Degas and Female Identity: A Catalogue of Beauty or Use?

Prior to the Industrial Revolution (1820-1840 in Europe), the traditional French woman was occupied with domestic duties involving: housekeeping, child rearing, preparation of meals, and harvesting of crops. After the Industrial Revolution and with more of an onslaught of city and modern life, women’s roles expanded to factory workers and laundresses. The independence of women was very limited, and women did not obtain suffrage in France until 1944. During the 1800s, the roles of women were completely attached to the ties of the home and domestic life. A woman could only work with the permission of her husband and their work was restricted to appropriate tasks for women.

This underlying tension between women and society sets some of the background to Edgar Degas’s artistic work. Degas’s works over the course of his artistic career, spanning from 1853 to his death in 1917, move from history painting and to paintings more focused on the lower workings of contemporary life. He becomes particularly interested in the working women who he believes understands the toil and pain behind the brushstrokes of a painter, the curtain of a ballerina, or the finely pressed shirt from the ironers. Throughout these works, Degas creates a catalogue of women. The categories include: ballerinas, ironers, nudes, and domestic women. Degas creates beautiful and sometimes hazy illustrations of the lives of these women. This exhibit will look at the difference between the depiction of the woman in Sulking and how it compares to Degas’s other paintings of lower-working class women.

Degas, Laundresses Carrying Linen into Town, 1878, 

Oil on Paper, 46 x 61 cm, Private Collection

Hoisting cumbersome and seemingly heavy baskets, Degas immediately places these two women as laundresses on their way to deliver their handiwork. The gestural way that this is painted imparts a notion of movement and hurried activity. These are women who are faithfully accomplishing their tasks in their new modern roles. This painting depicts a common place scene of the new contemporary, French life. The harsh outlines and influence of Japonism, creates a flat picture plane and dissolves the illusion of depth. This, in combination with the obscured faces of the women, leads to a dissolution of a three-dimensional identity of these figures. Instead, they are reduced to a singular type, some ironers.

Degas, Two Ballet Dancers, c. 1879 

Pastel, Shelbourne Museum

Exhaustion and slight discomfort are imparted to the viewer when we happen across these Two Ballet Dancers. Degas is showing two dancers sitting and resting on a bench. Their hunched bodies and bowed heads imply a recovery from physical exertion. Again, we can only identify these women as ballerinas and they lose their complexity as individuals and are instead expressed by their usefulness as dancers, or rather exhaustion as dancers. Degas is well known for his fascination with ballerinas. He correlated the struggle and pain of an artist painting with that of the intensive training and rigorous demands of a ballet on a ballerina. He often painted from several on site sketches that he would make of these young women dancing. The faces of these women are completely obscured, and we only see them in the scope of this painting. Ballerinas were seen as lower, working class.

Degas, A Woman Ironing, 1873 

Oil on Canvas, 21 3/8 x 15 1/2 in., Walker Art Gallery

This painting depicts a woman who is intently engaged with her work, her silhouetted figure dimmed and set in contrast with her white sheet background. We experience this feeling of quick and precise work that is represented as flurried brushstrokes quickly dabbed into the paint, revealing the hands and iron embedded in the fabric. As the viewers, we are intrigued by this seemingly commonplace woman. The identity of this woman is completely tied to her use. She is ironing; therefore, she is a laundress. In context of the mid-nineteenth century, her gender only solidifies her extended use to that of a menial and household job, regardless of how deft and adept she may be at her task.

Degas, Woman at a Window, 1872 

Oil on Cardboard, 61.3 x 45.9 cm, Courtauld Gallery

This shroud of a woman is only distinguishable by her attire. Degas dissolves her facial features into a veil of grays and reds. He highlights her hands and the outline of her form with the contrasting white light and red background, clothing her in a dark and hazy dress. With the artist’s use of lighting and smooth detailed strokes, our attention is drawn to her hands that are laying curled in her lap. Her hands seem out of place in the painting, like they shouldn’t be idle. Compare this to the previous paintings we looked at. She is task-less. We cannot tell who she is, because she has no occupation.

Degas, Woman Ironing (La Repasseuse), 1869 

Oil on Canvas, 92 x 74 cm, Nene Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

Paused in the middle of work and staring demurely—or disinterestedly—at the viewer, is a young woman ironing. She is lightly clothed in her undergarment and appears a little unabashedly so. In the mid-1800s, women who were lower, working class were seen as oversexualized and promiscuous. This is particularly emphasized in relation to laundresses. They were often seen in the haze of their workspaces, sweating and barely clothed in their hot environment and were known to be flirtatious with their customers as they delivered their handiwork. This added dimension also confuses us as viewers when we see how clearly her face is rendered, especially in comparison to the Woman at a Window piece. Degas is portraying a very discernable figure as a common worker. This departs from the depiction of women as only identifiable by their occupation, like we have seen in the previous paintings. Compare this with Sulking.

Degas, Sulking, 1870

Oil on Canvas, 32.4 x 46.4 cm, The Met, 29.100.43

A striking and immediate gaze entrances us at the first glance of this female figure leaning forward in the middle of the composition. She is different from the other women we have seen thus far. Instead of being occupied with a task or her face being obscured, she is identifiable as a person. The woman in this painting is intriguing to look at because Degas encourages us to subtly notice her with his detailed painting and her soft, almost smooth face. Compare her face with the faces of the other women shown. She is given clarity and distinction, whereas some of the other women are only identifiable by their tasks or are barely outlined with faces obscured. Although this women’s identity could be determined by her face and clothing, she is still very ambiguous. She is also rendered separate from an occupation and seems to be slightly removed from her immediate surroundings. Degas is allowing another dimension of this woman to show separately from the ties of domestic work.