Forms of Masquerade: The Art of Dora Carrington (1998)

Beginning with French feminists such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, critics have long been exploring ways that women artists embody themselves in their productions. At same time, other critics have focused attention on ways that texts - through overdetermined gendering of characters and plots - deconstruct any stable readings of body. As result, third sex, which Marjorie Garber claims cross-dresser creates, echoes and problematizes Simone de Beauvoir's concept of second sex; as Judith Butler maintains, drag is the destabalization of gender itself, destabalization that is denaturalizing and that calls into question claims of normativity and originality (128). For such critics, cross-dresser marks space of ambivalence and possibility, indicating a category crisis elsewhere, an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux that destabilizes comfortable binarity, and displaces resulting discomfort onto figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, margin (Garber 17). Insofar as embodying and destabilizing seem like disparate if not opposed ways of addressing gender issues, life and work of British artist Dora Carrington provide particularly challenging opportunity to test adequacy of contemporary feminist theorizing. Born to middle-class family in 1863, Carrington grew-up in staunchly Victorian atmosphere. At seventeen, she entered Slade School of Art, quickly discarded her given name, lopped-off her hair (an act for which more staid Virginia Woolf dubbed her Crop head), and restyled herself as androgynous Carrington. While at Slade she frequented home of socialite Ottoline Morrell, where she met writers such as Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence, and artists such as Roger Fry, Augustus John, and Vanessa Bell. In 1915 she met writer Lytton Strachey and, until her death in 1931, she and Strachey created an unconventional menage in their two country homes, Tidmarsh, and later, Ham Spray. Although friends found their relationship odd, and even repulsive, their union appeared beneficial to both: while Strachey toiled away at what was to be Eminent Victorians, Carrington painted, gardened, cut wood blocks, and wrote lively letters. In 1921 she married Ralph Partridge, friend of her brother's, and began an increasingly vexed juggling of her art and her two loves. In 1931 Strachey fell ill and died of pancreatic cancer - soon after, Carrington shot herself. Given sensational aspects of her short and tempestuous life, it is not surprising that Christopher Hampton recently made her focus of film, Carrington (1996). As Hampton film illustrates, if people know of Carrington, it is mainly in terms of her strange love affairs and bohemian lifestyle, not her art; in fact, in film we tend to see her paintings only as credits roll. To certain extent, Carrington probably would have approved of such move: she appears to have wanted her legacy to remain in her life and not in her painting, and to achieve this, she often used her art to direct attention to her domestic situation. With view to exploring nature and significance of this deflection, in this essay I will focus on four of Carrington's works that blur distinction between her life and her art: false bookcase she created for her Ham Spray home; performance-art living statue that she posed for at home of Ottoline Morrell; woodcut entitled The Servant Girl; and trompe l'oeil window she titled The Cook and Cat. In examining these works, and particularly last two, I wish to explore way that Carrington's self representation as servant gestures toward an issue that troubled many 19th- and 20th-century women artists - how to speak symbolically without tarnishing one's reputation. In Carrington's case, I will argue, depicting herself as servant both deflected interest from her artistic practices and allowed her to displace her discomfort at being both woman and painter onto figure of equally vexed status: female servant who, like female artist and woman's body, was something to be seen but not heard. …