July 8th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Just A Girl And Her Snake
This is a detail from an 1880 painting called “The Serpent Charmer” by Jean-Leon Gerome:
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=2319
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=2319
A “GIRL” and her snake? You may want to rethink that old bean…
This fellow (Ivan Davidson Kalmar/University of Toronto) disagrees:
http://www.libr...h.htm
“The perception that Muslim males were not men enough to challenge a Western male partly explains the Western preoccupation with oriental homosexuality. In Gérôme’s The Serpent Charmer (illus. 11) warriors wearing costumes from different parts of the Ottoman empire watch a naked boy make a cobra rise to the sounds of a gourd pipe. They repose indolently on each side of the green-turbaned elder, who hold a long-stemmed pipe. The pipe’s long shape here echoes that of many of the weapons and the flute: the phallic, homoerotic and paedophile connotations of the whole need hardly be belaboured. Work like this no doubt helped some Western men (including Gérôme?) to externalise troubling features of their sexuality by projecting them onto the Muslim male.”
Strange… to me that looks much more like an adolescent boy!
I seriously think the naked figure is a boy. In the Muslim world, a girl past the age of 9 was never accepted to be outside in this fashion, not to mention the masculine features of the body. The painting is definitely portraying a Muslim community as evident by the wall of the mosque in the background, and the prayer rag on which the boy is standing
it looks more like a boy to me…
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Since there are no angels, there is no answer.
I have an abiding philosophical distaste for efforts to fix meanings into ambiguous art, because of the pointlessness of the enterprise. Given the lack of secondary sex characteristics visible, it is literally unknowable and unprovable whether the figure in the picture is male or female — because the figure in the picture has no literal existence and its gender is not unambiguously specified.
I said “girl” because I live in a cultural context where naked snake-charmers tend to be female, so the gender ambiguity of the scrawny figure in the image did not jump out at me. Affixing maleness to that figure in your head is just as legitimate as what I did, for whatever reasons you choose to do it. But trying to preference that opinion over a counter-opinion with which you disagree? What’s the point?
(And yes, I appreciate the comments with “to me” qualifiers. It helps, even if I remain baffled by enterprise of advancing firm opinions on fundamentally undefined issues.)
Well, it seems (to me) perfectly reasonable to analyze a piece of art, taking into consideration the cultural context of the artist, and the artist’s probable knowledge and concept of the subject matter (specifically, Muslim culture), and conclude that it is vastly more likely that the artist intended that figure to be male rather than female. So I don’t think the issues are fundamentally undefined. I’m with Dr. Whiplash on this one.
Nice choice of picture for a discussion topic, though! Thanks!
I would argue that nothing has any meaning but what we assign to it individually. That includes art.
What do you mean by that?
;-)
Same thought here: “Girl?”. But I wouldn’t be posting if I didn’t find your apology, Bacchus, slightly absurd.
If you had posted an illustration of a poorly-sketched Medusa going down on Perseus, and captioned it “Snake-on-Man-on-Man Action”, you would have received essentially the same comments and could have made essentially the same point in your defense.
I can appreciate, however, that you get tired of having folks waxing pedantic while browsing your generous contributions. What to do about it? Whatever you want, I suppose. It’s your blog.
Absurd or not, my comment was in no way intended as an apology. Rather, it was round four-million-and-nine in my ongoing disparagement of people trying to score “you’re wrong!” points on the internet.
I have a fundamental philosophical objection to people who try to make “that IS” arguments about art. Art never IS anything, it creates impressions in people’s heads.
In this case, the impression created in my head differed markedly from the impression most commonly created in people’s heads. Which is fine, but I do not apologize for it.
What I do not understand, and what I will not tolerate on my blog, is people trying to tell me that the impression created in my head was wrong, in a situation where there is, and can be, no objective truth because there never was any objective reality of which this picture is a representation.
The absurdity I see is found in the arguments based on academic analysis or artist intent. I cheerfully admit that I am not parsing this piece of art the way the majority does. But I am not wrong because it is impossible to be wrong in looking at art.
As for what I can do about it, this comment thread is already missing about half a dozen comments from people trying even harder to prove how wrong I am, with mannerisms more rude than I am prepared to tolerate. I particularly liked the “you’re obviously wrong, get over it” comment, but not enough to publish it in full.
Hm… I can understand that on a blog like this, the comments are likely overwhelming. But to use your own philosophy, I came to the site, I read your title (ie, ‘girl’), and then looked at the image presented, with gender firmly implanted in my mind.
And found that my impression was different.
I didn’t mean to suggest your impression was wrong, but it certainly wasn’t the one that was imparted to me when looking at the art. And it would be interesting perhaps, to talk about why you had the impression you did, and why I had the impression I did, as a way of understanding the visual qualities that one looks to when assigning gender.
But the conversation clearly got judgmental, and that’s a shame. Because intelligent debate or sharing should be encouraged, whereas I agree, finger pointing or demeaning commentary should not.
At any rate, I considered the relative shortness of the hair, the proportion of the hips and buttocks, how the derrier dimples in from the side, and the massing of the thighs- all of which just spoke of youthful masculinity to me.
And rather attractively at that! Thanks for sharing the photo….
Agreed that there is indeed no point and no place for people stomping around your blog declaring your interpretation to be wrong.
To clarify my post, I meant “apology” as in “speaking in defense” as opposed to “acknowledging wrongdoing and expressing regret”. Tragically unclear, admittedly.
Thanks for your perseverance as a blogger!
K, I agree, that could be an interesting conversation to have. As I’ve noted, my interpretation was more the result of not looking very closely, plus preconceptions based on the fact that I’ve seen lots of burlesque photos of naked ladies doing snake charm dances. Doing a mostly-hetero sex blog from the male perspective, there’s a part of my visual processing that sees “naked” and parses “female” unless there are obvious male features; if I don’t stop and study carefully, sometimes I don’t give an ambiguous depiction like this the attention it deserves.
All right, I’m getting tired of deleting more comments devoted to telling me just how wrong I am about whether the butt in this picture has a dick attached to the back side, behind the frame where it rubs against the wall. Apparently the world of academia is in unanimous agreement, there’s semen running down the wall where this painting hangs.
The urgency and certainty of that point of view continues to strike me as unutterably bizarre. Fortunately, my blog is the one place in the world where I can demand, and get, the last word in an interminable argument about philosophy. Thread locked.