new formations NUMBER 5 SUMMER I 988
Kaja Silverman
LIBERTY, MATERNITY, COMMODIFICATION
The Statue of Liberty, as we have all been recently reminded, was a gift from
France to the United States. As such, it would seem to provide a classic example
of what Baudrillard calls 'symbolic exchange', that privileged form of social
intercourse which he counterposes to every kind of value, whether it be usevalue, exchange-value, or sign-value, and which he hence exempts from
commodification. He has this to say about symbolic exchange in 'The
ideological genesis of needs':
In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration,
the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which
it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is
thus not independent as such. . . . The gift is unique, specified by the people
exchanging and the unique moment of the exchange. It is arbitrary, and yet
absolutely singular.
As distinct from language, whose material can be disassociated from the
subjects speaking it, the material of symbolic exchange, the objects given, are
not autonomous, hence not codifiable as signs. Since they do not depend on
economic exchange, they are not amenable to systematization as commodities
and exchange value.1
Baudrillard thus maintains that the gift derives its meaning from the exchange
itself rather than from a differential play of signs and that it is not 'separated'
from the participants of that exchange in the way that sign-value is, which has
no relation to anything but a closed system. He goes on in the same essay to
connect the gift to lack, desire, and psychic ambivalence, thereby grounding it
firmly within an economy of the subject.2 A similar argument about the
immediacy and personal thematics of symbolic exchange helps to organize most
of the other essays in the same volume, essays which are otherwise relentless in
their critique of theoretical categories (such as need and use-value) that might
somehow link object to subject.
I would like for a moment to juxtapose this notion of the Statue of Liberty as
gift with a 'plug' for NBC that I recently encountered in the New York Times.
That 'plug' featured an obliquely angled photograph of Bartholdi's monument
with the caption: 'Is This False Advertising?' My initial response was to read the
pronoun 'this' as referring both to NBC's recent appropriation of Bartholdi's
statue as a logo, and to the ad itself, which used the statue in a very similar way.
Then I realized that the intended referent was Liberty, and that the morning
reader of the New York Times was being asked to consider whether America's
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foremost national monument represents a 'true' or 'false' advertisement. There
seemed to be no room within this referendum for any other possible account of
Liberty's status; she was in either case necessarily an advertisement, and as such
entirely contained within exchange-value and sign-value. (NBC's promotional
crew seems not to have grasped that if this is indeed the case, there can no longer
be any way of ascertaining her 'truthfulness' or 'falsehood'.)
How are we to reconcile these two very different accounts of Bartholdi's
statue? Is it possible that she is in fact both gift and commodity? That the
categories Baudrillard so emphatically separates are inextricably bound up with
each other? Let us see what we can learn about Liberty through the agency of
symbolic exchange, and symbolic exchange through the agency of Liberty.
Liberty Enlightening the World, to cite her complete name, conforms to
Baudrillard's theoretical paradigm quite smoothly in certain respects. She is a
unique object, beyond literal replication because of her size and the peculiar and
anachronistic circumstances of her production. She has also been sanctified, as it
were, through a whole series of public ceremonies, the most recent of which
occurred in July 1986. (Significantly, while the gift remains Baudrillard's
Last stage of mounting copper to the armature, 1886
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primary example of symbolic exchange, he also exempts the 'traditional, ritual
and arlisanal object' from commodification.)3 Finally, Liberty attested in her
original French context both to a political lack and to a political desire - to the
lack, that is, of a stable and orderly republic, along the lines of the United
States, and to the desire for precisely such a form of government. (If one were to
subscribe to the argument that Bartholdi built his Alsatian mother's image into
the statue's face, one might want to suggest that she spoke as well to a whole
complex of Oedipal and nationalistic desires, particularly given the recent loss of
Alsace-Lorraine to the Prussians.)
However, Liberty also exceeds the conceptual model elaborated by Baudrillard,
and she does so in ways that call radically into question the binarization of
symbolic exchange and commodification. First of all, far from transcending
exchange-value and the circulation of capital, that object has been from the very
outset an enormous economic problem; it took the French Committee five years
and considerable ingenuity to raise enough money to build her, and the
American Committee a comparable period of time to finance her pedestal and
erection.4 Similar fund-raising campaigns have been required at regular
View of the face of the Statue of Liberty hung in a wooden frame, c. 1885/6
LIBERTY, MATERNITY, COMMODIFICATION
Eugene Delacroix, 28 July 1830, Liberty Guiding the People to the Barricades
intervals since then in order to preserve and refurbish her, most recently that
spearheaded by Lee Iaccoca.5
Second, the Statue of Liberty carried a highly elaborated sign-value within
her immediate French context, a value having to do with the differential play
between certain of her own features and those inscribed within earlier
representations on the same theme. It has become something of a commonplace
to compare Liberty Enlightening the World with Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the
People to the Barricades (1830),6 a comparison which does much to clarify the
political nuances of Bartholdi's project. Both 'heroines' are larger than life, and
each holds her right arm boldly aloft. However, whereas Delacroix's Liberty
carries a tricolour and a rifle, and is in fact leading a revolutionary insurrection,
Bartholdi's Liberty supports a domesticated torch, and holds a stone tablet with
the date of a revolution long past. Liberty Guiding the People also strides
robustly forward, trampling bodies under foot, accompanied by armed
comrades and the smoke of battle, whereas her subsequent counterpart stands
solitary and motionless, with only her right foot suggesting even the possibility
of movement. However, what speaks most eloquently to the distance separating
the moderate republicanism articulated by Bartholdi's statue from the radical
republicanism embodied by Delacroix's protagonist is that whereas the latter
wears a red phrygian cap, the former displays a seven-rayed diadem, evocative
of a sunburst.
