Patricia Kelly, Simon Fraser University.

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“Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chance of seeing it go down.” Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

What woman hasn’t felt the attention of a man? Women live with the effects of the subtle and direct gaze nearly everyday of their life. In the three Matisse Stories, A.S. Byatt writes of five intelligent, talented women – Susannah, Gerda, Peggy, Debbie, and Mrs. Brown – and the different ways they each live with the attention and gaze of men.

Susannah is a woman much like myself. She has reached or surpassed a mid-point in her life; she has each day of her existence been presented with the opportunity to struggle with the hazy and shadowy inner thoughts that could propel her into action. As an aging woman, she is quite used to the gaze, the attention of men and of women: starting with her own parents, her extended family – aunts and uncles, grandparents, too. Teachers would see her and decide in their own mind just how much attention she deserved and what behaviour would be rewarded. But Susannah would grow up to be a woman comfortable with herself, and for decades comfortable without the rituals of the beauty salon. As she grew through her twenties and thirties, men would pass judgment on her every feature. Attention is not always desired, but the gaze would not likely cause any damage to her. Susannah does not require the expert services of a stylist until the changes in her outward appearance become obvious.

Lucian is initially a good choice as a stylist for Susannah. Like Matisse, he exalts the Rosy Nude, the woman of “huge haunches and a monumental knee, lazily propped high” (The Matisse Stories, 3). He understands that his clients are all women, not girls. His salon is a temple and he is responsible for transforming each woman that enters into a goddess. Both Susannah and the Rosy Nude benefit from the attention of Lucian because they embody what he claims to be devoted to himself – class.

They are both “so calm, so damn sure of [themselves]” (4). The Rosy Nude could be Susannah; it could even be Lucian’s wife. Lucian is likely aware, though, that the women who come into his salon are only rosy, pink, and creamy while inside. There really isn’t much he can do to bring the gaze back to them once they leave his salon and are subjected to a different type of exposure. Eventually there isn’t much he can do to convince himself that he is making these women beautiful: he doesn’t want the “old dears”, he wants to be surrounded by beauty. He’s filled his salon with young things, his giggling friends and “brightly hopeless” apprentices. They’re the statues for his Greek temple. Respectability and class will be thrown away and replaced by beauty. It shouldn’t have surprised Susannah that Lucian replaces his wife as well.

‘Love isn’t easy,’ says Susannah to Lucian after he describes his inability to choose between his girlfriend and his house. “Significant human relationships, erotic love above all, demand a kind of attention…” says Martha Nussbaum (Love’s Knowledge, 42). Lucian has made the error Nussbaum warns of: “Much of actual life goes by without that heightened awareness, and is thus, not fully or thoroughly lived…” (47). He lacks the perception that Aristotle has argued, “lies at the core of practical wisdom” (37). If this man’s wife can not receive his attention, it is unlikely that Susannah or any of the other women who request his services will. The beauty Lucian creates in his salon is deceptive: he will “just train this little bit [of hair] to fall across there like that” (15) and it is starting to seem foolish and futile to Susannah.

Lucian asks for more attention from Susannah than she is capable of giving: “If he had not left her so long to contemplate her wet face, it might not have happened.” (20) Susannah can now see in the mirror how Lucian really sees her: she’s not so much a goddess; she’s more a Medusa. And with a change in awareness and belief about her appearance comes a change in her emotions. She’s a character who demonstrates for us “the finite and imperfectly controlled character of human life” (42).

Elaine Scarry writes of the power of beauty and our relation to it. Beauty has the power to compel us first to behold, and then, to replicate this beauty or to distribute our attention to proximal objects we initially did not notice or appreciate or that had been with us all along but rejected. Beauty is a “benign impulse” that results “in everyday acts of staring” (On Beauty and Being Just, 9). Attention can move toward an object and it can be withdrawn from an object. The power of beauty is such that we submit involuntarily: we “surrender to the leaf light,…carried to other shorelines as inevitably as Odysseus is carried back to Delos” (47). Our perception of beauty is subject to error, however, and this alteration of perception, the object you once considered to have power over you, which “dropped so low–in my Regard–I heard it hit the Ground–And go to pieces on the Stones–At the bottom of my mind – can damage as much as an improper gaze ”(12).

Scarry writes that beauty is sacred, unprecedented. Lucian believes he finds beauty in his new lover; her beauty is, to him, unprecedented. She has his attention because she is new. Lucian has also been yearning for the sacred: “The past pulls you,” he says to Susannah. “Bones in the ground and gold coins in a hoard, all that. I went down to the City and saw them digging up the Mithraic temples. There’s a religion, all that bull’s blood, dark and light, fascinating” (Matisse Stories, 9).

