Artemisia Gentileschi, Feminist Formalist: Judith and Holofernes’s Reconfiguration of a Penis-...

________________________________________________________ BOWDOIN JOURNAL OF ART, 2016

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Artemisia Gentileschi, Feminist Formalist: Judith and Holofernes’s Reconfiguration of a Penis-Centered Visual Economy of Power VICTOR LIU Stanford University, Class of 2019 ABSTRACT This paper takes a formalist look at Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1611-1612 Judith Slaying Holofernes, in opposition to mainstream scholarship, which largely focuses on Artemisia’s biography. Artemisia engages a tradition of phallic imagery art history that has been shaped by a belief in both the supremacy of the penis in terms of biology and bodily function (“physical supremacy”) as well as the supremacy of the penis in structuring knowledge and meaning (“experiential supremacy”) also known as phallogocentrism. Such a tradition is predicated upon a belief that the penis is “active,” while female genitalia are “passive.” With this belief, a Freudian psychoanalytic reading of the original Book of Judith, Caravaggio’s rendition of the same scene, and Artemisia’s painting all uphold a penile economy of power and highlight “castration anxiety,” the fear of losing the cherished penis. However, in line with Irigaraiyan psychoanalysis, Artemesia herself believes female genitalia to be “active,” and the penis to be “passive,” creating a female genitalia-centered economy of power. As a result, Artemisia inserts femininity into her composition in ways that, in their very formal employment, indicate and


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perform the physical and experiential (anti-phallogocentric) “activity” of the female genitalia at the expense of “passive,” penile physicality and experientiality.

Judith Slaying Holoferne, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1611-1612, oil on canvas


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i. Introduction. Autobiographical vs. Formal Readings of Artemisia Gentileschi. Many are familiar with the story of Judith and Holofernes, especially of its striking visual adaptation in the form of Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s extremely violent rendition of the Biblical tale. Every inch of the composition is a study of raw, emotional intensity of the highest magnitude. However, it is the autobiographical reading of the painting that remains the most influential, as Artemisia’s reputation as a woman painting in the seventeenth century and a rape victim of fellow artist Agostino Tassi long had overshadowed her achievements as an artist, and the painting is popularly regarded as a rape revenge fantasy. This autobiographical reading, however important, can be over-determined, as it “[anchors] all consideration of her work in the life story.”1 Such a precedent made it such that “transcripts of [Artemisia’s] rape trial became required reading for everyone wishing to write about her work,” and many writings in traditional art history “developed a discourse that [tends] to undermine [her] art” and “[diminishes] her artistic merit.2” It disallows her from being fully valued as a formal and aesthetic innovator, a true master of her craft, the same way that her contemporaries, such as Caravaggio, are canonized. Formally, many continue to view Artemisia’s Judith and Holofernes as merely a rehash of Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes, as his painting preceded hers by a few years and bears compositional similarities. However, feminist art historians since the feminist revisionism of the art history canon have tried to alleviate Artemisia of this overdetermined frame as her claim to fame, instead foregrounding the excellence of her pure artistic merit. A deep and inquisitive analysis of Artemisia’s Judith and Holofernes on a level of pure

1 Bal, Mieke. "Introduction." Introduction. The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for

Feminists and Other Thinking People. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2005. 9-15. Print. 2 Bal, Mieke. "Introduction." Introduction. The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for

Feminists and Other Thinking People. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2005. 9-15. Print.


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form reveals her aesthetic contribution to be great: her painting refutes the very concept of the phallic symbol, completely reconfiguring an economy of power that centers the penis and the male body into an economy of power that centers female genitalia and the female body. Much of how this economy of the phallic image is established is best analyzed through the lens of psychoanalysis, a field heavily drawn upon in art history—especially feminist art history—due to its stated importance of sexuality as it relates to power. Phallic imagery has long since dominated arts and culture, employed in buildings, paintings, and sculptures alike in a variety of traditions around the globe, each attesting and reasserting the purported strength of male generative powers in largely male-dominated societies. The Book of Judith is a prime candidate for examination of how this economy of the penis works. Under this economy, Book of Judith can be read as a castration metaphor. Castration is discussed at length by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who postulates that any sort of gendered interaction is marked by “castration anxiety,” as well as its counterpart “penis envy”—in which, quite literally, men wish to protect their penis from being castrated and women wish to castrate penises to claim them for their own, as Freud characterizes their vaginas as simply the “lack” of a penis. In Caravaggio’s case, he amplifies maleness, reasserting the penis and the male sexual desire that the original story “castrates.” In Artemisia’s case, she cannot simply amplify the elements that have to do with castration, emphasizing the destruction of the male body and penis, as that simply reinforces an economy of power that centers the penis. By threatening its destruction, she upholds its value, acting under Freud’s idea that she is merely suffering from penis envy. As such—under a reading the corresponds to the writings of Luce Irigaray, who refutes the economy created by the castration complex—Gentileschi asserts female body and genitalia as


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powerful in its own right, rather than needing to castrate the penis to achieve agency, containing an active, autonomous source of power that the male actually covets.

Overall, Freud, Caravaggio, Irigaray, and Gentileschi are engaged in a debate over which gender is more superior via the way bodies and psychologies develop reciprocally. They strip the designations of male and female of its associated acculturated behaviors and socialized values, simply pitting male body versus female body. Caravaggio and Gentileschi assert that a certain gender’s superiority is built into their very biology—that the penis or vagina indicative different generative abilities, as, in psychoanalysis, “the sexual function is above all the reproductive function.3” In rendering a sex as more powerful in body and active in bodily function in their paintings, the artists seem to assert that the sex is more sexually powerful at procreation, excelling in a bodily/sexual/procreative act of generation—a type of superiority this paper will refer to as “physical.” However, this reproductive function does not just end with literal birth, as both Freud and Irigaray assert in their essentialized theories that differences in bodies lead to differences in the way people process and create experiences. As such, in rendering a sex as having more semiotic and hermeneutic meaning in their paintings, the artists seem to assert that the sex is more skilled at creating knowledge, meaning, and art, or intellectually/creatively valuable in generation—a type of superiority this paper will refer to as “experiential.” Both types of gender superiority are of note as the artists’ beliefs on the matter manifest formally in their paintings, as analysis will show.

ii. Freud, the Castration Complex, and the Book of Judith.

