The Madhouse

Claudia Reddan

The wall at the NGV was full of portraits of naked women. They all looked the same. Curvy bodies, petite breasts, rounded stomachs and white skin.

Many of the women were contorted, with their heads twisting one way and their bodies the other. They looked like fictional characters; straight, luscious hair only growing from their heads.

Amongst the portraits, I came across her.

She didn’t look at the painter like most of the other women did; she was looking down, turning inwards and failing to put on a show like the others.

Trapped inside a canvas, in a 19th century domestic bubble like the other women. I wondered what it was like for them to live as a muse in a male-dominated world.

He leaves early morning.  

That’s when the circus of shadows begins. When Elizabeth is left alone inside the madhouse.  

The sun has not risen and the mist is blowing off the paddocks.

Its chestnut floorboards creak as the grandfather clock ticks from the dining room. 

Magpies sing whilst Elizabeth lays in an empty bed. 

She only feels alive when she is with him. 

Every morning, she watches as the ice melts away from the fringes of the grass through the window. 

What else is there to do for a married woman? 

For a woman at all? 

Her youthfulness and rosy cheeks stood out. She was a human with emotion in her face. She did not merely look like an object, but someone who was stuck and longing for something more. What was life like for her? How did she find herself to be the subject of a brush? 

The sense of longing in the artwork led me to research the role of women and the male gaze in 19th century portraiture. 

I came across Lynda Nead’s 1992 book, The female nude: Art, obscenity, and sexuality. Nead looks at how 19th century nude portraiture was seen as a ‘visual culmination of renaissance idealism and humanism’. But I felt that there was nothing humanistic about those portraits. There wasn’t a sense of who the women were.  

Was the male gaze exploitative to women? 

Nead endeavours to look at how high art was, and has since been, associated with female nudity and the idea that its aesthetic excused its exploitation and transformed it into art.  

The house is cold. 

 Her nipples harden as she observes them.

 Elizabeth’s body is marked by the hands of others. 

They trace her back, her arms, her chest. Warm, forever tracing. 

The wind begins to howl, drowning out the ticking clock, almost as if it is laughing at her. 

The redgum bedside table moans as Elizabeth leans against it. It talks to her. 

Sunrays shine through, melting away the frost on the windows. The rays land on her bare skin. 

In the corner of her eye, she sees them as they move around. 

This is her madhouse.

 One big box sealed tight. 

The air is stale, and it smells like smokers' breath. 

The little girl watches.

The purpose of 19th century nude art was to embody ‘perfection, universality, and unity’. The word perfection screamed to be the truest when thinking about the artworks. The ideal perfection the male gaze desired. In terms of universality, there was no diversity on the wall of the NGV, they were all unified in the same gaze. 

Her innocence had been commodified and stored inside a canvas. For the rest of her life and beyond, her body would be hung on different walls, her breasts swimming in the eyes of different men.  

Mastered by men, but never a master herself, a figure of someone else’s imagination. 

It is recommended she stay in a sanatorium.  

Elizabeth has tried to explain to her husband where the marks in the wood have come from.  

 When Elizabeth’s husband is not present, the little girl appears. 

White Holy Communion dress, scuffed brown strapped shoes, and pink ribbons in her plaited hair. 

Clothes Elizabeth remembers wearing as a child. 

She skips in and out of the rooms of the madhouse, observing Elizabeth as she sits. 

The little girl’s rosy, innocent youthfulness still mirrors Elizabeth now.

But the inside of the box does not match the outside. 

The little girl often cries in the madhouse, her hair draped over her legs as she weeps. 

Perhaps it is the black shadows that scare her. 

They scare Elizabeth too. 

They pace the long hallway, dragging their feet.  

Their long toenails carve lines in the wood. 

Callused hands scrape against the walls.  

I later found John Berger’s 1972 novel, Ways of Seeing, where he argues that 19th century art is not pornographic. He states that ‘nakedness, and female nudity’, are separate; that ‘to be naked is to be oneself’. In the artworks, I felt that nakedness and female nudity were treated the same; the women didn’t feel like themselves. How similar were the portraits to the women in real life?

Can a woman be oneself in the eyes of the male gaze?  

How much does it change the genuine self? 

They get louder, jolting Elizabeth from her dream state, to find the box has been filled with smoke.  

On all fours she crawls towards the bedroom door, slowly turning the handle.

Her eyes water from the smoke.  

They thud against the walls. Shadows of who she once was.  

Elizabeth stands at the top of the hallway and covers her eyes as she takes the first couple of steps. 

A shadow bumps into her back, knocking her down to the ground.  

A toenail scratches along the back of her leg, tearing through her skin, opening her to the world. 

They walk on her back, pushing her down, cutting with each step.  

The little girl appears amongst the shadows, ushering Elizabeth into the kitchen. 

She stands next to a metal bucket of warm water, holding a cloth. 

