The Disappearing Female Artist

One thing I've noticed in my reading is that female artists tend to disappear. If they are lucky enough to be recognized during their lives, something happens; they fall out of favor, their books go out of print, they lose contact with the literary intelligentsia. For example, Jean Rhys was believed to be dead before somebody wanted to do a radio version of Voyage in the Dark and put an ad in the paper in order to search for her heirs. Nella Larsen also disappeared, she left Harlem and moved to the East Village, dramatically removing herself from her Harlem Renaissance friends and, and worked as a nurse in a hospital.

Because women writers like Rhys and Larsen keep disappearing, it becomes up to us, the scholar, to locate and give voice to them. This bothers me because, for one, it seems to disempower the woman writer. Larsen, after all, chose to disappear. Two, these writers never actually went anywhere, it was the readers who lost them even though they were easy to find (Larsen's books never went out of print for any extended period of time).

This idea of disappearance is one of the many ideas I am working through for my Larsen chapter. Initially, I was interested in the actual idea of ghosts, particular as this was an interest in early photography; people attempted to catch evidence of the spiritual world with the camera. I love this idea but I have put it aside for now.

Instead, I am looking at photographs printed in some of the major magazines of the Harlem Renaissance. These publications often featured photographs of the African American elite in society pages along with photographs of houses, cars and other material evidence of financial success. One of the major themes in Larsen's novels is material items and many of the characters are drawn to commodities, perhaps as a means to avoid commodification themselves. And going back to my earlier idea, commodities prevent these characters from the the threat of disappearance. One can't go anywhere if one has a house full of stuff to take care of.

I am also thinking of these commodities as displacing the woman writer as the subject, or object, of the photograph. Focusing on material items makes these items take on the object role in photographic reproduction.

Lastly, and thanks to a talk that Kristeva gave at Stony Brook earlier this week, I am considering the idea of renewal in my chapter. I really want to give Larsen and her characters a chance rather than focusing on the inevitable tragic ending of their lives. Larsen's character, Helga Crane, for example, runs away from various situations she finds distasteful. I plan to argue that rather than escaping, or disappearing, each new experience is part of a process of renewal, a means to find herself anew.


Well, this for me has been a very successful blog post. I think somehow I have managed to outline my chapter! Thanks, Mr. Blog!