The phrygian cap figures centrally in most accounts of nineteenth-century
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revolutionary representation. Believed to have derived from Rome, where it was
awarded to slaves who had been given their freedom,7 that headgear came in the
years following the French Revolution to be closely associated with a female
figure representing the republic, a figure who was sometimes loved and feared
under the name of 'Liberty', and at other times embraced and reviled under the
more familiar, incendiary, and potentially insulting name of 'Marianne'. The
first seal of the first French Republic, for example, depicts Liberty holding a
pike topped with a phrygian bonnet, and that item of clothing reappeared in
scores of other popular representations during the nineteenth century. Maurice
Agulhon suggests that of all the details associated with this republican figure,
the phrygian cap is 'the symbol most charged with significance, the one whose
omission is always significant'.8
It is not merely that Bartholdi's Liberty doesn't wear that emblem, but that
the radiant head-dress she does wear has a monarchical past. The sun was
intimately associated with French royalty, emphatically so, of course, during
the reign of Louis XIV. To adorn Liberty with a sunburst was in a sense to
'crown' her, and thereby to align her with a tradition of stable and conservative
government. To the eye skilled in French political representations of the
nineteenth century, her diadem also invokes the enlightenment, an invocation
which her name repeats. Radical unreason is the spirit that reigns over
Delacroix's painting, on the other hand, with its smoking muskets and bleeding
bodies.
Finally, and most interestingly to me, Bartholdi's statue would have conveyed
its moderate republican values to his French contemporaries through its
treatment of the female body, which contrasts markedly with earlier and more
radically republican representations. I want to say a few words about some of
those representations before returning to the monument which is the main focus
of this essay.
Delacroix's painting shows Liberty's breasts and shoulders breaking free
from her loose garment, drawing a metaphorical connection between the
political revolt of the people and the exposure of sexualized parts of the female
anatomy. Liberty's body can be clearly read beneath her tunic and peplum in
the first seal of the first republic, 9 and her legs are exposed in many other
revolutionary representations, such as Prudhon's The Republic, with Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity. The Republic, an extraordinary painting Daumier
produced in 1848 for a state competition devoted to the search for a new and less
potentially disruptive image of the republic than Liberty/Marianne, dutifully
substitutes an inconspicuous blue cap for the by then familiar red bonnet, and
seats its female figure on a kind of throne. However, it constructs her body in
such a way as to promote rather than dampen republican ardour. The woman's
monumental arms, shoulders, and breasts are completely bare, her nipples
concealed only by the heads of two nursing but already substantially developed
children. Her arms are muscular, and the entire upper half of her body gives an
impression of dynamic strength which is more than a little reminiscent of
Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People. Her hair is unfettered, and she grasps a
furled tricolour with a firm hand. Her substantial legs are clearly outlined
beneath her skirt, and her groin is marked by a strategic shadow. The maternal
L I B E R T Y , MATERNITY, COMMODIF1CATION
Honore Daumier, The Republic, 1848
dimensions of the painting do nothing to neutralize the impression of a
politically powerful sexuality; indeed, the maturity of the children she is
suckling helps to make lactation an erotic event.
Bartholdi's statue, on the contrary, completely buries the female form
beneath her classic drapery. Liberty's head and neck are exposed, and parts of
her feet and the lower parts of her arms can be glimpsed, but everything else is
concealed beneath metres and metres of copper 'fabric'. Apart from the modest
outline of her breasts, no other part of her body is even implied by her tunic and
peplum. Pointing out that Bartholdi performed no anatomical studies while
working on Liberty, Pierre Provoyeur suggests that she is in effect 'all
drapery'. 10 Any thought that a body might nevertheless lurk beneath those folds
is abruptly put to flight by the possibility of entering the statue, and climbing up
inside it. From this interior vantage point, as from all exterior views, all that can
be seen between arms and feet are the green metal sheets of her neo-classical
garments. Eiffel's support structure only works to deny corporeality even
further, since it puts a wrought-iron pylon and secondary system of trusswork at
the centre of the statue, 11 substituting rationalism and control for the
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gunpowder and sexual bravado of Delacroix's painting, or the mammarian
munificence of Daumier's Republic.
It was Laboulaye, of course, who provided the ideological impetus for
Bartholdi's colossus, urging him in 1876 that the statue 'not be liberty in a red
cap, striding across corpses with her pike at the port', but 'the American liberty
whose torch is held high not to inflame but to enlighten'. 12 This exhortation
underscores the didacticism that has fuelled the project from the very
beginning. It also indicates that Liberty's initial audience was French rather
than American. What Bartholdi's statue held out to his compatriots was
the promise of a liberty uncontaminated by passion, a republic without
republicanism, and a political arena from which the female body would be
discreetly barred.
