Egon Schiele
Amy Simmons
Fin-de-Siecle Seminar
note: if you want a copy of the paper with figures, it is in the library

Hysteria and Androgyny in Egon Schieles Figure Studies

What does it mean to be hysterical? Perhaps I've also been so, perhaps I am now, but I know nothing about it, having never examined the matter thoroughly and having only heard about it second hand without studying it.  Isn't it a malaise, a great distress, caused by the desire for an impossible something?  In that case, all of us who have imagination are afflicted with it, with that strange sickness.  And why would such a malady have a sex?  -George Sand

            Egon Schiele's figural works, both those of himself and those of women, act as vehicles for psychological expression.  The gesture of the body and the countenance of the face are the two ways in which Schiele communicates his subjects interiority, whether this be through a scream, a grimace, or a contortion of the spine.  By placing his subjects in a spatial void, the subject becomes intensely isolated and self-contained.  In this way--distanced from the outside, material world--Schiele s subjects become embodied expressions of their psychological state.   Schiele's reliance on psychology in his artwork is symptomatic of his coming-of-age in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna.  The popular theories of neuropsychiatrists such as Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot inevitably shaped Schiele's consciousness and influenced his artistic trajectory.  By comparing Charcot s psychiatric research on hysteria to Schiele's figure studies and self portraits, we are able to make connections which may deepen our understanding of the artist s views of gender and sexuality in relation to his search for identity as a young man.

  Sex and Schiele 

      It can be convincingly argued that Egon Schiele objectifies women, that he reduces them to purely sexual objects.  In some cases the entire study of a woman is, in effect, focused on her genitals.  In Observed in a Dream for example, the reclining woman pictured is generally devoid of color except for the vivid reds, oranges, and pinks used to emphasize her erogenous zones: the nipples, lips, and vagina.  Moreover, her eyes are closed and half draped with a black cloth to further restrict her vision (Figure 1).  The viewer is able to gaze upon this woman with no fear that she will disrupt his voyeuristic experience of pleasure in sexual power.  But we cannot ignore the fact that Schiele also objectified himself through the self-portrait, and that Observed in a Dream is an extreme example of Schiele's objectification of women.   Although voyeurism is at the core of Schiele's art, there is a strong subversive element in the way he presents his nudes.  his art breaks through the ornamentalism of Jugendstil, and autonomy is restored to his models  (Werkner 77).  In the self-portrait, Seated Male Nude, Schiele represents himself as a sexual object (Figure 2).  He too reclines, with his legs spread and his genitals displayed.  His arm covers his face and his eyes are closed, much like the woman in Observed in a Dream.  Here too, the nipples and genitals are accented with a bright red tone.  Throughout his creative lifetime, Schiele represents women in the same way he represents himself, by displaying sexual energy and trying to overcome sexual repression.

        The sexual repression that Schiele struggled with during his life was a direct result of his childhood.  His father contracted syphilis several years before Egon was born.  His father gave his mother the disease, and she, in turn, transmitted it to four of Egon's siblings.  Three boys died in their infancy, and one of his three sisters died from the disease at the age of ten.  Luckily, Egon escaped a very early death, but he spent his childhood living with his sick father who refused to be treated.  His father soon deteriorated and spent the last few years of his life completely insane and confined to bed, and died when Schiele was only fourteen.  All of this left a deep impression on the young Schiele, who would for the rest of his life equate sexuality with death.  Many of his watercolors depict naked bodies (including himself) that are thin and sickly, often using unnatural colors like greens and blues for skin tones.  The Pregnant Woman with Green Belly has swollen eyelids and a slouching  gesture which add to the feeling of abnormality and sickness that her light green stomach represents (Figure 3).  Her pregnancy should be representative of youth and new life, but instead it becomes the symbol of death.     

