The Woman in White: Whistler, Hiffernan, Courbet, Du Maurier

Daly, Nicholas.
Modernism/modernity, Volume 12, Number 1, January 2005, pp. 1-25 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2005.0039
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DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
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MODERNISM / modernity
VOLUME TWELVE, NUMBER
ONE, PP 125.
2005 THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Woman in White: Whistler, Hiffernan,
Courbet, Du Maurier
Nicholas Daly
The early 1860s are white years. The arrival of sensation as
a byword for the breathlessly modern in these years (as in sen-
sation drama, sensation novel, sensation paragraph) seems
curiously wedded to that color. To be more precise, the sensa-
tion era is ushered in by a series of female figures identified
with whiteness. In The Woman in White, Wilkie Collinss semi-
nal sensation novel of 18591860, drawing-master Walter
Hartright becomes embroiled in a complicated plot by villains
Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco to steal a young womans
identity. The first of many narrative shocks comes in the form of
his chance moonlit encounter with a mysterious young woman,
Anne Catherick, dressed all in white, who is fleeing from a pri-
vate asylum for the insane. The first of the special-effects-driven
sensation plays to make an impact in London was Dion
Boucicaults The Colleen Bawn (1860), in which the son of the
manor tries to extricate himself from a secret marriage to a poor
young woman, Eily OConnor, by having her murdered. The title
derives from the Irish cailn bn, sometimes translated darling
girl, but literally meaning white or fair-haired girl. Like The
Woman in White, The Colleen Bawn was a huge popular suc-
cess, and inspired a whole range of spin-offs, including an opera
whose title continues the white theme, The Lily of Killarney.
Perhaps the floral title of the opera offers us one clue to what
whiteness might mean in this context: vulnerabilitythese hero-
ines are pure and delicate blossoms; orphans of the storm that is
modernity, or angels cast out of the house into a cold world. To
this extent these women in white might be seen to represent
Nicholas Daly is a
lecturer in the School
of English at Trinity
College Dublin, and a
Fellow of the College.
His previous publica-
tions include Modernism,
Romance, and the Fin de
Sicle (Cambridge
University Press, 1999)
and Literature, Technology,
and Modernity
(Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
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sensation-era revivals of the figures of virtue in distress that are at the heart of all
nineteenth-century melodrama.
But whiteness was also finding its way into the fine-art galleries, notably the Berners
Street Gallery, where a painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Woman in
White, was exhibited in the summer of 1862. Better known now as Symphony in White
No. 1: The White Girl, or simply The White Girl (and this is the title that I will use
here), this was the first of his attempts at a new type of painterly painting. The girl
was the young Joanna (Jo) Hiffernan (sometimes Heffernan), Whistlers Irish model
and mistress, who appears in many of his other works of the 1860s: Wapping (1861);
(probably) The Lange Leizen of the 6 Marks (1864); Symphony in White No. 2: The
Little White Girl (1864); Symphony in White No. 3 (18651867); The Artists Studio
(1865); Whistler in His Studio (1865), as well as the uncompleted White Note (1861
1862), and the dry-point sketch, Weary (1863).
1
In The White Girl Hiffernan, wearing
a simple white muslin dress, stands on a wolf-skin before a white curtain, her long,
loose red hair providing a brilliant contrast to her pale surroundings (Fig. 1). Rejected
by the Royal Academy earlier in the year, the painting caused a sensation when it
appeared in June at Matthew Morgans new gallery. In 1863 it appeared in the Salon
des Refuss at the Palais de lIndustrie in Paris, where together with Manets Le Bain,
later retitled Djeuner sur lherbe, it again created a sensation.
With The Woman in White Whistler wished to break with the classical conception
of paintings with content: a picture should have nothing to do with fictional or his-
torical sources outside itself; nor should it have any narrative content of its own. As the
later title, Symphony in White, No. 1, suggests, the aim was to subordinate content to
form; we are to approach the painting not as a representation of a particular young
woman, be it the fictional Anne Catherick as the original title seemed to indicate, or of
the real Jo Hiffernan, or even as a figure for all young women, but as an artistic com-
position true to its own internal formal principles. Whistler adopted this new musical
title from a review in the Gazette Des Beaux Arts of July 1863 by the French critic,
Paul Mantz, who had described the painting as a symphonie du blanc. He may also
have been thinking of the principles of color-use proposed by Michel-Eugne Chevreul,
the first English translation of whose work appeared in 1854 as The Principles of Har-
mony and Contrast of Colours, though theories that linked complementary colors with
harmony in music had been around since Isaac Newtons Opticks.
2
There may be an-
other meaning to the later title, of course: Symphony in White, No. 1 also suggests a
symphony in White No. 1, that is, a commercially available painters pigment.
3
This
pun further emphasizes the painterly aspect of the piece, drawing our attention to its
actual physical nature as paint on canvas. In any case, the later title makes clear that
the subject of the painting is not the girl, but color, whiteness itself, the choice of
white over some other color perhaps signaling an ambition to work with the least con-
trastive of tints (cf. the term white work used in embroidery). Imbued with such a
will to bravura minimalism, Whistlers work may appear to us less a symphony than a
five-finger exercise; one thinks of Gustave Courbets claim that he learned to paint by
drawing a white vase on a white serviette.
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Fig. 1. James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in
White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862). National
Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
How, then, can we link Whistlers white girl with those other white women of the
1860s without foundering on the rocks of self-referentiality? Insofar as The White Girl
has a context at all, surely it is not such stuff as sensation drama or sensation novels,
but art itself: synchronically the mid-Victorian narrative painting that Whistler re-
jectedWilliam Powell Friths enormously successful Railway Station, for instance,
then on view in the Haymarket, admission one shillingor diachronically, by affilia-
tion, the bold handling of figures that Whistler admired in the portraits of Velasquez?
I will attempt to show otherwise. In the first section of this essay I will argue that The
White Girl is very much of the sensation era, and moreover that it depends for its
success on the same shock effects that sustained the sensation novel and drama. In
short, I will be suggesting that aestheticism and sensation are formed in the same
modern cultural matrix.
But what about the girl in Whistlers White Girl? Does she simply motivate the
device through which the painting achieves its particular effects? Is she subsumed
into the symphony? Or, to ask a somewhat different question, what is the status of the
model in the work of non-mechanical reproduction during the years of aestheticism?
To answer these questions I want to turn in the second part of this essay to George Du
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Mauriers enormously successful 1894 reanimation of the sensation novel, Trilby. Mar-
rying a nostalgic evocation of Bohemian life in the Paris of the late 1850s to a sensa-
tional plot involving occult mesmeric powers, it captivated readers on both sides of the
Atlantic when it appeared in Harpers Magazine, and generated a wave of Trilbymania,
a passionate popular interest in anything even remotely connected to the novel. Du
Maurier met Whistler in Paris in the 1850s, and they moved in the same circles in
London in the early 1860s. As is well known, the painter forced his one-time room-
mate to remove from the novel the character of Joe Sibley, the idle apprentice, a
talented but feckless Bohemian who was quite clearly based on him. I want to argue,
though, that the novel returns us to their shared past more directly still, and that Trilby
offers us not just an insight into Du Mauriers mixed feelings about his Bohemian
youth and a few side-swipes at the aesthetic movement, but also a Gothicized narra-
tive of the relationships among Whistler, his model-mistress, and the artwork. By evoking
a very different painting of the 1860s, Gustave Courbets infamous secret painting,
LOrigine du Monde, Trilby offers a skeptical account of Whistlers avant-garde ambi-
tions.
White Girls
Whistler spent his apprentice years in Paris, where he sometimes worked at the
studio of Charles Gleyre (Monet, Renoir, and Sisley would also study there). There he
became friendly with a number of British artists, including the Anglo-French Du
Maurier, the two of them becoming frequent visitors at the studio apartment of Tho-
mas Armstrong, Thomas Lamont, and Edward Poynter in the Rue Notre Dame des
Champs, later the model for the studio in Trilby. In 1859 Whistler came to live and
work in Londonwhile maintaining strong ties to Parisrenting a studio-cum-flat at
70 Newman Street in Chelsea, which he later sublet to Du Maurier, while continuing
to use it himself at times. He seems to have been attracted by two types of modern
English subjects in these years: bourgeois interiors, like At the Piano (1859), and paint-
ings and etchings of the low life of the Rotherhithe docks, such as Wapping (1861).
