Solitary Pleasures

The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism

Paula Bennett, Vernon Rosario, Paula Bennett, Vernon Rosario

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415911740
• eBook ISBN: 9781134715336
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare nell'arte

Solitary Pleasures is the first anthology to address masturbation, exploring both the history and artistic representation of autoeroticism. Masturbation today enjoys a highly equivocal and contradictory status among cultural discourses relating to sexuality. On the one hand, it is the subject of much popular treatment, especially in sexual self-help books, advice columns, and in pop culture--for example, Madonna's "Like a Virgin" performance, a recent Roseanne episode, and David Russell's movie Spanking the Monkey. On the other hand, masturbation is still a taboo subject for most people in everyday conversation. Perhaps more surprising, it has been largely dismissed by academics as a trivial, humorous topic and the "history of a delusion."

It was not until the eighteenth century that "onanism" was portrayed as a morbid act of epidemic proportions that produced pox, hair loss, blindness, insanity, impotence and a horrible. Its prevention and treatment warranted diverse and often cruel measures: surveillance, diets, drugs, corsets, electrical alarms, urethral cauterization, clitoridectomy, and labial sewing. This literature's apocalyptic warnings about the personal and social morbidity of "pollution-by-the-hand" are largely unknown to most people today, but the ghostly echoes of these admonitions still inform and preserve the present taboo of the subject.

Why did this apparently innocuous activity become so overpoweringly stigmatized? Why was the eradication of masturbation one of the most important goals of 19th century public hygiene? Why, even after the "sexual revolution," is masturbation still shrouded in shame?

1

Autonomy as Deviance:
Sixteenth-Century Images of Witches and Prostitutes

Laura Weigert

In 1514, Baldung Grien dedicated a drawing with the satirical greeting, “to the Clergyman Happy New Year” (fig. 1). The drawing depicts the entwined bodies of three women: one peers from between her legs at the viewer, while a second straddles her, her arm wrapped around the third, who holds a cauldron in one hand and touches her own genitals with the other. This drawing is one of a group of prints, drawings, and paintings of similar subject matter produced by Albrecht Dürer and the circle of artists around him. Representing either witches or prostitutes, the compositional focus is, in all cases, genital stimulation. How were these striking images with unusual and blatant sexual content received both visually and conceptually by their contemporary audience? To address this question I isolate the sexual iconography shared by this group of images. I then discuss the corresponding discourses in which the sexual behavior of witches and prostitutes converges.

Figure 1. Hans Baldung Grien, Three Witches, 1514, pen on red-brown tinted paper, heightened with white.

This group of images serves as a particularly rich source with which to explore the sexual beliefs of the early sixteenth century. All of the examples employ a similar iconography and emphasize sexual activity among women, an element which is not characteristic of contemporary textual sources. These images were produced during a period in which definitions of sexual practice were particularly contested. Furthermore, the images depict two categories of women then at the forefront of these discussions on sexual matters: prostitutes and women accused of practicing witchcraft. A coincidence therefore exists between the production of the images and the increased marginalization of these two groups; in both cases their sexual activity was the focus.

Art historical literature has not related these images to sexual discourses or to the formation of social categories. The studies of Baldung Grien’s depictions of witches link his work to polemics on witchcraft that would have been available to him in Strasbourg at the time. Linda Hult (1984, 261–62; 1987, 266–71) argues that Baldung’s images serve a polemical function similar to that of the anti-witch treatises. Sigrid Schade (1983) explores the depiction of the bodies of women in Baldung’s witches, placing them in the broader context of the denigration of the female body in southern German visual imagery as well as relating them to the contemporary anti-witch tracts.¹

However essential this project has been for deciphering aspects of Baldung Grien’s images of witches, it does not provide an adequate interpretive framework to analyze their sexual content. The issue which I address is not how witches are represented in visual imagery, but rather why particular kinds of sexual activity were related visually to witches. That this sexual iconography was not limited to witches, but included prostitutes as well, suggests that similar attitudes existed concerning these groups of women. Thus my paper expands the visual field established in other studies to include both images of witches and of prostitutes. And, rather than concentrating exclusively on beliefs about the practices of witches, I situate the images in terms of discourses on sexual matters contemporary to their production.

The Images

I base my discussion on prints, drawings, and paintings produced by artists in southern Germany in the first half of the sixteenth century. Among the images of witches are a print and three drawings signed by Baldung Grien, an engraving by Dürer, a drawing by the Master H. F., a copy of a Baldung drawing by Urs Graf, and a print by Sebald Beham.² The sample of depictions of bathing women/prostitutes includes a print by Sebald Beham, a drawing intended for a print by Dürer, and an anonymous painting identified as a copy of a painting by Baldung Grien.³

The sample of sabbath images diverges significantly from contemporary illustrations included in anti-witch sermons.⁴ These didactic prints specified the results of the evils of sorcery. One example, a print produced in Baldung’s workshop, illustrated Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg’s sermon against witches (fig. 2). The effect of the witches’ spell is directly narrated by the inclusion of a man who has lost his pants. He peers from a tree on the left-hand side of the print at the group of women gathered around a collection of animal bones. One of the witches, who is clothed, holds a stick on which hangs the mans pants. The loss of his pants refers to the witches’ usurpation of male authority and power, and by extension their reported ability to cause impotence.⁵

Figure 2. Workshop of Hans Baldung Grien, “Three Witches Preparing for flight,” from Johann Geiler von Kayserberg’s Die Emeis, fol. 37V. woodblock print, 1516, 8.8 × 14.2 cm.

