ABSTRACT

This chapter suggests that Edgar Degas did regard the action depicted in "The Young Spartans" as a challenge that would lead to an ensuing athletic competition. It argues that no matter what its original iconographical stimulus may have been, had very different meanings for Degas when he began it in 1860 and when he considered exhibiting it for the first time two decades later in 1880—at a moment when the feminist movement in France had begun to emerge as a significant force in the political life and in the social consciousness of the French people. The attitudes and influences of the contemporary feminist movement may have far broader implications for Degas scholarship than the illumination of a single picture and its iconography; and the chapter concludes with a reconsideration of Degas's brothel monotypes and bather imagery in the light of this new context.