Woman in the Shadows : BERTHE MORISOT’S IMAGES OF WOMEN <i> By Anne Higonnet (Harvard University Press: $45; 311 pp.; illus.)</i>

The story is both fascinating and sad and, to be honest, not the whole truth. Through the layered complexities of 19th-Century Parisian society, it goes, “woman” drifts like a passive sea-creature, showing her strange faces only now and then as the tides move her along. Anne Higonnet has done a fine job of gathering evidence from many sides to bolster her argument that the Impressionist Berthe Morisot, like other women artists in the past, was psychologically dissolved in the society that bred her.

What was lost to social convention, Higonnet suggests, was a woman’s sense of herself as an independent being. So for an artist, the stumbling-block was self-portraiture, then the study of other women. Unable to come to grips with her own image, much less her naked body or inner nature, the woman as artist was helpless to define for herself the wider field of the world in which the men so confidently took their stands. In an earlier biography of Morisot, Higonnet described the self-portrait that appears on the cover of this one. It shows Morisot as she saw herself in a mirror, posing as if she had claim to “no place, no body, (with) no signs of class or time, almost none of gender--just a questioning gaze, soliciting nothing, remorselessly self-appraising.”

That kind of wraith-woman was the offspring not of the high historical heritage that gave men their sense of place but of what Higonnet calls “feminine visual culture.” The subculture permeated the retiring-rooms of the Parisian bourgeoisie, where women pored over dress-patterns, posed for fittings, and lounged in gauzy deshabille . It was disseminated through mass-produced engravings showing styles of room-decor and costume and even womanly manners and gestures. It also inspired a plethora of amateur drawings and watercolors by its consumers, not unskillful works which were often pasted into albums along with bits of cloth, pressed leaves, and other memorabilia in a primitive effort at self-invention. “Every woman is inseparable from her album,” a contemporary observed.

Morisot drew from this fount, which continued to support but also to impede her when she sought to reposition herself as a serious artist. Actually, her move in that direction was made easier by the character of Impressionism itself, informal and sketchy and, in that sense, continuous with the culture she came out of. But at the same time, pressure on her to conform to an acceptable female life-style caused Morisot great uncertainty and pain. After a crisis of depression, she destroyed most of her early, promising studies and wrote, “I don’t want to work anymore for the sake of working . . . it seems to me that a painting (of mine) . . . could sell and that’s my only ambition.” To consolidate a sense of professional self-respect, from then on she turned out vast numbers of highly salable pictures of the world she knew best: women in garden-bowers and intimate corners of their homes, surrounded by the accouterments of enclosed female existence. Her work was always, loyally, lauded by Degas and others for its “feminine” qualities. But over the years, it acquired what Higonnet calls “cool detachment,” often signified by figures with little or no formal relationship to one another. This lackluster feeling and the mildness of her compositions accounts for Morisot’s dim reputation even compared to that other equally domesticated but more visually adventurous artist Mary Cassatt. In the end, Higonnet’s Morisot seems held in suspension between unclear signals from inside and out, “uncomfortable on the boundary between ways of seeing,” torn between convention, repressed eroticism, and “pictorial ambition.” The author uses the words “stylistic discrepancies” to describe the unresolved brushwork in much of her oeuvre . Nevertheless, she finds in it “a life all the more intense because it is withheld”--a conclusion not all readers may accept.

However, it should be noted that Higonnet’s view of her subject is, itself, the product of a time and a special perspective. The author is one of a number of feminist art historians who have appropriated French deconstruction and American social theory to account for the fate of creative women in the past. Their intent is to focus not on studies of “male genius” but on the social--gender-related--forces that impinged on women. Yet Berthe Morisot, like any other human being, cannot be understood solely as a construct of outside pressures, and this mode of analysis, in its fix on the surroundings, fails to bring the whole creature up from the depths.

The poet Mallarme, one of many men who knew Morisot well, encouraged, and praised her, called her “the friendly Medusa.” Her friendship with Edouard Manet was close, how close no one knows. He painted her 11 times, providing a passionately vital sense of the woman caught between instinctive sensuality and a glowering independence of gaze. Also, at least once he even worked on one of her paintings, as Degas did on one of Cassatt’s. Few exchanges in art history are more instructive about the different ways women and men, even of the same group, went about their work, the men moving fast with the brush to block out big forms and simplify outlines, the women looking for nuances of feeling in a face and pose.

Morisot married not Edouard but his brother and bore a daughter she painted obsessively, who in time became “all that I love, all that’s left to me of youth and beauty.” But she remained, one supposes, the meduse , and Higonnet might have given us more of the dangerous dark--that is, the deep lived reality of the self-impelled woman. Frustratingly few of the passages from her notebooks and letters collected here hint at her longing for a wider life, her anguish and bitterness at its constriction, her spiritual isolation. “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal,” she wrote once, “and that’s all I would have asked, for I know I’m worth as much as they.” A cry like that arises from the shadows of society, out of the crucible of private thought.

It is ironic that a mode of criticism devised to rescue women from societies in which they seemed lost should perpetuate their invisibility by ignoring the full story of their struggle there. Morisot’s letters and notebooks have been published in France, many translated by Higonnet. Perhaps one day she will give us more of this somber, inwardly expressive woman.