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Castration Fears and Male Hysteria







E.Manet - Olympia.jpg
Manet, Olympia
The French Revolution, is often taken in tandem with the industrial revolution as marking the birth of the modern world.  Manet’s Olympia as the first document worthy of the descriptor modern art.

In this painting Manet's representation of woman seemed to have provoked bourgeois wrath precisely because the woman appeared to be a common prostitute with an insufficiently submissive gaze.

In the 1860s, the image of  liberty as a terrifying and unconrollable woman of this sort to  a phallocentirc society where the preservation of class position depended on the control of women must have shaken the bourgeois male pysche to the core.

The reactions to this painting suggest that the Paris of the 1860s was redolent with castration fears which equates to male hysteria.

Source. Consciousnss and the Urban Experience. David Harvey
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