Smile When You Think about Hell Essays on Paula Rego M ARIA M ANUEL L ISBOA ESSAYS ON PAULA REGO Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell Maria Manuel Lisboa https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2019 Maria Manuel Lisboa This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Maria Manuel Lisboa, Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0178 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0178#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Any digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0178#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-756-6 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-757-3 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-758-0 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-759-7 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-760-3 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-761-0 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0178 Cover image: Untitled (Abortion Series 1998). Copyright Paula Rego, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art, all rights reserved. Cover design by Anna Gatti. In memory of Chris Dobson, distinguished scientist, knight of the realm and much-loved friend. He was the man whom, as Head of House of my college, St. John’s College, Cambridge, a malign fate forced me, a card-carrying feminist, to address as ‘Master’. Sometimes. To my two grandmothers: Belmira Gabão and Adelina Lisboa. And to my two lovely mothers-in-law: Winifred Brick and Anne Woolf (Mrs. Ogre). A grandmother is a mother twofold and a good mother-in-law is a gift that keeps on giving. Contents Acknowledgments ix A Note on Images xiii Prologue: A Patriot for Me 1 1. Past History and Deaths Foretold: A Map of Memory 33 2. (He)art History or a Death in the Family: The Late 80s 95 3. The Sins of the Fathers: Mother and Land Revisited in the Late 90s 129 4. An Interesting Condition: The Abortion Pastels 199 5. Brave New Worlds: The Birthing of Nations in First Mass in Brazil 275 6. I Am Coming to Your Kingdom, Prince Horrendous: Scary Stories for Baby, Perfect Stranger and Me 291 7. Paula and the Madonna: Who’s That Girl? 353 8. Epilogue: Let Me Count the Ways I Love You 389 Appendix A Translation of Alexandre Herculano’s A Dama Pé de Cabra (The Lady with a Cloven Hoof) 409 Appendix B Translation of Hélia Correia’s ‘Fascinação’ (‘Enchantment’) 433 Works Cited 441 List of Illustrations 459 E-figures 477 Index 459 Acknowledgments Life has thrown at me my fair share of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but in my Sea of troubles they have always been there: the lovely friends and relatives who have taken up arms on my behalf, kept me safe and made the difference in the choice between to be or not to be. Paula Rego puts dangerous and delightful thoughts in the most upright of minds without even trying. The inspiration for these acknowledgements comes from her and I blame her entirely for the implied violence. In approximate alphabetical order, Victoria Best, the loveliest of friends, who if I asked her to help me hide a body would say: ‘Of course I will, darling. Perfect timing: I’ve just finished baking you a cake’; Janet Chow, Colin Clarkson, Fiona Colbert, Hélène Fernandes, David Lowe, Sonia Morillo Garcia and Mark Nichols (I did say more or less alphabetically), magician librarians who would provide me with good reference books on how to carry out a perfect murder; Margaret Clark who would hide the body in her garden and use it for compost and Ken Coutts who would look disapproving but whose moustache would nevertheless twitch ever so slightly; Céline Coste Carlisle who would make me a tarte tatin to restore my energy after the deed was done; Chris Dobson who may well have been the best, kindest, most intelligent and funniest man I have ever known, and who might not have helped but would have watched and laughed if I tripped and fell over in the process of wrongdoing; Mary Dobson who would look at me standing over the body dripping knife in hand and say: ‘Oh, Manucha, I don’t believe you would ever murder anybody. You are a very special person’; Peter Evans, who would be delighted that I’d finally turned x Essays on Paula Rego into a film noir femme fatale and Isabel Santaolalla who would organize everything incredibly efficiently including the collection and disposal of the body; Robert Evans, who would raise an eyebrow, remain perfectly poker-faced but help anyway; the Gentlemen Porters of my College, who would suggest the College cellars as a good place to hide the evidence; Philippa Gibbs, who would help as long as the victim wasn’t Welsh; Margaret Jull Costa who would translate my alibi plan into several languages; Ádela Lisboa, Ana Cristina Lisboa and Zé Rodrigues, my lovely and loving relatives who would help because that’s what family does; Teresa Moreira Rato, my friend whether I’m right or wrong (since we were five years old), who, when asked would stub out her cigarette and go and get a spade; Coral Neale, who would look a bit annoyed and say, ’I’ll help but only after midnight: I’m working till late’; Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, who would be a bit concerned but would place the body in the basket of her bike and deal with it in five minutes flat; John O’Sullivan, Aicha Rehmouni, Farida