Viaud's seventh novel, The Story of a Child (1890), is,
as the title indicates, the story of a child, tracing the life of
Pierre, presumably the Pierre Loti of several of the previous
novels, from shortly after his birth to his fifteenth year.
It does something else, however. It glorifies Pierre's mother
and her relationship to her young son. Indeed, by presenting her
at her first formal appearance as surrounded by sunlight (Chapter
V), the novel comes very close to depicting her as an iconographic
saint, something probably very close to Viaud's mind.
And, again, there was an equivalent of this glorification of
motherhood and a mother's relationship to her child, to one child,
in the works of a contemporary French painter. Though born in the
United States, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) spent most of her adult
life in France, and there did her important painting.
The Bath - c. 1892
Mother and Child - 1901
Mother and Child - 1888
Mother and Child Against a Green Background (Maternity) - 1897
Among them was a series of paintings of a mother with one child,
sometimes male and sometimes female, done right around the time of
Viaud's novel. As Stephen F. Eisenman has written, Cassatt
"invented and constructed a gendered alternative for the masculine
hero--the female nurturer and her offspring" (Nineteenth
Century Art [London: Thames and Hudson, 1994] 267).
The last two, and in particular the last one, come the closest
to Pierre's depiction of his mother in The Story of a Child:
his mother is, above all else, the source of protection against
fear. Already in Chapter Four, at the end of his recollection of
his first meeting with the sea, Pierre recounts how
I took off again, running, my face very upset, I think, and
my hair tormented by the wind, in a great rush to be near my
mother, to kiss her, to press myself against her; to have her
console me for a thousand anticipated, inexpressible anguishes
that had seized hold of my heart at the sight of those vast green
and deep expanses. (Chapter IV)
Elsewhere Pierre describes his mother as "the natural refuge,
the asylum against all the fears of the unknown, against all the
black sorrows that had no definite cause" (Chapter V).
On the Balcony - 1871-72
The Cradle - 1872
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the other distinguished female French
painter of the time, Berthe Merisot (1841-1895), also did several
canvases of mother and child, or in some cases children. Here are
a few. They do not emphasize mother-as-protector the way Cassatt's
works do, however.
Hide and Seek - 1872
Pierre recounts a game of hide and seek that he played as a little
child in Chapter Three.
Butterfly Hunt - 1874
Pierre describes how he used to go butterfly hunting in Chapter
Sixteen.
In the Park - 1874
It should not come as any surprise that I have chosen paintings by
women to enrich the experience of reading one of Viaud's novels.
As an author of gay fiction, Viaud often combined what Western
society has stereotyped as "masculine" and "feminine"
sensibilities. It is particularly appropriate, for this reason,
that I have chosen the works of French Impressionist painters to
give his works an artistic context. As Eisenman wrote, "a final
transgressive feature of Impressionism must be noted: unlike
contemporary Salon painting, it did not wholly reiterate the
prevailing gender stereotypes about artmaking. Impressionism's
chief practitioners were either males who painted in a style
judged appropriate only for women, or women who painted with the
ambition and conviction which it was then thought could be found
only among men" (254).
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