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The Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art*

Carol Duncan

In this essay, | am using the term erotic not
as a self-evident, universal category, but as a
culturally defined concept that is ideological in
nature. More specifically, | am arguing 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.
Indeed, once one begins to subject erotic art to
critical analysis, to examine the male-female
relationships it implies, one is struck with the
repetitiousness with which the issue of power is
treated. 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 remark-
ably limited set of fantasies. Time and again,
the male confronts the female nude as an ad-
versary whose independent existence as a physi-
cal or spiritual being must be assimilated to
male needs, converted to abstractions, en-
feebled or destroyed. So often do such works
invite fantasies of male conquest (or fantasies
that justify male domination) that the subjuga-
tion of the female will appear to be one of the
primary motives of modern erotic art.

In Delacroix’s Woman in White Stockings
(1832), for example, an artist’s model (i.e., a
sexually available woman) reclines invitingly on
a silken mattress. The deep red drapery behind
her forms a shadowy and suggestive opening.
The image evokes a basic male fantasy of sexual
confrontation, but the model does not appear
to anticipate pleasure. On the contrary, she
appears to be in pain, and the signs of her
distress are depicted as carefully as her alluring
flesh. Her face, partly averted, appears dis-
turbed, her torso is uncomfortably twisted, and
the position of her arms suggests surrender and
powerlessness. But this distress does not contra-
dict the promise of male gratification. Rather, it
is offered as an explicit condition of male
pleasure —the artist’s and the viewer’s.

The equation of female sexual experience
with surrender and victimization 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.
The Victorian myth that women experience sex
as a violation of body or spirit or both, and that
those who actively seek gratification are per-
verse (and hence deserving of degradation), is
but one of many ideological justifications of the
sexual victimization of women devised by the

modern era. In the 20th century, the theory and
practice of psychology has given new rationali-
zations to the same underlying thesis.

The visual arts are crowded with images of
suffering, exposed heroines—slaves, murder
victims, women in terror, under attack, be-
trayed, in chains, abandoned or abducted.
Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827), in-
spired by a poem by Byron, is a tour de force of
erotic cruelty. Ingres’ Roger and Angelica (1867)
also depicts woman as victim. Here, an en-
dangered and helpless heroine—naked, hairless
and swooning—is chained to a large, phallic-
shaped rock, immediately below which appear
the snake-like forms of a dragon. This fantastic
but deadly serious statement documents a com-
mon case of male castration anxiety. But the
artist-hero (he is Ingres-Roger) masters the situ-
ation: he conquers the dangerous female geni-
tals. First he desexualizes Angelica—reduces
her to an unconscious mass of closed and bone-
less flesh; then he thrusts his lance into the
toothy opening of the serpent—Angelica’s
vagina transposed. Given the fears such an
image reveals, it is no wonder that Ingres ideal-
ized helpless, passive women. The point here,
however, is that neither Ingres’ fears nor his
ideal woman were unique to him.

Americans, too, thrilled to images of female
victims. Hiram Power’s The Greek Slave (1843)
was probably the most famous and celebrated
American sculpture in the mid-19th century.
Overtly, the viewer could admire the virtuous
modesty with which Powers endowed the young
slave girl, as did critics in the 19th century; but
covertly, Powers invites the viewer to imagine
himself as the potential oriental buyer of a
beautiful, naked, humiliated girl who is literally
for sale (he specified that she is on the auction
block). The narrative content of this sculpture
supports the same underlying thesis we saw in
the Delacroix: for women, the sexual encounter
must entail pain and subjugation, and that sub-
jugation is a condition of male gratification. But
even in paintings where nudes are not literally
victims, female allure is treated in terms related
to victimization. For Ingres, Courbet, Renoir,
Matisse and scores of other modern artists,
weakness, mindlessness and indolence are at-
tributes of female 'sexiness. Germaine Greer’s
description of the female ideal that informs
modern advertising could as well have been
drawn from modern nudes: