The Lives of the Muses:
Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired

Must muses necessarily be passive? asks Francine Prose's first book of nonfiction, an incisive and witty examination of the muse throughout history. Her answer is, refreshingly, no. In her examination of nine muses, from the eighteenth through the twentieth-century, Prose explores how each of these women sought, with greater or lesser success, to carve out a relationship that was not simply that of a mute, pale and adoring inspirer of art. As Prose's introduction and portrayal of each of the nine women makes clear, "every historical period re-creates the muse in its own image," endowing the muse with the "qualities, virtues, and flaws that the epoch and its artists need and deserve."

Prose's representative muses are an interesting and varied lot, all creative and intellectual women in their own right. For instance, Hester Thrale, the "dark-eyed Welsh fireball," inspired Samuel Johnson from 1764 until about 1782 but she also compiled a collection of autobiographical sketches called "Thraliana" as well as editions of Samuel Johnson's correspondence and travel literature. Other muses include Alice Lidell, the inspiration behind Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Lizzie Siddal, who had the unfortunate lot of casting her fate with the famed Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Lou Andreas-Salome, who captivated Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud; Gala Dali, Lee Miller, Claris Weston, Yoko Ono, and ballerina Suzanne Farrell, whom Prose portrays as both collaborator with, as well as muse for, choreographer George Balanchine. Each of these women are aligned by Prose somewhere along the spectrum from passive, supportive "muse" (such as Siddal) to women such as Lee Miller, who successfully managed to bridge the spectrum from "inspirer" to artist in her own right.

Seven-year old Alice Liddell, muse to the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) is among the most fascinating portraits in Prose's muse gallery. Carroll has, in this era, been interpreted as a pedophile, given the hundreds of little girls he befriended, and the series of nude portraits of them he snapped in his studio. Prose asks us to consider his relationship with Alice Liddell in a somewhat more complicated light. While Prose acknowledges the eroticism in Carroll's child-portraits, most specifically his acclaimed "Portrait of Alice Liddell as the Beggar Child," she notes that "our culture has too narrowly defined the parameters of what it calls love and drastically foreshortened the continuum along which each individual passionate affair or painfully repressed romance, each homosexual or heterosexual alliance, each socially condoned or "inappropriate" attraction, is located." Prose considers that Liddell had a degree of power in this relationship, as she also notes in her analysis of Liddell's flirtatious relationship with another Victorian man of letters, John Ruskin. As Prose asks, "What subliminal signals drew these men to Alice, and Alice to these men? What needs of her own inspired her to re-create, with Ruskin, something like her relationship with Dodgson--as friendship mutually understood as a subversive intrigue that thrived on discovering clever ways to outsmart the grownups?" What Prose's analysis makes clear is that the "clouds of naiveté and innocence" that Victorians celebrated in their pale, sweet child muses, as well as the pale lady of death Lizzie Siddal, is not only indicative of the Victorian era: what the Victorians reduced to naiveté, we reduce to child pornography and pedophilia. What we tend to ignore is the complexity between "Eros and creativity" in our desire to explain and understand the mysteries of art.

Lizzie Siddal's tragic life and death reveals the inherent pitfalls of musedom. While Prose does not view Siddal as an exceptionally talented painter or poet (as Dante Gabriel and John Ruskin attested) she does emphasize that in Siddal's "pitiful death and grotesque afterlife we have lost sight of her as a brave and unconventional Victorian woman living on her own and then, during a tempestuous ten-year engagement with her lover." Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a dead child and as Prose notes, she became more "useful to the purposes of art" dead than alive, as revealed by the ecstatic portrayals of Siddal Rossetti churned out after her death, such as "Beata Beatrix." Rossetti's exhumation of his wife's grave to collect the poems he tossed in during her burial in a moment of grief is surely among the more grotesque stories lining the already colorful Pre-Raphaelite gallery.

Like Siddal, Lee Miller attracted her lover, Man Ray, through her beauty, but she did not remain a passive muse. She learned everything he could teach her about photography and composition and then moved on to open her own portrait studio in New York and made a name for herself, although it was not until she became a war photographer that she peaked as an artist. Miller's muse was World War II; she throve on the "combined attractions of danger, a constant supply of arresting images, and a sense of purpose: a mission to inform the world about what she was seeing."

Prose's most interesting questions involve the notion of gender and musedom: "To say that Farrell and Balanchine might have been each other's muse raises the complicated, thorny questions: Do women artists have muses, and are there male muses?" She notes that history abounds in same-sex artists and muses, such as Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, although, interestingly enough, Prose does not devote a portion of her book to investigating same-sex couples and their individual muses. To do so--to look at the relationship between Barney and Brooks, Auden and Kallman, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas--would have added depth and complexity to Prose's investigation of the muse. Do the same dynamics exist? If the muse, for instance, is inevitably associated with feminine qualities, such as nurturance and passivity, how does a male homosexual relationship complicate the notion of musedom? Or a lesbian relationship? Although Prose asks this question in the introduction, she does not investigate it in her line-up of nine seemingly haphazardly picked muse figures.

As it is, Prose provides us with some fascinating portrayals of historical figures and asks, as always, witty and pertinent questions, but does not take us into terribly unfamiliar terrain. Nonetheless, this book should appeal to a wide audience, both academic as well as popular. While it does not say anything strikingly new about the role of the muse throughout history, Prose does provide us with insightful and original portrayals of nine dynamic women who deserve to have more attention paid to their remarkable lives.

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Debra Cumberland is an assistant professor of English at Winona State University in Winona, MN. Her work has appeared in Hurakaan, American Literary Realism, The Nebraska English Journal, and The Omaha Reader.

She can be reached at debcumberland@yahoo.com.

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