But let us return to the scene of the gift - to the occasion of the transfer of the
Statue of Liberty from France to America. What is suggested by even the most
cursory account of that transfer is that the object failed to carry its sign-value
with it into its new context. The substitution of a seven-rayed diadem for a
phrygian cap can have meant little to most Americans, who would not have had
access to the complexities of French republican representation, and the modesty
of Liberty's attire probably seemed unremarkable. Indeed, I would go so far as
to suggest that Bartholdi's statue failed at first to signify anything much to the
American public, and that because it remained largely outside of sign-value its
symbolic exchange could not take place. Of course the gift brought with it an
onerous financial obligation - the obligation to raise almost $400,000 for the
construction of the pedestal and the erection of the statue on Bedloe Island,
a proviso calculated to dampen any recipient's enthusiasm. However, a
substantial portion of that money was raised quickly enough once America
decided that it wanted Liberty. But before that could happen - before France's
present could be psychically accepted - it was necessary for it to be semiotically
reconstituted as a representation no longer of moderate republicanism, or
French political aspirations, but of the American socius.
The re-inscription of Bartholdi's statue was undertaken by Joseph Pulitzer, a
Hungarian emigre, and owner and editor of The World. He intervened at a key
moment in the American monetary campaign, raising $102,000 from 121,000
donors in five months while dramatically increasing his readership. Pulitzer
directed his appeal to the 'common' woman and man, marketing not only the
statue, but his newspaper and a very powerful image of the United States - one
predicated, interestingly, upon an imagined continuity between the French
masses and their American counterparts, and hence upon internationalism
rather than nationalism. In so doing he completely shifted the terms of the
symbolic exchange, which now came to signify class solidarity rather than the
desire for a stable and orderly republic:
We must raise the money! The World is the people's paper, and now it appeals
to the people to come forward. . . . The statue . . . was paid [fori by the
working men, the tradesmen, the shop girls, the artisans - by all irrespective
of class or condition. Let us respond in like manner. Let us not wait for the
millionaires to raise this money.1
LIBERTY, MATERNITY, COMMODIFICATION
75
Pulitzer printed the names of contributors in The World, along with letters
from immigrants, children, widows, and pensioners, letters which he may well
have contrived. Here is a particularly telling example in the binarism it sets up
between rich and poor, and in its dramatization of the statue's emotional
appropriation:
Please find enclosed $7.25 as a first subscription to the Bartholdi Pedestal
Fund. We, as workmen poor in pockets, but rich in patriotism, contribute
our mite in hope that the example will be followed by working men generally,
and shame the close-fisted millionaires if that be possible.
The Employees, Douglas Taylor, printer 14
In paying in this way for the statue, the American people made it an image of
themselves, and signalled their acceptance of the French gift. However, what
they thus invested in, both economically and psychically, was a representation
that exceeded geographical and racial boundaries, and that was far more lateral
and egalitarian than either the republic Laboulaye had in mind, or the one they
helped to secure on American soil.
Pulitzer's intervention would seem to call for a double reading of the sort
proposed by Jameson in 'Reification and Utopia in mass culture', 15 since it
created a situation where the work of art functioned to gratify the 'imperishable'
desire for social collectivity while at the same time succumbing irretrievably to
sign-value and commodification. I would indeed state the case even more
bleakly: Pulitzer created a situation where the work of art gratified the
'imperishable' desire for social collectivity precisely through its commodification. The American public was sold the image of the United States in which they
dreamed of seeing themselves, and they have continued to pay for that dream
ever since, underwriting in the process countless subsidiary products and
political schemes, from First World War bonds and Sure deodorant to NBC and
the 1986 Modern Language Convention. This is a classic example of the
disjunctive operations of desire, which can perhaps only ever be satisfied
through displacement and substitution, investment occurring at one site and
'gratification' at another. What is paid for, in other words, is never what is
delivered.
However, lest we lose sight of the Utopian aspects of the sign-value Pulitzer
attached to France's gift, I want to stress the continuity that can be traced
between The World's fund-raising campaign and the poem Emma Lazarus was
later to write about the Statue of Liberty. That poem reiterates the connection
between Bartholdi's colossus and the masses, while extending the latter category
to include not just France and America, but the unassimilable poor of every
other country as well. 'Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, / Send
these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me, /I lift my lamp beside the golden door'
are the lines Lazarus puts into Liberty's mouth, lines which can never be too
familiar to quote once again, particularly in these days of massive homelessness
and immigration restrictions. Lazarus annexed such a radically democratizing
promise to the statue that the keynote speaker at its official unveiling ceremony,
Chauncey Depew, felt impelled to hedge it about with qualifications, warning
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that while 'there is room and brotherhood [in America] for all who will support
our institutions and aid in our development, those who come to disturb our
peace and dethrone our laws are aliens and enemies for ever'. 16
The degree to which the American public finds not just its national identity
but its very sense of itself as a social collectivity within Bartholdi's statue has
perhaps never been more eloquently expressed than in a representation which
was produced in 1918 by filling in the immediately recognizable outlines of that
statue with the photographic cut-outs of the 18,000 officers and men stationed at
an Iowa military base. As Philippe Roger says of this representation, 'the
totemic giantess [there] becomes a fabulous conglomerate of flesh and blood, her
body a mosaic of human bodies. And that extraordinary tableau vivant is a
mythic realization of the desired fusion of the foreign colossus and the social
corpus.' 17 The collage is also striking for the way in which it compensates for the
statue's own missing body by substituting a myriad of smaller bodies, and for
the gender hybridization that results. In a way, the constant stream of visitors
filing up the stairs at the heart of the statue performs much the same function,
placing breathing, pulsating male and female bodies beneath the copper drapery
of her neo-classical garments.