Hadu, Jack Glossop, Des O’Rourke and Jamie Pineda and with fond memories of Jean-Pierre Laurent (‘Madame, time eez nussing when I am wiz you’) who would serve me the body medium-rare on a silver platter with a delicious sauce; John Rink, the man of my dreams who would wash up the murder weapon, dry it and put it away neatly; Helen Watson, who would say: ‘I wish you hadn’t done it Manucha, but a friend’s a friend. Of course I’ll help’. And as ever, with love to Laura Lisboa Brick, who I hope would visit me in prison. *** This volume gathers together both my published and unpublished work on Paula Rego. The bulk of it, ‘A Map of Memory’, is composed of Paula Rego’s Map of Memory: National and Sexual Politics , my monograph previously published by Ashgate but now out of print. A shorter version of chapter 5, ‘Brave New Worlds: The Birthing of Nations in First Mass in Brazil ’ was published previously in Portuguese in Brazil as ‘Admirável Mundo Novo? A Primeira Missa no Brasil de Paula Rego’ in João Cézar de Castro Rocha (ed.), Nenhum Brasil existe: pequena enciclopédia (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks Editora, 2003), pp. 73–91. Chapter 7, ‘Paula and the Madonna: Who’s That Girl?’ was first published in Ann Davies, Parvathi Kumaraswami and Claire Williams (eds.), Making Waves xi Acknowledgments Anniversary Volume: Women in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 185– 201. Chapter 6, ‘I Am Coming to Your Kingdom, Prince Horrendous: Scary Stories for Baby, Perfect Stranger and Me’ is an entirely new essay. I am grateful to the original publishers and editors of the essays published previously for permission to reproduce modified, extended and translated versions of the works. Images are numbered following the principle of giving chapter number and image number separated by a full stop. Thus the fourth image in chapter 1 is 1.4. For these purposes the Prologue is noted as chapter 0 and the Epilogue as chapter 8. All translations from Portuguese literary works, including poetry, critical texts and interviews are my own. I am very grateful to Paula Rego for giving me permission to reproduce her images and above all for creating them. Erin Sleeper, Celia Duque Espiau and Mary Miller at Marlborough Fine Art were endlessly patient with my disorganization in keeping track of the digital images with which they kindly provided me. I thank them and apologize. I am more than grateful to Alessandra Tosi, my publisher (for the second time), for her patience and kindness, and Lucy Barnes (in honour of steel snowflakes). I am also very grateful for research grants from St. John’s College, Cambridge, and from the University of Cambridge, which made this book possible. A Note on Images The bulk of the images in Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell are reproduced in the book, and referred to in the normal way as figures (fig.). However, there are a small number of images that could not be reproduced in the text, but which can be found online. In order that the reader has access to these images in some form, we have provided links to their location online and we refer to these linked images as e-figures (e-fig.). For clarity of reference, the e-figures are numbered separately in the text and listed separately at the end of the book. In projecting their anger and dis-ease into dreadful figures, creating dark doubles for themselves and their heroines, women [artists] are both identifying with and revising the self-definitions patriarchal culture has imposed on them. Sandra Gilbert and Susan M. Gubar ‘No sight so sad as that of a naughty child’, he began, ‘especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?’ ‘They go to hell’, was my ready and orthodox answer. ‘And what is hell? Can you tell me that?’ ‘A pit full of fire’. ‘And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?’ ‘No, sir’. ‘What must you do to avoid it?’ I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: ‘I must keep in good health and not die’. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre She looked mournful as she always did though she smiled when she talked about hell. Everyone went to hell, she told me, you had to belong to her sect to be saved and even then — just as well not to be too sure. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Ella (writes home) — Dear all. Having a wonderful time. Yesterday we learned how to die. Polly Teale, After Mrs. Rochester Prologue: A Patriot for Me Patriotism is not enough. Edith Cavell Is there another plot? Virginia Woolf Always historicize! Frederic Jameson It dawned on me that here were people who had spent their lives re-connecting pictures to the worlds from which they came. R. B. Kitaj Pre-Figuring the Motherland This is a book about love. It is about ‘doing harm to those one loves.’ 