Professor’s Work Examines Negative Images of Women

What kind of man would spend 15 years obsessed with thousands of images of naked women? Or poring over depictions of women so thoroughly emaciated they seem on the verge of death? And then cull more than 300 reproductions of those images for a lavishly illustrated book--a book he dedicates to “the many brilliant women who have taught me most of what I know”?

A mild-mannered, 48-year-old professor with sandy hair and glasses who wears Birkenstocks, jeans and a V-neck sweater vest over a blue button-down shirt. A man who when asked about his politics calls himself a feminist.

“Sure,” Bram Dijkstra said, his thin frame hunched over a table in a noisy Laguna Beach restaurant. “I certainly am a feminist in the sense of what the feminists stand for, the survival of humane values in the world.”

Despite his penchant for decidedly lurid images of women in art, Dijkstra can probably make such a claim. A professor of comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego, he is the author of a new book entitled “Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siecle Culture” (Oxford: $37.95), an ambitious, penetrating study of the development of 19th-Century misogyny in art, literature and science.

Male Paranoia

Still, male paranoia toward women is hardly the kind of subject you would expect a man to write about. “As a matter of fact,” Dijkstra said with a laugh, “I’ve been asking myself that question too.

“I think I was more sensitive to this theme because I grew up in an all-female household,” said Dijkstra, who was born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands. “My father was interned in a Japanese prison camp and died soon after the war. My mother and my older sisters were so very capable, so able to survive independently during and after the war, that I was puzzled that people have these ideas about women.”

Dijkstra said that the book also grew out of his long-standing interest in the visual arts and that he was researching a book on modernism when he became curious over the movement’s disdain for 19th-Century painting.

“The general attitude in our culture at that time was that the work of the academic painters was so absolutely reactionary and abominable that no one should even look at it.”

Intrigued, he began studying turn-of-the-century art and was stunned by what he saw: images of women that ran from hollow-eyed creatures lying on their deathbeds to voluptuous goddesses sprawled across grassy fields.

“I began to see there were certain patterns in the art,” he said, “in the narratives, and I began to wonder why should women be represented in these specific forms time and time again?”

Dijkstra believes that social Darwinism and other scientific theories were instrumental in discrimination against women, resulting in profoundly negative images of women in turn-of-the-century literature and art. And in “Idols of Perversity,” he argues his case by analyzing not only the scientific literature of the period, but the works of such esteemed writers as Emile Zola, Henry James, Mark Twain and Charles Baudelaire, and of obscure and famous artists. Not even the revered Impressionists--including Renoir, Degas and Manet--escape his scorn in this 400-plus page book.

“Our sense of the late 19th-Century art is of all these lovely ladies strolling around with parasols,” he said, clearly bemused. “One of the ironies is we’ve developed a nostalgia for that period. But we can only maintain that notion if we don’t look at the art represented in my book. It is not all sunshine and light.”

Take, for example, “At the Edge of the Abyss” (1890), which depicts a naked woman and a snake who “conspire to make an end of a young man who is naively seeking no more than a kiss from a beautiful lady.” As Dijkstra sees it, this “serpent-eyed temptress” is about to send him “crashing down into the deepest and coldest crevasses of Mother Earth’s regressive body.”

Or Arthur Hacker’s “The Temptation of Sir Perceval” (1894), which shows a man “so fresh and intellectual that his spirituality surrounded him like a saint’s halo,” being “stalked by a lady of catlike mien whose only wish was to dissipate our hero’s manly virtue.”

These paintings, Dijkstra points out, belong to a large group of works featuring sexually voracious women intent on destroying men’s souls. And according to Dijkstra, they reflect the turn-of-the-century male view that women were such primitive, evil beings they could literally thwart evolution.

Dijkstra contends that the exaggerated concepts of femininity and masculinity that became culturally ingrained in the 19th Century were influenced largely by Darwin, who believed that since the origins of human life were bisexual, sexual differentiation was a sign of evolution. Thus, Dijkstra said, scientists concluded that the “more manly a man was, the more evolved he was, and the more feminine a woman was, the more evolved she was.”

Some theories that were used to justify prejudice against women would be ludicrous if they were not so barbaric. One such theory, “dating back to BC,” Dijkstra said, which became a particular favorite of scientists in the 1860s, held that the brain consisted of a substance “virtually analogous to semen.” Thus, the logic went, the more “continent” a man was, the more evolved he was. Because women were the reproducers, it was believed that most of their “vital energies” went to their reproductive organs, which explained why they had inferior brains. The “science” of brain measurement lent further support to this belief, with the revelation that women had smaller brains than men.

