The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development. - book reviews

In Degas's hands pastel took on a direct physicality. . . . His pastels are palpably tactile, but, of course, physically untouchable. . . . [His] emphatically material surfaces were, then, metaphors for the physical experience of female flesh, and more specifically, for the experience of illicit flesh. . . . Signified by this materiality, woman's body is literally embedded in the physical facture of the pastel medium (pp. 136-37).

Only occasionally does the writer go beyond the frame of her argument. Thus, she defines the significance of Gustave Caillebotte's male bather toweling himself by linking him to Jacques-Louis David's noble Roman in The Intervention of the Sabine Women; both seem to this viewer to be primarily male academic studies. This homology spirals into speculation that is uncharacteristic of Callen. She writes (regarding the Caillebotte):

The English "wipe dry" is deceptively, pedestrian. The French s'essuy/er/ant uses only vowels and soft consonants; it is enunciated inside the mouth, behind closed teeth, and involves the lips, tongue and cheeks. These sounds - the first, and then the double "s" plus the "-uy/er/ant" - evoke, in the very process of their utterance, a sensation of sensual, passive indolence (p. 145).

Sometimes a fricative is just a fricative. This digression disappoints because the author had beguiled this reader into confidence in the text, a seduction that is intellectually arousing and possible only over time. It's a big letdown, then, when Callen's final chapter does not summarize her argument.

Few academic writers will still commit to the extended study which invites an active critical reading. Fewer still have editors to push them to craft the powerful summary readers need. In the pleasure of sustained consideration, the perversity of the guide may define the boundaries of the experience. Divagation marks the route, an impossibility in shorter texts, especially in those papers prepared for conferences or seminars, which often reach publication without testing the boundaries of the whole field. Callen's material on pastels, cited above, vastly improves upon a paper she delivered at a Liverpool symposium in conjunction with the Tate Gallery's exhibition Degas: Images of Women. That gathering also generated another volume of essays, edited by Richard Kendall and Griselda Pollock, Dealing with Degas.(7)

Most of these books consider the question of "sex" contra "gender," which is paralleled in masculine imagery by the terms "penis" and "phallus." Joseph A. Kestner defines them in his Masculinities in Victorian Painting using concepts developed by Peter Schwenger in his essay "The Masculine Mode." Kestner quotes Schwenger: "The masculine mode is above all an attempt to render a certain maleness of experience . . . the infusion of a particular sense of the body into the attitudes and encounters of a life." Kestner surprises in his choice of illustration: Robert Longo's Sword of the Pig, which "constructs both the penis and phallus, both physical maleness and symbolic system," establishing "that phallus, even functioning in distinction from penis, could not signify without recognition of penis" (p. 274).