ABSTRACT
Among berthe morisot’s earliest surviving paintings is a female Narcissus, a young woman absorbed in contemplating her own reflection. For Sigmund Freud, the narcissistic woman is both “the purest and truest one”—the most womanly, and the most erotically alluring. The Narcissus story has many tellings besides Freud’s, not least its allegorical tellings in the context of art appreciation and nature-love. Marking the porous boundaries of self and other, a daughter is the privileged object of the mother’s narcissistic gaze. In this chapter, the author focuses on a group of much later paintings belonging to the 1890s that are similarly both charged and troubled by maternal concerns. The coincidence of loving and painting, like the relations of distance and desire, are inflected not only by the biographical circumstances of Julie’s adolescence and Morisot’s middle age, but by transitions in Morisot’s artistic practice.