Admittedly, “all of this sounds really absurd,” Dijkstra said with a laugh, “but people really believed it.”

Dijkstra emphasized that the most important aspect of his book, however, demonstrates not only how such reasoning was responsible for anti-female attitudes in the late 19th Century, but for anti-Semitism and racism in the early 20th Century as well.

“The same criteria that were used to denigrate women were also used to denigrate Jews,” he said. “And the most favorite way to denigrate Jews in the late 19th Century was to say they were effeminate.”

Dualistic Mentality

Evolutionary theories concerning male and female traits created a dualistic mentality in the 19th Century, Dijkstra said. To the turn-of-the-century male, women were either virgins or whores, angels or devils, madonnas or vampires. As Dijkstra pointed out, this paradox, combined with the rise of capitalism in the late 1800s, pushed middle-class women out of the working world and into the home--and into the role of “household nun.” In essence, a saintly housewife whose virtue was so pure it redeemed her husband’s tarnished soul.

“There was this notion that the bourgeois male, in order to make money, had to go out into a world that was very evil,” Dijkstra said. “And that he’d have to stick his neck out in a way that his soul would get damaged. So what developed is this notion that a husband and wife form one entity before God, and hence, they have one soul between them. And if they had one soul between them, it was better to keep that soul at home.”

The virtuous woman was passive, weak and self-sacrificing, and artists celebrated this ideal in a flood of paintings depicting women as madonnas, nuns and angels. So potent was this cultural notion, Dijkstra said, that invalidism itself became fashionable--a fad romanticized in a series of canvases showing gravely ill women.

As Dijkstra wrote: “More and more, the mythology of the day began to associate even normal health with dangerous, masculinizing attitudes. A healthy woman, it was often thought, was likely to be an ‘unnatural’ woman.”

To the 19th-Century male, the ideal woman was either mad, asleep or--better yet--dead. This fantasy resulted in a spate of canvases depicting such famous victim-heroines as Ophelia and Juliet. Tennyson’s love-crazed Elaine, who dies of unrequited love over the irresistible but indifferent Sir Lancelot, was a particular favorite of late 19th-Century artists.

Writes Dijkstra: “The public rejoiced in the sight of a beautiful woman in love, safely dead, and hence not likely--in her perfectly self-evident state of extreme self-sacrifice--to complicate the emotional life of the viewer any more than Elaine had complicated that of Sir Lancelot. . . . Pale and dead Elaines floated toward oblivion year after year at the Royal Academy.”

But it wasn’t simply imaginary heroines who succumbed to this ideal. Sarah Bernhardt, for instance, liked to travel in the late 1800s with a coffin--one she sometimes slept in. According to Dijkstra, her bizarre habits were, “given the late 19th-Century’s fascination with the notion of feminine insanity and the cult of the woman as corpse, truly flawless responses to the cultural taste of the times.”

Why did women conform to such self-destructive notions? “Having your own mind and your own will is so directly tied with having your own money,” Dijkstra said, “and by the 19th Century, the attack on the independent capacity of women to make money had been completed.”

Inevitably, women did rebel against their prescribed roles as the feminist movement spread and gained wide appeal. In response, there came an even more aggressive assault against women, Dijkstra said, reflected in increasingly perverse male fantasies about women in literature and art. Women lying naked, their backs so arched with desire they appeared to be inviting rape; women trysting with animals; women themselves part animal; women as vampires.

Dijkstra contends that many of these negative images continue to influence our thinking about women today. “We’re still living very much in the shadow of the kinds of fantasies that were set up in the 19th Century,” he said.

And he had particularly harsh criticism for fashion magazines in general, citing advertisements that suggest violence.

“Women are never encouraged in these advertisements to see themselves as competent, intelligent individuals,” he protested. “Instead, the suggestion is you need some form of prop--a perfume called Opium or Decadence or Poison. There are images at the turn of the century of Circe, the sorceress, who by her beauty turns men into swine. This is another thing: You bring out the beast in men because you put on certain clothes or certain perfume.

“What I would like most is for people to realize is that these are not things of the past,” Dijkstra said. “Our ideas about relationships between men and women are still imprisoned by the ideas of the late 19th Century.”