Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

directed by Céline Sciamma

Bracy Appeikumoh

I live alone. I make my own meals. I make my own bed. I make sure that I can survive to the next day and that (surprise surprise!) takes a lot of work. I’m also a writer, coming up with ideas, penning them, organizing thoughts, gathering knowledge, trying to make something out of nothing.

Shouldering both of these tasks in tandem is exhausting and on some days I am better at one than the other—days where I feel like a literary virtuoso are also often the days that my bed lies unmade, my meals are leftovers, and the trash is probably full. Now, I cannot imagine what it would be like to have to do this for myself and for a whole household of people.

It takes a lot to get me into something. I need to be sure that the experience is going to be worthwhile—because, y’know, time. Portrait of a Lady on Fire first piqued my interest when I watched Broey Deschanel’s epic deep dive into how it explores and subverts gaze because I’ve spent most of this year obsessed with gaze and porn culture and it really opened up a lot of thoughts. OK, cool. I added it to my list of films to watch at some point. I then had a meeting (over Google Meets because, y’know, COVID) with a dear friend in my creative writing program to discuss our manuscripts, and she suggested the film to me as well. That was all the proof I needed.

In PoaLoF, I meet Marianne—an artist tasked with painting the elusive Héloïse. Héloïse doesn’t want to be painted because she knows the destiny of that portrait—an offering of marriage from a man she does not know that will whisk her to a life in an unfamiliar land. Marianne is dedicated and particularly duplicitous in how she gets her subject to comply

A scene shows Marianne carefully sketching, the entirety of the frame is the canvas with the pencil as it goes, delicately blooming the image forth. I didn’t realize when it had happened but I found myself getting so lost in that process as if I were the one doing the work of carefully creating, lost in the flow of the beauty of my craft. I felt so connected to Marianne at that moment (even though my artistic prowess is nowhere near hers) because I know what it's like to get lost in this flow. When the scene ends, I realize that this is the first film where I got to see a woman shown with this level of flow.

Women’s time is always supposed to be split—yes, we can be #GirlBosses and #Empowered but there are several subtle reminders that my time is best spent learning domesticity. Stephenie Meyer felt the need to thank her husband and children in the acknowledgment sections for sacrificing by eating take out while she worked on her manuscripts. I remember excitedly fawning over an author a few years ago and asking for advice on her writing process, to which she responded that you can be a good mom/wife or a good writer but never both at the same time. Sure, whatever, women can’t have it all and people must make sacrifices and choices, but I see that a man can be a good writer and a good husband but a woman is not allowed to do both—the markers for what makes a successful woman versus a successful man are not an equal playing field.

In this era of wokeness, we still haven’t shed the concept that domesticity is supposed to innately come to women but not to men. A few years ago, I read Emma’s comic You Should Have Asked, in which she describes the mental load women bear as project managers and executors of household chores. I see this play out when heterosexual couples in the creative field somehow have an unspoken rule that the male creative’s time is more valued when said male creative will routinely interrupt his partner’s flow to have her either take care of him or the children they both share responsibility for. I often wonder how much more successful these women would be if part of their brain space wasn’t occupied by that mental load.

I remember being unceremoniously whisked into kitchens while I was in the middle of doing something. I was always in the middle of something when it happened and this taught me that whatever I was doing was not as important as this. There is nothing wrong with women learning to tend to a household—everyone should know how to do that—but there is something wrong when it is reserved only for women and done under the pretense of securing a husband. Girls are taught that they must be sociable, pleasant, accommodating, this is why I would allow myself to be interrupted while I spoke, while I thought. Society doesn’t value women’s time and space. I see this when someone will interrupt my day to tell me I don’t look good enough. The only reason we say women talk too much is because we would rather not hear them.

I am supposed to be a wife-in-training. Wives-in-training are to expect lives plagued by interruption. This concept has always been at odds with my desire to be this whimsical woman creative. “He who finds a good wife.” Because good wives must be discovered while they are on some promenade, my penchant for staying inside playing video games, reading, or writing has proven problematic. Thus far, this will be my second master’s degree but I feel people will be more excited about me graduating a bachelor into a husband than me going from a BA to an MBA then MFA. In a sense, that makes me like Héloïse.