Mole and Thomas: Human Statue of Liberty, 1918
I would like to mention briefly two other textual instances that also testify
powerfully to the intimate identification of the American people with the Statue
of Liberty. Marina Warner recounts visiting Bedloe Island in 1984, and
watching tourists have their photographs taken with their faces framed by a
headless cardboard reproduction of the adjacent monument. 18 This little story
dramatizes interpellation as effectively as does Althusser's parable about being
hailed on the street, or his account of Christianity.19 A similar psychic and
ideological operation was implicit within all those television and newspaper
images that circulated in July 1986 of centennial celebrants adorned with rubber
diadems. However, what distinguished these imaginary transactions from those
described in Lenin and Philosophy is that in each case the cultural subject found
his or her social identity through identification with a female imago. This is a
crucial detail, which does much to explain the firm hold which the statue has
secured upon the American psyche; this particular suture reprises in some
fundamental way the early history of subjectivity, in which the mother functions
both as a visual and as an acoustic mirror. 20
Although the Statue of Liberty would seem to be the authentic object from
which all its many reproductions derive, it in fact resists assimilation into a
discourse of origins and originality. It, too, can be seen to be a reproduction of
sorts, and in more ways than one. To begin with, Bartholdi conceived of another
colossal project long before the American statue, proposing to the ruler of Egypt
in 1867 that he build a lighthouse in the shape of an enormous female fellah at
the entrance to the Suez Canal.21 The maquettes which Bartholdi constructed of
this figure, which was to be called Egypt Carrying Light to Asia, contain most of
the key details that were later to define Liberty; they show a loosely draped
woman with an illuminated headpiece, holding a torch in her upraised left arm.
The American project was clearly a replacement in certain respects for the
Egyptian one.
Second, the process of constructing the Statue of Liberty proceeded largely
through reproductions. Bartholdi began with a series of sketches, from the last
of which he made a 2.11 metre figure. He then fabricated a second figure four
times the size of the first. The second figure was sectioned, and after an
extremely laborious and painstaking series of measurements and calculations a
wooden model four times the size of each section was built, and covered with
plaster. Wooden impressions of the plaster-covered sections were then
produced, into which the copper sheets of the final statue were hammered until
they assumed the shape of the mould. 22 Which if any of these figures could be
said to be the original? Certainly not the end-product, which is quite literally a
tracing of a tracing. (Extraordinarily, one of the two 'reproductions' of Liberty
that are located in Paris may actually be said to be nearer to the first figure than
is Liberty herself, since it was probably made from a foundry mould struck
from the second figure.)
Finally, the statue was reproduced long before she was herself in existence.
As early as 1875 an illuminated transparency and a small statuette of Liberty
were displayed at a fund-raising dinner, and the next year one hundred onemetre terracotta statuettes were sold in Paris and New York. In 1877 a diorama
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of Liberty was installed first in the Palais de l'lndustrie, and later in the Jardins
des Tuileries. In 1878 'her' photograph appeared in a number of illustrated
magazines, and thousands of souvenir photographs were printed. 23 The last of
these fund-raising events took what for lack of a better word I will call the 'idea'
of Liberty Enlightening the World deep into the heart of mechanical reproduction,
where it has been ever since.
It is odd that Bartholdi would have marketed Liberty's image in this way,
since the statue itself might almost be said to throw down the gauntlet in the face
of mechanical reproduction. Her construction, as I have already suggested, was
almost a parody of artisanal production, occurring as it did at a moment well
past the inception of photography, and its status as gift would seem to depend in
some very profound way upon its singularity. And yet in some curious way
Liberty's uniqueness has been constituted precisely through her massive
dissemination, just as her symbolic exchange depended upon a newly
manufactured sign-value. Her privileged status, in other words, has finally more
to do with all the ways in which she has been brought 'closer', as Benjamin
would say, to the viewer, than with the maintenance of her aura through
distance.24 That proximity is fostered by the easy access to the interior of the
statue, as well as through the massive proliferation of mechanically reproduced
representations, which assure that her image is clearly etched within the psyche
of every American.
It is not surprising, given the impossibility of holding the Statue of Liberty to
a myth of the original and authentic object, that her commentators have turned
in their attempt to establish her ground and starting-point to the question of
who might have served as Bartholdi's living model. The two answers that have
been most frequently given to this question - mother and prostitute - are
staggering in their binarized overdetermination, summarizing centuries of
representational history. Let us nevertheless look rather more closely at the way
the first of these cases has been presented.
Trachtenberg has made perhaps the most elaborate case for considering
Bartholdi's mother as Liberty's inspiration and prototype. 'It is said that
Jeanne-Emile [Bartholdi's wife] spent long hours posing for the figure of
Liberty,' he writes,
but Bartholdi himself admitted that the face of the statue was his mother's.
