Disobedient

I really wanted to finish this novel, but I became way too sickened by it at the 50% point, which is where the famous rape takes place. Not because of the rape itself– I know about Artemisia Gentileschi's life and I knew what I was getting into. No, what put me off was the incredible historical inaccuracy, all to push a really stupid point.

The book really wants to push this reductive men vs women angle, at the expense of every character except Artemisia herself, and perhaps her rapist Tassi. It belittles her father Orazio and is entirely incorrect on the way that the culture surrounding painting in Baroque Italy operated. I was not an expert on this subject before I read the book, and I don't consider myself one now. These are all things I learned from cursory research, which the author either ignored or didn't find in the first place.

It was not considered scandalous or disobedient for a woman to paint a nude woman. Why would it be? It's not like lesbianism was a popular subject– it doesn't even arise in what I read of the book. If you look at Gentileschi's work, it's full of nude women, often depicted in erotic poses. This was because a woman posing for a woman painter was considered more proper, and less like prostitution, which is a commerce that, according to Italians at the time, operated between men and women, not women and women.

There is a scene where Gentileschi decries Caravaggio's Judith as being too sexual– after all, we can see the shape of her nipples through her dress. Yet to accuse Caravaggio of a prurient interest in women is frankly hilarious; Gentileschi's work has far more naked female skin than Caravaggio's! Caravaggio's sexuality is famously debated over, then and now, because Caravaggio's favorite subjects are young men in various states of undress.

The book goes on to decry paintings showing too much nudity, as though nudity equals sexuality– something the book itself wants to address in scenes where its heroine champions her right to study the body and anatomy! And yet it still falls back on lazy stereotypes that evil men draw sexy paintings while good girl Gentileschi paints morally pure Art. It seems totally unaware of the fact that the viewer brings their own interests to the work, as in any art form. There's a scene where Gentileschi is horrified that a man might find her Susannah and the Elders painting sexy, and yet previously she bemoaned how other artists cavalierly depict female nudity. It's okay when she does it, but not them.

The book makes Gentileschi's father, Orazio, into a bumbling idiot with no talent, even though several years after the events of this book take place, he becomes a noted patron of Queen Henrietta Maria, the woman after whom Maryland was named. Orazio also scorns Caravaggio multiple times in the book, saying his interest in light and shadow is passe and that his work is gruesome– when in reality both Orazio and his daughter are considered Caravaggisti. The book also depicts him as unable to appreciate his daughter's work, when it was a matter of record that he boasted about her talents.

It does all this to further the idea that Artemisia was ahead of her time, that the establishment (men) couldn't understand her, and that she had feminism all figured out before it had ever been invented. The book depicts Artemisia as right at every turn, about everything, too talented to be properly understood, and with goals that are incomprehensible to her male contemporaries– all things that are entirely untrue, even inside the novel itself. A huge amount of fretting is spent depicting how Artemisia isn't free, how she can't go wherever she wants, how she is constantly chaperoned, yet her rapist attempts to assault her when she is without a chaperone. The book puts this down as a weird irony, and no more is said on the subject. The book's internal logic is broken.

In the end, the feminism in this book is reductive, second wave at best, terf-y at worst. The motif of the Hermaphroditus figure appears as an attempt for Artemisia to grasp at breaking the gender binary, and there's a lovely scene where she draws a man in a dress to try and better understand gender taboos. This scene is rendered obsolete by her later using the story to scare away a potential suitor. Breaking the gender binary is fine when she's in control of it, but the bodies of nonbinary / trans / gnc people are also useful as a medium of disgust and horror.

I read historical fiction so I can go back in time, and see the morals and cultures of a past era. I don't read historical fiction to learn historically fictitious tales about how everyone was wrong except one woman who has an entirely anachronistic view of the world, presumably from birth. It's boring, ideologically reductive, and incredibly uncreative.