 The water stings Elizabeth’s cuts; she watches the red run down her legs.  

 The kitchen window frames her like a canvas. 

Berger explores the relationship between the painter and the woman. He argues that nude portraiture cannot be considered a nude. ‘The painter's personal vision of the particular woman he is painting is so strong that it makes no allowance for the spectator’. The spectator ‘is an outsider who can only witness the relationship but cannot understand it’. Therefore, he cannot believe that ‘she is naked for him’, and ‘she cannot be turned into a nude’. 

What kind of relationship was there between the girl and the painter?

‘The painter's personal vision’ screamed male gaze. How necessary was the painter’s vision to the portrait? 

It made sense why they all looked the same, they were there to be figments of the masculine imagination, a universal vision. 

Lost and forever stuck in the imagination of a man. 

To be a woman is to pose for others.

 Give to others.

Be for others.

To be painted in muted tones.

She squeezes the red from the cloth into the water.

The sun shines through, calming the goosebumps on her skin.

 The windows of the madhouse are the most dangerous.

The world teases and beckons her to leave the box.

In the glass, there is a woman that looks back at Elizabeth.

She looks exactly like Elizabeth; identical button nose, soft features, but she is not how Elizabeth feels on the inside.

Berger distinguishes erotic art and pornography by arguing that it is a matter of ‘love versus sex, aesthetic value versus bad art, and feeling or emotion versus action’. In the artwork in question, some emotion, but only some, leaked out. Although, it felt like it wasn’t supposed to be there. How might someone define the difference? Which category would the painting in question fall under? 

I knew that the world had progressed since the 19th century. I knew as a woman that there was much more freedom and opportunity for us beyond a canvas. Yet, the girl in the frame reminded me of how women are still trapped in a submissive role; expected to be in the background of the masculine. They are looked down upon for their authenticity and the way they fill the space.

Would a 19th century woman still relate to us? 

Would the girl relate to me? 

It meets her eyes.

Staring at her, tilting its head from side to side.

Its big black pupils grow bigger and bigger. It surely cannot be Elizabeth.

She moves her arm up, and it moves its arm too.

Elizabeth gently dries the tender, stinging red wounds on her legs and back.

She observes the woman in the window.

                                           Elizabeth has always been afraid of her reflection, wondering why it felt like a stranger, when it was supposed to be her.

She notices the thick, bright blue veins that run down her breast.

It’s hard for Elizabeth to believe that she could hold such vital signs of life.

Her finger follows the vein down to her nipple; it feels artificial and fake.

The clock begins to tick again, and the shadows bash and thud against the walls, banging and banging.

I questioned how much female sexuality was in those paintings. There was female nudity, but what about feminine sexuality? 

Nead unpacks the concept that 19th century nude portraiture stored a ‘masculine identity’. ‘Unbounded, needing to be contained’ within femininity, providing a ‘cultural frame’. The women were empty and looked unrealistic because they were muses to represent and hold the masculine imagination, and that was their only purpose.

The concept that the canvas was considered ‘empty of meaning’, until it was ‘given meaning by him,’ comes fourth in Neads work. It became clear that in a 19th century world, women were forced to exist in the regulation and control of the masculine.

It was evident that this was what linked their world with ours. The masculine is still dominant, and free to be wild and unrestricted. However, femininity is still seen to be submissive and there to balance out and support the masculine. There is more freedom in this universe for women, but the pressure and expectation to conform to old roles lingers. The male gaze continues to follow and trap women, just inside the world, instead of only inside a canvas. 

What advice would a 19th century woman give to us? 

What would we say to them?

                                                                     She stands naked, shivering at the sight of the loose bits of wood hanging from the wall.

A thick line of smoke begins to float down the hallway.

The clock ticks louder, and the shadows began to shout.  

The kitchen fills with smoke. It fills Elizabeth’s lungs as she coughs and coughs.

The sound of her cough is silenced by the shouts and screams of the shadows.

 She collapses on her knees and falls to a foetal position. 

Her mouth fills with smoke and she covers her ears.

The little girl appears, sitting underneath the white sheet. 

She waves Elizabeth over to her. 

Elizabeth crawls through the smoke.

They sit together, the sheet covering them like a tent.

The smoke leaves Elizabeth’s mouth and lungs, the little girl smiles with a rosy grin.  

The sparkle and glow in the little girl’s eyes remind Elizabeth of how empty she feels.  

She waits underneath the sheet with the little girl.  

Waits for purpose.  

Waits for her husband.  

Waits for life. 

Claudia Reddan is a student and writer from Melbourne. She is interested in screenwriting and experimenting with different forms and genres. Her writing lyrically explores what she’s most intrigued by—people, and how they see themselves, the world, and others. She has an 11-year history with Irish Dancing, which has given her many stories to use in the future if she is ever blank for ideas.