Hysteria 

      Schiele not only painted physically sick woman and children, he painted the pathological as well.  He spent months painting proletarian children, and his friend Arthur Roessler tells us that he was fascinated by the ravages of the sordid sufferings to which these innocents are exposed  (Schroder 90).  Schiele also gained admittance to a woman's hospital in Vienna, in which he did numerous drawings of pregnant and sick women and girls.  Although there is no direct evidence that Schiele was aware of Charcot's research on hysteria, Charcot was popular at the time, and Schiele had ties to men working in the field, such as gynecologist Erwin von Graff.  Schiele most likely came into contact with women deemed hysteric  by the medical staff at the hospital.  Charcot carefully documented hysteric poses  using photography, and his colleague, Paul Richer documented even more varied poses in a set of lithographs he published in Les dmoniaques dans lart (Paris, 1887).   These publications may also be seen as catalogues of the (female) body's expressive qualities.  Indeed, they could in this respect serve as early documents of performance and body art  (Werkner 69).  Already, the poses of the hysteric were becoming aesthetisized, or as is evident in Schiele's art a  new aesthetic of ugliness  began forming (Schroder 88).  

      Schiele must have drawn from the new gestural possibilities that the hysteric woman opened up for the human body, for the positions of the figures in his works closely resemble those of hysterical women.  The most striking example of similarity is that of Schieles Self-portrait with Hand to Cheek  (Figure 4) and Paul RՎgnards photographic study of a patient with acoustic hallucination (Figure 5).  These two psychological representations practically speak for themselves.  Both the girl and Schiele have one hand to their cheek while the other is positioned in front of the body.  Even their two heads tilt at the same angle.   The positions of the hands are significant to both the hysteric and Schiele.  This is evident in almost all of Schiele s self portraits (in which the hands are intact) and the exhaustive documentation of hand positions by Charcot.  In figure 6, a hysteric is demonstrating the different positions her hand might assume when going into a hysterical attack.  Again and again, Schiele represents himself with no thumbs.  In Lyricist, Schiele presses his rigid hands to his body, the thumb of his left hand has totally vanished, while the thumb of his right hand is bent and contorted (Figure 7).  His head lolls to the side in what could be deemed and epileptic fit and his eyes are mere slits through which he gazes at the viewer.  As an artist and a lyricist, Schiele is crushed by world and by deep emotion, receding into the background only to be swallowed up by darkness. 

      Schiele often caught his subjects in what seems to be mid movement, capturing them in the height of ecstasy or more commonly in the depths of torment and self hatred.  In this way, he acted much like Charcot and Richer by aesthetisizing an individuals emotional state.  The depressed viewpoint of paintings like Portrait of Arthur Rossler cause the subject to appear like a bug under glass, crushed and frozen at a heightened emotional state.  In this way we can study the subject s emotion scientifically (Figure 8).  Particularly in this painting because Arthur Rossler's eyes have been omitted, and the viewer is unable to emotionally identify with the man.  We can compare this portrait to Paul Richer's diagrams of hysterical women in which the view is foreshortened and depth is absent (Figure 9).  What we receive from these two pieces is a representation of movement.   At the time, the movements of the hysteric were studied by many performance artists in hospitals and recast on the stage as vanguard dance.  Schiele was close friends with a famous performance art couple, Erwin Osen and Moa, and often painted them in various positions.  Schiele for some time was obviously under the spell of Osen and Moa, whom he drew repeatedly in a series of ecstatic, mimetic poses (Werkner 56).  In Standing Female Nude with Hands Joined at the Breast Schiele represents Moa in a hysteric position that she often used on the stage (figure 10).  Her hands are clasped to her breast, increasing her isolation on the white page.  Her entire body undulates, the curves of her hips may be unnatural, but they help to describe the vulnerability of her fragile body which Schiele has elongated and cinched at the waist.  The typical hysteric, as in Charcot's photo Debut dune Attaque, often wrapped her arms around herself much like Moa does in this painting (Figure 11). 

