This week on the NYR Daily: Violence, control, seduction and mesmerism

On the NYR Daily this week Paula Rego: The Maids (1987) Today we published “[Paula Rego’s Wild Women](,” by Lucy Scholes, who contributes regularly to the NYR Daily on art and literature, and is a particularly acute observer of the complexities of women making art about their lives. In her review, she describes Rego’s turn from the surrealism and national political concerns of her early collage pieces to a “focus inward, transforming her own lived experience into large-scale acrylic, then later pastel tableaux” and a recurring interest in, as Rego once said, “a real lumpy, bumpy woman who has sinned.” I asked Scholes to choose one work from the exhibition that went unmentioned in her essay but that speaks to Rego’s talent for conveying violence and power with ambiguity and novelty. She chose The Maids (above): It’s a tableaux from Jean Genet’s 1947 play of the same title, inspired by the notorious case of the Papin sisters, French housemaids who murdered their employer’s wife and daughter in 1933, a crime that Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Lacan regarded as symbolic of the class struggle. Rego’s picture magnifies the dynamics of power between the four women. One of the maids dominates the canvas. She’s standing—center stage—behind her mistress, who, with her head bent and eyes downcast, sits in front of a dressing table. The maid’s hand rests on the back of the woman’s head, but whether in an act of tenderness or potential violence, it’s hard to tell. Behind them, in the corner of the room, the second maid is occupied with the daughter, who is sitting—perhaps slumped—in a chair. Whether the maid is caressing her or stopping the girl from fighting back, we can’t be sure. That a static image contains such contradictory possibilities is astonishing. Who’s really in control here? Who is victim and who is perpetrator? Is this a scene of assault or attendance? Symbolic elements, frequent in Rego’s later work, point to an answer: the single white lily that lies atop a small table suggests a funereal bouquet, and on the floor below lurks a small wild boar, its fangs bared. A mesmerist and patient, circa 1795 (Oxford Science Archive/Heritage Images/Getty Images) Earlier this week, we published Max Nelson’s “[‘A Compelling Power’: When Mesmerism Came to America](,” an essay about gender and social control in nineteenth-century mesmerism in the US, with a recent book on the subject by literary scholar Emily Ogden at its center. This was a different subject for Nelson, a former editor at the Review who’s now pursuing postgraduate literary studies at Yale and who writes prolifically on film and literature. I was curious about what led him to this interest in mesmerism. “Last fall, I was hoping to learn more about the stigma that surrounded novel-reading in the early American Republic,” Nelson told me in an email. “Why did so many commentators during those years denounce fiction as a kind of moral danger, intoxication, or threat? “Seduction” was a crucial term among some of these anti-fiction campaigners. In 1802, according to the scholar Cathy Nicholson, one called novels “the powerful engine with which the seducer attacks the female heart.” Works of fiction, it seemed, had to prove that they protected rather than endangered the virtue of whatever women read them. “The dangerous consequences of SEDUCTION are exposed,” the preface to William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy promised, “and the advantages of FEMALE EDUCATION set forth and recommended.” “Novelists,” in Ogden’s words, “had a professional stake in the question of how much gullibility was to be permitted.” It was her engagement with these matters of fiction and its critics that first drew me to Credulity, Ogden’s study of American mesmerism. The debate surrounding mesmerism, it turned out, drew on some of the same assumptions and ideologies as the one that surrounded novels. Here Ogden is, for instance, comparing The Power of Sympathy to the report by a scientific commission, co-chaired by Benjamin Franklin, that tried to debunk Mesmer: “The Franklin report came out during the heyday of American seduction fiction. Like the Report, such novels occupy the paradoxical position of claiming to put the quietus on falsehoods, even as they portray imaginative errors that seem difficult to recognize and impossible to suppress. Reading novels would ‘habituate [the] mind to remark the difference between truth and fiction,’ William Hill Brown ventured, and yet the genre is known for portraying credulous heroines and—according to its detractors—inducing credulity in its readers.” What started as a question for literary criticism opened, under the influence of Ogden’s book, into a set of questions about the strategies for power—keeping it, justifying it, expanding it—that circulated at this moment in American cultural history. And whom those strategies were devised to control: Credulity turned out to give revelatory accounts of the lives of the clairvoyants like Cynthia Gleason and Lurena Brackett, who talked back to their mesmerists or brought across their own defiant sensibilities on the page. I found myself longing to hear more from them and grateful to Ogden for parsing the records they left. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments on articles or this newsletter to Matt Seaton and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. Lucy McKeon Associate Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](