Susannah, like most women, wishes to be seen as a sacred object; this is why she enters the salon. The experience there is meant to be transformational. Lucian has claimed the power to create a style unprecedented for each of his patrons; each woman will represent a unique vision of beauty.

Susannah’s gaze, her attention, alters in “Medusa’s Ankles” as well. Unlike Lucian though, her regard for all of the Rosy Nudes who require Lucian’s attention, herself included, does not drop to the bottom of her mind; her gaze at herself, in the mirror, reflects to her the person she has always been – yet someone Scarry would describe as “an object present and confidently repudiated” (On Beauty, 16). The small alarms and warning lights go off for her, if not for Lucian. She insists upon proper attention to herself and the other women who change from goddess to Medusa in the stylist’s chair. Susannah is well aware that she is a beautiful woman, but she had forgotten until the moment that she is turned into a Medusa in the salon. The Medusa she sees reflected in the mirror is an image powerful enough to reawaken a dormant awareness, now with certainty, that she and the women around her have let themselves be deceived. Susannah’s outrage is not, of course, just for herself, but for all the women in the salon.

Beauty though, when recognized, says Scarry, is life-giving, to both the object of desire and to the perceiver. Susannah finds the proper attention not in Lucian’s salon, but afterward, in her own home, from the gaze of her husband. The ending to Medusa’s Ankles, the first of the Matisse Stories is brief: “Her husband came in, unexpected – she had long given up expecting or not expecting him, his movements were unpredictable and unexplained. He came in tentatively, a large, alert, ostentatiously work-wearied man. She looked up at him speechless. He saw her. (Usually he did not.)” (Matisse Stories, 28).

Another character who suffers from a lack of attention is the young artist Peggi Nollett in ‘The Chinese Lobster,’ the third of ‘The Matisse Stories.’ She’s the subject of conversation between her thesis advisor, Dr. Peregrine Diss, and the Dean of Women Students, Gerda Himmelblau. She is considered a failure by her advisor because she has failed to give proper attention to the subject she is deconstructing with her own artwork: a series of Matisse’s paintings. Peggi has failed to see the beauty in Matisse, a beauty which her advisor takes to be self- evident. She hates the way Matisse has distorted the female body in his paintings, and she thus hates all of them. To her the nudes are sinister, with body parts grotesquely swollen and protruding. (Matisse Stories, 102) She has failed to see the beauty of the particular, the beauty in just one of his paintings or one piece of one painting. There is nothing sacred, unprecedented, or life-giving in these paintings for Peggi Nollett.

Henri Matisse Odalisque in Red Trousers, c.1924-1925

Peggi’s advisor, Peregrine Diss, is convinced of his ability to see the beauty in great art, and certainly in the art of Matisse, who paints, in Diss’s words: silent bliss – the luxe, calme, and volupte (121). His transformation to the understanding of the power of beauty came early in his life, many years ago; he remembers distinctly suddenly being able to see: “I remember telling someone – my wife – it all was easy and flat. What a fool. And then, one day I saw it. I saw how hard it is to see, and how full of pure power, once seen. Not consolation…life and power” (121). Beauty is most certainly life-giving for him. And he is filled with the conviction of his truth, that comes, says Scarry, from the recognition of beauty. Iris Murdoch would say he has ascended to a stage where he receives a “vision of the Good” yet he fails completely to see any beauty in Peggi or her artwork; the first words he utters about her to Gerda Himmelblau are: “Poor little bitch” (109). He compares her to a potato, an object Matisse would never have considered. The potato is lifeless, colourless; it lacks the calme, the luxe, and the volupte. He has failed to “see the concepts through which [life and power have ] ascended (art, work, nature, people, ideas, institutions, situations, etc.; etc.) in their true nature and in their proper relationships to each other.” (Sovereignty, 92) He criticizes Peggi’s art and her actions with the same vehemence that she uses in her formal complaint to the Dean of Women Students. She is definitively repudiated by him as an object of beauty. Peggi at least has tried to convey the pointlessness of virtue, if not its importance. Diss sees only pointlessness and insignificance to her art. Diss seems to believe that Peggi lacks morality, precisely because she is unable to give proper attention to beautiful art, but he does not possess much more morality himself.

