"You were an actor with your handkerchief": Women, Windows, and Moral Agency

Abstract

"You were an actor with your handkerchief":Women, Windows, and Moral Agency Cynthia Lewis (bio) I. In Room 34, at the far reaches of Washington, DC's National Gallery of Art, hangs Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's painting Two Women at a Window, dating from the mid-seventeenth century (fig. 1). As spectators in the room come and go, this painting attracts the notice of observers more frequently, sooner, and for a longer time than do the other eight paintings in the small space. The reason is clear: the two women at the window look directly at viewers, engaging their eyes. The younger woman, a beauty, rests her cheek on her hand, her off-shoulder gown revealing soft, milky flesh. She appears welcoming. The older woman, by contrast, is swathed in her generous mantilla, which she holds up over her face, just below her eyes. The two figures, the one leaning forward virtually into the spectator's space and the other, standing behind her so as to draw the spectator into the painting's space, illustrate much about how parallel instances of women at windows work in early modern English drama. In both cases, women framed by windows involve their audience in moral dilemmas, moral questions, or moral concerns. Just who Murillo's women are underscores this point. Are they chaperone and charge, procuress and prostitute? How innocent or enticing is that girl's smile? Does the older woman's pose arouse or discourage interest? Is her shawl a means of flirtation or a socially polite cover for her smile? All such interpretations have been advanced; none has been thoroughly substantiated.1 The framing device of the window raises additional questions. What occurs on the other side of the window, which [End Page 473] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Two Women at a Window, c. 1655/60, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. [End Page 474] the viewer sees only as black background? Are the women confined within the building or free to come and go? If they are confined, how do they feel? Is their apparent contentment put on for their audience's benefit? How much choice do they enjoy? Murillo's painting is but one of many in the period centered on the image of one or two women at a window. Surely the most influential in its day was Rembrandt's Young Girl Leaning on a Window-Sill or, alternatively, Girl at a Window, dated 1645 and housed now in London's Dulwich Gallery (fig.2). Poised in the liminal space between indoors and outdoors, private and public, Rembrandt's girl captivates her audience in a manner that art historian Görel Cavalli-Björkman says derives from earlier Renaissance portraiture: The face-to-face exchange makes each participant simultaneously the beholder and the beheld. The sitters adopt self-conscious poses that are oriented toward being seen. The experience of viewing appears to be mutual and shared, and consequently the surface of the image confuses, rather than upholds, the division between inside and outside the frame, and complicates the parallel distinction between I and thou. (emphasis mine)2 Neither decidedly innocent nor sexual, the girl, according to art historian Ann Sumner, has been identified variously as "a relative of Rembrandt, a servant and even a prostitute."3 However obscure her identity, it matters. As the title of Cavalli-Björkman's article on the painting indicates, she is in "A Dialogue with the Beholder": who she is determines, in a sense, who her beholder is. The less certain her character seems, the less certain becomes the viewer's relationship to her and, by extension, the viewer's own character. Rembrandt painted other women at windows—for example, The Kitchen Maid (1651)—and inspired many other artists, both in his lifetime and long after, to do so.4 Another girl at a window, dated 1654 and rendered by an unidentified follower of Rembrandt, changes slightly the dynamic between subject and spectator because the young woman is looking askance, rather than directly at the audience (fig. 3).5 Still, as in the earlier Girl at a Window, questions abound here...