The impressionistic interior, At the Piano, was accepted at the Royal Academy exhibi-
tion in 1860, as was a portrait, La Mre Grard, in 1861.
4
Whistlers Tamise work is
very different in subject, though not in treatment. In a letter to his mother, Du Maurier
describes Whistler at work on Wapping in October of 1860: I see less of him now, for
he is working hard and in secret down in Rotherhithe, among a beastly set of cads and
every possible annoyance and misery, doing one of the greatest chefs doeuvresno
difficulty discourages him.
5
Wapping depicts a scene in a tavern overlooking the busy
Thames in which a red-haired young woman (Hiffernan), perhaps meant to be a pros-
titute, sits at a table with two men, the human commerce in the foreground doubling
the scenes of maritime commerce in the background. Patricia de Montfort suggests
that its risqu theme marks it as a sensation painting, a piece meant to shock the
sensibilities of its original viewers (WM, 80). Yet despite some mixed reviews, the
painting was hung, and was sold. In 1862 his etchings were considered good enough to
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be part of the British section at the International Exhibition then taking place in Lon-
don, and were favorably reviewed. In terms of Whistlers general reception in London,
then, The White Girl was a decided anomaly.
Though first exhibited in London, The White Girl was actually painted in Paris in
the winter of 1861, in a studio on the Boulevard des Batignolles. In a letter of Febru-
ary 1862 to Tom Armstrong, Du Maurier relates Whistlers account of the painting and
the effect he was aiming at: Besides this [Breton painting] he is painting the woman
in whiteRed-haired party, life size, in a beautiful white cambric dress, standing against
a window which filters the light through a transparent white muslin curtainbut the
figure receives a strong light from the right and therefore the picture barring the red
hair is one gorgeous mass of brilliant white. My notion is that it must be a marvellously
brilliant thingyou can fancy how he described it (L, 1048, 105).
The first to succumb to the paintings brilliant composition was Whistler himself,
according to Du Maurier in a letter to Armstrong of March 1862: The woman in
white is nearly finishedJim working at it all the winter from 8 in the morning; got
painters colic very severely, but worked pluckily through it all (L, 11722, 118). Painters
colic, or lead poisoning, was the natural result of Whistlers exposure to the massive
quantities of lead white, essentially lead carbonate hydroxide, 2PbCO3.Pb(OH)2, that
he was using to achieve his spectacular effects (it would be some years before painters
fully adopted the less dangerous zinc white).
6
Soon, the paintings intoxicating effect
was felt by others. Sensation is the term Hiffernan herself uses to capture the reac-
tion to it in a letter of June 16, 1862 to Whistlers American friend, George Lucas: the
White Girl has made a fresh sensationfor and against. Some stupid painters dont
understand it, while [John Everett] Millais for instance thinks it splendid, more like
Titian . . . but Jim says that for all that perhaps the old duffers [that is, the hanging
committee of the Royal Academy] may refuse it altogether.
7
Why did Whistler so clearly anticipate a negative reaction, when the old duffers
had not shown themselves to be altogether inimical to his earlier work? A painting like
At the Piano, though, was probably already rather on the fringe of what the art es-
tablishment considered acceptable. Classical, religious, and historical painting still
commanded the greatest prestige in the Academy, though landscape and portraiture
also had their place. Genre painting, particularly the painting of modern life, was best
received when it had a topical theme or narrative component, like Friths Derby Day,
or Railway Station. Whistler himself describes the inimical art culture of the 1860s
within which he tried to create a niche for his own work:
It was the era of the subject. And, at last, on Varnishing Day, there was the subject in all
its glorywonderful. The British subject! Like a flash the inspiration camethe Inven-
tor! And in the Academy there you saw him: the familiar modelthe soldier or the Ital-
ianand there he sat, hands on knees, head bent, brows knit, eyes staring; in a corner,
angels and cogwheels and things; close to him his wife, cold, ragged, the baby in her arms;
he had failed! The story was told; it was as clear as dayamazing! The British subject!
What. (LJMW, 58)
8
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At the Piano could just about be accommodated within this world; The White Girl
could not, and the committee of the Royal Academy did refuse his subject-less paint-
ing (two smaller canvases were accepted: The Thames in Ice and The Coast of Brit-
tany). Whistler avenged himself in a minor way by describing it in the catalogue as
Rejected at the Academy when he exhibited it at Matthew Morgans Berners Street
Gallery, part of his effort to [wage] open war with the academy.
9
What repulsed the
art establishment was not so much its themethe suggestive Wapping would be ac-
cepted by the Academy in 1864but its apparent lack of one, and scarcely better, its
impressionistic treatment.
Although any viewers at the Berners Street gallery who had seen the Times adver-
tisement (Now on VIEW, at the Gallery, 14 Berners Street, Oxford Street,
WHISTLERS extraordinary PICTURE of the WOMAN IN WHITE. Admission 1s,
including the gallery of 150 paintings), or the similar sandwich-board ads, must have
been expecting something unusual, they seem to have been no more willing than the
Academy to accept readily a painting without a subject, and they were equally per-
plexed by the paintings lack of finish.
10
Here is the reviewer of the Athenaeum:
The most prominent [painting] is a striking but incomplete picture by Mr James Whistler
. . . Able as this bizarre production shows Mr Whistler to be, we are certain that in a few
years he will recognize the reasons for its rejection [by the Academy]. It is one of the most
incomplete paintings we have ever met with. A woman in a quaint morning dress of
white, with her hair about her shoulders, stands alone in the background of nothing in
particular. But for the rich vigour of the textures, we might conceive this to be some old
portrait by Zucchero, or a pupil of his, practising in a provincial town.
11
In 1862 Whistlers attempt to modernize painting was interpreted not as modern, but
as incomplete, or as the work of some kind of curious throwback. As for the subject,
viewers supplied their own narrative context, assuming that Whistlers startling exer-
cise in color was really an attempt to illustrate Wilkie Collinss The Woman in White:
the Athenaeum reviewer continued, the face is well done, but it is not that of Mr.
Wilkie Collinss Woman in White.
This assumption that Collinss novel was Whistlers real subject had, to be fair,
some basis, since the painting had been hung with the title The Woman in White, and
advertised as such. Written by the son of an R. A., and with a drawing-master as its
hero, it is a novel that implicitly compares visual art and narrative, and the midnight
appearance of the fey Anne Catherick, dressed from head to foot in white garments
is the novels iconic moment.
12
Moreover, Collinss novel was such a luminous success
in the early 1860s that it is easy to imagine how visitors to the gallery might see the
painting in its after-glow even without the prodding of publicity: in 1862 an unofficial
stage version of the novel was packing them in at the Surrey Theatre, and there was
also a Woman in White perfume, two dances (the Fosco Galop and the Woman in
White Waltz), and various other spin-offs and parodies such as Watts Phillipss play,
The Woman in Mauve. So wide were the ripples that spread out from the novel that
Whistlers friend and sublessee, Du Maurier, illustrated one of these parodies, F. C.
Burnands Mokeanna, Or the White Witness, which appeared in Punch in 1863 (Fig. 2).
13
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If Whistler wished to free painting from narrative, and from the tyranny of the
Subject, he had made a very curious choice: in 1862 it would have been hard to keep a
painting of any white-clad female figure out of the powerful orbit of Collinss novel.
Though he was presumably quite happy with the free publicity generated by the asso-
ciations made between his narrative-free painting and the novel, he affected other-
wise, and began what would be a long career of writing letters to the press by inform-
ing the Athenaeum that the gallery had added the title without his sanction: I had
no intention whatever of illustrating Mr Wilkie Collinss novel; it so happens, indeed,
that I have never read it. My painting simply represents a girl dressed in white, stand-
ing in front of a white curtain.
14
This seems somewhat disingenuous, since Du Maurier
refers to the painting as the woman in white as early as February 1862, which sug-
gests that Whistler had in fact at some point used that title, even if he had not read
Collinss novel. And whether or not he had read the novel, he could hardly have failed
to notice its many spin-offs, and indeed the more general pervasiveness of the sensa-
tion phenomenon. Years later, in his Ten OClock lecture of 1885, he would pour
scorn on those art critics who treat pictures like novels, and always try to find out the
plot; and yet in this picture he seems to be teasing us to find just such a novelistic
connection.
