ABSTRACT
In response to a series of nudes at their toilette, pastels exhibited by Degas at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886, the contemporary novelist and critic J. K. Huysmans initiated what has since become an established convention in the Degas literature. Since the notion of Degas's "misogyny", its classic literary formulation in the late nineteenth century by writers like Huysmans and Paul Valery, few scholars have expressed discomfort with this label, and none has stopped to evaluate its sources or to question directly its validity. In 1962, for example, the appearance of Jean Sutherland Boggs's perceptive study of Degas's portraits revealed aspects of this artist's response to women, both in his art and in his life that should have cast serious doubt upon the old accusation of "misogyny." In addition to "misogyny," the theories that have been adduced to explain his single state have run the gamut from "natural timidity" to the equally unsupported speculation that have been "a repressed homosexual."