3 Irigaray, Luce. “Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 41. Print.


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The Freudian conception of sexuality at its most basic level characterizes male sexuality as “active” and female sexuality as “passive.” In such situations in which feminine agents are able to pose threat to the masculine, such as in the original Book of Judith which inspired Artemisia’s and Caravaggio’s paintings, this threat is invalidated under a Freudian reading, as this it then becomes an appropriation of an asserted inherently “masculine” practice of activity.

In terms of physical activity, Freud claims that the masculine is active and the feminine is passive. As Freud attests, “activity versus passivity is relevant to masculinity and femininity when one thinks of the active sperm joining the passive egg,” and the “behavior of these elementary sexual organisms” is “a model for the conduct of sexual individuals during intercourse,” in which males seek out, seize, and penetrate static females4. This characterization stems largely from Freud’s belief that the woman’s vagina is merely the lack of a penis. When child-aged males and females become aware of gender difference, Freud asserts that the man assumes that his penis is valued, and protects it from being cut, while the woman is envious of the male’s penis and, due to her own lack of a penis, tries to acquire one5. Penetrating the woman seems to forcibly remind her of her own castrated and passive condition, releasing her pent-up “penis envy,” or penisneid, which culminates in the wish for her to castrate the males and become “active.” As such, Freud sees women’s ultimate goals as transforming into men. Even when women overcome the literal desire to castrate men, penis envy also is important in Freud’s characterization of women’s reproductive function, as he states that “the desire to obtain the

4 Johnson, Miriam M. "Chapter Eight -- Psychoanalysis and the Making of Mothers into

Wives." Strong Mothers, Weak Wives: The Search for Gender Equality. Berkeley: U of California, 1988. 190. Print.

5 Freud, Sigmund, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes." Freud on Women: A Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. 309-310. Print.


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penis is replaced by the desire to have a child,” who becomes “the penis substitute.”6 As such, Freud contends that female physical production is inherently a passive maneuver, as the child is produced not by reclaiming activity and obtaining a penis, but by being penetrated by one, and women are never allowed to possess agency in their natural biological state, always striving for agency in the form of taking on a penis.

Freudian castration anxiety is embedded in the very Book of Judith from which Gentileschi’s and others’ Judith and Holofernes paintings originate, as the narrative centers around the Jewish widow Judith, who enters the camp of the invading general, Holofernes, seduces him, and then finally beheads him while his is drunk. The castration is first established by the erotic undertones of the story. The Book of Judith particularly features descriptions of feminine beauty with sexual, bodily undertones. Judith “[strips] off the clothing of her widowhood” as well as washes and anoints her body, making herself up “provocatively” for her intended audience: “ones who ravaged the virgin’s vulva for defilement and stripped naked the thigh for shame and polluted the vulva for disgrace.”7 The narrative relates this beauty as an appeal to the male gaze, the men “hear [Judith’s] words and considered her face” as “wonderful beyond measure in beauty.”8 These sexual fixations throughout the text, as well as the movement of these bodies in an erotic choreography, such as the “surging throng” that arises on part of the soldiers during Judith’s entry into the Syrian camp9. The men are left “awestruck” by her beauty and halt their bodies to stop and stare at Judith— 6 Irigaray, Luce. “Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 41. Print. 7 Pietersma, Albert, and Benjamin G. Wright. "Ioudith." A New English Translation of the

Septuagint: And The Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under That Title. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 450. Print.

8 Pietersma, Albert, and Benjamin G. Wright. "Ioudith." A New English Translation of the Septuagint: And The Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under That Title. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 451. Print.



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a mental and physical cessation that, again taking the entire self to be a metaphor for a penis, is reminiscent of an erection10. However, after a protracted accumulation of the sexual tension, Holofernes falls asleep immediately and violently, “[collapsing] upon his bed,” having fainted from drunkenness before being able to ravish Judith11. Taking sleep to be a metaphor of death—as it frequently is in the Bible, such as in Daniel 12:22, Job 3:11-17, and John 11:11-14—this sudden halt of libido caused by sleep is akin to castration, the abrupt death of the penis. The fact that this cessation of libido is instigated by an embodiment of female sexuality—namely, Judith—demonstrates the gender dynamics of Freud’s castration anxiety: the vagina as constantly wishing and posing harm to the penis. Judith beheads Holofernes with his swords after this. Following this induced fissure between libido and non-libido, the death of sexuality, is a literal death by bodily division.

It is tempting to mine Freud’s theory for hidden feminist possibilities, in that the theory suggests the overwhelming vulnerability of masculinity, put in a constant defensive state against feminine threats of castration, emasculation, and death. In castration theory, the penis simultaneously symbolizes male power and the loss of male power, constantly vacillating between the two. However, even though the penis also reminds one of the possibilities of its own removal, this threat only further sanctifies the penis as the precious object and active agent in an economy of power, and increases the mania over protecting it. The membered “have” continues to be the normative, desired state, over the void-like “have-not.” Freud’s short and posthumously published 1922 essay, “Medusa’s Head,” demonstrates 10 Pietersma, Albert, and Benjamin G. Wright. "Ioudith." A New English Translation of the

Septuagint: And The Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under That Title. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 451. Print.