The painting created just as much of a stir when it reappeared in Paris the following
year at the Salon des Refuss, the alternative exhibition ordered by Napoleon III to
accommodate the many works that had been rejected by the committee for that years
official Salon. (The extra Salon can be seen to be part of the bread and circuses laid on
by the monarch to shore up popular docility in the face of his autocratic rule, part of
that mid-century consumers paradise in which Walter Benjamin read the shape of
Fig. 2. George Du Maurier, illustration for Mokeanna, or, The White Witness, Punch, 1863.

12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 7

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things to come.) According to some reports, Whistlers work was more a succs pour
rire, than succs de scandale, generating ridicule as much as shock (the reaction of the
Parisian crowd is described in Zolas LOeuvre [1886]). English critic Philip Hamerton
describes how each group who passed the painting stopped instantly, struck with
amazement . . . then they always looked at each other and laughed.
15
Some were more
deeply impressed, though. Paul Mantz commented on the paintings strange charm in
the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and coined the term Symphonie du blanc. Fernand
Desnoyers described Whistler as le plus spirite des peintres and the painting as a
portrait of a spirit, a medium, in his pamphlet on the Salon (LJMW, 74). Whistlers
friend, Henri Fantin-Latour, wrote to say that Baudelaire finds it charming . . . .
Legros, Manet, Bracquemond, de Balleroy and myself; we all think its admirable.
Gustave Courbet, reported Fantin, was also struck by the works spiritual quality: [he]
calls your picture an apparition, with a spiritual content (this annoys him); he says its
good (WB, 86).
What was so unusual about this genre painting of a young woman in a white dress
that caused viewers in England and France to be baffled by it, to attack it, to take
refuge in laughter, but also in some cases to see it as strangely powerful? As I have
suggested, it was not the sort of painting that the Royal Academy favored, but the
depth of the reaction to it suggests that there were other factors at work in its recep-
tion. In fact, although the viewers of 1862 may have been wrong in seeing Whistlers
White Girl as an illustration of The Woman in White, I think they were on to some-
thing. The White Girl is not so much an illustration of Collinss sensation novel as its
analogue: it is a sensation painting, though not quite in the sense that Wapping is.
In the case of the drama and the novel, the term sensation testified to a common
awareness that there was something qualitatively different about these forms, that
they were somehow intimately connected to the modern, to the industrialization of
everyday life. One aspect of sensation drama was that it placed the audience within a
permanent present: not just through setting, but also through the techniques of sus-
pense, the audience was radically interpellated into the drama. As I have argued else-
where, the sensation novel worked along similar lines, producing an essentially so-
matic effect on its readers, what H. L. Mansel memorably called preaching to the
nerves.
16
The exemplary instances of this effect were the sensation scenes shared by
novel and play alike, where the audience or readers attention is focused on a spectacu-
lar set-piece, often a last-minute rescue, or the sudden appearance of a figure who is
supposed to be dead: the rescue of Eily OConnor from drowning in The Colleen Bawn;
the burning river-boat in Boucicaults The Octoroon; Laura Fairlies appearance at her
own graveside in The Woman in White; the railway rescue in Augustin Dalys Under
the Gaslight, Boucicaults After Dark, and many others. For many contemporary crit-
ics of drama these scenes meant the upstaging of actors by stage-carpentry, and the
usurpation of the play as a whole by its spectacular scenes; for critics of the novel the
effect of the sensational scene was to replace all nuance with what Mrs Oliphant called
a simple physical effect.
17
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This same species of immediately immersive intensity, this simple physical effect
was deployed by Whistler. His deliberate eschewal of the procedures of the Academy
meant that the viewer was forced to come to terms with this particular painting at this
particular momentthere could be no easy recourse to narrative, symbology, or clas-
sical or historical sources. Like the sensation scene, it immersed its audience in a thrilling
commodity experiencein this respect Eilys immersion in The Colleen Bawn is self-
reflexive of the genre as a whole, as is the title of a popular play of 1862, A Moment of
Terror.
18
Whistler, of course, was not simply trying to give his audience a frisson. There
was a serious artistic purpose to his shock techniques: he wished to jolt the viewer out
of a comfortable and contemplative relation to the work, and to confront him or her
with both its hereness and nowness, and its material medium specificity, its nature as
paint on canvas.
One effect of the sensation novel and the sensation drama was the pleasurable
acclimatization of their consumers to the speeded-up, stimulus-saturated world of Vic-
torian urban modernity; they provide a species of temporal training, a form of shock-
lite that inoculates the subject against hyperstimulus.
19
Sensation at this level takes
its part in that modernization of the subject described by Benjamin as taking place on
the streets of Paris, and more recently identified by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in the
railway carriages of Europe, and by Jonathan Crary in the fine art of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century.
20
Crary, in Suspensions of Perception, argues that after mid-
century there arises a conception of the normative modern subject as not just isolated
and cellularized, as Michel Foucault has told us, but also focused and alert even in a
kaleidoscopic and mobile world. Attention and attentiveness are the keywords of a
new discourse that dreams of a focused subject who can withstand the sensory over-
load of modernity, but this discourse is troubled by the realization that attention had
limits beyond and below which productivity and social cohesion were threatened,
that forms of focused attention on one stimulus can tip over into states of distraction,
daydream, and reverie.
21
In sensation drama and fiction this same dyad of riveted
attention and distraction is the animating principle of the entertainment. (Indeed, a
scene like the railway rescue, in which the audience has a brief moment to see the
hero/heroine snatched to safety before the lights of the train disappear again, resembles
nothing so much as the tachistoscope described by Crary, the laboratory apparatus
that was used to measure the subjects response to fleeting stimuli.) It is no coinci-
dence that in the sensation novel normal consciousness is always in danger of tipping
over into some altered state, where self-presence is extremely precarious. Laura Fairlie
comes to resemble the feeble-minded Anne Catherick in The Woman in White; the
hero of the Moonstone turns out to have committed the crime himself in a trance-like
state; Lady Audley in Lady Audleys Secret ends her days in a private asylumher real
secret is that she is mad. (The private asylum lies in the background of many of these
narratives, and seems to have been the great middle-class nightmare of the 1860s, far
more than Foucaults panoptical prison.) A similar preoccupation with liminal mental
states, if not with actual madness, is evident in the fine art of the period, and Crary
shows how a number of artists thematize and critique the new discourse of attention/
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distraction in their work from the 1860s on. But in the case of The White Girl this
thematization, in the form of Jo Hiffernans distracted, vacant stare, goes hand in hand
with an attempt to solicit attention, to retrain the viewer, not as a subject capable of
dealing with urban, industrial capitalist society, but as an aesthete who can respond to
balanced masses of color, to niceties in shades of white on white, without recourse to
explanatory narratives or external interpretive schemes. Whistler, that is, is trying to shape
an audience for modern painting. Obviously he cannot recreate the effects of the the-
ater, where a collectivity is tutored in the temporality of modernity; nor can he feed his
audience on a diet of suspense and shock over months, as the serial novelist could do.
Instead, the artwork galvanizes the audience into a close encounter with the material
artwork; not some Paterian idealist encounter, but a more material and abrasive one.
If the conscious effect aimed at by Whistler was the retraining of his audience for a
new orientation to the artwork, some commentators at least could register this even
while resisting. Here is the reaction of an American critic who saw The White Girl at
the French Universal Exhibition in 1867: [it shows] a powerful female with red hair,
and a vacant stare in her soulless eyes. She is standing on a wolfskin hearthrug, for
what reason is unrecorded. The picture evidently means vastly more than it expresses
albeit expressing too much. Notwithstanding an obvious want of purpose, there is some
boldness in the handling, and singularity in the glare of the colours which cannot fail to
divert the eye and weary it.
