Devouring Frida. Margaret A. Lindauer

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СКАЧАТЬ (self-sacrificing women) as the popular opposite from machismo.⁴⁷ During the 1920s and 1930s, women had little opportunity to effect political cultural changes, despite their organized fight for women’s rights, including the right to vote.⁴⁸ Thus resistance to strict gender codes could effectively be enacted only in their personal lives. However, if a woman resisted actively enough, foregoing passive subordinate behavior, she fell into another category—the fallen woman, a potential traitor whose resistance is associated with an active, aggressive sexual drive.

      According to Lesley, Kahlo explained that the orchid represented in Henry Ford Hospital was a flower that Diego gave her while she was in the hospital, but it also represented “the idea of a sexual thing.”⁴⁹ Merely incorporating a subtle representation of sexuality was not in and of itself a serious transgression, but reports of Kahlo’s blatant acknowledgment of sexual connotations cast suspicion on her willingness to abide by social codes. Bertram Wolfe described Kahlo’s masculine manner. She chain-smoked cigarettes, drank to excess in public, and used “the richest vocabulary of obscenities … known [of] one of her sex to possess.”⁵⁰ In other words, her behavior was resolutely unfeminine and thereby an overt challenge to gender dichotomy. This sort of challenge was typical of the “woman resistor” or fallen women and, Franco argues, was a significant element in social mythologies told through popular, postrevolutionary fictional written and filmed narratives.⁵¹ The fallen woman narrative ended either in a moralizing portrayal of an irretrievable psychological decline (for which only the woman herself was to blame) or in the jubilant recovery of a woman reentering the dominant order. Both of these themes are present in Kahlo’s life during the mid-1930s, at which point it became clear that she could not be “contained” within the category “mother,” and during which her feelings toward marriage are characterized as having transformed from blissfully domestic to vengefully dishonest. Biographies typically identify two primary catalysts for the transformation—Kahlo’s insistence that she and Rivera return to live in Mexico in 1933 and her despondence over Rivera’s infidelity. Both are relevant to gender stereotypes in that Kahlo transgressed and Rivera exalted in their respective female and male paradigms.

      Kahlo’s letters indicate that she was aware of, and accepted, Rivera’s extramarital affairs, which began perhaps as early as their wedding day. (Herrera reports that Rivera got excessively drunk and disappeared for two days, during which he probably was in the bed of another woman.) In Mexico, Rivera’s sexual “conquests” were publicized, accepted, and expected in a society in which machismo is an overarching, constructed measure of masculinity. As Marvin Goldwert argues, “From adolescence through his entire life, the Mexican male will measure virility by sexual potential.”⁵² Although Kahlo may not have liked her husband’s philandering, she purportedly tolerated Rivera’s promiscuity and the publicity surrounding it until he became sexually involved with her sister Cristina. Upon discovering the affair, Kahlo moved into an apartment in Mexico City. Her disillusionment with marriage is apparent in a letter she wrote to Ella and Bertram Wolfe during the separation: “I had trusted Diego would change, but I can see and know that it is impossible; it’s just a whim on my part. Naturally, I should have understood from the beginning that it will not be me who will make him live in this way or that way, especially when it comes to such a matter [as his sexual liaisons with other women].”⁵³ In the same letter, Kahlo reflects on her life as the wife of Diego Rivera, succinctly characterizing the social position of the subordinate wife:

      First, he has his work, which protects him from many things, and then his adventures, which keep him entertained. People look for him and not me. I know that, as always, he is full of concerns and worries about his work; however he lives a full life without the emptiness of mine. I have nothing because I don’t have him. I never thought he was everything to me and that, separated from him, I was like a piece of trash. I thought I was helping him to live as much as I could, and that I could solve any situation in my life alone without complications of any kind. But now I realize I don’t have any more than any other girl disappointed at being dumped by her man. I am worth nothing, I know how to do nothing; I cannot be on my own.

      My situation seems so ridiculous and stupid to me that you can’t imagine how I dislike myself. I’ve lost my best years being supported by a man, doing nothing else but what I thought would benefit and help him. I never thought about myself, and after six years, his answer is that fidelity is a bourgeois virtue and that it exists only to exploit [people] and to obtain an economic gain.⁵⁴

      Clearly Kahlo was devastated by the affair and questioned the personal value of her domestic devotion. Rivera accordingly is castigated for his callousness, as well as his infidelity, in Kahlo’s biographies. However, she also is held accountable for Rivera’s affair with her sister, for Herrera asserts that Rivera may have had the affair with Cristina because he blamed Frida for their leaving the United States in 1933.⁵⁵ Herrera’s interpretation intimates the social, gendered context that contained the moralizing consequences awaiting the wife who dominates her husband, “forcing” him to relocate and thereby not practicing “proper subordination.” Kahlo crossed an unspoken boundary that distinguished pervading gender paradigms when she actively made demands; she was no longer passively subservient and therefore suffered the consequences—her husband’s affair with her sister. This narrative, consistently recounted in biographies of Kahlo, parallels remarkably the moralizing films and published fiction Franco analyzes. There undoubtedly are aspects of “truth” embedded in the biographies, but the point is not to distinguish “truth” from moralizing fiction but rather to recognize the pervasiveness of cultural stereotypes and mythologies in order to question whether Kahlo’s paintings really promote social prescription as thoroughly as some biographies imply.

      Kahlo and Rivera soon reunited, but Kahlo no longer appeared to embrace conventional bourgeois ethics regarding marriage and sexuality, for both she and Rivera had intimate, sexual relationships outside their marriage. Herrera attributes Kahlo’s sexual infidelity to extreme disillusionment and considers her pronounced sexual drive a conscious retribution against Rivera. Herrera suggests that in 1935 Frida had affairs with Isamu Noguchi and mural painter Ignacio Aguirre primarily because Rivera had been unfaithful.”⁵⁶ Zamora notes, “some [of Kahlo’s] friends believed these dalliances were merely in retaliation for Diego’s transgressions; others felt they were expressions of her own sexual amorality.”⁵⁷ Whether vengeful or sincere, Kahlo implicitly is cast as amoral, despite the spousal agreement; but it was not necessarily her sexuality, rather her active pursuit, that was most socially transgressive.

      Comparing Rivera’s Today and Tomorrow: Modern Mexico mural in the National Palace (figure 4) to Kahlo’s painting A Few Small Nips (figure 5), both completed in 1935, demonstrates a double standard and contradictory perspectives regarding sexual promiscuity and infidelity. Franco argues that Rivera’s Today and Tomorrow: Modern Mexico characterizes the limited extent of women’s liberation in postrevolutionary Mexico.⁵⁸ Kahlo and her sister Cristina are depicted as teachers, but there are significant differences between them. In the 1920s and 1930s, teachers and caretakers, “surrogate mothers,” were respectable social roles for women, particularly unmarried middle-class women, signifying participation through appropriate political service in postrevolutionary Mexico. Vasconcelos characterized women who carried out literacy programs in rural areas as national heroines. Despite the inclusion of women in the nation’s social reconstruction, as Franco points out, the teaching missions “placed women in a position that was rather similar to that of the nuns in the colonial period serving their redeemer. They were expected to be unmarried and chaste, they had little expectation of rising in their profession, and motherhood was still regarded as woman’s supreme fulfillment.”⁵⁹ In the mural Rivera casts his wife, who is unable to realize “woman’s supreme fulfillment” through bearing children, as a teacher, the next best, socially respectable role. She rests her hands on a boy’s shoulder in a gesture of care and encouragement while, with the other hand, she helps him hold his book. Frida as СКАЧАТЬ