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how, when this economy of power is left intact, the act of viewing of engaging with castration is ultimately a reaffirmation of male sexuality. In the essay, Freud asserts that the female Medusa is the embodiment of the castration complex; as a woman whose hair of snakes resembles myriad phalluses, her possession of multiple penises signifies the threat of lacking a penis or a man losing a penis to her12. However, Freud asserts that the spectator “stiffens” due to fear of Medusa as well as her ability to turn the viewer into stone, and that this stiffening is akin to an erection13. The viewer’s erection “reassures him of the fact” that “he is still in possession of a penis”14. Medusa’s threat to the penis simultaneously serves as a “mitigation of the horror,” as it affirms the penis as a source of power, valued object, and sign of a normative state of being15.

As such, in the Freudian reading, the feminine is experientially passive. Translating the logic of “Medusa’s Head” to the Book of Judith, Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes threatens the penis, as Freud asserts that “to decapitate = to castrate,” but her desire to strip Holofernes of his power by taking away his penis only upholds the penis’s signification of power and activity and the vagina’s signification of their lack16. This narrative itself perfectly demonstrates this limiting manner in which women are able to empower themselves in a penile economy. For all the harm that the vagina poses to the penis, the vagina ceases to be a vagina once the 12 Freud, Sigmund, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. "The Infantile Genital Organization and

Medusa's Head." Freud on Women: A Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. 272. Print.

13 Freud, Sigmund, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. "The Infantile Genital Organization and Medusa's Head." Freud on Women: A Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. 272. Print.





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threat is carried out. Judith is only able to become active by taking for herself Holofernes’s phallic sword, and Holofernes induced passivity comes from a death that removes his penis effectively turns him into a woman himself—a horrific, bloody wound, sexual desires quashed, confirming castration anxiety’s conflation of the death of the penis with the death of the self. In addition, the penis here is, too, affirmed by the viewer’s “erection,” as they stiffen with fear due to the violent audacity and gruesomeness of the story’s climactic act of beheading.

iii. Under a Castration Reading, Artemisia’s Judith and Holofernes Makes Judith Active Without Challenging the Masculinity of Activity under the Freudian Economy.

Active power is only penile in this economy, and the concept of the castration complex, while it may threaten individuals’ power, still maintains that men are powerful. In Caravaggio’s painting, he counteracts the castration’s attempted usurpation of his power by asserting that he still embodies activity, as the sheer energy in which his body is rendered imbues him with both virility and visual pull—sexual/bodily activity, of “physicality,” as well as an active dominance of the painting itself, of the “experiential.” Under a Freudian reading with this same economy, Artemisia’s painting in which she highlights the castration and the transferal of activity to Judith seems empowering, but still maintains the penis-centered economy, as she is currently unable to separate activity from masculinity. Judith’s agency and activity comes only by way of castrating appropriating numerous phalluses; she may have killed her individual male oppressor, but maleness as a concept continues to oppress.


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Judith Beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio, 1598, oil on canvas, 145 cm x 195

cm. In Caravaggio’s rendition of the scene (see above), it is the dying

Holofernes that is imbued with activity and energy. His masturbation, orgasm, and rippling body speak to the “physically generative” capacities of the male biology. Caravaggio highlights Holofernes’s physical activeness through his body’s liveliness, even suggesting that Holofernes is orgasming. In a direct combative stance against the castration that Holofernes experiences in the original text, Holofernes’s expression appears to be in a state of sexual pleasure. As his muscles tighten, his hands grasp the cloth of the bed, and his eyes and mouth open in dull surprise, Holofernes appears to be experiencing a full-bodied orgasm. Sexual ecstasy is not only about power insofar as the person with the ecstasy has the power, and the fact that


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Holofernes’s appears to be orgasming here could be interpreted as a loss of autonomy in deference to Judith. However, Holofernes seems to be administrator of his own orgasm rather than the passive recipient of one. The thick ropes of blood, in their controlled stream, resemble male ejaculation. His agency is exhibited in how Holofernes seems to grasp the thick, lateral stream with his hand, as if it were a prehensile object or weapon—a phallic sword like that which Judith holds—actively holding onto his penis as he loses it and even giving the suggestion that he is masturbating. In contrast, Judith’s body is still and doll-like, her slim, white limbs showing no signs of shadowed torque, and her porcelain face, barely sullied by an almost imperceptible furrow of the brow.

The dynamism and impactfulness with which Caravaggio renders Holofernes speak to the “experientially generative” capacities of the male body, as Holofernes’s sexualized and powerful body dominates the painting, completely capturing the viewers’ attention. Holofernes’s left arm, bent perpendicularly, stabilizes him in the composition and create for him a visual pull that Judith, with her tenuous and static body language, so lacks. Holofernes’s steely, upward stare is imbued with life, and is disaffected by Judith’s weak downward gaze—she has no power over his body, and Holofernes continues to act autonomously. With rippling, strapping muscles and a torso twisted on its axis, Holofernes is depicted in a state of dynamic tension, heightened by the intensity of the contrast of light and shadow, which meticulously models each flexing muscle group. The viewer, in attempting to resolve this tension with imagined visuals, is compelled to expect movement from the figure. In contrast, Caravaggio depicts Judith as passive, non-confrontational, and somehow disconnected from the violent and passionate act of murder. Although her outreached arms, smooth and lacking in torque, grab Holofernes’s hair and hold a sword that beheads him, her posture is rigid and non-kinetic. Overall, Judith lacks this sense of


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temporality; the viewer does not anticipate the finishing of her downward slash. She merely “is,” but does not “do,” as her body lacks the agency to truly create or induce.

