The WOMEN in WHITE

Red-headed muses, coded feminism, and the correlation between Whistler's scandalous painting and a gothic novel of the same name

- Michael J. Pearce

Twenty-first-century eyes may see little reason for the storm of scandal stirred by James Abbott McNeill Whistler's painting Symphony in White, No. 1:The White Girl at the Salon des Refusés of 1863.Yes, like his friend Henri Fantin-Latour, and the arch-flâneur of Montmartre, Édouard Manet, Whistler had dared to paint in bold, loose brushwork, contrary to the conventions of the tight rendering and slick finish of the contemporary academic style, but surely the textures and knife of pigment were not enough to provoke the giggles and titters of the bourgeoisie!

Whistler left mysterious clues hanging and un-spelled. Her morning dress was the costume of domestic privacy, not usually seen in public; red hair reminded literary and Christian viewers of Mary Magdalene, the prostitute of biblical myth who washed Jesus' feet with her mane of red hair and returned to innocence. The scattered posy of flowers spilled onto the wolfskin suggested a love treated carelessly, with a lone white lily slipping from her long fingers, a symbol of innocence lost, death, and the betrayed bride. The white dress, the costume of the dead following the 19%-century funeral tradition of dressing the deceased in a simple white gown or a shroud, an emblem of pure virtue and the grave; the savagery and teeth of the flayed wolf and its direct gaze threatening bestial revenge, the red hint of blood around the edges of its skin pointing to recent slaughter. This vampire bride may have killed a wolf—or even a lycanthrope—in savage violence and vengeance. Alexandre Dumas' popular werewolf story, Le Meneur de Loups (The Wolf Leader), had been published in 1857. Symphony in White was a sensual painting—imagine the canine fur between the woman in white's bare toes, hidden beneath her shocking and improper dress! Imagine her hair caressing Christ's sacrificial feet!