22
What the critic glosses as want of purpose is not some Kantian non-purposiveness
so much as a powerful color-effect aimed at the eye of the viewer without the usual
rationale of subject-matter. The eye is captured, and has to adjust not just to the glare,
but also to the minimal contrast of white on white. The reference to the weary[ing]
effect of this on the eye is not just a throwaway remark, since in terms of nineteenth-
century color-theory the painting would indeed exhaust the eye. According to such
theories the presence of any of the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) required the
use of the product of the other two to provide rest for the eye (CM, 22). But here the
eye has to travel from the dazzling red hair across whole swathes of bright white to
encounter the complementary product in the green flowers, though blue and yellow
(of a sort) are present in the rug and in the wolfskin. The theories of Chevreul and
others are being harnessed here to create nervous strain rather than harmony: for the
viewers of the 1860s this was a very discordant color-symphony. (In this respect the
painting provides a negative anticipation of the use of soothing interior design schemes
in hospitals to provide an antidote to shell-shock and nervous cases, following the
color theories of H. Kemp Prossor [CM, 208].)
That this attempt to fix the viewers gaze was a violent one is evident: perhaps in-
spired by his friendship with the Fenian leader John OLeary, Whistler was prepared
to use drastic methods to effect his artistic revolution.
23
As it happens, in 1867 Whis-
tler also began to acquire a reputation for violence of a more tangible kind. In Paris he
appeared in court for taking part in two street brawls, the first time for assaulting a
workman who had dripped plaster on him as he passed in the street below, the second
for shoving his brother-in-law through a plate-glass window (he was let off on the first
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 10
DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
11
occasion; on the second the Judge said Connu and fined him). An earlier story of his
assaulting a black fellow-passenger while en route back to London from Valparaiso
also began to circulate. Even his Bohemian friends did not approve, D. G. Rossetti
penning a rather barbed limerick:
Theres a combative artist named Whistler
Who is, like his own hog-hairs, a bristler;
A tube of white lead
And a punch in the head
Offer varied attractions of Whistler.
24
Rossetti seems to have realized that Whistlers use of white lead was intended as a
punch in the eye, as a visual assault on the viewer. And of course not everyone wanted
such vigorous treatment: Whistlers career, like that of many proto-modernists, testi-
fies to the difficulties of creating an audience for unfamiliar material.
Of course the extent to which the painting really does break with Academy practice
is worth questioning. There are eighteenth-century paintings by Jean-Antoine Watteau
that The White Girl appears to cite, and even at the time Paul Mantz linked it to Jean-
Baptiste Oudrys Salon painting of 1753, The White Duck.
25
Nor is the painting empty
of all symbolic resonance. If the painting refuses us the sort of subject much favored
by the mid-Victorian art establishment, it is scarcely a non-representational exercise in
pure color, and at least some of its content seems to at once offer and withhold mean-
ing. As with the figures of the Colleen Bawn and the Woman in White, the painting
draws on a long iconographic tradition of representing female innocence and chastity
as white: this is the virginal white of wedding dresses. That Whistler is putting such
connotations in play is made more obvious from the fact that Hiffernan is holding a
broken lily, while other flowers lie scattered on the floor before her. We are being
invited to think of bridal bouquets, as well of the association of young women and
flowers, and of course of young women and deflowering. And yet the fact that this
young woman is standing on a wolfskin suggests that she is not so vulnerable, that she
can keep predatorswolves and perhaps even wolf-Whistlersunder her heel. This
is to address only the more obvious symbolism of the painting. In 1862 we might
imagine a range of other meanings at work. The loose white dress invokes its opposite:
the fashionable aniline-dyed corseted dress. This, with her loose red hair, links the
white girl to the female icons of the pre-Raphaelites, and their studied anti-moder-
nity.
26
The whiteness of Hiffernans skin evokes other kinds of skin, and the racial
stakes of the American Civil War, which had been raging since April 1861 (Whistlers
brother was an officer in the Confederate army, and Whistler himself, a former cadet
at Westpoint, seems to have been rather ashamed at missing his chance for action).
Nor is black/white the only opposition in play here. Hiffernans fair skin and red hair
announces an English/Irish ethnic divide. In this light The White Girl must have re-
minded at least some viewers of the play The White Boy (1862), which dealt with
revolutionary Irish secret societies (cf. Whistlers friendship with OLeary and other
Fenians in Paris in the 1850s). But that is another essay for another time.
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 11
M O D E R N I S M / mode r ni t y
12
Whistlers modernism met with considerable resistance. Until the 1880s and 1890s,
when major international collectors began to buy up his paintings, it was hard work
turning women into arrangements and symphonies, and those into money and pres-
tige.
27
Until then his work retained the shock-value of violence. The conflict between
his vision and that of the art establishment would reach its apogee some fifteen years
after the impact of The White Girl, when John Ruskin brought the pugnacious artist
fresh notoriety in the July issue of Fors Clavigera by accusing him of ask[ing] 200
guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the publics face with Nocturne in Black and
Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875). Whistler would learn to his cost, in his action for libel
against Ruskin, that the educated public were still closer in their views to the latters
moralized aesthetics than to his own. (One casualty of the jurys hostility to Whistlers
aesthetics would be another symphony in white, The White House, his eye-catching
new house on Tite Street in Chelsea. Sold at auction after Whistlers bankruptcy, it was
bought by Harry Quilter, the Timess art critic, who had appeared as a witness for
Ruskin in the trial.)
If Whistler continued to fetishize white, by then he had long broken with red:
Hiffernan seems to have largely dropped out of his life in 18661867, after his return
to London from a mysterious trip to Valparaiso. Weintraub speculates that Whistlers
break with Hiffernan resulted from her visit to Paris in his absence, where she posed
for the explicitly lesbian work, Le Sommeil. But we will return to Hiffernans work with
Courbet; for now let us turn to the white girls appearance in another medium, a novel
by Whistlers quondam room-mate, George Du Maurier, and one of the first modern
best-sellers, Trilby.
Trilby OFerrall
In December of 1861, while Whistler was painting The White Girl in Paris, George
Du Maurier had plans of his own to captivate the public, not with a painting, but with
an illustrated story of left-bank life. While Whistlers progress seemed unstoppable,
the sudden loss of vision in one eye had forced Du Maurier to rethink his future in fine
art. Since a career as a painter seemed out of the question, he began to work as an
illustrator for various London journals, eventually securing a position on the staff of
Punch. His letters of the 1860s trace his rivalry with and admiration for Whistler, but
also trace Du Mauriers progressive alienation from Whistlers bohemian world, and
attraction to the bourgeois domesticity of the Wightwicks, the family of his fiance and
later his wife, Emma. At first though, he very much lived in Whistlers shadow. In
1860, not only was he subletting Whistlers studio at 70 Newman Street, but he was
also making use of the dress coat and waistcoat that the latter had left behind. He
describes Jimmy as the grandest genius I ever met, a giant (L, to his mother, June
1860, 812, 11), though he also speaks of his cutting out Jimmy at a social gathering
(9). In October he boasts that though Jimmy is the greater lion of the two of them
there is no rivalry between themand in any case he is more liked than Jimmy is,
particularly because of his singing voice, his Horgin, as he puts it (L, to his mother,
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DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
13
October 3, 1860, 147). (His musical prowess meant a great deal to Du Maurier, and
he speculated that he could make a living from his singing if his eyesight failed.) By
September 1861, now living at 91 Newman Street, rivalry seems to have turned to
mild hostility: Jimmy Whistler gone to Parisbon dbarras; jen devenais las; noth-
ing is more fatiguing than an egotistical wit (L, to his mother, 657, 66). His refer-
ences to Jo Hiffernan seem to mingle jealousy at Whistlers sexual success, and snob-
bery at Jos social origins. By 1862 he writes disapprovingly that she was de plus en
plus insupportable et grande dame (L, to Thomas Armstrong, May 1862, 13640,
139), and an awful tie for the artist (L, to Thomas Armstrong, February 1864, 2268, 227).