Camile Paglia says that there are very few female obsessives—hence why we have no Michelangela or Jane the Ripper—then quickly credits herself as being counted amongst these few obsessives in existence. Women obsessives have always existed but our world has been ill-equipped for them, thus we bullied them into hiding. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf creates the hypothetical Shakespeare’s sister, Judith Shakespeare—a woman with all the literary ability of her brother—then asks us just how far she would have gotten with that gift in a world that didn’t even allow women to play themselves on the stage? Just how far would she have gotten when denied the education that built the foundation for her brother’s career, especially when her time would be infringed upon with requests to “mind the stew” or “mend the socks”? I often mourn all the women creatives and intellectuals we have lost, swallowed whole by society. The women burnt at the stake, the ones shipped off to madhouses, married off to husbands that either beat them into silence or assimilated all their knowledge into their own masculine lexicon.

But let me not kid myself—one of the reasons Marianne is able to accomplish her task is because the house, being wealthy, could afford to hire a maid to remember to stock the pantry and make dinner and so on and so forth. Hunger becomes less inconvenient when there is someone there who has already made your food for you. These luxuries have often only been afforded to men (who could rely on the women in their lives, e.g. wives and mothers) and the wealthy (who could hire staff). In Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser, and Tithi Bhattacharya’s Feminism for the 99%, they note how domesticity is a passing buck that gets put onto the lower-income women who then pass their own domestic duty onto lower-income women, and thus perpetuates the cycle. Domesticity remains women’s work and women’s work is not valued.

Another time devourer is the wanton pursuit of beauty that is expected of women. That image of the mad-haired raving genius is reserved for men. If Einstein had been a woman and presented the way male Einstein had, she would never have gotten through her first equation. Whenever anyone wants to tear down a woman’s achievement, what’s the first thing they go for? She’s fat and ugly. How dare she not pluck those eyebrows? How dare she wear that dress? How dare she? I went to business school and as a result have read many a Business Insider article about how Steve Jobs was a genius because by wearing the same outfit he reduced his decision fatigue. Now, let's put that into womanhood, shall we? Would the world be as accepting of a woman of that success who did the same thing? I can already hear people saying, “Nobody cares what a woman wears!” But that’s the hypocritical hubris of society—you claim you don’t care, but you do. If I want to walk around with ink-stained hands, they must at least be manicured.

I remember when I decided to cut off all my hair in 2014. I’ve just never been fond of hair, I have hated sitting in chairs to get my hair done ever since I can remember. I like buzz cuts because I like knowing that I have one less thing to do when I get up to go, plus have you ever tried to sleep with a fresh set of braids? Especially when your braider thinks it's a skill to braid someone’s scalp? It’s not pleasant, it’s not fun, it just ain’t it, son. I cut my hair under the pretense that I was going natural but I soon fell in love with being a baldie but, scared to commit, would cycle through growing it out only to cut it off within the next two months. In 2019 I finally conceded to my desires, cutting it all off for good and investing in my own clippers because there is something wholesome about shaving my own head. This feat isn’t without its irony—growing up, my mother would frequently threaten to cut off my hair when I expressed how much I hated getting my hair done. Of course in Nigeria, a shaved head was never a symbol of pride and as a child and adolescent I was still too invested in social norms. Anyway, now here I am, cutting my own hair with clippers every week and a half.

Even now, several months after seeing this film for the first time, something about Marianne just sticks with me. I admire how she is unconventional in her pursuits. A true obsessive (re: Paglia), she disregards rules which dictate that women aren’t to paint men nude because her love for her craft outweighs any social norms. She, attuned to what it means to create, knows that art is love in motion, that the portrait she is painting is a relationship as real, dynamic, and lasting as marriage itself, destroys the original painting of Héloïse to create one much closer to the truth. Her love for her craft flows into her love for Héloïse which in turn flows into the masterpiece she completes by the film’s end.

Flow is sacred; it is like communing with God. The Ruakh is a facet of the Holy Spirit attributed to creation, divine inspiration, imagination. In realizing that creative power innate in humanity we connect with an aspect of divinity—this is where we actualize ourselves as artists, as women, as people. Unfortunately, there is only one “true” way women are supposed to create. We are obsessed with policing women’s decisions, especially those surrounding family. When I was eighteen, I shared my aspirations with a Nigerian Aunt. Insufferable and daunted by her own choices, she softly threatened me with the reminder, “You know you’re a woman. Remember your biological clock.” I named the desktop folder in which I store my written work ‘Womb.’

Bracy Appeikumoh is a Sarah Lawrence College Creative Writing (Speculative Fiction) MFA candidate who writes to imagine a world wholly different from our own. She explores issues such as sexuality, gaze theory, the subversive effects of fandom culture, and internet culture. She is also a nerd. Find her on Twitter @bybracy. Humor her by visiting her website appeikumoh.carrd.co. You'll get a cookie.