Diss seems mostly repelled by Peggi’s strong emotional response to Matisse’s art: instead of replicating the beautiful nudes, she has spattered them with organic matter. Diss’s reaction is characteristic of what Nussbaum describes as “the Western philosophical tradtion where emotion has no place in practical reasoning” where “judgments on which the major emotions are based are all false” (Love’s Knowledge, 42). But beauty, according to Scarry, has power and is readily equated with justice because it leads us toward a “capacious regard of the world,” to an understanding and awareness of the beauty that exists around us because our response is emotional and mystical, not intellectual. There has a breakdown in communication between Peggi and Diss because there is no shared context, as described by Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good. Matisse’s nudes were to be their “common object of attention” yet aren’t (32). “I did say something about the inarticulacy of painters…” is Diss’s indirect reference to Peggi’s kind of artist. (Matisse Stories, 111)

Gerda Himmelblau can attend to art and to people. It is evident that she can see, that she has what Murdoch describes as the “[p]atient attention [that] transforms accuracy without interval into just discernment” (Sovereignty, 88). Fortunately for Peggi, she possesses the “exactness of attention…required in moral situations” (64). She has grown to like the food at the Chinese restaurant she has chosen for their meeting: “It has certain subtleties one discovers as one goes on” (Matisse Stories, 107). Her attention goes to decorative features of the restaurant, to the sea creatures in the display case, and to Diss’s features as a man aging with dignity. Gerda has become comfortable with the melding of dissimilars in the restaurant – specifically, the Orientalized version of western music. Diss doesn’t hear the music. He gives more attention to his meal than to Peggi, the subject of their conversation. He should be giving more attention to her than her art.

Gerda shares with Peggi the context of deep pain, the freezing pain that seems only to be released by suicide and this compels her to define Peggi’s situation with accuracy and truthfulness. Gerda’s previous relationship with her suicidal friend, Kay, and the pain transferred from Kay, to her, assists Gerda with the painstaking attention to particulars required to reach a moral decision. This long history of attention to pain assists Gerda when the time comes to deliberate upon Peggi’s situation. Murdoch would say Gerda has been “morally active in the interim” (Sovereignty, 19) before deciding to act with compassion, much as Murdoch’s hypothetical mother-in-law (M) over time sees the virtue in her daughter-in-law (D) because of her effort to attend. It is easy to see from the beginning of the story which of the two professors would be just toward Peggi.

Odalisque with Magnolias 1923/24

Our recognition of beauty is involuntary, argues Scarry; however, the distribution of our attention to similar objects or those in proximity is voluntary, an act of our will. And the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible, says Scarry (On Beauty, 50). Scarry herself had a quiet but insistent dislike of palm trees until she gave attention to one particular tree. She can now see each palm tree as an object of beauty. We have to wonder what stops Peggi from seeing beauty, if not in “Matisse’s distortions of the Female Body” (Matisse Stories, 102), then in other objects around herself. It isn’t as if her attention has moved involuntarily elsewhere, as in the case of Lucian, removing his attention from his wife to a younger woman. Her focus is so fixedly upon what she considers to be the ugly and disgraceful. At least Diss can see that she is throwing shit at herself when she ‘rearranges’ the Matisse paintings. Neither Peggi nor Diss can “bear much reality” – the requirement, according to Murdoch, for moral action. For both, “art presents the most comprehensible examples of the almost human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy…” (Sovereignty, 63). Both have thus failed to find entry so far to the ‘good life’ due to their self-absorption and thus neither is a great artist.

Three artists are featured in the second of Byatt’s stories, ‘Art Work’: Debbie, her husband Robin, and their housecleaner, Mrs. Brown. Robin, trained in Fine Art, stares at the detail of surfaces as few others do: the table tops, blank walls, shadows on the ground. All the colours are there for him, in his mind, and have mostly been reduced to white or buff. Only his emotions have any real colour to them; in a house of muted and soft sounds, he rages red while his family moves quietly around him. Only Mrs. Brown dares to interrupt the surface tension with her vacuuming.

We know the colours are still there for him though because they are represented by small, bright objects – his fetishes – in his painting studio: the green Wedgwood apple, the poppy-red silk pincushion, the cobalt-blue glass candlestick that sit upon his white wood table and in his latest series of paintings. They are there to be periodically rearranged, revised and reviewed by Robin, as Peggi Nollett did to Matisse’s paintings of the nudes. Someone else is staring at the objects in Robin and Debbie’s house: Mrs. Brown pushes back ever so subtly against her employer by periodically rearranging Robin’s objects herself. They fight when she moves a Chinese pipe-cleaner bird onto the bough of a green glass tree: they can’t agree about the concept of balance. As Scarry says, “how one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things” (On Beauty, 15) The two artists, Robin and Mrs. Brown, walk uneasily around each other and the small coloured objects, trying to find beauty and balance. Their visions of beauty greatly differ.

