Women and Modernity: the Case of Frances Hodgkins: an Investigation of her use and Abandonment of the Image of Woman

Abstract

The thesis asserts that a study of the images of women painted by Frances Hodgkins reveals much about the difficulties for the woman painter of gaining a place within modernist discourse, and also much about the impossibility of conceiving of woman as a producing subject. It argues that Frances Hodgkins abandoned the depiction of women, which for the greater part of her career had been her favoured subject, as a result of the pressures of trying to establish herself in an avant-garde context. The thesis begins with a discussion of the exclusion of women from high art discourse, which reached its height in the modern period. It then traces Frances Hodgkins's origins as a painter within the amateur tradition, and demonstrates the differences between her images of women produced within that tradition, and images of women she produced for the professional high art market. The images are analysed according to five categories, derived from a study of feminist art-historical analysis of women's painting. These categories; 'the look', 'the face', 'the body', 'being busy' and 'woman-to-woman,' denote representational strategies which accord subjectivity to the depicted woman, visible in the works from the amateur tradition, but not asserted in the depictions for the professional market. In 1901 Frances Hodgkins went to France, where she participated in a context where women impressionists like Berthe Morisot brought representational strategies from amateur discourse to their work. This milieu authorised the depiction of women of Hodgkins's own class for a professional market, and enabled her to express her own desires. The community of femmes-peintres was the milieu which fostered her development as a modern painter and a producing subject. The final two chapters trace her abandonment of the image of woman as she moved gradually towards finding a place in the British avant-garde. Despite the fact that she achieved considerable critical acclaim during the last part of her life, hostile critical comment, preoccupied with gender, is shown to have been a factor in the effacement of the image woman from her oeuvre. She continued for some time to make representations of her intimates, and the relationship of these depictions to the early work produced within the amateur tradition is discussed, as are the works she produced late in her career when other objects stand in for the image of woman. These replacements argue a recognition on her part of the impossibility of asserting a female subject within modernist discourses. As well, her case provides a paradigm of the way the modernist canon was constructed to exclude women.