DOI Heft:
Nr. 2
DOI Artikel:Henshaw, Julia Plummer: Images of Women in Polish Symbolist Art
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18901#0057
18. Józef Mehoffer, The Strange Garden, 1903, Warsaw, Muzeum Narodowe
be no middle ground between the wild, naked sensual being and the chaste, proper wife, whose
carefully contrived appearance responds to the expectations of society and reflects her husband’s
wealth and respectability10. Men depended on their wives to provide them with much more than
mere sexual pleasure, a commodity that could be easily found elsewhere. Nor, of course, were
respectable middle-class women of the late nineteenth-century expected to take pleasure in sex.
It is indeed „a paradoxical situation that while patriarchy tends to convert woman to a sexual
object, she has not been encouraged to enjoy the sexuality which is agreed to be her fate”11.
To return to the theme of the femme fatale and the work of Weiss, it is impossible to overlook
the large and rather advanced painting Obsession (1899/1900, Adam Mickiewicz Museum of
10. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899.
11. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Garden City, N. Y., 1970, p. 119.
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be no middle ground between the wild, naked sensual being and the chaste, proper wife, whose
carefully contrived appearance responds to the expectations of society and reflects her husband’s
wealth and respectability10. Men depended on their wives to provide them with much more than
mere sexual pleasure, a commodity that could be easily found elsewhere. Nor, of course, were
respectable middle-class women of the late nineteenth-century expected to take pleasure in sex.
It is indeed „a paradoxical situation that while patriarchy tends to convert woman to a sexual
object, she has not been encouraged to enjoy the sexuality which is agreed to be her fate”11.
To return to the theme of the femme fatale and the work of Weiss, it is impossible to overlook
the large and rather advanced painting Obsession (1899/1900, Adam Mickiewicz Museum of
10. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899.
11. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Garden City, N. Y., 1970, p. 119.
47