And her hard dour features may, indeed, be recognized beneath the
classicizing mask. For Bartholdi, the emotional core of meaning in his
colossus was deeply personal - not America's achievement, not even the loss
of his beloved Alsace, but the political degredation of his beloved mother. 25
According to Trachtenberg, the statue's origin is synonymous with Bartholdi's
own literal origin - not just with that abstraction of woman which Courbet was
to entitle Origin of the World, but with the very specific features of Bartholdi's
biological mother. Warner, who has a rather more sophisticated understanding
of Liberty's maternal connotations, nevertheless asserts that 'it is the countenance
of Mme Bartholdi, mere, which we behold in the statue', 26 as if to suggesi both a
perceptual innocence on the sculptor's part, and the possibility of a directly
mimetic art.
LIBERTY, MATERNITY, COMMODIFICATION
79
I myself would argue that the visual resemblance is by no means as selfevident as these writers suggest, and that what they are seeing when they look at
the statue - what we are all culturally encouraged to see - is a fantasmatic
mother, capable of effecting our imaginary union not only with her, but with the
entire nation. This maternal construction clearly taps into lack and Oedipal
desire in a big way, but to say that is not the same thing as to propose a one-forone relation between Mme Bartholdi (or any other existential mother) and the
Statue of Liberty. I would in fact go so far as to suggest that Bartholdi's colossus
works to rectify the political degredation not so much of his actual mother,
whose region and home became the scene of a Prussian occupation, as of the
mother whose sexuality had been exposed within political representations like
Delacroix's Liberty, Daumier's Republic, or - to return to the example I cited a
moment ago - Courbet's Origin of the World.
That last painting - or to be more precise, what Linda Nochlin has recently
shown to be a set of variable photographic representations filling in for that
painting, which would itself appear to be irretrievably lost27 - intersects with the
present discussion in more ways than one. It is not only that here, too, it is
impossible to recover the original object, but that once again the issue of origins
is posed thematically through a figuration of motherhood. (What somehow
passes Nochlin's notice is that when attached to any of the photographic
representations that circulate as reproductions of Courbet's painting, the title
Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World, c.1866
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Origin of the World sharply isolates that representation from the all-too-familiar
beaver shots with which it might seem otherwise indistinguishable, and obliges
it to circulate as a transgressively maternal image - an image that shows the
mother as only a prostitute 'should' be seen, and which in the process forces a
redefinition of both categories.) There is, however, a world of difference
between Bartholdi's colossal mother and that projected by the Courbet
reproductions, the former functioning, as I will attempt to show, as the virtual
'redemption' of the latter.
What I will henceforth call 'Courbet's painting' or Origin of the World, for
purposes of economy, but by which I will continue to refer to its photographic
reproductions, might be said to complete the strip-tease begun by Delacroix and
Daumier. It excerpts from the female body precisely those parts which remain
clothed even in the earlier two paintings, offering the viewer a nude image of an
anonymous woman's thighs, groin, hips, stomach, and lower breasts. When
placed side by side with reproductions of those other paintings, it seems almost
to 'flesh' them out, pulling the drapery away from the partially covered bodies
that personify the concepts of Liberty and the French Republic. At the same
time, significantly, Origin of the World deletes all of the anatomical details which
Bartholdi includes in his statue, notably neck, head, and feet, so that those two
representations function as virtual antimonies.
My metonymic slide from the exposed breasts of Liberty Guiding the People
and The Republic to the exposed stomach, groin, hips, and thighs of Origin of the
World is meant to suggest once again, and with even greater force, that the
image of a nude or partially exposed female body was capable of exercising a
political force in nineteenth-century France that is denied to it within dominant
representational practices in the late twentieth century, and to indicate that
Courbet's painting belongs in the same discussion as Delacroix's and Daumier's,
despite its apparent affinities with contemporary pornography. Of course I do
not mean to imply that female sexuality or politics of any sort can be directly
read off a 'natural' or unconstructed female body. These three paintings
constitute a representational system, not a corporeal reality - a representational
system that posits the female body and female sexuality as politically explosive,
and which does so in opposition both to the history of monarchical France, and
to that of Catholic art, with its cult of the Virgin Mary.
Neil Hertz, who has recently commented very interestingly upon the hysteria
such images were capable of eliciting from contemporary male figures who were
either ambivalent or downright hostile to radical republicanism, quotes a
passage from Hugo's Choses Vues which I would like to include in the present
discussion, a passage which mediates elegantly between an overtly political
painting like Liberty Guiding the People and the seemingly apolitical Origin of the
World. On 23 June 1848, Hugo witnessed the following exchange between the
revolutionary forces, who had set up a barricade at the Porte St Denis, and the
National Guard, who were in the process of charging that barricade:
a woman appeared on the crest of the barricade, a young woman, beautiful,
dishevelled, terrifying. This woman, who was a public whore, pulled her
dress up to the waist and cried to the guardsmen, in that dreadful bro".hel
LIBERTY, MATERNITY, COMMODIFICATION
8l
language that one is always obliged to translate: 'Cowards! Fire, if you dare,
at the belly of a woman!'
Here things took an awful turn. The National Guard did not hesitate. A
fusillade toppled the miserable creature. She fell with a great cry. . . .
