions and kept no records because she had fled her homeland with a
considerable sum of stolen money." 4 Greig believes this may have
been dowry money or that she may have married, then jilted, a wealthy
"foreign noble." Either way, Greig tells us, Raymond eventually
emigrated to Canada in 1865, where she worked as an itinerant photographer,
before settling around 1871 in New Eden, Michigan, to establish a portrait
studio. Though an unusual occupation for a woman, this was not unheard
of, and despite critics’ complaints that "female Daguerreians
are out of place, pants or no pants," several thousand women were
actively photographing in the United States and Europe by mid-century.
5
Raymond was not alone in her love of independence. Among those who shared
her view was the painter Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), who garnered great
success despite her transgressions of social, gender, and sexual codes,
including smoking cigarettes and sporting short hair. In response to inquiries
as to why she never married, Bonheur quipped "Que voulez vous? J’ai
préféré conserver mon nom." 6 In 1857 she applied
for and received a "Permission de travestissement," a special
permit from the Préfecture de police allowing her to wear trousers
for "health" reasons. Lamenting the realities of the late 1850s,
Jules Michelet exclaimed: "How many irritations for the single woman!
She can hardly ever go out in the evening; she would be taken for a prostitute.
. . . If she should find herself delayed at the other end of Paris and
hungry, she will not dare to enter a restaurant. She would constitute
an event. She would be a spectacle."7 How Raymond defied these social
mores is evident in a police mug shot from 1899, which shows her not only
dressed as a man, but charged with assault.
Central to Greig’s analysis is the singularity with which Raymond
consistently turned sexual, racial, and cultural norms inside out. Replete
with references to mythical, biblical, and contemporary subjects, Raymond’s
world is revealed as one where attributes of power, genius, sensuality,
spirituality, purity, strength, and desire are redistributed, and where
agency belongs equally to women and men, regardless of class or race.
In her Madonna and Child, for instance, the virgin is a young woman
of African descent, her child a female; her Bacchus is played by a naked
woman, obviously comfortable in her own skin; her Odalisque is
a coy and sinewy male nude. Contrary to expectation, Raymond’s New
Eden Artists shows a racially mixed group of women. More directly to the
point, Eakins’ Last Class comments on the infamous incident
in which the painter Thomas Eakins defiantly removed the loin cloth of
a male model. In contrast to the official version, Raymond’s tableau
presents a racially mixed group of women working in an atmosphere of serene
concentration. The work is made doubly provocative for its casting of
the model as an African American—who, to the Victorian mind, symbolized
a potent and threatening sexuality.
Persuasion
Too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable . . . There is throughout
it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations
of the poor . . . there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights
of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in
God’s providence.
—Elizabeth Rigby, review of Jane Eyre, 1848
Like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Isabelle Raymond grew
out of Cynthia Greig’s imagination. Had she actually lived, she might
have been a Victorian photographer, the equivalent of such literary figures
as George Eliot and the Brontë sisters, whose male alter egos (Ellis,
Action, and Currier Bell) provided access to power, however tenuous. Raymond
is the historical figure feminists dream of discovering—one who consistently
produced strong and independent work. Greig/Raymond’s photographs,
presented within a museological apparatus imbued with art historical contextualization
and authentic-looking visuals, are not only an exploration of ‘what
if,’ but as ‘a lost history’ they poignantly illustrate
the way in which oppressive social structures can erase radical transgression
by suppressing historical evidence.
If Jane Eyre roused the mire of critics such as Rigby—who
incidentally wrote one of the most incisive analyses of early photography—Brontë’s
work also struck a cord with many readers for its drama and humanity.
Though it is doubtful whether Raymond’s work would ever have reached
a broad audience, it is interesting to consider the effect such work might
have had upon those involved in her various tableaux vivants, as well
as upon potential 19th-century viewers. As Judith Davidov posits in Women’s
Camera Work, the collaborative process inherent in tableaux vivants
"has to do not only with making art, but with making—or remaking—identity."
The very act of assuming roles before the camera is "tied to the
possibility of authoring alternative scripts to the one in which one finds
oneself." 8 Aware of such potential, Greig has postulated an historic
personage who allows her to move back into history, remaking it, both
righting wrongs and casting doubt on the solid ground of what we know.
Greig’s fiction calls fact into question, thereby opening the door
to the possibility that other truths may also be fictional, and that some
fictions may turn out to be true after all.
Greig’s project raises multiple issues relating to the assumed authority
of histories and books, as well as to the alleged truth and objectivity
of photography. Perhaps most importantly, in assuming the authoritative
voice of an Art Historian in both her text and her exhibition, Greig adopts
the very mechanisms which produce and perpetuate histories. In this way,
she reveals viewers’ vulnerability to authoritative structures. Greig
is "interested in leaving the viewer with a memorable experience:
the moment that exists between believing Isabelle is real and discovering
that she is a fiction." 9 For me, the discovery behind this work
is the way accepted truths can so easily become contaminated. That having
once opened the door to doubting the accuracy of the record, everything
is open for renegotiation. Maybe Isabelle really is out there. Maybe she
is a truth stranger than her own fiction. Either way, persuasion is one
of Greig’s strengths. And I like her version of the story.
Footnotes
1 - Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York, Abbeville Press, 1994), 10.
2 - Cynthia Greig, "The Bride Wore Trousers: The Life and Photographs of Isabelle Raymond". in The Body Aestetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 127-56
3- Cynthia Greig, e-mail to author, 22 April 2001
4 - Greig. "The Bride Wore Trousers". 130
5 - Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, 43-45
6 - "What do you want? I preferred keeping my own name." (my translation) Karen Petersen and J.J. Wilson, Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal From the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (New York; Harper & Riw, 1976), 75-76.
7- Jules Michele, La Femme (1859), sa quoted by Tamar Garb, "Gender and Representation." in Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, 236.)
8 - Judith Fryer Davidov, Women's Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 60.
9 - Cynthia Greig, e-mail to teh author, 22 April 2001.
Biography
Cynthia Greig earned an MA in Art History from The University of Iowa in 1988 and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1995. She has earned numerous academic awards and honours, and has been a visiting artist in programs such as Beloit College, The University of Michigan, and Denison University. She has lectured and participated in panel discussions in several Michigan Universities and has exhibited in cities such as Rochester, New York City, Minniapolis, San Francisco, and Houston. Her latest essay, The Bride Wore Trousers: The Life and Photographs of Isabelle Raymond written as an accompaniment to the exhibition scheduled for June at Gallery 44, is forthcoming in a University of Michigan Press publication.