Artemisia emphasizes the activeness through Judith’s body, in which she actively performs her own sexuality—exhibiting and uncovering her sensual flesh in motion—in opposition to Caravaggio’s Judith’s still, doll-like body. Artemisia paints a deep shadow, cutting across Judith’s chest, emphasizing where her breast heaves and rolls against the neckline of her dress. The sleeve of her dress slips off of her bare shoulder, almost seductively, on the cusp of revealing more. Also in this vein of sexualized undress, Judith’s sleeves have been rolled up as far as they go, bunching into thick coils of fabric, exposing her thick, fleshy arms, whose uneven and oblique shadows suggest that the arms are in motion, and whose slightly shaded rolls of flesh echo the cleavage. In contrast, Artemisia’s Holofernes’s body and sexuality are passive. He ejaculates ineffectual, weak splatters, and trickling droplets that stain the bed beneath him, as if sexually impotent. Holofernes’s expression, with rolled, downcast eyes, embodies the blankness of someone just departed. His mouth agape, he may be experiencing orgasm, but one induced by Artemisia, who seems to sap the energy from him.

In terms of her active experientiality, Judith is the initial and primary focus of the viewer’s attention, thus the central generator of the painting’s experience. The viewer’s vision is immediately stabilized by the painting’s point of action: the sword that Judith wields, slicing off Holofernes’s head. Flanking the blade are Holofernes’s vertical limbs, which create with the sword a triglyph of stable, parallel lines. Untangling the knot of pale limbs, the viewer’s eye is smoothly guided by the pathway-like limbs towards the brightly lit faces either of the two women, Judith and her womanservant. Holofernes’s face, however, is obscured by shadow, and appears


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disconnected from his body and the visual pathway that the limbs create. As such, the women, and not Holofernes, take “ownership” of the tangle of limbs, the viewer’s entry point into the painting, and thus take prominence at an artistic level. After initially capturing the viewer’s attention, Judith, imbued with an immense bodily energy, creates for the viewer an expected sense of movement that makes more impactful the beheading/castration. Artemisia’s Judith has a powerful, muscular body, apparent in its modeling of her flexing and contortion through intense contrasts of light and shadow. Her neck is also cast in an intense contrast of light and shadow, sharply delineated by her neck’s protruding tendons, which convey her degree of exertion. In addition, Judith’s left hand features a plane cast completely in shadow, emphasizing the tightness of her fist and the sheer aggression of her grip. Her hands are flexed, rather than relaxed, and her wrists are engaged. Due to depiction of an energetic body, the viewer imagines more vividly Holofernes’s immediate and violent beheading.

Due to Holofernes’s relative lack of experiential control compared to that of Judith, Judith beheading Holofernes can be mistaken as the literal act of castration. Due to the ambiguity in which Holofernes’s body is rendered, he is unable to fully assert and define himself semiotically in the painting, leaving the viewer much room for interpretation as to what is depicted. Much of his body is covered by cloth, and his legs and arms are somewhat interchangeable because only his forelegs and forearms are showing. Holofernes’s body appears to be positioned on the bed so that his head rests against the mattress and his legs, to the left of the composition, are lifted upwards into the air. However, one could also extrapolate that his body is, in fact, flipped, due to the ambiguous manner in which the limbs are depicted. The limbs simply register as limbs, stubbed columns of flesh, given the lack of hands, feet, and more distinctively shaped appendages such as calves or forearms to clarify the identity of the body part. This is unlike


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Caravaggio’s rendition of Holofernes, which renders Holofernes’s body in extreme clarity, exaggerating the “arm-like” quality of the arm with his rippling biceps and splayed fingers, making fully sure that every bit of his flesh corresponds exactly to a specific body part. In Artemisia’s version, what seem like legs may appear as arms and elbows, raised over a head covered by cloth, and what seem like arms and elbows may appear as legs and knees. In the center of the composition is Holofernes’s head, in between two legs, invokes a penis. Gripping what that resembles pubic hair with a furiously clenched fist, Judith can be interpreted to be physically castrating him rather than beheading him.

It is this difference in experiential control that creates, beyond the castration demonstrated by Holofernes’s beheading, multiple other phalluses into the painting that are also being castrated, transferring power of sexual production to Judith. Artemisia paints the penis in many different points in time and in space, making their removal and transfer to Judith more visually impactful and also seemingly ever-present.

Holofernes’s failure to stably signify leads the viewer to, due to ambiguity, fumble between perceiving several ostensible penises. As mentioned earlier, each of Holofernes’s limbs only has its thigh or forearm showing, resulting in short, straight shafts of flesh, ambiguous enough in signification to be interpreted as penises. An amputation of sorts of the rest of the limb is what creates these penises. This amputation of a penis-like limb invokes the idea of the castration of an actual penis. In its already-amputated state, the castration seems to have already occurred. Yet, the penis remains, as it was the very amputation of the limb that had created it, creating the expectation and threat of future castration. The blood that surrounds the bases of the penises created by the amputated arms as well as the blood-red cloth around the bases of the penises created by the amputated legs are like a castration in progress. The red creates a division,


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but, simultaneously, also a unity. Caught in a moment of ambiguous in-between, this red cloth creates a castration then permeates all temporalities—before, during, and after—as the penis is simultaneously castrated and awaiting castration.

In contrast, due to her experiential control of the painting, Judith signifies all too well, without ambiguity, stably communicating with a single penis the presence of several others. Judith holds a sword, a phallic symbol in itself, with the hilt and blade creating a shape similar to the testicles and shaft of a penis. However, the sword does not just signify one penis, but multiple penises, as the hilt itself also appears phallic. The hilt, pointed upwards as the sword slices downwards, appears like an erect penis, with a shaft-like grip and a pommel that especially resembles the rounded and conical shape of a penis’s glans. In addition, the two cross-guards of the hilt also each signify penises, as the cross-guards are also designed with rounded, conical ends that resemble the glans. All in all, Judith’s sword in Artemisia’s painting signifies penis within penis within penis, in deep contrast with the same in Caravaggio’s painting, in which it attempts to signify as few penises as possible, and even denies her the transfer of ownership of them. He paints the sword with a shorter hilt, with Judith’s hand obscuring the shaft-like grip completely and leaving to the viewer’s eye only a small bit of the pommel. In addition, the end-guards are polygonal, angular, and rendered as inorganically as possible in a metallic grey hue. When taking Holofernes’s head to be a penis in itself, Judith uses a penis to cut off Holofernes’s penis, and the sword is both that which she wields. The single image of the sword signifies multiple moments in time of the sequence of castration, thereby representing the transfer of penile power in multiple moments in time as well.

