On the evening of December 4, I somewhat nervously entered the Stimson Room of the Library to hear Professor Suparna Roychoudhury discuss her recently published book, Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science. The Stimson Room was warm and bright, with countless volumes of poetry lining the bookcases against the walls. Cozy sofas occupied the middle of the space, and large windows offered a view into the cloudless, starry night. The English department had arranged folding chairs in several neat rows, and copies of the book were available for purchase. People mingled, drinking cider and munching on cheese and crackers before the talk officially began.

I was nervous because being in a room full of intelligent, articulate academics is always a daunting task for me. I was worried that I would not understand the talk, and would have to nod and utter “ah”s of appreciation to feign a comprehension that I lacked. However, I admired Professor Roychoudhury, and as a student in her Renaissance literature seminar, I believed attending this event would give me valuable insights. The atmosphere of the room was so inviting, and the attendees so amiable, that I quickly forgot my trepidation, and chatted with friends, classmates, and professors before the talk began. When we all finally took our seats, I found myself absorbed in Professor Roychoudhury’s words.

Professor Roychoudhury opened her talk by discussing what led her to write the book in the first place. She found that scholarship concerning the impact of 16th century psychology on Shakespeare’s conception of the imagination in his plays did not exist. Surprised, she was so interested in this research problem that she decided she should be the one to investigate it. She prefaced her research by providing an overview of ancient and medieval ideas about cognitive psychology, or how the brain produces “phantasms,” mental images. Professor Roychoudhury also explained how the discipline of science, in the modern sense, arose in the 16th century, and how new notions about the mind influenced Shakespeare, even as classical philosophy remained entrenched in Renaissance thought.

Before she read the excerpts she prepared for us, Professor Roychoudhury outlined the chapters in her book and what they generally entailed. Chapter 1, Between Heart and Eye: Anatomies of Imagination in the Sonnets, examines questions about the head, heart, and eye and their relation to “fancy” in The Merchant of Venice. Chapter 2, Children of Fancy: Academic Idleness and Love’s Labor’s Lost, explores imagining as a leisure activity in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Chapter 3, Of Atoms, Air, and Insects: Mercutio’s Vain Fantasy, focuses on the immateriality of fantasy in Romeo and Juliet. Chapter 4, Seeming to See: King Lear‘s Mental Optics, studies vision as imaginative mental representation in King Lear. Chapter 5, Melancholy, Ecstasy, Phantasma: The Pathologies of Macbeth, analyzes mental illness as expressed in dreams and hallucinations. Chapter 6, Chimeras: Natural History and the Shapes of The Tempest, investigates nature’s relationship to the imagination, particularly in conceiving of the “unnatural.”

Professor Roychoudhury chose to delve into Chapter 4 in her talk. She explained Plato’s ideas about vision; he presumed that the eye sees by shooting a beam of light out onto the perceived object. Plato’s student, Aristotle, held the opposite view, asserting that light enters the eye, not exits it. Euclid, in his Optica, conceived of vision as geometrical problems, providing diagrams explaining perspective and other phenomena. This mathematical rendering of optics endured through the 15th century into the 16th century, with Johannes Kepler illustrating how the eye acts as a camera obscura (using a lens) in 1604. This discovery proved that vision produces pictures. However, Kepler’s theories also proved that vision is inverted because of how rays of light hit the eye’s lens.

Professor Roychoudhury provided us with a handout of significant passages in King Lear:

Gloucester. Dost thou know me?

Lear. I remember thine eyes well enough. Doest thou squiny at me? No, do thy worst, blind Cupid. I’ll not love. Read thou this challenge; mark but the penning of it.

Gloucester. Were all the letters suns, I could not see.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Lear. Read.

Gloucester. What, with the case of eyes?

Lear. . . . Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes.

Gloucester. I see it feelingly.

Lear. What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears.

(4.6.133-37, 140-47)

Lear. Get the glass eyes, / And, like a scurvy politician, / Seem to see the things thou dost not.

(4.6.164-66)

The significance of Renaissance optics appears in King Lear, where Shakespeare plays with the trope of the blind sage. The tradition that losing one’s vision results in an increase in one’s insight was firmly established by Shakespeare’s time. Yet, it was now understood that the eye errs in seeing, leaving the mind to correct what the eye perceives, and the mind is not always able to do that. This revelation thus admits that both the eye and the mind can err, so wisdom and insight no longer entirely belong to either. Shakespeare uses Gloucester’s blinding to explore this problem.

