Reading Bodies: Female Secrecy in Nineteenth-Century French Painting

In this paper I consider nineteenth-century depictions of women reading as the staging of an interplay between text and body. Focusing on works by Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas that depict the female reader using her body to create a private space in which to read, I argue that the intellectual privacy involved in the act of reading is mirrored in the way in which women use their bodies to create seclusion and to distance themselves from potential observers. The works in question not only complicate ideas concerning the relationship between women and books during the latter part of the nineteenth century, but also reveal anxieties about what women read during that period and, more importantly, about how they read. The emphasis on physicality in depictions of female readers in the works of Renoir and Degas is contrasted with the representation of readers by Fantin-Latour in which the female body is transformed into a moral emblem. An analysis of images of the reader’s body in nineteenth-century French painting leads to a reconsideration of the relation between women and concepts of physical and intellectual interiority. Depictions of the use of the body to create a secret space for reading in the nineteenth century mirror anxieties about the secret spaces of the female body.