The images of bathing women also deviate from contemporary bath scenes which relate narratives of sexual exchange. Although the public baths served the whole community’s hygenic needs, they frequently served as brothels as well. Civic records from southern German urban communities document this alternate use of the bathhouses, and popular broadsheets associate women who worked in the bathhouses with prostitutes (Brundage 1987, 527; Wiesner 1986, 96).⁶ Fifteenth-century representations of bathhouses underscore their dual function, as is seen in the Master of the Banderoles’ late-fifteenth-century print, The Fencing Room (fig. 3). The right-hand side of the print is split into two levels: below, three women attempt to pull a man in a fool’s costume into the bath with them; above, a man and a woman embrace behind a disheveled bed. The two scenes are united within the same architectural structure, which is covered by a sheet enclosing both the bed and the bath. In all related examples, the bathhouse is constructed as a site of sexual exchange.

Figure 3. Master of the Banderolles, The Fencing Room, engraving.

The transition from a narrative of sexual exchange to an isolated view of women at the bath can be traced in two drawings by Dürer. A drawing dated 1516 depicts two clothed men approaching a group of four women (fig. 4). The setting is clearly a bathhouse: a bathmaid’s cap identifies the older woman as a procuress, buckets of water are set on the floor, and the women are naked. The exchange between the men and women is sexual: one man holds a skewer with sausages on it; the other holds out a bowl and a spoon, as if he is requesting to be served.⁷ In another Dürer drawing, from 1496, the actions of the women do not involve men, although they are observed by a man, barely visible in the doorway in the background (fig. 5). A group of six women sit or stand in a bathhouse, identified by the water spigot, furnace, and the pots and basins of water. The women are in the process of washing and touching themselves and each other. A younger woman washes the back of an older woman, who wears the procuress’s hat; the thigh and arm of the washer press against the older woman’s buttocks and back, respectively. Another woman stands with one leg raised on a bench, facing into the room. She appears to wash the front of her body, but her back obscures the exact location of her gesture. Genital stimulation is not overtly included; yet the drawing conveys the pleasure of physical contact between women.

Figure 4. Albrecht Dürer, The Women’s Bath, drawing, 1516, 283 × 217 mm.

Figure 5. Albrecht Dürer, The Women’s Bath, drawing, 1496, 231 × 226 mm.

In my sample of images, as compared with other contemporary or previous depictions of the same groups of women, the male presence is extracted and the images are stripped of the narrative content which hinges on the inclusion of men as active participants or covert observers. The lack of a male presence is essential to the specific sexual iconography coincident in these images of witches and prostitutes. All of the prints, drawings, and paintings depict groups of women only, one of whom is always older, all of whom are naked, united in their bathing or sabbath rituals. These activities employ the same instruments: brushes, scissors, mirrors, and buckets. Small children are frequently included as well. Furthermore, what is only hinted at in Dürer’s Bathwomen is made explicit: the images focus on women caressing their own or another’s genitals.

An anonymous copy of a lost painting by Baldung Grien, The Woman’s Bath demonstrates the correspondence between depictions of witches and bath women (fig. 6). Three women of varying ages gather around a concave mirror: the youngest strokes her genitals with a brush; the middle-aged woman, combing her hair back from her face, observes her reflection in the mirror, a reference to vanity; and the eldest, who is seated, looks at the pair of scissors in her hands. The gathering takes place in a darkened room devoid of any furnishings except for a classical column, ornamented by two bronze reliefs to the left of the women. The scene is dimly lit by an open door in the background, through which a fourth participant, naked but wearing a white headdress, joins or observes the event. The interior space, the mirror, and the fact that all three of the women are engaged in some form of hygienic activity identify the setting as a bathhouse. Yet the unkempt hair of the eldest woman, the dark room, and the concave mirror around which the three are intently grouped visually link the painting to depictions of witches’ sabbaths. This example is particularly indicative of the way these images link the two groups visually by deemphasizing the defining characteristics of witches and prostitutes and the specifics of the bathhouse or sabbath settings.⁸

Figure 6. Late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century copy after lost painting by Hans Baldung Grien of ca. 1515, Women’s Bath, painting, 46.2 × 32.4 cm., Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.

Similarly, the drawing addressed to the clergyman contains only the bare minimum of information with which to identify its subject (fig. 1). The cauldron held upwards by the youngest of the three women spews a torrent of liquid beyond the upper frame of the drawing. The undefined magical force which causes the flames to emit from the sabbath cauldron sweeps the long hair of the women upwards and away from their bodies. The cauldron and the witches’ flowing hair serve to identify the women as witches and the setting as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Politics of Solitary Pleasures
• 1 Autonomy as Deviance: Sixteenth-Century Images of Witches and Prostitutes
• 2 Playing with Herself: Feminine Sexuality and Aesthetic Indifference
• 3 Forbidden Pleasures: Enlightenment Literature of Sexual Advice
• 4 Phantastical Pollutions: The Public Threat of Private Vice in France
• 5 Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl
• 6 The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice, and Pouring Tea
• 7 “The Roots of the Orchis, the Iuli of Chestnuts”: The Odor of Male Solitude
• 8 “Pomegranate-Flowers”: The Phantasmic Productions of Late-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Women Poets
• 9 Fragments of a Poetics: Bonnetain and Roth
• 10 Can Robinson Crusoe Find True Happiness (Alone)? Beyond the Genitals and History on the Island of Hope
• 11 Coming in Handy: The J/O Spectacle and the Gay Male Subject in Almodóvar
• Notes on Contributors
• Index