Women, Portraits, and Painters

“The Madonna of the Future" and "The Sweetheart of M. Briseux”

Abstract

Although traditionally interpreted as dealing with the problem of the artist, these early tales by Henry James can be read as powerful statements on the cultural and aesthetic construction of woman. Woman's beauty opens the way for her entrance into the aesthetic dimension, that is, her withdrawal from the existential and temporal sphere, thus virtually changing her from an actual person into an art object. In "The Madonna of the Future," the woman protagonist's explicit resistance to such an aestheticization and the male artist's failure to produce his masterpiece are a denunciation of the artist's idealization both of woman and of Renaissance art. In "The Sweetheart of M. Briseux," the woman protagonist's entrance into the aesthetic sphere, seen as a release from the strictures of life as a bourgeois wife, turns out to be a delusive alternative, equally involving self-denial and loss of identity.