Suddenly a second woman appeared. This one was younger and still more
beautiful; she was practically a child, barely seventeen. What profound
misery! She, too, was a public whore. She raised her dress, showed her belly,
and cried: 'Fire, you bandits!' They fired. She fell, pierced with bullets, on
top of the other's body.
That was how this war began. 28
This passage makes absolutely explicit the representational importance which
images of the female genitals were capable of assuming in radical republicanism,
both for the left and the right; not only did the two prostitutes display their
cunts as an image of the 1848 revolution, but they were treated as if their bodies
were indeed the very embodiment of that revolution. It is, of course, precisely
this display which links Courbet's painting both to Hugo's text, and to such
revolutionary moments of nineteenth-century history as 1848 and 1870-9.1 feel
impelled to add that the genital 'switchpoint' which facilitates the easy transfer
from one of these texts to the other works to erode the distinction between
mother and prostitute which Bartholdi's statue helps to re-inscribe, and which
has organized the search for his human model.
The moment has perhaps come to ponder once again the elision of the female
body in the Statue of Liberty, particularly given the maternal sign-value which
it shares with both the Daumier and the Courbet paintings. Let us do so via a
passage from Trachtenberg's book on the American monument, a passage
which seems to reclaim for it some of the transgressive value of Origin of the
World. 'This decent woman', he writes, 'takes on an altogether different
character' to those who 'know' her (and this 'know' has a decidedly carnal
inflection) than to those who merely 'see' her from outside, since 'for a fee she is
open to all entry and exploration from below'. 29 The implication is obvious:
although Liberty seems to be a mother, she is in fact a prostitute. However,
Trachtenberg's reading ultimately works to preserve the integrity of the
categories he juxtaposes, categories which he conceptualizes in terms of two
classic binarisms - the binarisms of exteriority and interiority, and appearance
and reality.
I would also argue that Trachtenberg's account is emphatically denied by
what the tourist finds when s/he climbs inside Bartholdi's statue. That denial
may very well be a disavowal (it is perhaps, inevitably so), but it is crucial to
understand that at some very important level Liberty is precisely an extension of
the desire to 'return' to the inside of the fantasmatic mother's body without
having to confront her sexuality in any way. Her 'contents' are erotic only in the
sense that a bachelor machine or one of Hans Belmer's 'poupees' might be said to
be; they are all system and structure. And in some equally pressing way that
voyage to the interior of the fantasmatic mother was, at least in its nineteenthcentury French context, a journey away from political contestation and radical
engagement. Emma Lazarus's poem holds out to the twentieth-century
American tourist the possibility of making a rather different journey, one to the
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NEW FORMATIONS
centre of international socialism, but the extensive commodification and
political reappropriation of the statue do much to foreclose upon that
possibility.
It is ironic in the light of this foreclosure of sexuality and the resanctification of
motherhood that the other 'persistent rumour' that has circulated with respect
to Liberty's origin is that her model was a prostitute. 30 Needless to say,
Bartholdi's family has done its best to lay this rumour to rest, stressing that
Bartholdi himself always cited his mother as his inspiration. It is also predictable
that none of the statue's commentators has given it any credence, since to install
an anonymous prostitute in the place of Liberty's model is to cut the ground out
from underneath her in a very troubling way; such a parentage could never,
within a traditional paradigm at least, be anything but shameful and full of
uncertainty, and it casts a dark shadow over the monument's maternal
pretensions. However, the rumour was nevertheless bound to circulate, since
(as I have attempted to demonstrate) Bartholdi's statue speaks to the very
profound desire to reassert the distinction between categories which had begun
to bleed into each other, and to place the mother back on her pedestal. What
was and still continues to be incendiary about a painting like Daumier's
Republic or Courbet's Origin of the World is that they posit a female sexuality
which lies beyond the classic oppositions, fusing motherhood with eroticism.
If the Statue of Liberty cannot be established as being the original from which
all copies derive, nor a flesh-and-blood model be adduced to fill in as the missing
source, neither can we fall back upon the authority of Bartholdi-as-author. This
is a situation where authority is highly dispersed, and difficult to assign.
Laboulaye is often cited as the person responsible for the 'idea' of the
monument, supposedly on the occasion of a dinner party in 1865 at Glatigny.31
Whether or not this was indeed the case (we have only Bartholdi's self-serving
word for it), liberty figures as one of the major themes of Laboulaye's writing, 32
and the sculptor consulted closely with him about the statue throughout her
design and construction. It was Laboulaye who suggested the date that appears
on the tablet Liberty holds, 33 and who urged that she be aligned with the law
rather than the barricades. Crucially, it was also as a consequence of his
intervention that Bartholdi abandoned an earlier maquette for the statue, with a
very different conception of the female body. (That maquette shows Liberty's
knee thrusting dynamically forward, and her left hip and arm thrown backward;
there is very clearly a body beneath her drapery.) 34
Eiffel must also be counted as one of the monument's authors, not only
because his support structure made everything else possible, but because that
structure serves to define the space inside. Liberty's 'interiority' is, as I have
tried to show, a crucial part of her artistic, psychic, and ideological functioning,
permitting the visitor to penetrate and be encompassed by her, and taking the
place of the elided female body. Eiffel's metal trusswork might almost be said to
be the law that inhabits Laboulaye's vision of Liberty, and that prevents her
from succumbing either to sexuality or to republican passion. At the same time
it is a work of art in its own right, in much the same way that Eiffel's oridges
were; indeed, he used the same construction principles for the former as he did
for the latter.35
LIBERTY, MATERNITY, COMMODIFICATION
83
Frederic-Auguste Bartoldi, maquette for Liberty, n.d.
