You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Manet and the Family Romance is the culmination of several years of painstaking research by art historian Nancy Locke, associate professor of art history at Wayne State University. Her interest in the life and works of the revolutionary painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883) is not primarily about his place in art history and his contributions to the development of painting, although Manet was recognized as the leader of the non-conformist painters of his day (Bataille, 1983). Locke has chosen to focus on the inner life of the artist; the evidence she presents is based on a study of Manet's paintings, in the context of the social history of the period as well as biographical details of Manet's life and relationships.
In her introduction, Locke writes, “In my view, a set of family relationships structures Manet's art and we can better understand the work as a whole by looking at emerging patterns in a mythology of the family” (p. 1). In referring to a “mythology of the family,” she is thinking of Freud's concept of the family romance. The five essays that comprise the book attempt to justify this conclusion.
Locke's introduction continues with an outline of the history of psychoanalytic approaches to art, referring to writings both by art historians and by psychoanalysts. She argues that psychoanalytic concepts are important in “understanding the formation of self, whether in representation or in a given social milieu” (p. 7). There is understandably a particular emphasis on the thinking of French psychoanalysts and philosophers, including Lacan and Foucault. Locke's knowledge of psychoanalytic writers, their theories, and their approaches to understanding artists and their art is quite impressive, and would be worthwhile reading for any psychoanalyst interested in this field.
Chapter 2 is entitled “The Couch of Orestes,” a reference to Thomas de Quincy and to the nineteenth-century idea that elements of childhood longings can resurface in dreams (p. 14), an idea that Locke