'Mary Cassatt left America for Europe determined not to be another sacrifice on the altar of good womanhood.' So begins Van Buren's explicit consideration of the modernist madonna. Van Buren believes Cassatt used her modernist commitment to the portrayal of immediate personal experience to construct a new vision of the madonna and child. The author chooses two texts to lead up to her culminating discussion of Cassatt, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Alcott's Little Women. With these novels, Van Buren tries to show the way a new maternal metaphor for a more confident, more aggressive, more sexual woman emerged only in very gradual stages, with one character in each novel who is both a rebel and a mother. Yet, the rebel still could not be integrated into the maternal metaphor until Cassatt. Her madonna, in Van Buren's view, finally frees herself from the strictures of the prevailing ideal for the nineteenth-century woman, 'the angel of the household'.

Van Buren's discussion with its free flow of associations