Reading with One Hand: Suggestive Folds and Subversive Consumption in Jean-Honore Fragonard's 'The Bolt'

Examined within the context of libertine literature and popular prints, Fragonard's Le Verrou can be seen as an ironic attempt to sublimate low, erotic genre scenes into the form of high-status history painting. While "leaving the curtain drawn" on the sex act raises the work's status and seems to permit various moralizing pairings, Fragonard's inclusion of the massive genitalia hidden in the bed curtain parodies his own attempts to elevate and simultaneously points the viewer towards the appropriate "use" of this image - as erotic aid for masturbation. The original pairing with the Adoration of the Shepherds, once accepted as an allegory for sacred and profane love, becomes further blasphemous with the addition of the genitalia. The isolated phallus in Le Verrou exists within a visual culture of extracted genitalia in the eighteenth century ranging from genre scenes to political satire, traditions which themselves have a basis in objects and images from antiquity. In addition, the seduction depicted in Le Verrou must be examined within the discourse and politics of rape and virginity in relation to property laws and stereotypes about female sexuality as well as within the larger canon of seduction-resistance imagery. Appropriating John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as a literary and stylistic source, Fragonard embraces the ambiguity of the woman's resistance and culpability, a mixture of fear and desire characteristic of the Burkean sublime. With his hidden genitalia, I propose that Fragonard borrows directly from Cleland's stylistically veiled erotic metaphor, thus participating in a larger culture of concealment and rhetorical irony, and placing meaning-making in the hands of the consumer. In pairing a bambochade with a history painting of the Virgin Mary, Fragonard subverts the hierarchy of the genres, disrupting and complicating proper rules of convenance, ultimately merging high and low in the ancient form of rhetorical paradox.