The Struggle
Hannah Frasure, Pomona ’24
Medium: Graphite and Ink
This piece portrays some of Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical concepts via an unconventional redrawing of one of the most famous sculptures in Western art history, The Kiss. While at first glance, the original work, depicting the embrace of a naked man and woman, seems to be an innocent (if not scandalous, given where and when it was created—France, 1882) representation of love, its sculptor, Auguste Rodin, was implementing a darker idea. It represents two characters from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy who were based on real-life lovers in medieval Italy. The pair was murdered by the jealous husband of the woman. But while they represent the sin of lust, some academics contend that Dante renders the two in a sympathetic light, as does Rodin, who it has been argued—by focusing on anatomical correctness and emotion—chooses to render women as subjects, fully capable of reciprocal, mutual interactions with others, as opposed to relegating them to be the objects of men’s desires. However, in my rendition, I wanted to depict a version more accurate of heterosexual relations throughout history—where if they are not forced, are fake.
Here, I engage with Beauvoir, who consistently discusses this kind of fake relation in her works in contrast with her existentialist contemporaries. While other existentialists address the dangers that come from our relationships with the “Other,” it is only Beauvoir who addresses the gendered aspect. She posits women have historically been the “Other,” denied the freedom to engage in the kind of personal projects that allow them to transcend time and space, to be subjects of their own life in the sense that men are. This kind of relationship makes for authentic love between heterosexual partners, where both fundamentally respect the freedom and subjecthood of the other, difficult. In The Second Sex, she provides the specific example of how in sexual interactions, the woman’s participation tends to only a means for the man’s pleasure, rather than an ends in and of itself. So, as you can see in my work, there is a shallowness to the interaction, which mirrors the one the sculptor had with the likely model and assistant, Camille Claudel, a 19-year-old who became a contemporary of his, and who he ultimately betrayed and destroyed the career of. One can see how even as the woman appears to be a willing partner in the embrace, there are parts of her that are not—in the form of the ghost-like arm that limply hangs by her side or defiantly pushes away from the man and claws at the air—suggesting these interactions, once again, fail to allow women to transcend their reality. Moreover, in viewing women only as objects, men too lose their subjecthood, as Beauvoir would have it, because they sublimate their selfhood to something that will nonetheless perish upon death (the cultural idea that one is rewarded with manhood if they succeed in multiple heterosexual conquests). So, in my work, the pair remains in hell even as it is an existential as opposed to biblical one. Neither realizes the true freedom of the other, and so both fail to authentically love. The elements and principles employed in this piece point to that. The contrasting direction of pencil strokes in the background texture resemble the expressionist style of Rodin’s sculpting, with the overlaying finer lines of pen overlaying giving the impression of how sculptures are created—from large detail to smaller ones. The grey monotone conveys the ethical muddiness and strips the piece of any eroticism that was present in the original work. As a result, it defies the commodification of female sexuality and the objectification of female bodies. Ultimately, I wanted to portray something that would resonate with the intended audience of this journal—college students—and as a blind eye is often turned to the gendered reality of hookup culture, which permeates college campuses, I wanted to do just the opposite.