Marni Reva Kessler. Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet's Paris. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 215 Pages. ISBN: 0816647828.

Marni Reva Kessler's Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet's Paris explores nineteenth-century conceptions of femininity, sexuality, public health, vision, imperialism, colonialism, urbanism, and modernist art practices through an analysis of a variety of representations of the veil. While Manet's Paris—the Paris of the Second Empire and early Third Republic—has been the subject of much research, Kessler's approach to the city and the modern culture it produced, through an exploration of the veil, is provocative in its interdisciplinary engagement with the subject.

The title, with its reference to the painter Édouard Manet, clearly reveals that Kessler's approach is art historical. One of her more interesting claims is that there is a connection between the veil's prevalence in the visual culture of the time and developing modernist artistic practices, as exemplified by the works of Manet, Caillebotte, Renoir, Morisot, and Degas. According to Kessler, these artists represented the veil as a convenient means for showcasing their technical skills in representation. However, in her use of a variety of source materials, Kessler's arguments are most interesting and relevant when they venture away from a traditional art historical analysis of paintings. Looking at the veil's appearance in a variety of cultural artefacts, including contemporary fashion journals, promotional materials for the 1889 Exposition of Paris, early documentary photography, and literary texts by Zola, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, Kessler makes it clear that the veil's emergence in Paris during the Second Empire was produced by and productive of a set of bourgeois expectations about class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the role of women in urban life.

The first chapter, “Pathologizing the Second Empire City,” proposes that the emergence of the veil in French culture at this time articulates and structures the relationship between the bourgeois woman and the burgeoning modern city of late nineteenth century Paris—a city that emerged under Napoleon III and the urban development projects of Baron Haussmann. Kessler's narrative is straightforward: the demolition projects necessary for the success of Haussmann's developments meant that dust filled the city, itself a tacit signifier of a kind of “cultural chaos, disorder, and change” (1). As a shield against the harmful consequences of the dust—both literal and abstract—on bourgeois women's health and habits, the veil was advertised as a solution to this perceived threat by both medical and fashion discourses.

The chapter goes on to outline the ways that dirt and dust participated in general “social anxieties over a perceived breakdown in class structure and moral behaviour,” so that by the middle of the nineteenth century “the bourgeoisie was obsessed with filth, degeneration and infection” (1, 15). What is significant is that the literal discourse of dirt was linked to prostitution and the attendant moral and social threat of contamination it represented to bourgeois society. In this context the veil became a class signifier used to distinguish the proper woman from her urban counterpart, “the prostitute.” By the 1860s, medical discourse expanded to include ideas of public and urban hygiene and Kessler's archival sleuthing provides fascinating contemporary articles and images (reproduced in the text) that demonstrate the simultaneous proliferation of discourses of femininity and fashion as well as discourses of hygiene and public health—all of which participate in the ideological construction of the veil. “Pathologizing the Second Empire City” argues that these emergent modern discourses operated to produce the appropriately attired bourgeois woman's body.

Chapter two, “Making up the Surface,” and chapter three, “Unmasking Manet's Morisot, or Veiling Subjectivity,” expand on the contradictory expectations of women and femininity at this time. The proper bourgeoise's make-up had to remain subtle, as a means of distinguishing her from prostitutes whose make-up was more pronounced. Thus make-up has the ability to make a woman both conventionally beautiful and the epitome of vice, and Kessler argues that the veil “was an object of artifice that could enable a proper woman to vacillate between a straightforward adherence to propriety and a staging of falsity, mystery and sexuality” (51). Wearing a veil would allow a woman to appear respectable, while beneath the surface she “could have invested herself with the qualities we have been led to believe were wholly dissociated from her” (51). Chapter three also looks at Manet's representations of his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot and at her own work, revealing a kind of “family drama” of infatuation and artistic jealousy that ultimately highlights the “precariousness of the position of woman artist—her unclassifiable status—during the second half of the nineteenth century”(63). Kessler sets about answering the following question:

Why then does Édouard Manet, in his series of paintings of Berthe Morisot, go against this social expectation by representing her with an increasingly convoluted facial terrain that would have been inconsistent with contemporary notions of perfect beauty for a woman of her class? . . . Manet is quite directly positioning Morisot within a category of femininity that would have stood outside bourgeois propriety (62).

Indeed, Kessler suggests that while their alliance was “strictly collegial,” it is through the manifold objects included in the portraits—lace handkerchiefs, a fan, a ribbon around her neck—that Morisot is represented not as an artist, but as a “well-brought up young woman, sitting inactively, not engaged in work” (72). By contrast, Morisot's self-portraits rewrite Manet's versions of her, and consistently cast light on her tenuous position as a working mother in late-nineteenth-century France.

Chapter four, “The Other Side of the Veil,” looks at the veil as an object that participated in establishing cultural differences between urban life in France and French imperial and colonialist projects happening elsewhere at this time. The veil registers “gender and cultural differences, circumscribes ocular experience, and potentially proposes alternative and appropriate ways of being acceptably feminine” (99). Kessler suggests that the popularization of the veil in Paris of the Second Empire was partly the result of its reference to the Muslim veil and its connotations of “gender, class, sexual differences, mystery, the forbidden, vision, colonialism, power”(101–2). Indeed Kessler's research, indebted to Edward Said's Orientalism, demonstrates that the reinvention of the veil, “the revision of a garment, typically associated with colonial culture, in order to make it suit modern urban needs, is part of an even more general move toward making the Orient, and interest in the Orient, fashionable” (127). Kessler makes the obvious, but frequently overlooked, point that while the Muslim veil granted women vision and limited their visibility, the veiled bourgeoise was bodily visible yet her vision was filtered through the lace of her veil.

While Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet's Paris is multifaceted in its approach to the veil, using a variety of cultural materials as objects of inquiry, the preponderance of images and the extensive analysis and critique of these should have merited at least some color reproductions, particularly where color is discussed explicitly. Nonetheless, Kessler incorporates into the overall project some very curious and wonderful anecdotes, which seem to typify the nineteenth century and provide a lively image of the culture in general. The book successfully engages with the veil as a polymorphous signifier, as both object and symbol, which was deeply enmeshed in the cultural developments of French history.