The passages above detail the meeting of Gloucester, who is physically unable to see, and Lear, who is now mad and mentally unable to “see,” or reason. Gloucester, obsessed with the physicality of seeing, does not stop talking about his eyes or lack thereof. Meanwhile, Lear is absorbed with metaphorical eyes, invoking imagination to discuss how the mind works. Finally, Lear implies that one can see with “glass eyes,” remarking on the relative uselessness of physical vision. The appearance of seeing, achieved by wearing “glass eyes,” is, to Lear, equal to actually seeing. Thus, Shakespeare implicates the mistrust of vision and imagination in this scene.

I found Professor Roychoudhury’s arguments convincing. Her assertions were grounded in thorough close-readings of her texts, and she incorporated a number of Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern texts to bolster her conclusions. I appreciate how she identified a hole in the scholarship and filled it, establishing a relationship between Shakespeare and science that I have not encountered before and doubt will encounter often. I regard Shakespeare’s plays, and Early Modern literature generally, in a new light because of this book talk, and I know that the knowledge I gained from it will be invaluable as I continue my education.

Mount Holyoke’s 2018-2019 Leading Woman in the Arts and very own alumna gave a public lecture titled “60 Years Later” in Mount Holyoke’s Gamble Auditorium. Jonas is a visual artist, who works with video and performance art in experimental and pioneering ways. She is also the first Mount Holyoke alumna to be included in the Leading Woman in the Arts program! Jonas graduated in 1958 from Mount Holyoke with a degree in Art History. The Leading Women in the Arts series has been active for 12 years, and is organized by the InterArts Council and the Weissman Center for Leadership. The program supports artists (in multiple mediums) who’s careers serve to inspire new generations of students. She was welcomed by President Sonya Stephens and warmly introduced by Amy Martin and Tricia Paik.

I found many aspects of Jonas’ lecture to be fascinating, and was excited to learn more about the work of the important female artist. What I found to be most compelling about Jonas’ work, was the emphasis she placed on life and art. Beginning with the lecture title, “60 years later” one can sense that Jonas views her work in the arts as a lifelong journey. Within her lecture, she took the audience with her through progressing periods in her life and how those periods influenced the work she went on to produce. She placed emphasis on the influence she took from experiences such as her childhood – where she learned the importance of play, spent much of her time in nature and found a connection to animals, especially to her beloved dogs. She talked about her early influences on her exposures in New York, Broadway and performance. As well as her own training in dance.

I found it most fascinating that Jonas drew and continues to draw much of her inspiration for her art from her life experiences. A creative medium that I am interested in is writing, specifically writing creative non-fiction and personal narratives. In my own work I write about life, and my childhood often appears, influencing my discoveries in different ways. In my work too I have been thinking a lot about craft recently, a question that was brought up for me when viewing Jonas’ work. The lecture that Jonas gave helped me in understanding the idea of craft in her work, which is so experimental in nature. As I learned about the life experiences that influenced Jonas’ creative decisions, I was able to connect with her work in a new way. It was in this frame that I was able to think about her work Mirror Improvisations that is currently featured in the Mount Holyoke Art Museum. My impressions and appreciation of this piece shifted after attending Jonas’ “60 Years Later” lecture. Previously, I had been unsure of how to interpret the work. But with this new idea of Jonas’ childhood influences I began to appreciate the work as an expression guided by her early life.

I interpreted this piece to be playing with the idea of a lingering childhood. The dress in the piece is striking because the two older women are dressed as children. The attire is definitely whimsical, reminiscent of a childlike interest in a fairy or a princess. The tulle skirts and paper crowns are surprising in this context of adulthood, and took me as viewer into an alternate moment in time and space. The setting also seemed to correspond with Jonas’ own childhood playing in the woods and spending summertime in nature. One could imagine this time spent in nature was made all the more important for young Jonas as it contrasted starkly with her time spent in New York. Through experimental filming, Jonas and the other members of the scene record what looks like a sequence of discovery and play. There are two people as well as a dog in the scenes. The presence of the dog further reinforced my idea that this piece could be a form of expression akin to a piece of personal narrative writing. During her lecture, Jonas stressed the significance of the continued presence of her pets in her life, especially her different dogs. Initially, I didn’t know what to make of the idea of reflection– and the filming and viewing though mirrors in this work. Now I can muse that this may be Jonas commenting on the role her childhood played in creating her sense of self, or that a part of her adult identity holds on to this inner experimental child. There is a definite sense of storytelling in Jonas’ work, which feels deeply personal. There are many ways to interpret the art of Jonas, but I was grateful for her lecture “60 Years Later” for providing me with a new way to consider her work.