      At the turn of the century, hysteria was generally thought of as a woman s disease.  In  the year 1883, the Salptrire, the public insane asylum for women where Charcot worked, admitted 500 women.  Between 18 to 20 percent of those women were diagnosed as hysterical.  In the same year, only two men in the Bictre (the equivalent male asylum) were diagnosed with the disease (Goldstein 218-219).  The term hysteria  is even derivative of the Greek word for uterus,   and the ancient Egyptians thought that the womb was a tiny animal which could make a woman sick or crazy due to its movements.  After conducting several case studies, including the famous Dora, Freud theorized that hysteria usually originated due to childhood sexual trauma and due to adult experiences of sexual abstinence, masturbation, and practices such as coitus interuptus.  

The Male Hysteric 

      But putting these facts about female  hysteria aside for a moment, what purpose could the mental illness serve in light of Schiele's male artistic universe?  If we agree that Schiele represented his women as hysterics, and that Schiele represented himself in the same way he represented his women, we can make only a short, and plausible leap to say that Schiele was in fact a male hysteric.  According to Jan Goldstien, the act of becoming a  male hysteric suggests,

    that if nineteenth century hysteria was a conceptual space
    for the conventional, stereotypical definition of femininity,
    it was also, by that same token, potentially a conceptual
    space for the subversion of gender stereotypes.  Through
    partaking of the pathological condition hysteria, the man...
    might also lay claim to the attributes of femininity it had
    come to epitomize--here, nervous hypersensitivity,
    vulnerability, self-absorption--and hence implicitly achieve
    something of the status of androgyny (Goldstien 134-135). 

As a male artist, Schiele faced conflicting gender stereotypes.  While he was expected to act normally masculine, he also carried along with him the stigma of being an artist--a sensitive  feminized translator of the world around him.  We can see these notions of masculinity and femininity at work in many of his self-portraits.  His friends generally describe him as a virile young man.  Paris von Gutersloh, a fellow painter, said of Schiele: he was  unusually handsome [with]...nothing at all artistic about him: his hair was not long...he was...an elegant young man (Knafo 74).  But this image of Schiele was a construct, in his paintings he depicts himself in the opposite  truer way: feminine, weak, and decaying.  Aware of the separateness of his image and psyche,  he once wrote,  My outward bearing does not agree with my inner needs (Knafo 76).  Schiele also perceived himself as being radically different than those in the world around him, he thought of himself as a social outcast.  According to Goldstien,  from the vantage point of the male, bourgeois, Christian doctor who made the diagnosis, the male hysteric remained the other,  as radically foreign and as extruded from the self as the female hysteric (154).  Schiele maintained his status as outsider by maintaining his status as male hysteric. 

      Two of Schiele's early self-portraits, Self-Portrait in Street Clothes Gesturing (Figure 12) and Self-portrait with Hands on Chest (Figure 13), explicitly exhibit Schiele's struggle with gender and his self-image.  In both paintings, the artist represents himself as androgyne.  His sex may be male, but he is purposefully gendering  himself as female.  In each painting, Schiele uses pinkish tones to accentuate his cheekbones and his lips, coloration in those areas being typically accented by females with rouge and lipstick.  He even colors his eyelids in the manner of women applying eye shadow.  Self-Portrait in Street Clothes Gesturing Schiele holds cupped hands to his chest, proudly offering the viewer his concealed (yet nonexistent) breasts.  His overcoat slips from one shoulder, in a stereotypically feminine gesture of seduction.  Self-portrait with Hands on Chest is equally feminizing.  Schiele's wrists are limp, his nails are painted, and his hair is lengthened and colored.  He wears an outfit which seems more female than male, compared even to the contemporary suits of the stylish dandy.  Incidentally, Schiele did dress like a dandy on a day to day basis, but in his art the representation he chose for himself was much different, as we have already seen. 