While Judith manages to empower herself and disempower Holofernes in this painting, Artemisia cannot, under a castration reading,


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separate activity from masculinity. Judith’s activity in physicality and the experiential only leads to her appropriating multiple penises, and Holofernes’s death, the act of ultimate passivity, effectively turns him into a woman himself—a horrific, bloody wound, sexual desires quashed, confirming castration anxiety’s conflation of the death of the penis with the death of the self. Judith functions like Medusa, upholding the economy of the penis by threatening its castration.

The castration reading proves too narrow in scope, as Artemisia’s painting actually responds to this economy of power by revising it through a feminist lens. Like the feminist psychoanalytic writers that would come after her to refute Freud, Artemisia contends that the female genitalia is “active” rather than “passive,” and incorporates this revised economy in her painting to bestow upon Artemisia a sense of activity that is wholly feminine.

v. Luce Irigaray Refutes Freud’s Economy of Power and Contends that Power is Centered on Female Genitalia.

Artemisia’s reorganization of the genital economy around female genitalia aligns with the work of Luce Irigaray, feminist poststructuralist psychoanalyst. The crux of Irigaray’s argument lies in the idea that femininity not a weak or passive “lack,” but able to assert itself powerfully and autonomously. Irigaray emphasizes the entire scope of female genitalia, rather than just the vagina as Freud does, using sex organs beyond the vagina to demonstrate the experiential and physical power and autonomy of the feminine. In terms of physicality, Irigaray asserts that women are able to independently produce sexual pleasure through their sex organs and men actually envy the womb. In terms of the experiential, Irigaray asserts that the feminine is indefinite, multiple, and infinite, due to their genitalia, which inherently threatens and overwhelms male thought and experience, which is definite, singular, and finite.


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As Irigaray states, the limited nature of Freud’s scope of female genitalia results from how “female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters”17. In Freud’s point of view, the clitoral orgasm is a purely adolescent phenomenon, and upon reaching puberty the proper response of mature women was a changeover to vaginal orgasms without any clitoral stimulation18. Freud relegates the vagina’s role to mere penis-sheath and woman to that of merely a tool for male sexual pleasure. He declares that the clitoris is a “truncated penis,” calls infant females “little men,” and characterizes clitoral pleasure and infant female sexuality as “active” and “masculine,” similar to penile pleasure19. However, since this “little penis” only receives pleasure before puberty, Freud seems to suggest that puberty itself castrates the female. Puberty, as a process of continued gender differentiation and the full actualization of a female’s “womanhood,” crystallizes her passive and subordinate status, denying her any traces of power and activity and leaving her with nothing—the “void.”

In terms of the physical, Irigaray refutes Freud’s view by asserting that female genitalia, when keeping in mind parts beyond the vagina, is complete in itself and its very existence directly undermines male bodies and male sexuality. Irigaray insists that the female sexual organs are always in contact with each other, the layers of labia enfolding the clitoris and providing constant autoerotic contact20. She therefore refutes Freud’s idea that clitoral sexual pleasure becomes obsolete by the end of puberty. Thus, female sexual pleasure needs no external object, but is complete in itself. In opposition, it is actually the penis that is dependent on intervention.

17 Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which is Not One.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 23. Print. 18 Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which is Not One.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 23. Print. 19 Irigaray, Luce. “Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,


NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 24. Print.


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Irigaray asserts that the penis always needs an associated mechanism to function—a hand, a vagina, a mouth, etc,21 In its dependency on an “other” for sexual pleasure, the penis is passive and possesses less agency.

In a reversal of Freud’s dynamic of gender and power, Irigaray thereby asserts that it is the penis that tries to “castrate” female genitalia out of envy of its autonomy and superiority. She argues that children’s initial awareness of gender differentiation causes envy of female genitalia’s activity and the male to want to use his penis to rupture the vagina and appropriate the pleasure of female genitalia as his own22. In addition, Irigaray expands the scope of female genitalia by postulating that all sexual desire is motivated by the return to the original union with the mother’s womb23. Males use heterosexual intercourse to enact this union, attempting to physically return to the womb with their penises, while women naturally exist in a state of such union due to their autoerotic contact. Freud insists that the “significance of the castration complex can only be rightly appreciated if its origin the phase of phallic primacy is also taken into account”—as such, Irigaray’s insistence that it is not women that suffer from penis envy but men that suffer from womb envy shifts the penis’s place in the genital economy24. The penis is merely a faulty tool, an apparatus born out of a desire to physically reach the womb but fails to do so, and a symbol of the inherent inferiority that is maleness.

In addition, Freud’s definition of female genitalia—with male-centric terminology—does not correspond with any sort of physical truth, but result from dominance of Western logic, which has engendered a preference for 21 Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which is Not One.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,



NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 24. Print. 24 Freud, Sigmund, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. "The Infantile Genital Organization and

Medusa's Head." Freud on Women: A Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. 270. Print.


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the male experience, or “phallogocentrism,” since the birth of metaphysics. Irigaray’s poststructuralist contemporaries Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous define logocentrism being the idea that there is an ideal external representation of an original, irreducible idea, such as a certain word or symbol, that uniquely signifies something and mediates our presence in the world. To these poststructuralists, logocentrism idealizes phallic external representations due to its long-held tendency to prefer presence over absence, visible over invisible, and the definite and singular over the ambiguous and multiple—engendering a preference for “penis” over “voids.” As a result, the poststructuralists assert that sexist thought has been ingrained into the system of language, critical thought, and the very fabric of civilization.