Sources:

Jonas, Joan. Mirror Improvisation. 2005.

Through the heavy doors and into the dark gallery. Banners bearing portraits of eight women hang from the wall. Images of the eight empresses of the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1912. As wife of the emperor or mother of the emperor, the empress assumed a currency of influence, both with the emperor, and in her role as head of the imperial harem. These empresses, whose stories have been overlooked, occupied an elite, rarefied position in Chinese history.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Peabody Essex Museum’s formidable exhibit “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City.” The exhibit is the product of a collaboration between the PEM in Salem Massachusetts, the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler galleries in Washington, and the Palace Museum in Beijing. The lives of the Qing dynasty empresses have been a neglected history, as the text introducing one of the exhibit’s galleries illustrates: “The imperial court closely regulated the life of each empress to ensure she stood as an exemplar for all women, yet the male officials who wrote Qing court history recorded very little of her activities. They perceived family matters and women’s roles as less important than the state affairs the emperor managed.” Through an astounding collection of objects, exhibition curators endeavour to “tell the little-known stories of how these women influenced art, religion, court politics and international diplomacy” (Cardin).

Organized thematically, each gallery in the exhibit spoke to a different theme relating to aspects of the empresses’ lives and areas in which they held influence such as “Becoming an Empress,” “Ascending the Throne,” “Fulfilling Family Roles,” “Celebrating Motherhood,”  “Worshipping as an Empress,” and “A Rich and Active Life.” Each gallery housed objects associated with each theme as well as a specific profile on one of the empresses. The sheer number of objects, nearly 200 in total, were awe-striking in their variety, from orate headdresses meant to be “demure yet tantalizing,” to intricate hairdressing sets, dressers, robes, and paintings.

(“Festive headdress with phoenixes and peonies, Tongzhi or Guangxu period, probably 1872 or 1888–89, probably Imperial Workshop, Beijing, silver with gilding, kingfisher feather, pearls, coral, jadeite, ruby, sapphire, tourmaline, turquoise, lapis lazuli, and glass; frame: metal, wires with silk satin, velvet, and cardboard, Palace Museum, Gu59708. The Palace Museum. On view in Empresses of China’s Forbidden City.”)

Every gallery of the exhibit, nearly every object, was surrounded by visitors. The crowd was very engaged in the exhibit; discussing and raising questions with their partners, children, and grandchildren. This atmosphere of inquiry and engagement not only mirrored, but heightened my experience of the exhibit.

Representations of the empresses in the material objects straddled the line of maintaining and contesting gendered expectations. Some depictions of the empresses in the exhibit revealed empresses as icons of ideal womanhood. A series of paintings represented empresses exemplifying the traits of “filial devotion to elderly, good care of sons and grandsons, diligence, and frugality” all of which Qing imperial women were expected to embody. Other galleries and objects reflected the empresses exhibiting more individuality. Empresses, with their cosmopolitan preferences, became tastemakers in culture and keen art collectors. Empresses were also exempt from footbinding and enjoyed greater freedom and mobility, from horseback riding and archery to travel. One area of influence I found interesting was the empresses’ influence over religion. Empresses’ religious practices led the court to construct “magnificent religious buildings, scriptures, and sculptures,” which in turn “shaped the pluralistic religious traditions of the court including Buddhism and shamanism.”

Despite the plethora of objects and areas of influence, I was always aware of the empresses’ confinement. Curators provided viewers a sense of scope of the empresses’ worlds by including a large map of the Forbidden City. The map denoted the living quarters and spaces the empresses would have been able to access. The space the imperial harem and empresses occupied was a relatively small cluster in such an expensive development.

The empress’ foremost job was to produce a male heir. Objects surrounding an empress made sure she never forgot that most essential job. Personal objects such as a screen, vases, a jar, and a snuff box bore images of  “boys at play” and “mother and child” or “mother and son.”

