Response to Olympia’s Look by Susan Vreeland: Excavating Dignity

People are threatened by art. I have seen this often with different compositions and poems that I myself have written over the years. In one particular instance my father was laying on a couch in our family room near where I was sitting watching television and reading as I attempted to write. After a time, he interjected, “What kind of smut are you writing?” I looked up, and then turned around to stare at him incredulously. He was joking of course. My father has a good sense of humor. One had to wonder, however, just what it was that would cause him to pose such a sharp question quite so haphazardly and if it was not so simple a question as it seemed. I had the feeling that perhaps it had turned into this joke designed to provoke a reaction from me, but it was rooted in a very real curiosity of what scenes I was creating on the pages of my notebook. For all he knew, his little girl was creating scandalous sexual scenes into which my own fantasies had been thrown. People are afraid of creation, of how they are portrayed, and what other people think of them for it may be the exact way that they privately think of themselves. In short, art incites paranoia.

The driving force behind Olympia’s Look is the question: “What was he thinking?” Indeed, what was Suzanne’s husband, Edouard Manet, the great French painter, thinking? Thought does not become a means to value or devalue, build of destroy, in this world until something physical comes of it. It must manifest itself in our world to be cared about. No one- or shall I say not many- have the ability to read minds, so what goes on inside of our heads is between us and perhaps whatever higher power an individual may believe in (So far, anyway. Perhaps this is just what our government allows us to believe.). It is in this tentative truth that the quill finds itself mightier than the sword. Though both have the indubitable ability to create and destroy, the artist illustrates ideas directly from their source of truth, their experience. Denial of ownership is impossible. It is an irrevocable representation of one’s self.

At Edouard Manet’s funeral, when Suzanne sees all of the models of her husband’s portraits sitting in a row, she finds herself in a surreal situation where all of his paintings have come to life before her eyes, imbued with a life of their own instead of that which her mind has given them. This sets her thinking. What did her husband see in each of these women, and what role did they fulfill that she so obviously could not?

Suzanne exerts as much power, however little she has, at every opportunity over the models that excited her husband’s creative muse as well as other parts. In Victorine Meurent’s case, the model for the painting Olympia’s Look, Suzanne has the chance to confront one of these women and ask the question that every woman who has ever been cheated on wants to know; what did the other woman do that they did not? To which, Victorine responds, “I collaborated with him” (86). After speaking with this mysterious woman that had tainted the sweet memories of her marriage, studying her at leisure, and analyzing her nature, confident that she has humanized and debased this phantom, Suzanne goes away, victorious.

Suzanne takes Victorine’s definition of her relationship with her husband to heart; for, as Lord Henry Wotton said in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “To define is to limit,” and humans have a natural, almost carnal, need to place limits on their environments and everything within them (Chapter 17). In doing this, Suzanne, tucking her problems away in a neat little box, has given herself the ultimate comfort that she needs to reach an acceptable level of acceptance with her deceased husband’s shortcomings. Potential, like art, threatens us. In definition there is limitation, and thus a form of freedom.