      Schiele's practice of feminizing his image does not stop at his gestures and facial features.  In his masturbation self-portraits, the dualism (between masculine identification and feminine identification) of his personality is represented in the way he displays (or doesn't display) his penis.  In Eros, Schiele displays his exaggerated penis to the viewer (Figure 14).  In fact, the member protrudes into the viewers space.  Schiele threatens us with his overblown sense of masculinity.  The penis is the only part of the painting in which Schiele makes use of his unnatural colors, it is throbbing with a disgusting day-glow orange.  He draws even further attention to it (if this is possible!) by touching it with the tip of his finger.  By comparison, the rest of the canvas is completely drab.  His face looks almost simian, with thick lips and a overhanging brow.  On the other hand, his facial structure could also be likened to a skull, with deep eye sockets and only a dark patch for a nose.  This relationship to death is even further increased by Schiele's color choices: white, gray, and black, with only hints of yellow ochre showing through.  We already know, from Schiele's childhood experiences with his father, that he often equated sex with death.  But this panting can be seen not only as a comment on the artists sexuality, but on the attitudes toward sexuality which we prevalent in Fin-de-Siecle society.  By directing his penis and his gaze at the viewer he directly challenges the distortion of the sexual instincts in modern civilized European society, in which sexual repression was integral to the social structure  (Wilson 28).  In this way, Schiele consciously subverted sexual norms.   

       In direct contrast to Eros, Schiele also painted Self-Portrait in Black Cloak, Masturbating (figure 15).  In this masturbation portrait, Schiele represents himself in a much kinder light.  His skin tone is natural and much more vital than his death mask in Eros.  The expressive brush strokes used on his body and cloak give the figure life.  The figure sits, but there is movement evident in his hands and legs and belly.  His penis is given less agency (in that it isn't there) while his body becomes more active.  His face returns to its human form, and it becomes the focal point of the painting--instead of the penis with a life of its own in Eros.  He expresses a melancholy and loneliness that the viewer is able to identify with.  It is intriguing that this new found life comes along with castration.  In fact, the missing penis is much more than a castration--it is the replacement of the male genitals with female genitals.  The ambiguity arises from Schiele's placing of his hands over his genitals and arranging them not to merely symbolize female sexual parts...but to create a quite literal representation of them: a triangle of pink flesh and pubic hair between his forefingers and left thumb and a more specifically vulvar effect between the first and second fingers of the left hand (Wilson 30).  During the period of these two self-portraits, Schiele was generally abstinent (though not by choice), and the only outlet for his mounting desire was masturbation.  Freud would probably diagnose Schiele as an hysteric due to Schiele's sexual trauma of having half his family die from syphilis combined with his adult experiences of abstinence and an excessive fixation with masturbation.  

 The Hysteric and Spirituality

       Schiele's tendency to conflate mysticism and eroticism is also symptomatic of his hystericism.  Like Emma Bovary (a famous literary hysteric), who  converts the true Christian God into the God of her fantasy,  one equipped with spurs and mustaches ; and this eroticized transformation, entirely attributable to the condition of her nerves,  renders her the hysterical poet  (Goldstien 144), Schiele also manages to eroticize religion as the  hysterical poet.  In his painting Cardinal and Nun, Schiele consciously comments on Klimt's The Kiss, but he transforms the piece into an illicit affair between two (supposedly) abstinent individuals (Figure 16).  He inverts the sexuality of the repressed Catholic society in which he was brought up.  He paints this piece in the period of his career after he was imprisoned for corrupting the youth with his art.  His twenty-four day imprisonment affects his deeply, he writes in his prison diary,

    But then, what does it actually mean: corrupted? Have adults
    forgotten how corrupted, that is, incited and aroused by the
    sex impulse they themselves were as children? Have they
    forgotten how the frightful passion burned and tortured them
    while they were still children?  I have not forgotten, for I
    suffered terribly under it.  And I believe that man must
    suffer from sexual torture as long as he is capable of sexual
    feelings.  (Comini 59)