But if Du Maurier was increasingly less the Bohemian artist and more the profes-
sional illustrator, in 1861 he decided that he could still put his Paris years to good use
by writing a semi-autobiographical tale of left-bank life in Paris. As he wrote Tom
Armstrong in a letter of December 1861:
I took it yesterday to the Cornhill24 pages of closely written foolscap, and yet I had
eliminated lots . . . [Thomas] Lamont is there as the wise and facetious Jerry, you as the
bullnecked and sagacious Tim; the street is our Lady of the Bohemians. I shall idealize it
in the illustrations (if I get them to do), make us all bigger, and develop you into strong
muscularity; having insisted on our physical prowess and muscular developmentthe
natural antidotes to morbid Quartier-Latin RomanceI shall be much surprised if it gets
into the Cornhill . . . If this does succeed, I shall write lots more on the same theme, and
try and embody the rather peculiar opinions of our set on art itself, and artists; and which
I feel very strongly. (L, 92)
It did not get into the Cornhill, and we hear no more of the untitled story for thirty
years, when Du Maurier returns to the Bohemian theme with Trilby (1894), perhaps
inspired by the success of that very different tale of studio life, The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1891). But if his earlier tale provided the germ, by 1894 the story had acquired
a more sinister dimension in the form of the relationship between Trilby the beautiful
model-cum-laundress turned diva, and Svengali, the novels Austrian-born Jewish vil-
lain. Svengali, of course, entered the language as a byword for manipulation and mag-
netism, one of a series of such figures in the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic imagi-
nary, as Daniel Pick has shown.
28
Like Whistler, Du Maurier equates the visual and the
musical: Svengali is not a painter like the other young men we meet in the novels early
chapters, but a musician and composer, who takes the tone-deaf young Trilby OFerrall,
and turns her into a singer of consummate ability. While he conducts, she spellbinds
audiences with her ability to sing simple ballads and songs without words across a
huge vocal range, performing super-human exercises in virtuosity. At the novels close,
though, we learn that there are two Trilbys, and that the singing Trilby is the creation
of Svengalis hypnotic powers: far from being a great singer, she is simply an instru-
ment for his musical genius, her masters voice. When Svengali dies, his hold seems to
be broken, and the original Trilby is briefly restored to the novels band of heroes. But
even from the grave Svengali asserts his power over her, and she dies shortly after
seeing his portrait.
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M O D E R N I S M / mode r ni t y
14
While the novel is now best known for this sensational mesmeric subplot, which
was emphasized in subsequent stage and screen versions, in the original novel far
more space is devoted to the idyllic evocation of Parisian studio life, and the male
camaraderie of the three young British artists: the Tim (Thomas Armstrong, later
director of the Art and Science Department of the South Kensington Museum) of the
1861 story has become Taffy; Jerry (Thomas Lamont, a lifelong friend of Du Mauriers)
has become The Laird; and Du Maurier himself, if he is there at all, appears to have
become Little Billee (later known as William Bagot). A very English version of Bohemia,
their homosocial world has more in common with Three Men in a Boat than it has with
Henri Murgers novel of 1851, Scenes de la Vie de Bohme. Du Mauriers narrative of
their left-bank life is chatty, digressive, and playful: readers expecting to be gripped by
a swiftly-moving sensational plot must have been baffled. In this sanitized Bohemia,
sexual appetency is displaced into gourmandry, and we are treated to lovingly detailed
accounts of what the three chums eat and drink, rather in the manner of a school-
story. This all-male Eden is doomed, though, and the first half of the novel describes
the gradual break-up of the male household through Little Billees growing attraction
to the beautiful and good-hearted, but fatally declasse heroine, Trilby.
29
Trilby works
as a nude model, and we are told coyly by our narrator in Latin, multum amavit: she
has loved many.
30
The end comes when Little Billees strait-laced mother comes from
England to persuade Trilby that she will ruin his life by marrying him. Svengali ap-
pears in this first section of the novel as a friend of the trio, one of the various satellite
characters who frequent the studio. Other minor characters include Lorrimer, the
virtuous apprentice, a thinly disguised version of Edward Poynter (by the 1890s an R. A.,
and in 1896 President of the Royal Academy), and in the magazine version, Joe Sibley,
the idle apprentice, clearly modeled on Whistler. Whatever his theories of the au-
tonomy of painting, Whistler was well able to see the links between model and artwork
when it suited him, and he objected to his representation as Sibley. Du Maurier was
forced to make changes to the subsequent book version, substituting the yellow-haired
Antony, a Swiss (T, 96), a witty man who never made an enemy, for Whistlers charac-
ter, and removing some of the illustrations (though Whistler, complete with monocle,
is still clearly visible in some of the illustrations, e.g., All as it used to be in Part
Third).
Trilby is based on Du Mauriers memories of his Bohemian years in Paris and Lon-
don, refracted through the experience of the intervening thirty years, and for much of
that period Du Maurier had conducted a series of skirmishes with the aesthetic move-
ment, parodying its affectations and excesses in his series of cartoons for Punch featur-
ing such characters as Maudle, Postlethwaite, and the Cimabue Browns. In Trilby,
though, it is the artistic practice of aestheticism that he attacks rather than the preten-
sions of the aesthetic followers. This practice is embodied not in the relationship be-
tween the talented painter, Little Billee, and Trilby, but displaced to that between the
musician, Svengali and the model.
When the homosocial world of the studio in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs
breaks up, Svengali takes up Trilby as his instrument. At the novels end we learn from
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 14
DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
15
Gecko, Svengalis assistant, that the mesmerist turns her into a singing machinean
organ to play upon . . . a flexible flageolet of flesh and blood (T, 299), through which
he is able to express his own musical genius (the phrase singing machine suggests
that Du Maurier may have seen Thomas Alva Edisons phonographic dolls when he
visited the 1889 Paris Exposition). But the novel hints that Trilby becomes Svengalis
sexual instrument as well, and the sexuality repressed in the representation of Bohemia
as a chummy all-male place returns here in a Gothic register: . . . with one wave of his
hand over herwith one look of his eyewith a wordSvengali could turn her into
the other Trilby, his Trilbyand make her do whatever he liked . . . you might have
run a red-hot needle into her and she would not have felt it . . . (T, 298).
The spiritual love that Little Billee has for Trilby reappears here transmogrified
into the barely disguised image of her brutal physical penetration by the swarthy for-
eign villain. To say that she has been reduced to a mere mouth for Svengali to sing
through, then, is not the whole story: his hypnotic powers give him ready access to her
whole body. That this idea was titillating as much as daring for the readers of 1894 is
clear from the novels astonishing popularity, and the letters from readers asking for
further details of the exact relationship between Svengali and his obedient organ.
31
The parallel between Svengalis artistic and sexual interests in Trilby is made clear
quite early on when he waxes lyrical about her unusually large mouth: Himmel! The
roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Panthon; there is room in it for toutes les
glories de la France, and a little to spare! The entrance to your throat is like the
middle porch of St Sulpice when the doors are open for all the faithful on All Saints
Day . . . (T, 50). But in this respect he is in fact only continuing a morcellization of
Trilby that begins much earlier. Trilby is a novel of fetishization, both sexual and com-
modity-basedpeople are reduced to particular body-parts; sexuality is displaced into
other registers; things behave like people, and people like things. Unsurprisingly, art
in the novel is also fetishistic. As Leone Ormond pointed out some years ago, Svengalis
objectification of Trilby is rather belated, since she has already been appropriated as
an object before Svengali ever sees her by the artists for whom she sits.
32
The first
thing that Little Billee does when he meets Trilby is to draw her perfect foot on the
studio wall. Much later, the trio revisit their old studio, where they find this same
sketch now operating as a sort of shrine. Protected under a square of plate glass, it is
now entitled Souvenir de la Grande Trilby (T, 200), and the Laird unsuccessfully
attempts to buy this piece of wall as a memento of her (Fig. 3). By then the three
former bohemians each possessed casts of Trilbys hands and feet, and photographs
of herself (T, 202), but this sketch was Trilbyness itself, as the Laird thought, and
should not be allowed to perish (T, 202). Du Maurier hints broadly at the species of
downward displacement involved in the fascination with Trilbys foot, in a long aside
about this wondrous thing, too often hidden away in disgrace, a thing to be thrust
out of sight and forgotten, though the sudden sight of it, uncovered, comes as a very
rare and singularly pleasing surprise to the eye that has learned how to see (T, 16).
Trilby, it seems, even makes a fetish of this aspect of herself: her foot, this token of the
lordship of woman over all is her one coquetry, the only real vanity she had (T, 16).
