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Item Number: 110284
Title: Love and authority in the work of PAULA REGO : Narrating the family romance
Author: Rosengarten, Ruth
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9780719080708
Description: Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. 24cm., hardcover, 244pp., 12 color, 30 b&w illus. Summary: Born in Portugal and long resident in England, Paula Rego repeatedly returns to her native country in the iconography of her paintings. Steering away from the well-trodden territory of biographical or national concerns, Ruth Rosengarten explores the narrative operations of Rego’s work by mobilising both psychoanalytic theory and social history. She confronts, as case studies, three complex figure paintings from different moments in Rego’s oeuvre: The Policeman’s Daughter (1987), The Interrogator’s Garden (2000), and The First Mass in Brazil (1993). The content of the three specimen paintings links them to the political context of the Estado Novo, the fascist-inspired regime that dominated Rego’s childhood. Plotting links between the spheres of the political and the personal, Rosengarten throws light on the complex intertwining of state power and parental authority in Rego’s work, focusing on the “labour of socialisation and resistance” that Rego’s work evinces in relation to the Freudian model of the family romance. Peeling away the layers of meaning that underpin Rego’s work, Rosengarten unveils the political context of Portugal under Salazar, and the workings of colonial fantasy, Catholic ideology and gender construction. In focusing on Rego’s narratives, always structured from the point of view of female protagonists, Rosengarten asks how Rego’s works define the turbulent psychic routes of female subject formation. In prodding the inalienable link between love and authority, Rosengarten offers a reading of Rego’s work that interrogates, rather than subverts, the Oedipal model structuring the patriarchal family. Contents: 1. Reading the Family Romance: Is there a feminist version? ; 2. Romancing the Father: The Policeman’s Daughter ; 3. Men Don’t Make Passes at Women with Moustaches: The Interrogator’s Garden ; 4. Possession and Loss: The First Mass in Brazil ; Conclusion: Painting History ; Bibliography.
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