 After his release, he paints Cardinal and Nun in order to show that to be human is to be sexual, even in the cases of the clergy.  Even in his painting, Resurrection, Schiele represents the Christ figure as a sexual being (Figure 17).  But Schiele's Resurrection is a double resurrection--of himself and of Christ.  He is being artistically resurrected after the martyrdom of his imprisonment.  Both he and Christ are naked only from the waist down.  While Christ is often portrayed nude in typical Christian imagery, a nakedness only from the waist down is more highly sexual--it implies that he could, and probably should be fully covered.  These paintings show that although Schiele moved away from erotic paintings of young girls after his imprisonment, he found a new way to subvert and challenge the views of sexuality in contemporary Vienna.

 Hysterical Voice

      Jan Goldstien discusses the creative figure of the male hysteric in her article  The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth Century France.  She claims that  from hysteria as a malfunction of the organs of female procreativity... there was only a short step to hysteria as a malfunction of the faculties of male artistic creativity (Goldstien 143).  Flaubert, for example, describes being unable to write when he goes into a hysteric fit,  I have made a vow not to touch a pen from now [mid February] until Easter... The simple act of writing installs hysteria in my head (143).  Why then, is Schiele able to take up the brush and represent himself during his most intense fits of hysteria?  It is because hysteria was a disease which affected a person s verbal capabilities.  Hysterics described sensations of  constriction and  strangulation in the throat...and the indecipherable animal like sounds--from barks, howls, roars, yelps, down to the grunts of a pig...Hysteria, it would seem, presented itself... preeminently as an impairment in the capacity for linguistic expression  (143).  Through his visual art, Schiele is able to escape the inherent non communicativeness of hysteria.  Even Freud and Charcot believed that through art their patients could bring repressed feelings to the surface in order to deal with them.  

      These language problems of hysteria are only a microcosm of the language crisis that faced Fin-de-Siecle Europe.  Generally it means the intellectual s loss of confidence in the ability of language to represent reality and--more specifically--the aesthetes skepticism about his own means of expression  (Huter 128).  People were beginning to recognize language as it is--an arbitrary system of essentially meaningless signifiers--and they were beginning to turn to the language of the body as a more concrete form of voice .  This language crisis led to whole new realms of expression for the Fin-de-Siecle artist, as we discussed earlier, modern dance was one of these silent forms.  In a similar way Schiele can be seen... as one of the painters who restored silence from painting and rescued it from words  (120).  Two of Schiele's rare self portraits which concentrate on his face, Self-Portrait 1910 (Figure 18) and Self-Portrait Screaming (Figure 19), exhibit his perceived impotency when dealing with language.  In both works, Schiele stands facing the viewer with his mouth open in a Munchian silent scream.  Although we are unable to hear the expression of Schiele's pain, we cant imagine that his gaping mouth could form the sounds of a coherent, civilized language.  Schiele reduces himself to an animal that is only capable of the barks, howls, roars, and yelps of a hysteric.  Even most of his teeth are missing--an artistic move which symbolizes the total degeneration and decay of his verbal capabilities. 

Hysterical Vision

       But the afflictions of the hysteric did not stop with the strangulation of voice, the eyesight was also affected. According to Freud's theories,  in the private world of the self the punishments for Schaulust (hunger of the gaze) imposed by the ego assumed the form of hysteria (Apter 147) In simpler, reductive terms, this is basically the urban legend come true--masturbation results in blindness.  Of course, the  blinding effects of what Charcot calls  scotomization include symptoms like  color blindness, dilated pupils, strabismus, and the twisting of the orb to reveal the whites of the eye (147).  Lacan further complicates the repercussions of scopophilia ( love of looking) by coining the term  scotoma, which  he uses as a metaphor for consciousness (148).  The gaze scotomizes Lacan's subject when the eye sees itself seeing itself. Therefore the scotomized Lacanian subject is caught in a continuous struggle for mastery between the eye and the gaze  (149).  The scotoma is the visualization of repression.  Just to make this difficult concept more clear, Scotomization is the process of visual occlusion [censoring]that punishes private or public voyure-ism  (149).