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M O D E R N I S M / mode r ni t y
16
When Trilby becomes famous, it is by an advertising photograph of her in sandals that
her former friends recognize her (Look Sandy, lookthe foot! Now have you got any
doubts? [T, 244]). The deathly and less jocular aspect of Trilbys aestheticization be-
comes clearer in the second half of the novel. Without Svengalis controlling power
she loses all vitality, but her fading away seems to make her more beautiful in their
eyes, in spite of her increasing pallor and emaciationher skin was so pure and deli-
cate, and the bones of her face so admirable (T, 266). She becomes, indeed, a White
Girl. Svengali exerts his power over her one more time from beyond the grave when
his portrait arrives in the post from the poisonous East (T, 282), and Trilby dies. The
lines between people and things blur further when she sings one more time on her
death-bed: when she stops, the doctor who examines her reveals that she has been
dead several minutesperhaps a quarter of an hour (T, 284).
In Trilby Du Maurier may be suggesting that all art has reifying tendencies, but
there is a more specific target for his animushis former friend Whistler. Whistlers
presence in the novel does not, in fact, disappear with the excision of the the idle
apprentice; he lingers as Svengali. Critics have tended to see Svengali as Du Mauriers
nightmare double for Oscar Wilde, but the sinister Austrian mesmerist and musician
more closely resembles the eccentric American with the monocle, given to the com-
position of Harmonies, Nocturnes, and Arrangements.
33
The earlier version of the
novel explicitly acknowledges the kinship between the more benign Whistler charac-

Fig. 3. George Du Maurier,

illustration for Trilby in Harpers
New Monthly Magazine 89.529
(June-November 1894), 72.
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 16
DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
17
ter, Sibley, and his demonic other: Sibley is always in debt, like Svengali; like Svengali,
vain, witty, and a most exquisite and original artist . . . [but] The moment his friendship
left off his enmity began at once. Sometimes his enmity would take the simple and
straightforward form of trying to punch his ex-friends head.
34
Whistlers choice of the
butterfly as his artistic signature (connoting transformation, beauty, artistic flight, and
so on) returns in Du Mauriers depiction of Svengali as a spider (Figs. 4 and 5), a
creature which captures its prey in its web and then feeds on it. Du Maurier even
seems to have based Svengalis vampiric aspect on Whistler: for some of his sitters,
such as the French dandy, Count Robert de Montesquiou, whom he painted in 1892,
the intensity of Whistlers gaze did indeed seem to drain them of their vitality. As he
told Edmond de Goncourt, he felt that Whistler with his fixed attention was empty-
ing him for life, was pumping away something of his individuality (WB, 355).
35
But if the demonic Svengali novel preys on Trilby OFerrall and lives vampirically
on her, who was the object of Whistlers sexual-aesthetic exploitation? Felix Moscheles,
another of Du Mauriers friends from his studio days, identifies Carry, a Belgian girl
they had befriended in Malines, as the model for Trilby, but Joanna Hiffernan is a far
more plausible original.
36
There are a number of indications that Du Maurier was
overlaying his memories of Paris in the 1850s with London in the 1860s. Some are
links so tenuous that they almost seem beneath notice, such as the fact that in his
letters he habitually refers to Jo Hiffernan as Joe, the name he later gives to Sibley in
the novel. But there are stronger clues. Like Hiffernan, Trilby is the daughter of a
lapsed Irish gentleman: in Trilbys case this is the hard-drinking Patrick Michael
OFerrall, Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, son of a Dublin physician, a classical tutor
who marries a barmaid and is lost to the world of respectability (18, 37); in Hiffernans,
it is Patrick Hiffernan, an impulsive and passionate Irishman. According to Du
Mauriers letters, the latter gave writing lessonsthe Pennells descibe him as a sort
of Captain Costigan [that is, an Irish character in Thackerays History of Pendennis], a
teacher of polite chiromancy.
37
Whistler felt that he might do something to disgrace
Joes sisters after their mothers death (L, to Thomas Armstrong, March 1862, 117
21). Trilby possesses Hiffernans Irish complexion, a mass of freckles, which contrast
with the delicate, privet-like whiteness of her neck (T, 13). Her accent is described
as half-Scotch, but her greeting to the three artists, Yere all English, now, arent
ye? (T, 13) is more stage Irish, as apparently is her gift for compliments (Thats Irish,
I suppose [T, 91]). Later, when rumors spread of the humble origins of the great
Madame Svengali, it is said that she had run away from the primeval forests and
lonely marshes of le Dublin, to lead a free-and-easy life among the artists of the Quartier
Latin, and that she was blanche comme neige (T, 238). Like Hiffernan, Trilby puts
her good looks to account by modeling for young artists; and like Hiffernan Trilby is
not married to the man (in Trilbys case men) she sleeps with. Even the novels most
far-fetched feature, Svengalis occult use of Trilby, recalls Hiffernans relationship with
Whistler, since Hiffernan had acted as a medium at sances at the house of Whistlers
more famous Chelsea neighbors, the Rossettis, and according to the Pennells, Whis-
tler and Jo had tried something similar at home. Whistler claimed that, a cousin from
the South talked to me, and told me the most wonderful things.
38
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 17
M O D E R N I S M / mode r ni t y
18
Fig. 4. Svengali as a spider, Trilby.
Fig. 5. The cover of the
1895 Harper and
Brothers edition of Trilby.

12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 18

DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
19
What, then, is Du Maurier suggesting finally about the relationships among aes-
thetic artist, model, and canvas by transforming them into the relationship between
Svengali and Trilby? What is involved in shifting the artistic modality of the novel from
painting, where it begins, to mesmerism and music? At some level this may be simply
a gibe at the musical metaphors beloved of Whistler and his followers; the Sympho-
nies, Arrangements, and Nocturnes. But the mesmerism suggests something else. Little
Billee and the other artists may fetishize Trilby just as much as Svengali does, reducing
her to a foot, or a face, but Svengali goes further by actually stealing her identity com-
pletely, or more accurately by replacing the living Trilby with a puppet, a conduit for
his own personality. Such critics as Grossman, Pick and Thurschwell are surely right to
argue that Svengalis mesmeric powers figure more general late nineteenth-century
anxieties regarding questions of influence, charisma, and the nature of the self. But it
is just as likely that the instrumentalization of Trilby is Du Mauriers narrative theory
of what Whistler was doing in such paintings as The White Girl: the historical Jo
Hiffernan is effaced to be replaced by Whistlers formal arrangement; she is abstracted
out of existence, turned into a sensational visual effect.
39
If Whistler was wary of critics
who sought to turn paintings into novels, Du Maurier gives him grounds for such
wariness by turning his artistic theories and practice into the stuff of Gothic. Du Maurier
is at least as damning in his estimate of the effects of Svengali/Whistler on his audi-
ence. Like Trilby, they too are hypnotized by Svengali and Trilby in concert (And
here Little Billee begins to weep again, and so does everybody else [T, 216]), and
captivated by Trilbys celestial form and face (T, 220). No less than the popular mass
culture to which it seemed to be opposed, aestheticism was just as much about retrain-
ing the modern audience, but here that retraining appears as a species of black magic
that can raise whole crowds to the pitch of hysteria and infatuation.
The Origin
And yet, there is a curious disconnect between the narrativized critique of aestheti-
cism and the sexual menace of the relationship between Svengali and Trilby. Whistlers
powerful personality may be the basis for Svengalis mesmeric powers, and the way in
which everyone gets their bit of Trilby may figure the abstracting processes of Whistlers
aestheticism, but there appears to be a certain narrative excess in the way in which
Trilbys mouth and feet are fetishized, and in the (related) way in which we are encour-
aged to think of Trilbys rape over a period of years by Svengali. I think that the source
material for this dimension of the novel also derives from the 1860s, but it is not the
relationship between Hiffernan and Whistler that is evoked, but rather her relation-
ship with a very different artist, Gustave Courbet, and her role not in the creation of
one of the threshold works of aestheticism, The White Girl, but one of the most infa-
mous works in the history of realism, LOrigine du Monde.