Irigaray contends to the superiority of female genitalia-based experiential products through negative example, showing that phallogocentric experiential products such as language are incomplete, failing to fully conceptualize or signify female genitalia. To Irigaray, Freud’s language and theory is not only fixated on singular in its own right, but also on stable “one-to-one” relationships—between sign and signifier as well as in binary opposites. Based on phallogocentric notions, he calls the “penis” is the “only” male sex organ and claims that women have no sex organ, or a lack of a sex organ, since his most lasting impression of female genitalia is that there is an overall lack of something visible—something which protrudes outward into the range of visibility like a penis does. However, this impression ignores the multi-part nature of female, as the clitoris is visible and protrudes outward similar to a penis, meaning that the designation of “no sex organ” is incomplete and only refers the vagina. In opposition to male sexual organs’ singularity, Irigaray asserts that women have “at least two” sex organs, yet they are not identifiable, and that the


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woman is “plural,” with “sex organs more or less everywhere”25 Fumbling between “vagina,” “clitoris,” “void,” “lack of penis,” and “nothing,” Freud fails to create a stable signifier for the entirety of the vagina.

The experiential capacities that women do possess threaten men, leading to men’s attempt to classify women through phallogocentric terms, in which woman are merely lesser men or accessories. As Irigaray states, women are multiple, far beyond the “one” that males possess and falsely ascribe upon women—greater than men26. This multiplicity is “often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow [men] whole,” leading to the fear with which men such as Freud view the feminine, seeing it as the equivalent to death and castration27. By expanding the scope of female genitalia from merely the vagina to the entirety of female genitalia, Irigaray empowers women by casting them once again as multiple. She gives women the agency to be voracious—to overwhelm men with their multipart nature, who can only comprehend singularity. vi. Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes Successfully Advocates for the Activity of Female Genitalia Imagery under an Irigarayian Reading.

To Irigaray, the vagina becomes an expression of feminine superiority, as long as it “involves a different economy” in thought—one that “upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse”28. In other words, to be powerful and to invalidate the “void” 25 Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which is Not One.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 26-28. Print. 26 Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which is Not One.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 30-31. Print. 27 Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which is Not One.” The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca,



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status that Freudian logic attributes to it, the system which surrounds the vagina must be reconfigured, one that allows the feminine to be autonomous—defined in relation to itself, rather than being reliant on male intervention or measured by male terms. Artemisia achieves this by overloading her composition with femininity and proving these feminine elements to be inherently superior. She structures her painting with infinitude and multiplicity, which imbues the painting with an agency that overwhelms the viewer and thereby attests to the power of the female experience. Artemisia also honors female genitalia’s physical superiority, invoking concepts such as menstruation and birth as modes of actively depriving of the womb’s agency.

In terms of the experiential, Artemisia asserts that feminine experience is superior to male experience by fashioning the feminine elements in her painting as not only dominating the painting, but dominating the audience. Just as Irigaray asserts that woman’s “voracious multiplicity” threatens men, Artemisia creates a feminine experience so impactful that it does not stably communicate in a phallogocentric manner, but instead ends up overwhelming and blindsiding the viewer.

Caravaggio’s version of Judith and Holofernes is structured in a phallogocentric manner. This work, organized laterally, appeals to Western logic, and specifically, the way Western society fashions texts—read left-to-right, horizontally, and in a lateral manner. The three figures are arranged horizontally—Holofernes on the left, Judith in the middle, and the womanservant on the right. This creates for the viewer a clear, unbroken path of flesh from left to right, starting at Holofernes’s perfectly perpendicular arms and continuing uninterruptedly with Judith’s arms and face. Caravaggio compounds this lateral impetus by the drapery in the composition, which creates even more horizontal pathways for the eye to

NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 29-30. Print.


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follow. The drapery is painted to flow horizontally as much as possible, rather than falling completely vertically. Holofernes’s left hand grips a bedsheet, suspending it in the air and creating horizontal folds. The red curtain above Holofernes contains both horizontal and vertical drapes, but the vertical drapes have been obscured with shadow, leaving only the horizontal drapes. Further supporting this phallic reading, these horizontal drapes in the curtain lead to a knotted portion of the curtain, which resembles the glans of a penis. The maidservant, who dons a heavily draped garment, is deemphasized as much as possible, cut off compositionally as to remove any interruptions to this mostly horizontal path. Similar to how the penis itself is extremely reliant on external stimuli, lateral experiences are passive and possess less agency over the viewer. The end point of the painting, the right side, does not fluidly lead back to the start point of the painting, the left side; as such, the viewer must contribute more cognitive work to reactivate the painting, the work must be “legible” enough for the viewer to work to reactivate, and the viewer holds more power over the experience.

Viewing painting as the least sequential and lateral of the art forms, as it is far less rigid in its structure of consumption than literature, which is read in a set sequence, or music, which is played in a set sequence, Artemisia begins an effort to remove laterality and phallogocentricity from all art and similar experiential objects by creating a painting with no beginning nor end. The arrangement of the figures is more circular, reminiscent of a vagina or a clitoris glans. The maidservant, who stood to the right of Judith in Caravaggio’s rendition of the scene, now stands above Holofernes and looks down upon him. Judith for the most part looks similar, but the thrust of her action is directed more downwards towards Holofernes, rather than simply to the side, as she leans over him—a full-bodied follow-through to the vertical slice of her blade. Artemisia’s Holofernes, below the two women, is


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not nearly as horizontal as that of Caravaggio’s—Artemisia’s Holofernes’s thighs peek out from the covers and hang akimbo diagonally upwards, while his head slopes diagonally downwards. These multi-directional stretches flesh end up creating a circular, infinite, visual pathway, instead of a lateral, linear, and finite one. The experience of the painting is much more impactful than that of Caravaggio’s, as it able to be seamlessly extend and reactivate itself, due to the fact that in this circular structure contains no definite beginning nor ending. The viewer needs not to manipulate circular experiences the same way they must with lateral experiences, in which they must consciously bridge gaps in the experience to impel the experience to continue—for example, with line breaks in texts, forcing the eye to return to the left side of the page unguided by the actual content. Like female genitalia, the circular structure finds power in autonomy.

