Millet's masterpiece, entitled The
Angelus, is another, much more highly Romanticized version of the same
idea. Here is a scene neither of
revolution nor of war. We're on a simple
farm, looking at two humble peasants standing in prayer, alone in the fields at
dusk. In this landscape we actually do
see a church steeple far off in the background, and I think you know why. The Angelus depicts these two farm workers
ideally, as humble and reverent saints, the man taking his hat off, the woman
with her hands clasped as if in prayer, and both with their heads bowed. This shows them to be devout people
regardless of their poor economic status—maybe even more devout for being
"poor in spirit." The light
also (as always) represents God's presence; and here it is dramatically painted
with exaggerated tenebrism to stress the notion that His compassion descends
even toward the lower class. After all,
the center focus of this painting is on their piety, not the church way off in
the background. This natural faith of
the common man is idealized as the perfect form of Christianity. Jean-François Millet is artistically
associating nature, the lower class, and a simple farmer's faith with spiritual
perfection. We've come a long way from
grandiose artwork of Greek gods and biblical heroes. These two, simple, faceless workers are
nothing less than the heroes of the Modern age, and their plain, agrarian
landscape, the new stage for the great drama of life.
It's hard to look at this painting
without feeling a sense of profundity for the scene taking place, despite (or
probably because of) its humble setting and characters. In some ways, a deeply spiritual lesson or
moral from this "story" is almost inevitable, and it was for this
reason that future generations would lash against such a work. Artist Salvador Dalí satirized it with a
mock-recreation of the scene in his own painting with the same title as
Millet's work. (When we get to Dalí—still
a ways off—we will look at his painting).
The original painting, it can be argued, does not lend any praise to the
lower class at all but instead undermines its supposedly favorable
characterization of the poor through prescribing aristocratic traits onto
otherwise ignoble figures. This is very
Anti-imperialist. The feeling is that
only by showing these two peasants as subservient to the doctrines of Western
evangelicalism are they held to amount to any importance in society, in
government, and in the world as a whole.
(In other words, Millet's Angelus has been considered offensive for
trying to make the lower-class peasantry seem good only by bestowing
aristocratic traits on them—essentially, painting a portrait of the upper-class
merely in more ragged and rural settings).
Did it not seem a little ignorant and impious for Marie Antoinette to
dress up and play in her cottage Le Petit Hameau, pretending to be a member of
the lower class when, in reality, the lower class starved under her ineffective
reign? A similar charge is placed here.
This all stems back to the
Enlightenment idea of the "noble savage." Millet's Angelus is a portrait of the lower
class made "more likable" (for lack of a better way to put it) by
their religious piety. Just who is such
a painting in favor of? In the late
1600s, British Restoration writer Aphra Behn published a novel which best
demonstrates the point here. In her
novel, Oroonoko, the title character,
a captive, black slave from Africa, revolts against the British and tries to
reclaim the lost princess of his tribe and the love of his life, Imoinda. Our protagonist slave, nicknamed Caesar in
the story, fights barehanded against traitorous Africans, despicable white
slave traders, and even a wild tiger. He
is nothing if not heroic; but was this novel really in favor of the black
population and opposed to the slave trade?
If you read Oroonoko in its
entirety, it is impossible not to notice the glorious way in which Aphra Behn
describes her main character—particularly in such a way that makes the black
slave seem more like a white aristocrat.
The idea of the "noble savage" gets first introduced just five
paragraphs into the text, when the narrator describes her notion of "these
people represent[ing] to me an absolute idea of the first state of innocence,
before man knew how to sin." Caesar
is described as being well educated, highly anglicized, and "more
civilized, according to the European mode"—hardly a "savage." A description of him that presents him as
especially white, written in shockingly racist language by today's standards,
reads as follows:
He
was pretty tall, but of a shape the most exact that can be fancied. The most famous statuary could not form the
figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot. His face was not of that brown, rusty black
which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony or polished jet. His eyes were the most awful that could be
seen, and very piercing, the white of 'em being like snow, as were his
teeth. His nose was rising and Roman,
instead of African and flat; his mouth the finest shaped that could be seen,
far from those great turned lips which are so natural to the rest of the
Negroes. The whole proportion and air of
his face was so noble and exactly formed that, bating his color, there could be
nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable, and handsome. There was no one grace wanting that bears the
standard of true beauty. (Norton Anthology, p. 2317 – see citation at bottom)
So we see that there are some problems with the
Enlightenment concept of the noble savage: a major one being that it became easy
to simply impart aristocratic characteristics to the otherwise
"savage" figure in order to make him noble. Individual, natural nobility, then, cannot be
shown to exist independently of cultural upbringing, as the Enlightenment
philosophers purported to argue. There
is a fundamental flaw. What we think is
characterization of the savage is in fact disseminated aristocracy—another kind
of Versailles role-playing, dress-up game.
Likewise, Millet's Angelus is disputed for inaccurately portraying the
lower class as an altogether civilized, Christian, and humbly subservient class
of Western society. It is aristocrats
and kings, after all, who like to see peasants the way Millet paints them: with
their heads bowed.
Did I explain that properly? Probably not. At any rate, we are quite out on a limb here
and need to get back to the art. I bring
this up to reference the rising debate over British imperialism at this time
that will peak at the turn of the century and inspire artists and writers to,
perhaps for the first time, honestly assess the situation of racism in Western
culture. One of the ultimate literary
attacks on imperialism would be published by Joseph Conrad in 1899, the novella
Heart of Darkness (another book
containing highly controversial language thought today to be too racist for
some schools in the US and which has consequently earned a place in the
American Library Association's list of top banned books of the 20th
century).
Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The
Norton Anthology of English Literature. Comp. M. H. Abrams. 9th
ed. Vol. C. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print.
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