An element the exhibit made very clear was that an empresses’ influence could extend beyond producing a male heir; the relationship between emperor and his mother provided continuing influence over the court. A close relationship between emperor and mother empress dowager was “emblematic of a harmonious society that Qing rulers credited to their rule.” The objects associated with empress Chongqing (1692-1777), mother of Qianlong Emperor, revealed the closeness of her relationship with her son. Chongqing experienced good health and traveled 10 months of the year with her son into old age. On display was the travel tableware she took with her on these journeys. When Chongqing and her son were not together, she walked with a staff that symbolized his personage. Also on display was a fan Qianlong painted for Chongqing bearing the image of a daylily, a symbol of one’s love for their mother.

While the palace observed a strict patriarchal hierarchy, there was a possibility for consorts in the harem to gain some upward mobility; a mother’s birth rank was not taken into consideration when selecting which son would be chosen as the next emperor. An empress could manipulate a way to maintain power, as in the case of Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) who maneuvered a way to consolidate power and maintain her influence for nearly fifty years.

Empress Dowager Cixi’s story remains, for me, one of the most intriguing of the exhibit, as it exemplifies ways empresses mobilized their influence to beget more influence. Upon the Emperor’s death Cixi and the other empress dowager Ci’an “instigated a coup to place power directly in their hands as co-regents of the child emperor” which led to her 47 year run (1861-1908)  as “de facto ruler of at the Qing court.” During her tenure Cixi “challenged the tradition that women shall not rule, and brought radical changes to the role of women in court politics, diplomacy, and art patronage.”

The exhibit ended with an object dissimilar to previous objects — an imposing portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi. The empress received a negative public reputation for supporting a the Boxer Rebellion a “violent anti-foreign uprising which besieged the American diplomatic quarter in Beijing in 1900.” In an effort recuperate her image for Western powers (‘the soul of a tiger in the body of a woman’ as one Western newspaper described her), the empress hired American painter Katherine A Carl to paint her portrait, which she would gift to Theodore Roosevelt for display in the 1904 World Fair. In the time of photographic portraits, the empress chose the more traditional, painted portrait, perhaps speaking to the comparative power of the two mediums. By hiring an American artist, Cixi’s political acumen is as much on display as her visage. I also found it intriguing that the empress chose a female artist to present this more ‘softened’ image of herself to the public.

(“Katharine Carl, The Empress Dowager Tze Hsi, of China, oil on canvas with camphor wood frame, 1903. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, S2011.16.1-2a-ap.”)

I found this to be a hearty exhibit, both in terms of the materials on display and the concepts it presented. One element I found particularly interesting was how the organizers chose to end the exhibit. At the exit, a roll of unfurled butcher paper with pens and pencils sat below two questions printed on the wall reading “What do you feel are the expectations for women in power today?” and “How do you think women in power are portrayed today?” I appreciated that the curators chose to end the exhibit with these provocative, challenging questions, bringing the empresses’ experiences to a modern context. The Qing dynasty empresses dealt in complicated and precarious power. The questions reiterated for myself the sense that this exhibit is about a representation of power, as there is no written record from the empresses’ perspectives about their roles and experiences of power. The voices of the women felt at times close and distant from the material culture in the exhibit. Private objects were often not fully their own, but were imperial property. Upon the death of an empress, the objects returned to the palace, to be passed on, or melted down and made anew.

One of the excellent effects of this exhibit is that, while it illuminated aspects of the Qing dynasty consorts and empresses’ lives, it also embraced the persistence of mystery surrounding their experiences.

Curators designed the exhibit to offer visitors a view into the empresses’ world, not just a view of a world. Before entering the exhibit text printed on the wall invites viewers to imagine themselves  empresses. The theme of imagining continued throughout the galleries. At the beginning of each gallery space curators included a brief creative vignette to bring visitors closer to the empresses. The vignettes included a future consort, as young as thirteen, being transported from her family home to the palace for marriage, and an empress anxiously waiting to hear which son of the emperor would inherit the throne following the emperor’s death. These vignettes engaged the visitors imagination, something I found suited my style of exploring.

Upon leaving the exhibit I was ready to venture out and do my own research. I think this a strength of the exhibit, that it raises more questions than it answers, inspires more inquiry, invites visitors to delve deeper.

Work Cited and Credits for Images (along with their captions)

Cardin, Dinah. “Stories of Opulence and Influence.” Peabody Essex Museum, 8 Aug. 2018, https://www.pem.org/blog/stories-of-opulence-and-influence.

Gordon, Lydia. “2018 Exhibitions Examine Women and Power.” Peabody Essex Museum, 14 Feb. 2018, https://www.pem.org/blog/2018-exhibitions-examine-women-and-power.

*All other quoted material from plaques in the exhibit