62 The tension of this work also relies on traditional divisions of the female body from the larger social sphere. In the catalog for the Reconsidering Roma exhibit, Rafaela Eulberg explores the female gypsy body as a double jeopardy of othering.18 The Gypsy, already an outsider, has historically been portrayed as a danger to society, with the assumption that their itinerant nature is grounds for an inherent lawlessness. By the same token, women have also been portrayed as dangerous, wild, and needing to be civilized and controlled. Women’s stitchwork of the 19th century (as portrayed in the poem Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning19) was a means of control, to keep the hands of gentle ladies from being idle, and their eyes and minds away from the temptation of the outside world. The double negative20 of the female gypsy body bears the burden of wildness, uncultured and untamed, but also of the mystical, misunderstood, and extremely sexualized being. One only needs to review the representations of the female gypsy in Carmen, Victor Hugo’s La Esméralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or artists’ representations such as Theodor von Holst’s The Wish (figure 23) and Courbet’s Gypsy in Reflection (figure 24) to see the trajectory of Roma representation by the majority. Voluptuous women with exposed breasts and long hair engage in fortune telling, lies, and theft, which are presented as the natural inclination of the sexually charged and dangerous Gypsy woman. Le Bas responds to the prejudice of these ideas with the constant influx of traces of English material culture, and textual exhortations that conflict with the pastoral view of history. 18
Rafaela Eulberg, “The Image of the Female ‘Gypsy’ as a Potentiation of Stereotypes – Notes on the Interrelation of Gender and Ethnicity,” Reconsidering Roma: Aspects of Roma and Sinti Life in Contemporary Art, edited by Lith Bahlmann and Matthias Reichelt (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 63-69. 19
This comparison is made by Kingston in the text for the Witch Hunt exhibit: “...And last / I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like / To see me wear the night with empty hands, / A-doing nothing.” – Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, public domain. 20
In this use, I do not mean two negatives equaling a positive, but rather the squaring of negative and negative to exponentially increase the negative view and experience of being both female and gypsy.