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in the original). The unique and peculiar in nature are no longer a key to
understanding but an obstacle, and to faithfully repeat these in painting is to
pollute the representation (Schor 1987: 16). The effect on the viewer is under-
stood in terms of a loss of perspective, a lack of hierarchy, confusion and
distraction. For Reynolds, a profusion of detail means that ‘the eye is perplexed
and fatigued’ (Reynolds cited in Schor 1987: 19).
The feminist theorist Naomi Schor shows how detail has repeatedly been
discursively linked with women, with inferiority and with a feminine inability
to transcend matter. However, the gendered and sexualized connotations of
detail and ornament are not only about the exclusion of women from cultural
production, but also about the policing and regulation of certain models of
selfhood in women and men. In the nineteenth century, the fascination with
decorative and sensuous things was seen as leading, in women, to a suscepti-
bility to the allure of the commodity. In men and women, immersion in the
sensations of modernity tended to be thought of as symptomatic of a feminine
self – a self grounded in nature, in the tangible and the particular, incapable of
abstraction and critical distance. To give into the sensations of modernity was
associated with passivity, which in turn was associated with femininity (Ross
1988: 101–2; Henning 1999: 38–42).
This is complicated by the fact that the commodity itself is feminized in
the nineteenth century to the same extent as it is fetishized. Abigail Solomon-
Godeau has examined the visual conflation of femininity and desirability as it
developed in French commodity culture from the 1830s. She notes the historical
shift away from the male body as a vehicle for the representation of the erotic
and the beautiful: ‘the image of femininity as an image of desire is a fully
modern one . . . because its masculine analogue was now for all intents and
purposes foreclosed’ (Solomon-Godeau 1996: 117). Not only does the com-
modity take on the image of femininity (adorned by and advertised via images of
desirable women) but in nineteenth-century commercial representations women
seem to become commodity-like. In a heavily display-oriented culture, women
epitomize the spectacular and women’s bodies are increasingly depicted in fet-
ishized ways: isolated, flattened so that flesh becomes a smooth surface, pre-
sented as object-like and offered up for possession. The commodity-fetish is
both eroticized and expressed ‘as a desire for the feminine’ (Solomon-Godeau
1996: 128–33). As Solomon-Godeau points out, when Marxist writers (such as
Haug, discussed in Chapter 2) write of the false appearances which eroticize the
commodity, they fail to notice that this is also a gendered process: the commod-
ity is eroticized as female, and as with women, its appearances are not to be
trusted (Solomon-Godeau 1996: 113–5).
In the writings of some early twentieth-century modernist artists and
architects there is a repeated rejection of femininity that is connected with