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My objective is to offer an approach to the relationship between women and power that takes into account the kinesic appropriation of social space by the female body. In historiography, mobility has never been a feminine attribute. Culturally conditioned to be passive, woman as portrayed in nineteenth-century fiction is like a fragile ornament who must stand in wait of he who travels, undertakes, acts—her father, husband or lover. In the society where spaciality is in the service of power, because “women are at the window and men are at the door” (Zola, Germinal), the woman who comes out, by deciding to leave or by adventuring alone into the urban space, is an individual who, consciously or not, moves toward confrontation with the social order. A woman's free expression of her wishes in the geographic and social space is in no way a passing distraction: such seemingly capricious boldness involves an act that engages her whole existence. For such an act is not only one of revolt, it is also one of transgression that resembles a rite of passage. After a woman dares to cross, symbolically, the threshold of her dwelling, things will no longer be the same; moreover, every notable change in her existence begins with an act: that of leaving, which is itself prolonged by wanderings.
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Since the emergence of exhibition practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there has been a progressive normalization of the material conditions for observing paintings, such as their placement and the spectator's distance to them. Just like painters and Salon visitors, art critics needed to move closer to their object of inquiry in order to gain better knowledge of it, but paradoxically, they could not claim objectivity without stepping back. The ideal distance that would allow viewers to simultaneously grasp the whole and the details was a contentious topic of discussion for nineteenth-century artists, critics, and scientists. Among the different ways in which this question was formulated in art criticism, one in particular reveals the presuppositions of the time about proximity: the constant reference to the smell of the painting. Associated with proximity, smell metaphorizes the pleasure or trouble spectators feel when they get close to paintings, to their pictorial materiality, or even to the figures depicted. Because smell always functions as a sign of the substance from which it emanates, art critics' reference to it allowed them to consider the problem of proximity within the social and aesthetic issues of their time.
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By analyzing the immediate reception of the novel Les Demi-civilisés, this article attempts to construct a narrative and discursive algorithm for the critical discourse. Indeed, the critic's argumentative strategy consists in linking literariness and an ideological conception of literary writing by using the double isotopy. Fundamental and interdependent, those isotopies work like the indices which characterize literary criticism as different from other discourses (historical, sociological), and construct in synchrony the notion of an aesthetic value of texts in a given society and a given period.
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Different authors of treatises on the origin of painting (Pliny the Old, Alberti, christian theologians) give us the opportunity to apprehend three ways of understanding what painting produces : shadows, mirrors and prints.
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