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By Elias Rabinovitch

Edgar Degas’ 1868-69 painting, Interior (fig. 1), has inspired a host of conflicting interpretations by art historians. Scholarly conjectures on Interior’s subject matter have ranged from describing the work as a depiction of the aftermath of an adulterous affair; an exposition of the reality of marital discontent; and—as the informal title of the painting, The Rape, somewhat misleadingly suggests—even brutal sexual assault (Sidlauskas 678). Framed by an examination of the broader artistic trends in visual and literary culture of the late nineteenth century within which this painting was made, I argue in this paper that Degas designed Interior precisely to serve the function of intellectually engaging his viewers within his ambiguous pictorial fiction. Degas was a social outsider: his primary concern at the time he created Interior was to release works that challenged the norm. In this work, Degas constricts the viewer within a menacing and all-too-familiar domestic space, which in turn compels the spectator to attempt to reconstruct his narrative according to a range of visual clues. The result was a painting that shifted the way the beholder understood contemporary art, and in turn, his position in modern French society.

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The Bourgeois Interior and Popular Culture

In the nineteenth century, the domestic space or the middle-class interior became one of the primary settings for literature and art. This trend arose out of the burgeoning capitalist economy in modern France. As urban spaces of living became more ubiquitous with the construction of apartment buildings and homes across Paris, the middle-class or ‘bourgeois’ interior became the primary nexus of the contemporary Parisian urban experience on both a physical and psychological level (Sidlauskus 683). In other words, the city dweller would leave the chaos of the modern world in the street, and recede inward into his personal space in order to engage in those activities that could be performed only beyond the range of the public gaze. Thus, while the themes of history, such as wars and assassinations, were traditional subjects of paintings, these were no longer particularly relevant to the lives of French citizens in the late 1800s. Instead, writers and artists began to frame their narratives within the bourgeois interior to make their narratives more compatible with contemporary Parisian private life (683-684).

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Degas consciously designed Interior within this changing artistic climate. Prior to the 1850s and 1860s, themes from contemporary life were rarely addressed in the visual arts, as strict censorship at the annual or biannual Parisian Salons held that only history paintings and other traditional genres were to be considered worthy of entry into their esteemed exhibitions (House 83). Up until circa 1868, Degas had mainly been a history painter and seldom went against the status quo (Hoffman 28). However, after the success of Édouard Manet’s Salon des Refusés, wherein works that were rejected by the Salon were displayed, Degas—following in the footsteps of the Realist[1] Gustave Courbet, Manet, and his other revolutionary artistic contemporaries, the Impressionists—radically shifted the focus of his creative vision with Interior by choosing to depict a scene from modern life. Degas’ new goal was no longer to become a ‘popular’ painter, but rather to subvert established norms of what could and could not be portrayed in a given painting, and to challenge the lens through which contemporary spectators had been conditioned to view images (House 81). In other words, by choosing to focus on contemporary life, modern painting could now act as a locus of critique, a way to expose the arbitrary structure and problems beneath the surface of late-nineteenth century society.

Among such problems was domestic violence. Interior depicts an uneasy confrontation between a man and a woman within a dimly lit bedroom. The painting emerged at the beginning of an age of sensationalist media interest in domestic disputes and even spousal murder within France (Ferguson 187). Crimes of passion were represented in the popular press more than ever before, and French citizens were bombarded with violent images and headlines that directly compromised their personal conceptions of safety on a daily basis (193). Portrayals of domestic violence were not limited to newspapers, however: while the incidence of conjugal violence in urban middle-class families grew, literature and stage dramas that dealt with themes of domestic altercations began to explode in popularity, as several books by Degas’ contemporaries were released that directly injected violence into marital life, such as Walter Duranty’s the Struggles of Françoise Duquesnoy (1873), and Émile Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867), which is commonly suggested as a narrative influence on Interior (Sidlauskas 681).

The Canvas as a Crime Scene

It is my contention that with Interior, Degas—an artist who was increasingly becoming a social deviant—transplanted the popular hysteria surrounding domestic violence in the bourgeois interior from literature and theatre into his painting in order to arrest the viewer in a fundamentally new and confrontational fashion. Charles Baudelaire, perhaps the most important art critic of the 19^th century, held that in the industrialized age, the artist had two choices. On the one hand, he could be a dandy, one who cultivates their public persona to rise above supposedly ‘lower’ or ‘debased’ forms of popular culture; or, the artist could become a ‘criminal,’ living beyond social constraints, choosing to adopt both a counter-cultural philosophy of art and of his place in modern life (Straw “The Social Fantastic”). Degas, more than any of his contemporaries, was an example of the latter. The artist repeatedly and openly challenged voices of authority in French society, and expressly prided himself on the fact that he lived life on the absolute edge (Hoffmann 9-10). Consistent with his ‘criminal’ public persona, Degas held that “ ‘[a] painting is a thing which requires as much trickery, malice, and vice as the perpetration of a crime’ ” (qtd. in Herbert 45). Thus, with Interior, Degas transforms the viewer into a detective. The artist constructed an ambiguous ‘crime scene’ and forces the beholder to solve his mystery.