Also similar to female genitalia—whose plurality of sex organs leads to the failure of phallogocentric signs, such as the terms Freud and others use to describe female genitalia—the painting finds power in multiplicity and amorphousness. Artemisia’s rendering of the womanservant refutes the phallogocentric idea in which visible, external tools, such as words or symbols, are viewed as ideal, due to their stability and reliability in conveying ideas, and that a unique sign can signify a unique idea in a “one-to-one” relationship. The womanservant’s presence creates an initial ambiguity as to whom Judith really is, as both women look similar and stand somewhat above Holofernes and gesture towards him. In addition, the womanservant also creates an ambiguity between her and Holofernes’s bodies, as their arms are entangled in a manner that makes it harder for the viewer to parse whose limbs are whose. It appears initially unclear whose semi-balled hand is held up to the womanservant’s face, due to the visual interruption of Judith’s arm. The painting is not just an example of the superiority of feminine multiplicity in how “multiple” Judiths attack


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Holofernes’s—the experience holds power over the viewer in that it confounds and overwhelms them. Just as the female body presents the male viewer with something to be feared due to its inability to be classified in terms of maleness, the multiple Judiths and ambiguous bodies short-circuit the viewer’s usual tendencies in viewing paintings and dominates the viewers with their own inability to normatively “read” these signs. The painting reigns supreme over the viewer, reveling in its unintelligibility.

In terms of the physical, Artemisia inserts references to other parts of the female body and the female body’s functionality, menstruation and birth, to refer to the way that femininity naturally holds power and prevents males from achieving such power. In the painting, blood is the key to an economy of power centered on female genitalia. Blood signifies “lack,” just as the vagina does. However, rather than invoke the “Medusa’s Head” effect and uphold the penis as a valued object, Artemisia’s employment of blood in the painting makes the penis’s removal contingent on its deprival of the womb’s power, centering the economy of power upon female genitalia. Fear of castration is rephrased as fear of life outside the womb—the economy becomes not about the absence of the penis, but the penis’s lack of union with the mother.

Through menstruation, the penis is actively forced out of the vagina and away from the womb through its bloodflow. Menstruation is also a key process in the fertilization of the female reproductive system—birth being a similar act of ejection and deprival of the womb. Instead of blood spurting in a manner that favors malehood, resembling male ejaculate and spurting towards male elements in the painting, as it does in Caravaggio’s painting, the blood that spurts from Holofernes’s neck in Artemisia’s painting resembles the sporadic spray of female ejaculate and is drawn towards and associated with feminine elements within the painting. Whereas the blood in Caravaggio’s painting seemed to echo the lateral, phallic shape and direction


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of Judith’s sword, and even appears as a sword of blood held by Holofernes’s left hand, the blood in Artemisia’s painting spurts towards Judith and drips upon the bed sheets below. The blood lightly sprays Judith’s ample cleavage, creating a connection and likening between blood and the female. However, in addition, her furrowed breasts, cast in heavy shadow, seem to create two labial lips and a “void”-like vagina. This effect of blood being sprayed towards the vagina can be visually reversed as blood being sprayed from and away the vagina, as if menstruating. Furthermore, the white bed sheets also resemble female genitalia due to vertical draping and a use of light and shadow that also creates an effect of labial lips framing “void”-like vaginas. This is in contrast with Caravaggio’s painting, in which he prevents interference with his horizontal visual pathways by painting Holofernes gripping the bed sheets and preventing them from their natural, vertical drape, not only enforcing a phallic, lateral viewing experience, but also preventing vaginal symbols from manifesting. The blood that drips down from Holofernes’s body into the crevices of the vertical drapes of the bed sheets in Artemisia’s painting then resembles menstruation. Furthermore, below this series of vertical drapes, blood also drips into the dark crevice in which the two mattresses meet, creating an even larger menstruating vagina, framed by labial lips. Caravaggio’s painting also contains these stacked mattresses and crevice, but deemphasizes this, due to subconscious aversion to including vaginal elements, by creating through Holofernes’s gripping of the fabric chunky folds that obscure the vaginal crevice and disturb the continuous shape of the labial lips.

To Irigaray, the ultimate feminine act of physical production, birth, inherently disempowers the male, as it prevents him from his desired union with the womb, the source of power. The violent, gendered power dynamic of the painting aligns with the violent, gendered power dynamic of birth, in which the male is brutalized and deprived of the power that females possess.


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The waterfalls of blood in the composition create a downward momentum and, as blood has been demonstrated to be the embodiment of femininity, represent the violence that the feminine enacts upon the male. Parallel to the trajectory of the blood that flows in this painting, Holofernes appears as if he is being forced out of the woman’s body, upside-down, crying out like a pained infant, limp and weak from being newly brought into the world. In fact, the composition of the painting mirrors the shapes of female birth-related organs. The circular arrangement of the figures echoes the shape of the womb and uterus, and the path of blood represents the infant’s, or Holofernes’s, lateral exit through the birth cavity and deprivation of the womb’s power.

