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.
Nancy Locke's volume Manet and the Family Romance is a marvel of academic scholarship and offers many insightful accounts of individual works by Eduard Manet (), but its main claim to innovative status is its use of “psychoanalysis to illuminate formal structures in art” and its integration of a psychoanalytic reading into the “larger history” of an artist's oeuvre, including his “attention to contemporary life” (p. 86). In particular Locke convincingly argues that Manet's complex family situation, particularly his relationship with his father, Auguste, deeply influenced his art. Locke's use of and attitude toward psychoanalysis is my focus in this review.
According to Locke, Eduard Manet, oldest of three sons, married his father's mistress, Suzanne Leenhoff. Two years and three months older than he, she had been music teacher to both Eduard and his brother Eugene. Suzanne “gave birth to an illegitimate boy whose paternity remains unknown,” but Locke believes he was Auguste's son (p. 47). Manet married Suzanne when the boy was eight and legally depicted himself as the boy's “godfather.” Manet painted his wife and her son Leon Koella Leenhoff with considerable frequency. Locke suggests that portraiture was the backbone of Manet's art, as also indicated in her detailed analysis of his portraits of the model Victorine Maurent and the artist Berthe Morisot, the latter presumably in love with Manet. Morisot, who belonged to Manet's socioeconomic background and class to a greater degree than Suzanne, married Eduard's younger brother, Eugene.
In an effort to hush up the impropriety of the father's assumed adultery and scandalous offspring, all the more socially threatening because Manet's father was a prominent, wealthy judge with a noble background, Suzanne's bastard son was presented as her younger brother. Locke demonstrates the oedipal dimension of this family secret—the way it plays itself out in Manet's art—and labels it generally as “Manet's ‘family romance’” (p. 7).