Others with some claims on authorship include Giuseppi Ceracchi, a neoclassical sculptor with revolutionary interests who worked in France, and who at
the end of the eighteenth century travelled to the United States and proposed a
Liberty monument to Congress, 36 and Richard Morris Hunt, who designed the
magnificent pedestal on which Bartholdi's statue stands. Pulitzer and Lazarus
might be said to have 're-authored' Liberty for the American public, and since
their time an inestimable number of artists, politicians, and advertising firms
have recontextualized her in ways that have dramatically transformed her signvalue, and even her image itself. I would like to comment briefly on three of
these recontextualizations.
The first of my revisionary citations - Hudson Talbott's Luncheon on the Grass
(1982) - testifies vividly to the distance separating the female bodies that appear
within nineteenth-century radical republican art from those to which we have
grown accustomed in the late twentieth century. That ink and water-colour
NEW FORMATIONS
rewrites Manet's Picnic on the Grass as well as Bartholdi's statue, staging a threeperson picnic in Central Park, with a view of the Manhattan sykline and the
Hudson River. The unlikely picnickers are the Empire State Building, the
Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty. The buildings are both coded as
male, striking similar poses to those adopted by the two men in Manet's
painting. Liberty, however, is much more emphatically 'feminine' than usual;
wearing only her diadem, she sits provocatively on her green draperies, and her
tablet and torch have been cast negligently aside. Stripped of her tunic and
peplum, she is recognizable only through her famous headpiece, for she has
become all body. However, female nudity has none of the radical significance
here that it enjoys in Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People, or Daumier's
Republic. On the contrary, it works to rigidify existing gender categories, and to
banalize the concept of liberty. Moreover, while Bartholdi's statue no longer
conforms to the role of a staid matron, her new image does nothing to challenge
the binarism of mother and prostitute; she has simply slipped irretrievably from
the first of those categories to the second.
The concept of liberty undergoes a similar diminution through its association
with the female body on the back cover of Mad Magazine's June 1975 issue. An
all too recognizable image of Bartholdi's colossus adorns that cover, altered only
in two crucial respects: instead of the torch of enlightenment she holds up a bra
between dismissive forefinger and thumb, and her tablet bears the words
Talbott Hudson, Luncheon on the Grass, 1982
LIBERTY, MATERNITY, COMMODIFICATION
85
Ms Liberty (Mad Magazine cover, 1975)
'Women's Lib' rather than 'July 4, 1776'. The caption introduces her as 'Ms
Liberty'. The substitution of bra for torch suggests that there may be a body
underneath Liberty's draperies after all, but that suggestion works to close off
rather than to open up revolutionary meaning. Feminism is reduced to the
desire for less restrictive female dress and the statue's ponderousness and stern
demeanour offer a parodic commentary on the solemnity with which it
ostensibly pursues this goal. What is thereby denied is not only feminism's
larger political project, but the radicalizing part which representations of the
body in fact played during the early years of that movement, and the theoretical
importance that category has since assumed. (This is perhaps the moment to
add that although my own sexual politics resonate much more fully with the
images generated by nineteenth-century French republicanism, Bartholdi's
statue has not been without its feminist claimants; barred from its 1886
unveiling as were all women but the wives of the French delegation, American
suffragists held their own simultaneous ceremony,37 and in 1915 they gathered
with Carrie Chapman Catt at Liberty's base to demand the vote.)38
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NEW FORMATIONS
Bartholdi's statue has been reappropriated in countless other ways as well
but I will confine myself to one last example - Jean Lagarrigue's painting'
Liberty Cola (1974). Against a clouded night sky, Liberty rises ominously from
her base. Her tablet is in one hand, her torch in the other, and her diadem is in
its usual crowning position. However, an enormous Coca-Cola bottle takes the
place normally occupied by her head and draperies. This painting does not so
much redefine Bartholdi's monument as comment ironically upon the primary
mechanism through which her image has been disseminated, and new meanings
attached to it, i.e. on the statue's commodification. In saving this example for
last, I do not mean to imply that Liberty has succumbed to this fate only
recently, or that there has ever been a moment in which she stood outside the
market-place. Contained within sign-value and mechanical reproduction long
before she was even assembled, Liberty has necessarily been always-already
within commodification as well. As early as 1875 Bartholdi offered his statue as a
logo to the French business world, and Champagne Delauney of Reims
immediately took him up on his offer.39 Since then Liberty has been part of the
marketing campaign for hundreds of goods, from T-shirts, posters, and
commemorative coins to perfumes, political agendas and automobiles. She has
indeed become the ultimate commodity, able to 'float' any number of secondary
products.
