cies becomes the Surrealistic version of the
femme fatale. More subhuman and brutal than
her 19th-century predecessors, she testifies to
the higher level of sexual anxiety and hostility
experienced by the 20th-century male. For as
women increasingly demanded a share of the
world, the defense of male authority became
more desperate:

Now become a fellow being, woman seems as
formidable as when she faced man as a part of
alien Nature. In place of the myth of the la-
borious honeybee or the mother hen is substi-
tuted the myth of the devouring female insect:
the praying mantis, the spider. No longer is the
female she who nurses the little ones, but
rather she who eats the male.®

Pictures of nudes in nature also affirm the
supremacy of the male consciousness even
while they ostensibly venerate or pay tribute to
women as freer or more in harmony with nature
than men. From the Bathers of Delacroix to
those of Renoir and Picasso, nude-in-nature
pictures almost always ascribe to women a
mode of existence that is categorically different
from man’s. Woman is seen as more of nature
than man, less in opposition to it both physi-
cally and mentally. Implicitly, the male is seen
as more closely identified with culture, “the
means by which humanity transcends the giv-
ens of natural existence, bends them to its pur-
poses, controls them in its interests.””

This woman/nature-man/culture dichotomy
is one of the most ancient and universal ideas
ever devised by man and is hardly new to
modern Western culture. However, in Western
bourgeois culture, the real and important role
of women in domestic, economic and social life
becomes ever more recognized: increasingly,
the bourgeoisie educates its daughters, de-
pends upon their social and economic coopera-
tion and values their human companionship.
Above all, the idea that women belong to the
same order of being as men is more articulated
than ever before. In this context, to cling to
ancient notions of women as a race apart from
men —as creatures of nature rather than of cul-
ture—is to defend blatantly an ideology that is
everywhere contested and contradicted by ex-
perience. Nevertheless, the majority of nude-in-
nature pictures state just this thesis.

In countless 19th- and 20th-century paintings

—Romantic, Symbolist or Expressionist—fe-
male nudes in outdoor settings are treated as
natural inhabitants of the landscape. Although
modern artists have characterized it differently,
they agree that this woman-nature realm is an
inviting but alien mode of experience. It both
attracts and repels the male. It beckons him to
step out of rationalized, bourgeois society and
to enter a world where men might live through
their senses, instincts or imaginations. But the
condition of entry —shedding the social identity
of the bourgeois male—also entails loss of au-
tonomy and of the power to shape and control
one’s world. The male artist longs to join those
naked beings in that other imagined realm, but
he cannot because he fails to imagine their full
humanity —or his own. While he values his own
instincts, or that part of himself that responds to
nature, he regards this portion of his nature as
“feminine,” antagonistic to his socialized mas-
culine ego, and belonging to that other, “natu-
ral” order. Nor can he acknowledge in women a
“masculine principle”—an autonomous self
that knows itself as separate from and opposed
to the natural, biological world. Like Munch
before his Madonna, he hovers before his
dream in ambivalent desire.

Rarely do modern artists imagine naked men
in that other realm. When they do, as in works
by Cézanne or Kirchner, the male figures tend
to look uncomfortable or self-conscious. More
often, the male in nature is clothed—both in
the literal sense or metaphorically —with a so-
cial identity and a social or cultural project. He
is a shepherd, a hunter, an artist. Matisse’s Boy
With Butterfly Net (1907) is a magnificent
image of a male in nature (or rather a male
acting against nature), highly individualized
and properly equipped for a specific purpose. In
beach scenes by the Fauves and the Kirchner
circle, males—when they are present—are not
“bathers,” i.e., placid creatures of the water,
but modern men going swimming in bathing
suits or in the raw. They are active, engaged in a
culturally defined recreation, located in histori-
cal time and space. The female bather, who has
no counterpart in modern art, is a naked exis-
tence, outside of culture. Michelet, the 19th-
century historian, poetically expressed the ideas
implicit in the genre: man, he wrote, creates
history, while woman:

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