      Lacan describes these censoring taches,  or hysterical spots as stains, punctiforms, sutures, splits, butterflies ( primal stripes...on the grid of desire), or  points of irradation from which reflections pour forth overflowing the ocular bowl  (149). Now having described the visual repercussions of scotomization, we can turn to Schiele's figure studies.  Occurring again and again throughout his creative lifetime, we see Schiele's tendency to use harsh, unnatural color splotches in his works.  The work Two Girls Embracing (Seen from the Back) gives us ample evidence that Schiele was (unconsciously) enacting the hysterics vision affliction (Figure 18).  The view of the back of this couple is unusual in Schiele, who as we have seen, is fond of displaying the breasts and genitals of his models. In this painting however, Schiele censors the most erotic view of the two girls, and we only see their backs.  This erotic censoring process is taken further by Schiele's use of color.  He distributes smudges and stains of reds, blue greens, and browns across the girls  skin, colors that are typically associated with blood, decomposition, and decay.  He also uses a black crayon to draw scar or suture like marks on the skin of the two girls, further enforcing the idea that they are hurt and/or dead.  Through these ways of representing decay he negates the erotic possibility of the painting, he punishes himself and the viewer for scopophilia or Schaulust.  

       These scotomic representations of women take full form only after Schiele is released from prison, possibly due to his guilt over the incident.  Schiele states in the title of one of his prison paintings I Feel Not Punished but Purified,  but in actuality, he does feel guilty about the entire incident.  This guilt is evident in the drop off of the number of nude women he paints, and he almost entirely stops painting children.  His self-portraits also change.  In contrast to his earlier portraits, Schiele's eyes in his self-portraits after 1913 lose focus. His pupils become dilated, he often looks like he is hypnotized, or occasionally he doesn't paint eyes at all.  Schiele's eyes in Self-Portrait with Raised Arms are reduced to two empty black holes (Figure 19).  His hands are partially raised to his face as if he were intending to cover his blindness, or to even increase his blindness.  In Self-Portrait with Raised Left Hand, Schiele performs the same visual punishment (figure 20). In this portrait, he assumes an absurd gesture much like that of a court jester.  His sleeves are bloused and puffy, in traditional jester style.  His eyes stare blankly into the viewer s space, but his gaze is not focused or directed any longer, he is not the voyeur, he is the victim. He has even symbolically castrated himself by cutting his body off at the waist.  This is a Schiele that has been rendered impotent by sexual guilt. As a visual artist, Schiele is lost without his sight, but by placing himself in the void and gouging out his eyes, he receives what he thinks is deserved punishment for his erotic excess. 

The Androgyne

       Representations of the androgyne are another way in which Schiele subverted the typical views of sexuality in his time.  We have already seen some of his androgynous self-portraits, but he was also fond of portraying androgynous females.  Schiele was typically drawn to female models who were thin and sexually underdeveloped.  He invited girls as young as 6 and 7 to his studio to model for him, some of them even modeled in the nude.  When Schiele was sixteen, he had his younger sister Gertie, who was twelve, pose as his first live nude model.  Gertie had another trait in common with many of Schiele's models at the time: her budding sexuality really was hermaphroditic, ill-defined, and hence non-threatening (Kallir 72). He claims to have not been sexually aroused while painting these children, nor to have had sexual relationships with them,  Erotic? he asks,  I did not feel erotic at the time.  Although he believed that children are sexual beings, one must remember that he was practically a child himself, coming into his artistic prime at the age of 20. 