If the Statue of Liberty could be so smoothly consumed within capital, that is
in part because her assigned gender makes her so pre-eminently exchangeable
so easily transferable (once her sign-value has been established) from France to
England, from the Chrysler Building to the Empire State Building, and from
Jean Lagarrigue, Liberty-Cola, 1974
LIBERTY, MATERNITY, COMMODIFICATION
87
buyers to sellers of all kinds. However, it is also because of her symbolic
importance, her status as gift. Baudrillard claims that 'an object [cannot be] an
object of consumption unless it is released from its psychic determination as
s y m b o l . . . and is thus liberated as a sign to be recaptured by the formal logic of
fashion, i.e. by the logic of differentiation', 4 0 but once again Bartholdi's
monument gives the lie to this easy separation of symbolic exchange from signvalue. Just as Liberty could only be accepted as a gift once she had assumed
sign-value, so her function as a sign continues to be dependent in some vital way
upon her psychic prestige. She represents such a valuable and multivalent
commodity, in other words, precisely because she provides the image through
which America constitutes itself as a socius. It is thus our national identity itself
which is being traded upon. T h e recent centennial celebration suggests that
even more may be at stake - that it may be our very capacity to constitute
ourselves as a social collectivity which the market-place has somehow turned to
the advantage of capital.
NOTES
I would like to thank Peter Wollen and Leslie Dick for the valuable advice they offered
me while I was writing this paper, and Barbara Miller for her photographic assistance.
i Jean Baudrillard, 'The ideological genesis of needs', in For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St Louis: Telos, 1981), 64-5.
2 ibid, 65.
3 ibid.
4 For an extended discussion of the French fund-raising campaign, see Catherine
Hodeir, 'The French campaign', trans. Maxwell Vos, in Liberty: the French-American
statue in art and history, ed. Pierre Provoyeur and June Hargrove (New York: Harper
& Row, 1986), 120-39. F ° r a discussion of the American campaign, see Mary J.
Shapiro, Gateway to Liberty: the story of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (New
York: Vintage, 1986), 35-45; and June Hargrove, 'The American fund-raising
campaign', in Liberty: the French-American statue in art and history, 156-65.
5 For a comprehensive treatment of this subject, see Richard Seth Hayden and
Thierry W. Despont, Restoring the Statue of Liberty (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986).
6 See for instance Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty (New York: Penguin,
1986 [rev. edn]), 66-8, and Pierre Provoyeur, 'Artistic problems', trans. Maxwell
Vos, in Liberty: the French-American statue in art and history, 80.
7 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: republican imagery and symbolism in France,
1789-1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1 1 14. See Neil Hertz, 'Medusa's head: male hysteria under political pressure', in The
End of the Line (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 179-91 for an
extremely interesting rereading of the phrygian cap.
8 Agulhon, op. cit., 21-2.
9 Agulhon includes a photographic reproduction of this seal on p. 19.
10 Pierre Provoyeur, 'Bartholdi in his context', trans. Frances Frenaye, in Liberty: the
French-American statue in art and history, 44.
II For a discussion of Eiffel's support structure, see Trachtenberg, op. cit., 126-50, and
Pierre Provoyeur, 'Technological and industrial challenges', trans. Maxwell Vos, in
Liberty: the French-American statue in art and history, 116.
12 Provoyeur, 'Artistic problems', 96-7.
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NEW FORMATIONS
13 Quoted by June Hargrove in 'Power of the press', in Liberty: the French-American
statue in art and history, 173. This article offers an extremely interesting discussion of
Pulitzer's campaign.
14 Quoted by Shapiro, op. cit., 51.
15 Fredric Jameson, 'Reification and Utopia in mass culture', Social Text, 1 (1979), 13048.
16 Quoted by Anne Cannon Palumbo and Ann Uhry Adams, 'Proliferation of the
image', in Liberty: the French-American statue in art and history, 236.
17 Philippe Roger, 'The edifying edifice', trans. Richard Miller, in Liberty: the FrenchAmerican statue in art and history, 270.
18 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: the allegory of the female form (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985), 15.
19 See L. Althusser, 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses', in Lenin and
Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-86.
20 For a discussion of the role played by the maternal voice in the formation of
subjectivity, see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: the female voice in psychoanalysis
and cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
21 See Provoyeur, 'Artistic problems', 83-93 for a discussion of the Suez project.
22 For a fuller account of the statue's construction, see Provoyeur, 'Technological and
industrial challenges', 106-19, and Trachtenberg, op. cit., 119-50.
23 Hodeir, 'The French campaign', 124-9.
24 Walter Benjamin, 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 2195425 Trachtenberg, op. cit., 60.
26 Warner, op. cit., 10.
27 Linda Nochlin, 'Courbet's L'Origine du Monde: the origin without an original',
October, 37 (1986), 77-86.
28 Hertz, op. cit., 163.
29 Trachtenberg, op. cit., 196.
30 Roger, op. cit., 269.
31 Trachtenberg, op. cit., 26.
32 See Jean-Claude Lambert, 'Laboulaye and the common law of people', trans. Frances
Frenaye in Liberty: the French-American statue in art and history, 20-5.
33 Provoyeur, 'Artistic problems', 95.
34 This maquette is reproduced in ibid., 94.
35 Trachtenberg, op. cit., 129.
36 ibid., 80.
37 June Hargrove, 'Unveiling the Colossus', in Liberty: the French-American statue in
art and history, 201.
38 Palumbo and Adams, op. cit., 260.
39 Hodeir, 'The French campaign', 128.
40 Baudrillard, op. cit., 67.
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89