1 Under patriarchy it is probably true that gender power and privilege come with a price tag, namely the possibility that a significant proportion of men must be married to women who do not love them. ‘Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want’ (Austen, 1985, 163). In Pride and Prejudice , the much-quoted words of Charlotte Lucas give accurate expression to a wider situation with implications for supposed true-love matches not only in the novel — Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Jane and Mr. Bingley — but far beyond its boundaries. If women 1 Paula Rego, quoted in McEwen (1997, 138). © Maria Manuel Lisboa, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0178.11 2 Essays on Paula Rego depend upon their men for social significance, status, visibility and even subsistence, it follows that, on the part of the woman, the imperatives of need (to be financially kept) and want (love, desire) become at best impossible to disentangle, while at worst the latter acts as a thin euphemism for the former. Angela Carter put it pithily, if brutally: ‘the marriage bed is a particularly delusive refuge from the world because all wives of necessity fuck by contract’ (Carter, 1987, 9). Contracts of employment, on the whole, do not specify the requirement of loving one’s boss. And what happens, furthermore, when even the simulacrum of love breaks down, and the subaltern rebels? The turning of the worm is another definition of revolution, and it is partly the subject of the essays that follow. This is a book about love. It is also about reversals in love, with all the multiplicity of meanings that such an expression entails. In the words of one of her exegetes, Paula Rego enters the Great Tradition of art by the back door, and once there lays down repeated visual statements concerning a binary world whose territorial lines are demarcated by the battle of the sexes (Rosengarten, 1999a, 6). In this pictorial universe, whose referent is realpolitik patriarchy, sexual politics set the agenda. The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton stated, with some recklessness, that ‘the soul of woman is not concerned with history’ (Guitton, 1951, 221): ‘the truth is that woman is more near to the human than man, so easily estranged from what is human. [...] One of the missions of woman, after that of generation, is to reconcile man to man and to disappear. She does not herself perform those deeds which transform history, but she is the hidden foundation for them’ (Guitton, 1951, 228). This view, belied by the intensity with which Roman Catholicism has deemed it necessary to deny the female historical role from Eve onwards, neglects also a vast world of experience that historiography has only recently begun to uncover. If a woman’s home is her castle, in one form or another ‘history has intruded upon the household and disrupted its traditional order’ (Armstrong, 1996, 157), but the reverse also applies. The family as cornerstone of the social fabric has itself the power to change from homely to that unheimlich (unhomely, uncanny) in which Freud detected the potential for psychic — and arguably political — anarchy (Freud, 1919, 335–76). Working from the standpoint of the ‘counterhistorian’ — which, as will be argued, is the 3 Prologue: A Patriot for Me position reproduced in a visual medium by Paula Rego — Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt write as follows: To mainstream historians, gender relations had appeared too stable and universal for historical analysis. [...] The feminist historian denied its naturalness by subjecting it to historical analysis [...] to show that gender relations, despite the endurance of male domination, only appear to stand outside of the historical processes. [...] Feminist counterhistorians raised a metahistorical question: What was it that made phenomena ‘historical,’ and why did so much ‘culture’ fail to qualify? (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2000, 59) In the work of Paula Rego, as her observers have often remarked, and as the well-known feminist aphorism would have it, the personal always becomes political: ‘public and private are not separate but intersective’ (Lowder Newton, 1989, 156). More unusually, however, as will be argued over the course of these essays, the political is translated back into the immediately accessible vocabulary of the personal: history is paraphrased in images drawn from domestic life, and national politics find expression through the familiar lexicon of interpersonal relations. The thoroughfare between the personal and the political, therefore, becomes a two-way system, in the context of which one term is easily exchanged for the other and back again. In an otherwise unflattering review of Rego’s The Sin of Father Amaro series of 1998, discussed in chapter 3, Tom Lubbock defines Rego’s ‘basic plot’ as ‘an ambivalent one of female survival, cunning, secrets, resistance and revenge, all qualified by a deep emotional investment in subjection and victimhood.’ He went on to write that the narratives that lie behind her pictures ‘are always woman-centred, but I’ve never understood why she’s called a feminist artist. Men may appear in her pictures as passive toys, but there is always an offstage context of invincible male power. Liberation and equality aren’t her business at all.’ (Lubbock, 1998). Much has been written about the tension, in Paula Rego’s life and work, between external conformity and internal revolt, about the struggle between outward good manners and an inward drive towards an iconoclasticism that sometimes borders on the profane (McEwen, 1997, 17, 36). Germaine Greer discerns this struggle in what she terms the ‘effort to present a violent and subversive personal vision in acceptable decorative terms’ (Greer, 1988, 29), and Paula Rego herself,