Alienated selves: Portraiture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France.

摘要

This dissertation examines the relationship between the visual portrait and an emerging consciousness of the self in French literary and visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas the formal elements of a portrait of a single sitter suggest unity and singularity---an isolated figure on a canvas---we reveal the incompatibility between portraiture and a rising notion of selfhood.;We argue that Theodore Gericault's portrait series of monomaniacs elicited a radically new phenomenon within the genre: the substitution of pathological traits for the identities of the sitters. Building on this first chapter, the rest of our study highlights the complex tension that results from the use of pathological categories for the purpose of visualizing individual consciousness. The subjects presented in Gericault's study supposedly exemplify a mental disorder (Monomanie du jeu, Monomanie de l'envie ) that defines their character while at the same time withholding their individual identities. The portraits thus invite the beholder to engage in a clinical assessment that will never lead to a full understanding of the subjects portrayed. Charles Baudelaire's poetry offers a different sort of insight into the impossibility of representing a unified self. Decapitation and mutilation in his lyric counter the possibility of giving face and voice to a mute image. Antonin Artaud's poetry, sketches, essays, and screenplays bear witness to his view of his mind as organically altered. While confessing his own mental and physical impairments, Artaud obsessively appropriates and inscribes himself within the lives of other visual artists like Vincent van Gogh and Balthus. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essays on portraiture apply questions of disintegration and erosion to the image itself, showing kinship between the act of portrait-making and the autobiographical gesture.;The subject's relation to the portrait reveals the compulsive tendencies that betray a perpetual alienation from the self. In this sense, although autobiography and portraiture are inextricable linked, the action of one consistently opposes or undermines the work of the other.