Cassatt’s Alterity

In this chapter, the author shares an interest in exposing the impact of gender on Cassatt's standing; its primary remit is production rather than reception, national identity rather than gender. While the study of impact of Cassatt's gender upon her artwork and its reception has enjoyed a long record, feminist work has held the artist's achievements hostage to depictive realism, or rather to the belief that her work bravely surveys the truth of bourgeois female life. The author argues that her means of representation are habitually allusive or oblique, and that the particulars of her outsider status or alterity helped to shape her distinctive approach to fact-based printmaking and painting. He looks at the subject through the lens of Gallic xenophobia, which first arose on economic grounds and accelerated during the 1880s, taking on a sociocultural cast in the case of Americans. The indirection and multidimensional nature of printmaking encouraged her oblique approach to realism.