i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Truth Unveiled / 159are played would be analyzed ƒve years later by Adrienne Rich in Of WomanBorn (1976). In this now classsic text, Rich distinguished between the potentialmeanings of a woman’s reproductive capacities and those institutionallyimposed upon her, just as Neel had done in her series of nudes from the 1930sand 1970s:I try to distinguish between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed onthe other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproductionand to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that potential—and allwomen—shall remain under male control. This institution . . . has withheld overone-half the human species from the decisions affecting their lives; it exoneratesmen from fatherhood in any authentic sense; it creates the dangerous schism between“private” and “public” life; it calciƒes human choices and potentialities. In themost fundamental and bewildering of contradictions, it has alienated women fromour bodies by incarcerating us in them. 37With her belly separating from her torso, Nancy’s body bears the evidencethat pregnancy, that most “essential” of female conditions, was a sore subjectindeed in the 1970s, the very site of the ƒssures within the social body, dividingwomen from women. The fact that the pregnant nudes are pictured as of anera and yet alone with their bodies, conveys both their historical status andtheir psychological reactions to their condition.Neel’s last pregnant nude, Margaret Evans Pregnant, from 1978 (ƒg. 156),is perhaps her most complex. In her ninth month of pregnancy with twins, thewife of the painter John Evans clings tightly to the „uted pedestal that serves asthe woefully inadequate support for the larger oval of her belly. 38 Ramrod stiffwith her effort, she would have the regal bearing of an Old Kingdom queen,were not her condition and her perch so unstable. Evans’s condition has invaded,ƒlled, every part of her body: her womb has taken over her torso, hernipples her breasts, so blockading the central region that the blood pools in herlower legs.The image re„ected in the mirror, composed in a series of relaxed curves,contrasts with the contractions along Evans’s breast, waist, and chair, thus suggestinga postpartum state. Familiar throughout the history of art as a device forpresenting different aspects of the sitter, the mirror functions in a particularlyapposite way here. For in her monumental verticality, Evans seems to picturethe Phallic Mother, the woman who in Freudian terms has compensated forher lack of a penis by producing a child. But the mirror denies the phallicunity projected by her swollen imposing form. If the re„ected image is seen asEvans herself, at that moment she appears to conƒrm the studies of “body image”researchers that the pregnant woman perceives her womb as separate