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PICKING FRUIT: MARY CASSATT'S MODERN WOMAN AND THE WOMAN'S BUILDING OF 1893
A visitor to the Woman's Building of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 would have entered through entrances at the east or west into a large Gallery of Honor. Prominently displayed at south and north ends of the gallery were large murals intended to illustrate the progress made by women over history: Mary Cassatt's Modern Woman (the central section of which is reproduced as fig. 1) and Mary MacMonnies's Primitive Woman (fig. 2). Although the MacMonnies mural was showered with praise, Cassatt's depiction of women of the modern world came under savage attack. Critics denounced the colors ("garish," "crude greens and blues," "impudent greens and brutal blues"); they attacked the subject ("cynical," "trivial"), its style ("primitive," "frankly realistic," even "Japanese"), and Cassatt herself ("too aggressive").(1)
The criticisms of Cassatt's Modern Woman do not cohere; each critic found in the mural whatever she or he detested. Nonetheless, they help to delineate Cassatt's transgressions-the ways in which her work broke through the boundaries of accepted imagery for women in the latter nineteenth century.
Of particular interest here is the manner in which Cassatt reversed the traditional icon of Eve picking the Forbidden Fruit. The Cassatt mural has come under increasing attention in recent years; Griselda Pollock has noted that Cassatt's invocation of Eve and Eden "questioned, transformed, and subverted" dominant images of Eve and woman. There has been no detailed attempt, however, to place the Cassatt mural within contemporary debates on the significance of the Genesis account, both between feminists and their opponents, and within the feminist camp.(2)
That debate had an explicit tie to the Woman's Building. Its guidebook proclaimed "Woman the acknowledged equal of man; his true helpmate, honored and beloved," announcing to all: "We have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the Eden of idleness is hateful to us. We...are become workers, not cumberers of the earth."(3)
Twentieth-century feminist scholars have examined the Genesis account extensively as part of an effort to resolve whether the Bible as a text is recuperative for women or is so thoroughly embedded within a patriarchal and misogynist discourse that it cannot be so employed.(4) The issue here is related but distinct,...