A Passionate, Virginal Chapel, Moving Us to Kneel: Marian Iconography and Lesbian Desire in Select Works by Romaine Brooks and Renée Vivien, 1900-1915
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines a select group of works by the poet Renée Vivien (née Pauline Tarn, 1877-1909) and the painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) created between the years 1900 and 1915. Catholic iconography, and in particular Madonna figures, reoccur in both of their works from this period. While their work is part of a longer lineage of Decadent artists using Catholic iconography, and indeed, the influence of the Decadent movement is seen in both women’s work, in this thesis I argue that their use of Marian iconography enabled Brooks and Vivien to confront heternoromative, patriarchal ideals and express lesbian desire, and to work through their complex relationships to their mothers. Using a queer Freudian psychoanalytic lens, drawn especially from Teresa de Lauretis’ positive reading of Sigmund Freud’s theories on perversion, I suggest that Vivien and Brooks’ mothers inscribed a narcissistic wound on their daughters which continued to affect their adult relationships with women, and this is expressed through the works I discuss. However, these are also works which explicitly depict lesbian desire, and their use of Marian iconography is linked with both of these ideas. The complex nature of these works therefore reflects how Brooks and Vivien were using their work to address issues within their own psyche, while simultaneously they are an attempt to envision a society in which lesbian desire was not only accepted, but celebrated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".