The subtitle of this book says it all: "Fantasies of the Feminine in Fin-de-Siecle Culture." Sadly though, so much of what this book contains may have began as fantasy but ended with reality.  Though an older book, this is not one to soon forget or an excuse not to buy and read and read again and again. Here is a book that speaks of the cult of the pale and dying Ophelia, the original grunge GenXer, all pale and tottering with a "vampire gaze", as if she were high on heroin, and about to fade. Women, in the late 1800s and early 1900s as now, somewhat, were creatures to be both revered and feared. In any event, they were creatures, quite unlike their male counterpart.

Women were wracked with nervous self-doubt, yet still managed to hold in their dark and wan eyes, all the wiles of death. Look at any of the paintings of our Ophelia, and find her with her hair full of nettles, a vampire look in her eyes - clearly a threat - or floating away as the story has it, on a watery grave surrounded on all sides by flowers yet oddly erotic. In Madeline Lamaire's painting, she emerges as if from the soil, full-breasted and lithe, her light hair plaited, she is ready for the want of any necrophiliac who will have her, and we know our Ophelia is dying, yet she appears curiously strong and healthy - almost Teutonic. Take to the max and take Sarah Bernhard's "coffin portrait" of the 1870s, where she lays, beautiful and young, surrounded by lilies and emaciated. Ophelia was every woman and every man's fetish of the time.  Even the French cosmetics firm, Houbigant, had great success when they created a powder called "Poudre Ophelia", a powder that would "create the outward appearance of being as decorously pale and fragile as any true Ophelia."

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Was it because of their real strength that women took on the role of the pale and dying and helpless creature? To appear less of a threat to the men they supported, women would lay about all day, not eating, dying of odd diseases like consumption and other weird and wonderful things that meant basically starving to death, God, weren't' they beautiful while they were doing it. They were fragile, helpless, and a fitting partner and then modern equivalent to the men who had once feared women.

Women after all, were givers of life, and were often depicted as such. Dijkstra's book has many such paintings of Albine, the mother of nature with her many children clutching for her breasts, eager to feed as she falls back on a bed of seaweed or flowers. Woman was "nature enthroned" and this had replaced "virgin enthroned." To take the place of our Ophelia, we now had the earth mother who could nourish us all, all the children, an d let's not forget, men too. This other earth mother is depicted as voluptuous and strong, covered in vines or flowers, she make men long for her - they want to nose their way in and suckle, like infants returning to the womb. IT was the "cultus" of family. It was the woman as receptive to nursing and giving not only to child, but also to man and more, to nourish and replenish the earth. The woman was nothing short of evolution embodied, and she was no doubt sexual and always protective.

Yet still, this strong and fertile earth mother is still depicted as somewhat chained to the house. She is protective and domestic, and in this way, a slave who must never leave the hearth fire. She is "the earths' warm flower-womb" and gone was the tottering and pale virgin, dying on her deathbed. Here was the giver of life and this marked a real shift in paintings in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  But soon, this heavy and rooted earth mother was replaced by once again, a sort of Ophelia, only this time, she floated on air or rode in just above the waves. Here again, the lightness and the paleness of a real woman as she was then seen as depicted by Brandenburg in 1870 in Whirling Sands and Bouguereau in "The Oreads." She was a sort of "flaky nymph", floating in the air and above the shoreline, and again, woman was relegated to the land of no threat and instead drifted along like so many clusters of "dandelion seed."

Soon, women were depicted as not simply part of the air, but also as part of nature; they were fickle, growing out of trees, or covered in vines, or seated, like Rossetti's women, covered in viny growths with bowers over their waving hair. Rossetti believed that women could not keep their mind on "weighty matters" and because of this, she was forever blowing in the wind in a sense. Lost in a kind of reverie and weighted down" with branches and heavy natural objects that keep her stuck in her daydream. Rossetti painted this scene again and again, and his women have that far away look in their eyes - it is all they could do, he felt. It was what woman <I>was</I> - she was rooted, perhaps, but also lost, and again, she was pale, thin, wan and helpless. 

Other view's like that of Arthur Hacker, painter of "Leaf Drift" (1902), had his nymphets frolicking in dead leaves, their pale naked bodies exposed, one of his models touching her nipple seductively. In paintings such as this, and the many artists who followed suit, women were inviting rape. It was their own fault, it was believed. She had "invited violence" and men "sought relief in daydreams" in which these seductive nymphs left them no choice. Their twisted poses, was viewed as a "rather prosaic search for novelty." The late nineteenth century male was lead to believe that women left men no choice but to "invite violence." That men were reassured that a woman is "naturally less sensitive to pain than man." The year was 1893 and men everywhere believed that women indeed, were asking to be raped and more, that it did not hurt them. That no matter what they looked like, how fragile how pale, this was all a big "come on" the seductive strip-tease and sadly, it was widely accepted and believed. The surviving art of the time only compounds the problem by showing us these willing and nude nymphets who with their eyes may say No, but with their twisted and contorted nude bodies, indeed, seem to say Yes. Even Thomas Hardy believed and wrote in Jude the Obscure that a woman stood no chance of being molested if her body and eyes but said No. but what if her eyes said Yes -- well then, it was her own doing and she must have wanted it. In short, "A woman who was raped was raped only because she wanted to be raped. Hardy knew this was true because science had proved it to be true." (Dijkstra, 103).

Naiads and woodland nymphs were often depicted especially with their backs broken as they rolled over waves or falls. It was "an anti-feminine cliché", a d between 1880-1914 - women were "rudely washed ashore", again nude and helpless, their breasts and genitals often arching upward, but always twisted and contorted in ways that the body could not possibly twist had the back not been broken. And so it was born, the cult of the broken back - and women again, were perceived as weak and even liking pain. Even with their backs broken, women were asking for it. They had asked for it in death, and now they asked for it in pain, and this was believed as "science." Woman may have been a goddess, but a goddess with a broken back, born on the crest of a wave and washing ashore to the provocation of men, she was a goddess chanting Yes, yes yes, to their cries, and there, as the others that had gone before her, to come as great temptress.

Dijkstra's book is filled with such depictions of women throughout the fin de Siecle and it would be impossible and lengthy to go through all of them here. Suffice to say that this is one book that is absolutely worth reading. We can watch our own evolution from dying Ophelia to wood sprite and naiad and narcissist in love with her own reflection.  Always though, the woman is represented in context to man - in contrast to man. She is always a force to be reckoned with, to be brought down. Even a woman just being is a temptress and a devil.