Beauty is also transformational, argues Scarry, because “the perceiver is led to a more capacious regard for the world. The requirement for plenitude is built-in” (48). As Scarry says, once the perceiver has identified beauty in an object, as for her in a palm tree, “the palm will always be found” (48). Mrs. Brown sees the plenitude of juxtapositions for colours long before she meets Debbie and Robin Dennison; not for her large expanse the “grey and buff and beige” that Robin paints. Her attire shocks and disturbs and repulses the Dennisons family; she’s an odd choice for a cleaning lady.

Yet Mrs. Brown, of the three artists, is the most successful; she is invited to exhibit her art in an installation at the Callisto Gallery, not Robin. His representations of the coloured objects receive acknowledgment by the gallery’s representative as having “real integrity” but his wife, Debbie is the only person who appreciates the beauty and intelligence of Robin’s art. Robin is uneasy with Mrs. Brown; they are like the oppositional colours he describes to her and their interface the electric yellow line created when the red and green are placed next to each other. Robin is entranced by this alchemy, the creation of the yellow with the red and green, but not entirely comfortable with it. He, like Peggi Nollet and Peregrine Diss, is a human that cannot “bear much reality” (Sovereignty, 62). Mrs. Brown has not had the luxury of escaping a painful reality; she has suffered physical abuse at her ex-husband’s hand, before her employment with the Dennisons. Her situation requires she take work as a cleaning lady, in order to make a living for herself and two young sons. As an artist, she must see the beauty in the particulars of a chambermaid’s environment: worn clothing, dusty pieces of larger objects, discarded toys – things that have lost the attentive gaze of the previous owner. She embodies, in person and with her art, “the absolutely random detail of the world” (Sovereignty, 84).

Mrs. Brown’s art, created from colourful, discarded scraps of fabric, string, and small objects is fanciful and fantastic. For Debbie, seeing the installation in the Callisto Gallery causes an un-selfing that Murdoch writes about – a “pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees” (83) She’s delighted for Mrs. Brown and ashamed she did not see the potential for creative energy in this woman. Both Debbie and Robin, the university-trained artists, have been in error, all the while that Mrs. Brown has been working for them. She may have been beauty in disguise. However, Debbie has the “intent to be virtuous” (6); her patient attention to Robin’s art over decades has made the beauty in Mrs. Brown’s art more obvious to her. She has been, as Murdoch would say, “morally active in the interim.” Mrs. Brown’s art is thus life-giving for Debbie: she decides to return to her previous work and passion as an engraver and illustrator after viewing Mrs. Brown’s installation. Her later illustrations contain replcations of both Mrs. Brown and the housecleaner who replaces her.

And so what role do limitations play upon the direction of our attention and the recognition beauty? In the essay, ‘On Beauty and Being Wrong’, Elaine Scarry admits to a late recognition of the beauty of palm trees because she is from the east coast of the United States. So few instances for her to gaze upon individual palms, so few chances to apprehend the beauty of this object. When we recall an object of beauty, she claims, it is the beauty of the individual – the particular – we know, not the more general category to which that object belongs. Likewise, the beauty in the symmetry and fairness of just laws and rules of order to society are usually too diffusely arranged or randomly scattered to be apprehended and understood as objects of beauty, which, says Scarry, some are.

Not all of the characters, of course, act within the same set of limitations. Each individual’s limitations are contingent upon a changing set of circumstances and thus give each their own personal history from which to draw upon when determining how to act. In ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, Susannah’s limit is that she is visibly aging. It is becoming increasingly difficult for her to see herself as the natural beauty she knows she once was. It is alarming to realize that people will look right at you and yet not see the history of beauty you know once existed. The aged image in the mirror in the beauty salon is the artistic reproduction of herself that she is forced to acknowledge. She must feel as if Lucian and his assistants are responsible for the diabolical rearrangement and reordering of her features, as Nollett did with Matisse’s nudes. Mrs. Brown, in ‘Art Work’, has been greatly limited by her lack of formal training as an artist and by her limited income as a single mother. She hasn’t had the exposure to art theory and techniques that Debbie and Robin have. Robin, ironically, is stifled by his knowledge of theory; every painting is his attempt to set a limit to the colours of what he wants to express. Mrs. Brown has only found objects and her imagination with which to express herself. But it is her art that succeeds as the catalyst that incites deliberation for Debbie and allows her to see this strange person as “[a] fellow sufferer” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Introduction).