In 1866 Whistler embarked for Valparaiso in Chile (then engaged in a war with
Spain), having told many of his friends that he was in fact going to California. Biogra-
phers have speculated that the trip was motivated by his sense of having missed his
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 19
M O D E R N I S M / mode r ni t y
20
chance for heroism in the American Civil War, though he may also have been avoiding
police attention in the wake of his friend John OLearys arrest for treason. Jo seems to
have done her best to manage his affairs in his absence, selling his work when she
could, but eventually she resumed her former career as a professional model. She left
London for Paris, where she sat for Gustave Courbet, whom she had met in the sum-
mer of 1865 in Trouville with Whistler (and probably earlier in Paris when The White
Girl was being painted in 1861/2). At Trouville he had produced a study of her, Por-
trait de Jo (1865), and in 18651866 four versions of a full portrait, the three which
Robert Fernier describes in his Catalogue Raisonn as: La Jo, Femme DIrlande, or La
Belle Irlandaise (Stockholm, probably the original), La Jo, Femme DIrlande, or La
Belle Irlandaise (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Jo, Femme DIrlande (Kansas City),
and Portrait of Jo, or The Beautiful Irishwoman (Collection Rolf and Margit Weinberg,
Zurich).
40
Art historians have speculated that she and Courbet had an affair in these
months. Whether they did or not, what Jean-Jacques Fernier describes as un
dferlement drotisme swept over Courbets studio, and he produced some of his
most sensual paintings during Jos Paris stay.
41
The Ottoman diplomat, Khalil Bey, who
admired Courbets erotic Vnus et Psyche (1864), had asked him to produce another
version of it for him to add to his already impressive collection of French art. The
result was the explicit eroticism, possibly inspired by contemporary pornographic pho-
tographs, of Paresse et Luxure, better known as Le Sommeil (1866), in which one of
the models is Jo (Robert Fernier identifies her as the blonde, James Rubin as the red-
head).
42
As with La Belle Irlandaise, the Hiffernan we see here is not the ethereal
beauty of The White Girl, a willowy figure who seems to play second fiddle to fabric,
but a mature woman of flesh and blood. As with his other nudes Courbet ignores the
idealizing conventions of academic painting to achieve effects of startling immediacy
and physical presence.
But in 1866 Courbet also painted another work for Khalil Bey that has come to be,
arguably, the most notorious painting of the nineteenth century: the unsigned LOrigine
du Monde, which shows the torso of a woman reclining with her legs apart; the edge of
a sheet covers one breast, and partly covers the other, but the viewers gaze is drawn to
her exposed genitals, shown in close-up, as it were, at the center of the composition
(Fig. 6). This was not a painting for the Salon: Khalil Bey kept it in his bathroom,
behind a green curtain. Male guests were invited to view it from time to time (Maxime
Du Camp and Lon Gambetta recorded seeing it in the 1860s). LOrigine might be
considered a brilliant deconstruction of the fetishistic aspect of art, or an egregious
example of it. Certainly, it makes the connection between fine art and the skin-trade
abundantly clear, too clear for it to work as drawing-room erotica. Contemporary opinion
evinced hostility to the painting and indeed its foreign patron. Charles Beauquier,
writing in the Revue littraire de la Franche-Comt in August 1866 wrote: The fa-
mous picture of Two Naked Women has been sold by M. Courbet to a Turkish diplo-
mat. Our painter is making at the moment a pendant to this picture. I dont need to tell
you that is as indecent as the first. Dame! For a Turk!
43
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 20
DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
21
LOrigine seems to have been a rather open secret. In June 1867 a satirical maga-
zine, Le Hanneton, featured a caricature of Courbet by Lonce Petit in which the
artist appears surrounded by some of his pictures; one of them is a white canvas with a
solitary fig-leaf in the middle. The painting disappeared after the sale of the bankrupt
Khalil Beys collection in 1867, to reappear in 1889 in the gallery of De La Narde, an
art dealer. Edmond de Goncourt describes seeing it there concealed in a locked cabi-
net, the exterior of which showed a landscape featuring a snow-bound chateau (possi-
bly Le Chateau de Blonay according to Robert Fernier). Bought by a Hungarian sugar-
magnate, the Baron Francois de Hatvany, in 1913, it went to Budapest and dropped
out of sight. Jacques and Sylvia Lacan appear to have purchased it in 1957, and they
also kept it hidden behind another painting, this time a nude by Sylvias brother in law,
Andr Masson. As late as 1987 Linda Nochlin, the eminent art historian, could find no
trace of the painting, but in June 1995 it was presented to the Muse dOrsay, where it
was exhibited behind a glass screen.
44
In the catalogue to the Courbet LAmour exhibition held at the Courbet Museum
at Ornans in 1996, a number of criticsJean-Jacques Fernier, Michle Haddad, and
Chantal Humbertsuggest that the model for this extraordinary painting is Joanna
Hiffernan (an idea mooted at least as early as 1978 by Sophie Monneret), though
Humbert suggests that Courbets realism is a more complex affair, and that LOrigine
may indeed be a composite of Hiffernan and a contemporary star of pornographic
photography, Augustine Legaton:
45
pour rpondre la commande de Khalil Bey, le
peintre aurait demand de poser la maitresse de Whistler, Johanna Heffernan [sic].
Courbet aurait ensuite peaufin la representation en se servant dune preuve
semblable de nu [to meet Khalil Beys order, the painter would have asked Johanna

Fig. 6. Gustave Courbet, LOrigine du Monde (1866). Muse DOrsay, Paris.

12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 21
M O D E R N I S M / mode r ni t y
22
Heffernan, Whistlers mistress, to pose. Courbet would then have buffed up the rep-
resentation with a similar nude photograph].
46
Did Du Maurier know of this picture and Hiffernans role in its creation? Raised in
Paris and himself a French-trained artist turned professional comic illustrator, is it not
likely that he could have seen or heard about the cartoon in Le Hanneton, or come
across the rumors about the paintings existence? He would almost certainly have heard
of Hiffernans other work for Courbet. His possible knowledge of LOrigine would
certainly illuminate the sexualized morcellization of Trilby in his novel, her alternat-
ing presentation as a foot or a cavernous mouth, and indeed the suggestion of her
becoming the abused private possession of a lecherous foreigner. (Trilbys description
as blanche comme neige, avec un volcan dans le coeur [T, 238] perhaps even sug-
gests that he had heard of the snowy landscape cover-painting that Edmond de Goncourt
describes.) Svengali, then, may not be so much the nightmare version of Whistler, but
Du Mauriers condensation of Whistler, Courbet, and Khalil Bey (not so much an
Oriental Jew like Svengali as an Oriental Muslim).
But besides this roman clef dimension, the novel appears to be making a serious
argument about the nature of art. By linking Whistlers publicly-exhibited abstraction
to Courbets piece of private bathroom erotica, Du Maurier casts into doubt the good
faith of the former. In December 1861 Du Maurier writes to Thomas Armstrong: I
really believe that mere female beauty would actually make a well painted picture go
down the swinish public throat, in spite of its artistic merit; indeed Millais is a very
good instance (L, 924, 4). By the 1890s he has swung round to thinking that sexual
interest could be used to less noble ends. Just as Svengalis musical genius parasitically
depends on its living organTrilbys beauty, Trilbys cavernous mouth, her fascinating
footthe impact of The Symphony in White depends on a representation of a beauti-
ful young woman. In both cases, sex is used to sell the grander aesthetic program. And
as in the case of LOrigine, it is the sexuality of the model Joanna Hiffernan that ap-
pears to be in question.
LOrigine resides still at the Muse DOrsay, and like the glass-covered drawing of
Trilbys foot on the studio wall in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, it has become a
veritable shrine for art pilgrims. In this respect, Du Mauriers novel seems to demon-
strate a strange prescience about the fate of Hiffernans fragmented image. And the
White Girl herself? Translated into a series of phantom doublesfirst a white sym-
phony, then an anatomical close up, concealed beneath a snowy landscape, and then at
once a singing machine and a glazed drawing of a footwhat became of the actual
Joanna Hiffernan? De Montfort quotes a letter from Whistler of May 1880 to his son,
Charles Hanson, in which he sends his regards to Auntie Jo, and Alan Cole remem-
bered visiting her with Whistler in the 1880s (WM, 80). According to the Pennells
she was seen at Whistlers funeral in 1903, and Stanley Weintraub rather skeptically
recounts Charles Freers claim that Hiffernan came to Cheyne Walk after Whistlers
death, to see him one last time, her striking hair now turning gray. As Weintraub points
out the scene is far too reminiscent of the Victorian narrative paintings that Whistler
hated to be entirely plausible (WB, 4634). It seems more likely that, having lent her
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 22
DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
23
image to some of the key works of modern painting, she simply disappeared into pri-
vate life. I wonder if she ever read Trilby.