      Some of these androgynous young female models were completely robbed of their femininity, like Nude Girl with Folded Arms (Gertrude Schiele) (Figure 21). Rigid and devoid of any feminizing curves, Schiele transforms his sister into a representation of the phallus, thereby perfecting the image of the androgyne.  So  if one accepts the claims of Freudian psychoanalysis, [Schiele] may have been especially sensitive to the pervasive, unconscious fantasy of androgyny as expressed in the young child's belief in a phallic mother  (Goldstien 150). 

      The way Gertie, in Nude Girl with Folded Arms, withdraws from the viewer, wrapping her arms around herself in protection is non-threatening to the male viewer.  The pre-adolescent, hipless, breastless body, being closer to its male counterpart, was less fear-inspiring than the body of a mature woman (Werkner 69).  Schiele, as a young man struggling with his sexuality, would inevitably turn towards the vulnerable femme fragile rather than the intimidating femme fatale.  By turning the notion of androgyny away from himself and projecting it onto women, Schiele was able to uphold the androgynous ideal (in theory) without remaining socially stigmatized as a victim of the negative characteristics of the weaker sex.  Does this shift in his representation of the androgyne (from an androgynous self to an androgynous other) mean that Schiele was confirming the classic gender dichotomy?  Not necessarily,

    male-hysteria-as-androgyny may not have been a completely
    laudable or revolutionary doctrine by some absolute,
    transhistorical standard.  But in relative, historical
    terms--which is to say, within the bounds of its nineteenth
    century context--it nonetheless retains its credentials as
    subversive. (Goldstien 157)

By this time in Schiele's personal life, he had emotionally and sexually matured.  He was no longer the adolescent trying to define a self, he was a twenty-eight year old married man.  Although his marriage to Edith Harms was a rocky one, Schiele had settled down.   At the time of their deaths from the influenza epidemic of 1918, Edith was pregnant with their first child.  At the end of his career, Schiele painted Embrace (Lovers) of himself and his wife (figure 22).  for the first time, it seems, Schiele gives us a whole picture.  The two figures are three dimensional, they are human.  They are painted in soft flesh tones, and no trace of decay is evident.  Danielle Knafo notes that the woman is far from being one of the countless prepubescent, androgynous-looking girls of Schiele's earlier drawings (148). Schiele has even filled in the void of his earlier empty background with a white sheet.  To complete this intimate portrait Schiele has turned his back to the audience, shutting us out and concentrating completely on his lover, not himself.

      Schiele had matured, but in the process he left us visual documents of the entire rough process.  These maps of his psyche shook the very foundations of the world in which he lived, and challenged society's conservative views of sexuality.  Through his art, he said that we should give sexuality a more fluid definition.  That the gender labels  male and  female are not, and should not be, as static as we make them.  As Schiele tells us from his prison cell,  He who denies sex is a filthy person who smears in the lowest way his own parents who have begotten him (Comini 62).  His children make that statement when they mischievously lift up their skirts.  They prove to the adult world that sexuality comes from a place that is not socially constructed, and that it is unnatural to suppress what is inherent. 

 ******************

  Works Cited:

1.  Apter, Emily.  Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and                        Narrative Obsession in Turn of the Century                      France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

 

 

2.  Comini, Alessandra.  Schiele in Prison.  Greenwich,                         Connecticut: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973.

 

 

3.  Goldstein, Jan.  The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and                         Literary Discourse in Nineteenth Century France.                       Representations, Volume O, Issue 34 (Spring, 1991), 134-             165.

 

 

4.  Kallir, Jane.  Egon Schiele: The Complete Works.  New York:                   Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990.

 

 

5.  Knafo, Danielle.  Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation.  London                  and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993.

 

 

6.  SchrӚder, Klaus Albrecht.  Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion.                New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1995.

 

 

7.  Werkner, Patrick.  Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese                   Modernism.  Palo Alto, California: The Society for the                 Promotion of Science and Scolorship, 1994.

 

 

8.  Wilson, Simon. Egon Schiele. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,            1980.