In ‘The Chinese Lobster’, Peregrine Diss is much like Robin Dennison; he has seen so much of what he considers true beauty in art and women, so much of the luxe, calme, and volupte, that there is no reason to see even a speck of beauty in Peggi or her art. Gerda Himmelblau, however, has lived a life much more austere and drier than Diss’s and thus, can see more easily her suicidal friend, Kay, in the much younger artist, Peggi. She is also capable of briefly connecting with Diss, as they realize uring their conversation about Peggi that the two of them share a detailed visual image of the colourless, lifeless soul that is attracted to death.

There is a notable absence of love in each of the three Matisse stories. Most of the characters either yearn for love and attention or feel a lack thereof. Some of the characters insist upon receiving love, yet refuse or are unable to give it. Robin lives his life as a painter by virtue of his wife’s sacrifices. Debbie is not entirely unhappy with the arrangement, although she is aware that her feelings for her selfish husband alternate between love and hate, because of “the extent of his absence of interest…” (Matisse Stories, 54) Mrs. Brown has already dealt with a selfish husband and is thus capable of extracting more attention, albeit mostly critical attention, from Robin. Lucian shops for erotic love and finds a youger replacement for his wife. After months of patiently listening to Lucian describe his need for more attention, Susannah is eventually unable to contain her outrage at his callous behaviour. Peregrine Diss holds to a specific physical ideal of love, one that matches that of Matisse. He reveals himself to be as unqualified to act as Peggi’s supervisor as he believes his replacement will be.

Yet, according to Murdoch, we can’t truly love unless we can see and attend to the detail and the random beauty in our world. Nature and art show us what is real and what is therefore beautiful and thus good. Nature and art necessarily reveal the good because the good itself is indefinable. It is an awareness of what is real that will cause us to check our selfishness (Sovereignty, 63). This checking of our selfishness, what Scarry calls the radical de-centering. The artist should strive to represent “a vision of reality” (62) although this requires diligent and exact attention. Perhaps if Robin had paid as much attention to Mrs. Brown as she did to him, his art would have succeeded in drawing a wider audience.

The three Matisse Stories introduce us to a number of artists, people whose passion is to replicate beauty. The characters demonstrate that beauty can be close at hand, yet not recognizable. It can be a person or object so similar as to be a mirror, yet we may not necessarily recognize the beauty. Determined effort to perceive beauty may not be successful and may result only in frustration. The absence of nature present may hinder the ability of some characters to recognize beauty and thus, the good. Murdoch wrote that, “We can all receive moral help by focussing our attention upon things which are valuable: virtuous people, great art, perhaps the idea of goodness itself” (Sovereignty, 55).

None of the characters in The Matisse Stories chose to do this and most of them seem impotent and frustrated, stuck in the blind routines they’ve known for years. They are not immoral people; their experiences represent the same indifference and fixations of most people. Robin has spent a lifetime trying in vain to access or possess what is beautiful with his paintbrush and canvasses. He and Diss and Peggi have forgotten that imagination is to be used to join the world, not to escape it (Sovereignty, 88). We forgive him and the others for their lack of moral behaviour because there is too much reality for most of them – Susannah, Lucian, Peggi, Peregrine, and Robin – to bear. They’ve given in to the consolations that Murdoch warns of: “self-pity, resentment, fantasy, and despair” ( 89).

Murdoch understands that humans are frail and thus will fail to attend and to love repeatedly in their life. What redeems Debbie Dennison is the radical decentering that follows a recognition of a fantastic beauty in Mrs. Brown’s art too powerful to ignore, as with Susannah’s recognition of her own beauty buried within her hideousness. And what enables Gerda Himmelblau to empathize is the shared context of suffering with Peggi. It isn’t Peggi’s art that succeeds in expressing a vision of what is real and thus good; it is Peggi herself. And so, Gerda, Debbie, and Mrs. Brown begin to move ever so slightly along the path of the good life.

Works Cited

Elaine Scarry. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.

A.S. Byatt. The Matisse Stories. London: Vintage Books, 1994.

Iris Murdoch. The Sovereignty of Good. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.

Martha Nussbaum. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Richard Rory. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989.