Although she argues for the feminine economy through the employment of blood, Artemisia points back to the vagina, the producer of blood, as the ultimate and foremost proprietor of this economy and its power. Artemisia prominently inscribes upon her painting a large, bloody vagina, from which all blood emerges. The red ribbons of the women’s sleeves, the blood beneath Holofernes’s body, and the crimson drapery that covers Holofernes’s lap creates an oblong oval, outlined in the color red. This oval contains and emanates all the painting’s actions: beheadings, castrations, birthings, and menstruations alike, oozing blood from this central point. Along with the red cloth that covers Holofernes’s lap is wrapped in a manner that looks like labial folds, Artemisia seems to assert that blood is the vagina itself, the labia, the clitoris—the very essence of the feminine body. Through her depiction of birth and menstruation, Artemisia successfully rids the vagina of its passive, penis-reliant, “void”-status that the male dominant order has ascribed to it—no longer is it a mechanism that threatens the removal of a penis, but a mechanism that threatens the deprival of the womb.


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Returning to the Freudian reading of Artemisia’s work that upheld the penile economy of power, how does Artemisia justify the multitude of temporal and spatial penises that Artemisia wields? Rather than uphold the penis as powerful, Artemisia constructs this once-penile power in a uniquely feminine manner. The many parts of female genitalia—labia, womb, birth canal, and so forth—and its functions such as birth and menstruation contextualize these penises. In addition, these penises are inculcated in an infinite and multiple experience, an effect amplified by the penises being numerous themselves. By emphasizing the feminine in this painting, Artemisia contextualizes these penises as clitorises. Although the clitoris was once postulated by Freud to be merely a less-functional version of the penis, Artemisia asserts the opposite. Unlike the reliant penis, the clitoris is active and autonomous. The bodily functions of female genitalia that center the economy on the womb contend that it is the penis that is the offshoot of the more powerful clitoris, as it enviably contains more of the womb’s power due to its closer state of union with the womb, via constant contact with the labia.

vii. Conclusion. Mothering an Artistic Genealogy.

The connection between cloth, blood, and female genitalia speaks to the way Artemisia perceives women’s ability to create experiences—to be artists. Cloth is a product of weaving, traditionally viewed as a lower woman’s art. The crimson cloth over Holofernes’s lap is Artemisia’s attempt to imbue an entire history of women’s arts with agency and dominance—that perhaps the claims of ineffectuality are fashioned out of fear of women’s more superior creations. Invoking the concept of fertility and physical generation, Artemisia’s painting speaks to the woman’s overall capacity to be an empowered form of mother—a matriarch of a long and storied genealogy that stretches infinitely into the future. The penis-centered


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conception of the mother is a woman who births a child as a penis substitute, resigning to her passive role as recipient of male penetration, while the female genitalia-centered conception of the mother is one whose birthing capabilities actively seek to expel penises and deprive them of the power of the womb. Mothering an experiential genealogy, rather than a physical one, Artemisia asserts this feminine activity in a scope far beyond the single painting she has created.

Beyond her own painting, Artemisia’s invocation of birth creates implications that women assert their dominance over the artistic canon. An anti-phallogocentric reading of the dark, void-like background hijacks an entire, male-dominated practice of Baroque painting and forcing it to share these feminist views. Artemisia’s painting was inspired by Caravaggio’s darkly intense painting style, which also featured dark backgrounds, and ended up inspiring many male, later-canonized artists under the Baroque movement to strive to his level of drama, also by painting their scenes against a stark background of shadow. Artemisia, utilizing this aesthetic trend while painting an ode to female genitalia, imbues this iconic, Baroque aesthetic trend with a feminist, political valence. This dark “void,” is a vagina. Artemisia seems to assert that this overarching aesthetic trend was born of males’ unconscious desire to rejoin with the mother’s womb. No matter the content of the painting and how male chauvinistic it may be, especially those from paintings by sexist male artists such as Caravaggio, the compositions’ “birthing” via the dark background ensures that the feminine reigns supreme. With this, the economy of female genital power not only looms and is incredibly present in the painting but is being constantly performed for the viewer.

Although the autobiographical reading empowers Artemisia herself through her painting of a rape revenge fantasy, it upholds the perceived “activity” of men and the penis that makes rape commonplace—it challenges


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only her specific situation, rather than the systems and power structures in place. The viewer’s acculturated tendencies to read power in phallic imagery makes it so that the autobiographical reading continues to uphold a male-centric gender hierarchy, just as Judith as an individual gains power in castrating Holofernes in a Freudian reading, but only by masculinizing herself. Artemisia’s legacy is that of yonic supremacy, mothering a genealogy of art centered around the female genitalia—dismantling a tradition of the phallic imagery and using the vaginal to not only replace it, but speak to the ways it is inherently superior and disempowers the phallic, both in physicality and experience. viii. Future Possible Inquiries into Artemisia and Feminist Post-Structuralism.

To be discussed and inquired further is if Artemisia criticizes the concept of kyriarchy—systems of oppression, domination, and submission—the same way that the other poststructural feminists do. Irigaray is oft criticized for the essentialism of her work, a criticism that extends too to Artemisia’s. Most post-structural feminism, most notably that of Judith Butler, abandons the female body as a subject and rejects female essentialism due to her assertion of the socially constructed and ultimately structurally fluid nature of gender. As such, these post-structural feminists question the idea that the hierarchy must exist at all, as, to Butler, it is “the sexual hierarchy [that] produces and consolidates gender”29. However, the feminist, artistic utopia that Artemisia and Irigaray mother replaces the patriarchy with a matriarchy, continuing to privilege a certain gender as the primary position of power for inherent, rather than constructed, characteristics—namely, the belief in women’s inherent physical and

29 Butler, Judith. "Preface." Preface. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

New York: Routledge, 2006. 7. Print.


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experiential superiority due to their genitalia. It is entirely possible that Artemisia’s reconfigured genital economy in a painting based on a story that touts phallic supremacy simply demonstrates the easily constructed nature of gendered power dynamics, rather than solidify and assert a female-dominated sexual hierarchy. Such remains inconclusive, and could be of interest in further formal analysis of Artemisia’s oeuvre.

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Artemisia Gentileschi, Feminist Formalist: Judith and Holofernes’s Reconfiguration of a Penis-...

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