Turning to the work in question, a man is shown leaning against a door on the far right. His eyes are fixed on a woman sitting on a chair and turned away from him. The two are in separate corners of the room, horizontally distanced by an uncomfortable amount of space. The deteriorating wood floor is set in shadow between the two figures, and foreshortened in order to position the viewer as a privileged, voyeuristic observer of the menacing scene at hand. A lamp emits an eerie glow that only partially illuminates the characteristics of the painting’s protagonists and the contents of the confining room, casting most items in shadow. The man is dressed in a sport coat, and has a grizzly beard, large facial features and intensely focused eyes; his hands rest anxiously in his pockets. Immediately, the viewer—or, as Degas would have it, detective—begins to generate questions: is this sinister-looking man restraining himself from anger? Has the woman done or refused something that inspired, or is about inspire an outburst of rage on the brooding man’s part? Naturally, the viewer’s gaze shifts to the cowering woman for answers. Her face is almost entirely hidden in shadow, but, in contrast, the light of the lamp brightly brings her white blouse into focus. One of her shoulder straps has been removed, and the skin of her upper back and neck is promiscuously presented to the man and to the beholder simultaneously. Is the man responsible for this ‘wardrobe malfunction’? Did he remove the corset that lies on the ground? If so, did he do so forcibly? The corset, in particular, suggests that some sort of sexual act or violation has already occurred; its removal signifies that a device of feminine constraint no longer suppresses the woman’s bodily form.

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The Fear of the Gaze

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Through clues such as the corset and the woman’s exposed shoulder, Degas invites the viewer to endlessly speculate. Considering the wealth of literature and theatrical productions focused on domestic violence that was circulating when this painting was made, coupled with the menacing atmosphere of the painting, it is more than likely a contemporary spectator would hypothesize that the dispute in question is the aftermath of a sexual assault. This conjecture might be supported by the appearance of what looks to be dried blood on the lower left edge of the single bed in the background. Yet, the arrival at such a theory in no way renders the image any less nebulous. The absence of any true narrative action in the scene prevents the viewer from identifying a definite subject behind the work. This narrative ambiguity destabilizes the certainty of the beholder’s analytical vision. Put differently, Degas’ indefinite subject matter abolished his contemporary viewers’ perceptions of how images were ‘meant’ to be read, and therefore how they believed society was ‘supposed’ to be structured. Thus, by engaging with Degas’ unsolvable ‘crime scene’—his strategic placement of an image of potential domestic abuse within the familiar space of the enclosed, windowless interior—the nineteenth century Parisian viewer was absorbed into the work and forced to reconsider his understanding of the space of the home as a supposed ‘sanctuary,’ free from the dangers of the outside world.

This effect is further amplified by the presence of the mirror in the background of the painting. As art and film historian Tom Gunning has observed, with reference to Walter Benjamin’s monumental analysis of the bourgeois interior in the Arcades Project, “The mirror image functions…less as an uncanny double than as…an ‘intruder,’ a messenger from the outside disrupting the illusion of homey security” (126). In Interior, the mirror—positioned directly across from the foreshortened expanse of floor that separates the man and the woman—acts as the key, self-reflexive indication that the viewer is observing a scene he was not ‘meant’ to witness; a scene taking place within a private, urban room. This, in turn, challenges the supposed anonymity of the viewer in his own ‘private’ interior. The mirror, and thus the painting as a whole, draws attention to the uncomfortable reality that those acts the viewer perceived to be invisible to the external gaze—sexual deviance, domestic abuse, or even murder—leave their imprints in the material culture of their home, simply waiting for a detective to discover them and connect the dots.

To conclude, Degas’ painting challenges and ultimately subverts two central components of contemporary Parisian bourgeois society: the Academic—and thus the dominant— understanding of narrative art, and the sacredness of the domestic interior as an ‘escape’ from the external world. As we have seen, in the artistic milieu of late nineteenth century Paris, many painters, writers, and playwrights became dissatisfied with creating cultural productions based on lofty historical themes and romantic ideals, and instead chose to focus on contemporary subjects with new methods of storytelling in order to highlight the ills rooted deep within modern French culture. It is precisely this shift that Interior documents in Degas’ career: his creative break from historical painter to social commentator. Openly countercultural and an archetypal example of Baudelaire’s ‘artist as criminal,’ Degas, in effect, perpetrated an artistic ‘felony’ in the making of this painting, and asks the viewer—as detective—to reconstruct the crime. Degas deliberately made the subject of his painting ambiguous in order to attract the speculative attention of the viewer, to compel him to rematerialize the narrative action according to a set of clues contained within the material culture of the enclosed interior. This action of ‘artistic crime-scene reconstruction’ fundamentally changed the way that Degas’ contemporary viewers had been conditioned to interact with images, and thus presented a challenge to conformist, Academic standards of art. Furthermore, in attempting to unearth the nature of the domestic dispute in question with reference to the position of physical objects in the room, not only is the viewer’s understanding of art destabilized, but so too is his conception of the private home as ‘shielded,’ that is to say, as the spatial sanctuary for an unhindered bourgeois identity. Interior, at its core, reminds the viewer that the public gaze haunts his every step: both when he leaves the world of the interior, and when he commits the most atrocious acts within it.

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