The Fallen Woman @ The Foundling Gallery, London
Intended as a corrective to the view of the ‘fallen woman’, this exhibition charts the emergence and development of that idea over the course of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries through a display of museum effects - mainly archival - and supporting artistic media. As an enticement to the largely social-historical narrative the exhibition presents, several canvases ease the spectator in, showing him first of all the productive importance of renewing one’s understanding of an artwork’s subtext, for while the first painting on the left-hand wall shows an interior family scene of parents with their children, the introductory blurbs helps us to see it as an encapsulation of the ideal. In other words, we are not witness only to the fact of nineteenth-century family life, but to the attitude that such a picture of family life was the proper aspiration of any spectator: one was supposed to want to live like that.
Clearly middle class, a painting several along shows a woman playing with her infant demonstrates that such an aspirational way of living was also possible for those of more limited economic means, as this is an intimate portrait of a working-class home. This way, the exhibition communicates the projected view of the equation of virtuous womanhood with contented motherhood: a child belonged with its mother in the home. By contrast with this was the implied opposite of disgrace and shame attached to the figure of the mother incapable of looking after her child because of her having conceived outside of the accepted context of marriage and love. Unmarried women who fell pregnant faced ostracism, which, apart from the loneliness of being excluded from the support structures of their customary world, carried the frightening consequence of penury.
For the informed visitor with some knowledge of modern social history, there is nothing surprising here, although we must acknowledge that the sustained personal focus on the fact of womanhood in this context of social shaming amid the harsh realities of contemporary life refracts and therefore renews that story’s relevance. This is an exhibition that educates in the scholastic fashion - we see history, we see art, we acquire knowledge - but beyond that it opens our eyes to the contradictory twins of popular ignorant cruelty directed towards women falling short of a socially constructed measure of respectability and those shafts of luminous compassion shining through the holes in that imaginarium.
Clearly middle class, a painting several along shows a woman playing with her infant demonstrates that such an aspirational way of living was also possible for those of more limited economic means, as this is an intimate portrait of a working-class home. This way, the exhibition communicates the projected view of the equation of virtuous womanhood with contented motherhood: a child belonged with its mother in the home. By contrast with this was the implied opposite of disgrace and shame attached to the figure of the mother incapable of looking after her child because of her having conceived outside of the accepted context of marriage and love. Unmarried women who fell pregnant faced ostracism, which, apart from the loneliness of being excluded from the support structures of their customary world, carried the frightening consequence of penury.
For the informed visitor with some knowledge of modern social history, there is nothing surprising here, although we must acknowledge that the sustained personal focus on the fact of womanhood in this context of social shaming amid the harsh realities of contemporary life refracts and therefore renews that story’s relevance. This is an exhibition that educates in the scholastic fashion - we see history, we see art, we acquire knowledge - but beyond that it opens our eyes to the contradictory twins of popular ignorant cruelty directed towards women falling short of a socially constructed measure of respectability and those shafts of luminous compassion shining through the holes in that imaginarium.
Richard Redgrave, The Outcast, 1851 (Detail) © Royal Academy of Arts, London, photograph by John Hammond
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