Notes
1. Patricia De Montfort also identifies her as the model for some of Whistlers magazine illustra-
tions of this period. See her White Muslin: Joanna Hiffernan and the 1860s, in Margaret F.
MacDonald et al., eds., Whistler, Women, and Fashion (New York, New Haven and London: The
Frick Collection and Yale University Press, 2003), 7691, 80. Henceforth abbreviated WM. The
catalogue raisonn for Whistlers paintings is Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret MacDonald, and
Robin Spencer, with the Assistance of Hamish Miller, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980).
2. See John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames and Hudson,
1999), 15, 196208. Henceforth abbreviated CM.
3. For example, a handbook of 1864 identifies Zinc White No. 1 as a possible replacement for
the better-known lead white. Cited by Hermann Kuehn, Zinc White, in Robert L. Feller, ed., Art-
ists Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, vol. 1 (Washington: National Gal-
lery of Art and Oxford University Press, 1986), 16986, 172.
4. For the mixed reviews of these paintings see Elizabeth R. and Joseph Pennell, Life of James
McNeill Whistler (London: William Heninemann, 1920), 5960. Henceforth abbreviated LJMW.
5. Daphne Du Maurier, ed., The Young George Du Maurier: A Selection of his Letters, 186067
(London: Peter Davies, 1951), 147, 16. Henceforth abbreviated L.
6. The primary victims of lead poisoning were, of course, the workers engaged in the manufacture
of lead white, not the artists. Symptoms ranged from shortness of breath to blindness and paralysis.
See R. D. Harley, Artists Pigments, c. 16001835 (London: Archetype, 2001), 168.
7. Gordon Fleming, The Young Whistler, 183466 (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1978), 173.
8. Whistlers description of the typical Royal Academy genre painting closely resembles an actual
painting exhibited at the 1861 Royal Academy Exhibition, C. S. Lidderdales The Inventor.
9. Letter to George Lucas, June 1862, cited in Margaret MacDonald, ed., James McNeill Whistler:
Drawings, Pastels, and Watercolours: A Catalogue Raisonn (New Haven and London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 37.
10. Times, June 16, 1862, 1. Such advertisements were not unusual, of course: the same page carried
advertisements for W. P. Friths Derby Day at the Upper Gallery, Pall Mall, and his Railway Station at
the Fine Art Gallery in the Haymarket, as well as works by Rosa Bonheur, John Leech, and others.
11. Fine Art Gossip, Athenaeum June 28, 1862, 859.
12. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, edited with an introduction by Harvey Peter Sucksmith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 15.
13. Leone Ormond, George Du Maurier (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969),
1458. As Ormond points out, the drawing is in part a parody of an illustration that Du Maurier had
produced for another sensation novel, The Notting Hill Mystery (18621863).
14. Athenaeum July 5, 1862, 23.
15. Stanley Weintraub, Whistler: A Biography (London: Collins, 1974), 856. Henceforth abbre-
viated WB.
16. H. L. Mansel, Sensation Novels, Quarterly Review 113 (1863), 481514, 482. See also Nicholas
Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 18602000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 402.
17. Mrs Oliphant, Sensation Novels, Blackwoods 91 (1862), 56484, 572. Cf. Nicholas Dames,
Wave-Theories and Affective Physiologies: The Cognitive Strain in Victorian Novel Theories, Vic-
torian Studies 46.2 (Winter 2004), 20616 for an account of the pervasiveness of such somatic
readings of Victorian fiction.
18. On the role of the commodity experience in nineteenth-century culture see Anne Friedberg,
Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University California Press, 1993).
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 23
M O D E R N I S M / mode r ni t y
24 19. On historical accounts of modernity as a form of sensory overload see Ben Singer, Melodrama
and Modernity: Early Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 5999;
on the training given by the sensation novel and sensation drama see my Literature, Technology,
and Modernity.
20. For a less Benjaminian account of the modernization of the self that traces the discourse of
shock back to the eighteenth century see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Crash (Speed as Engine of Individua-
tion), Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999), 149.
21. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999), 4.
22. Cited in LJMW, 100, from Bierstadt Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (1867).
23. On the life-long Whistler-OLeary friendship, which began in Paris in the 1850s, see Ronald
Anderson, Whistler, an Irish Rebel and Ireland: The Political Implications of an Undocumented
Friendship, Apollo 123 (April 1986), 2548.
24. Cited in LJMW, 101, from Moncure Conway, Reminiscences.
25. See David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art (New York and
London: Freer Gallery and the Smithsonian in Association with W. W. Norton: Norton, 1984), 389.
26. On the more general significance of female figures in aestheticism as mediating between the
claims of autonomous art and commodity culture, see Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beautys Body: Femi-
ninity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997),
especially pages 10813 on Symphony in White, No. 2.
27. The Times critic complained in 1878 that Whistler titled his paintings as if young ladies had
no right to feel aggrieved at being converted into arrangements. Cited in WB, 195.
28. Daniel Pick, Svengalis Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New York and London:
Yale University Press, 2000).
29. Du Maurier appears to have borrowed the name from Charles Nodiers eponymous fairytale
of 1820.
30. George Du Maurier, Trilby. Edited and with an introduction by Elaine Showalter (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 36. Henceforth abbreviated T.
31. Pick, Svengalis Web, 27.
32. Cited in Showalters introduction to Trilby, xiv.
33. On Wilde as Svengali see, for example, Jonathan Grossman, The Mythic Svengali: Anti-Aes-
theticism in Trilby, 28 (Winter 1996), 52542, and Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology, and
Magical Thinking, 18801920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3764. Pick is more
circumspect in Svengalis Web, and leaves the question of originals open.
34. Trilby, Harpers Monthly Magazine 27 (December 1893May 1894), 577.
35. In other respects life seemed to be imitating art. Whistler had returned to Paris in the 1890s,
and had even acquired a studio in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, the same street on which
Poynter, Lamont, and Armstrong once had their studio/apartment, and where he and Du Maurier
had visited so often.
36. Moscheles, With Du Maurier in Bohemia (London, 1896).
37. E. R. and J. Pennell, The Whistler Journal (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1921), 161.
38. E. R. and J. Pennell, Journal, 157.
39. In fact, if The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar are some of
the pre-texts for Du Mauriers sensational plot, The Woman in White is another: the foreign genius
steals Trilbys identity as surely as Count Fosco does that of Laura Fairlie.
40. Robert Fernier, La Vie et LOeuvre de Gustave Courbet: Catalogue Raisonn 2 vols. (Lausanne
and Paris: Fondation Wildenstein and La Bibliothque des Arts, 1977), vol. 1, 2445, vol. 2, 610, and
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
682.
41. Jean-Jacques Fernier, Courbet, reves dhomme, in Courbet, LAmour: Catalogue de
lexposition estivale 1996 (Ornans: Muse Gustave Courbet, 1996), 1333, 28.
42. See also Jack Lindsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art (Queen Square Bath, Somerset:
Adams and Dart, 1973), 2167.
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 24
DALY / whistler, hiffernan, courbet, du maurier
25 43. Cited in Lindsay, Gustave Courbet, 216.
44. On the paintings chequered career see Fernier, La Vie et LOeuvre de Gustave Courbet, and
especially Bernard Teyssdre, Le Roman de lOrigine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Nochlin records her
failed attempts to locate the painting in Courbets LOrigine du Monde: The Origin without an Origi-
nal, October 37 (1986), 7686.
45. Monneret, LImpressionisme et son poque: Dictionnaire internationale illustr (Paris: Denol, 1978).
46. Chantal Humbert LAmour du progress, ou Courbet chez le photographe in Courbet, LAmour,
13758, 145.
12.1daly. 1/18/05, 2:21 PM 25