Subversion of Gendered Fairytale in Kiki Smith’s “Lying with the Wolf”
Jules Spector - April 30, 2023
Figure 1: Kiki Smith, Lying with the Wolf, 2001. 88 x 73 inches. Ink and pencil on paper. Centre Pompidou, Paris.
American artist Kiki Smith is known for her wide-ranging and multidisciplinary depictions of the female body. Much of her work promotes a feminist message: as a part of the second wave of feminist art, she often seeks to explore the different roles of women in the patriarchal society in which she creates her work. As the daughter of famed minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, Smith grew up exposed to craftsmanship, though her work eschews defined stylistic categories associated with contemporary art. Instead, her decidedly figurative imagery refers to past themes and genres, such as fairy tales as well as the female body and its connection with nature. Smith has described her oeuvre as being cyclical in nature, a sort of “meandering act.” At multiple points in her career—specifically the period between 1999 and 2002—she focused her work on a female protagonist that she refers to as “Sainte Geneviève,” the Catholic patron saint of the city of Paris. Smith conflates the story of Sainte Geneviève with that of Little Red Riding Hood, creating a series of pen and pencil portraits and metal sculptures of a naked woman alone amongst wild animals, most often wolves. Smith’s Lying with the Wolf (Figure 1) is a 2001 drawing depicting this female figure lying intimately next to a wolf, their bodies intertwined in a tender embrace. The large-scale drawing exemplifies Smith’s feminist subversion of both folklore and Catholic martyrdom.
Smith is known as an accomplished printmaker and sculptor who “reintroduced the human figure as an important realm for artistic investigation and discovery” during the 1990s and the aughts. Throughout her career, she has frequently produced prints and sculptures of the same themes, which are exhibited in tandem in order to underscore the meaning of their content. These themes, most often, are inspired by the artist’s love of populist art forms and handcrafting, thus creating a folklore-driven body of work. In 1989, Smith was invited to make prints at the renowned printmaking workshop Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island, New York. At ULAE, Smith began to explore imagery associated with Catholicism, often using her own image—frequently folded and unfolded many times to create a warped and textured surface—to stand in for representations of historical figures of Catholicism or characters in western folklore.
Smith has strongly identified herself with her female gender over the course of her career, often presenting feminine forms without a significant political agenda; rather, she focuses on expressing universal themes and famous stories from a female perspective. Beginning in 1999, the artist began creating her series of works focused on the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, often connecting the lore’s imagery with that of Catholicism. Little Red Riding Hood, thought to be derived from French oral tradition, was originally an incestuous and cannibalistic adult satire—known as “The Story of Grandmother”—ending with the young female protagonist outsmarting the wolf after being forced to eat her grandmother’s flesh and share a bed with the antagonist disguised as the girl’s grandmother. First officially published by Charles Perrault as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge in the seventeenth century, the tale became a moralistic parable, warning young girls about the dangers of interacting with strangers. The story, as it is commonly known today, was written for the court of Louis XIV’s entertainment at Versailles, and served to regale the aristocrats with a moralistic tale with deeply erotic undertones. The titular red cloak and unwitting juvenile protagonist illustrate the fable’s subtext describing a loss of virginity and its disastrous consequences (namely, the young girl’s untimely demise at the hands of the wolf). Indeed, in the seventeenth century, red was already associated with sin and sexuality.
Figure 2: Kiki Smith, Born, 2002. 68 x 56 inches. Lithograph. Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Figure 3: Giovanni Battista Salvi (“Sassoferrato”), Madonna and Child, 1650. 52 x 39 inches. Oil on canvas. Vatican Museums, Vatican City.
One of Smith’s works that explicitly depicts the tale is her large 2002 lithograph, Born (Figure 2). In it, she portrays the grandmother and little girl rising from the belly of the wolf. The figures’ positions and cloaked outlines recall resurrection scenes from art historical depictions of biblical lore. Furthermore, the figures in conjunction with the positioning of the wolf resemble paintings of the Virgin Mary on the crescent moon dating back to the fifteenth century (Figure 3). The two figures are both self-portraits of the artist; Smith drew from a picture of herself as a child and another of her in adulthood. Her use of intergenerational female-centric imagery reinforces the feminist import of her body of work and her commitment to retelling traditional lore from a feminist perspective. In Born, Smith excludes any male authority figure from her portrayal of the tale; the wolf is included as a subordinate figure below those of the women. Instead of requiring masculine power to free them from the jaws of the animal, the young girl and her grandmother rise from its bloodstained belly of their own accord and without external forces. Furthermore, the women show no signs of adopting traditionally masculine characteristics to accomplish this feat; they are instead represented mid-embrace, a conventional representation of maternal affection.
Smith’s Lying with the Wolf is another work centered around reframing traditional depictions of the female body in folklore. Although a less evident portrayal of Little Red Riding Hood, the drawing’s relationship between a woman and a wolf clearly evokes the artist’s other works recalling the tale. Lying with the Wolf depicts a reclining female nude intimately entwined with the figure of a black wolf. The wolf nuzzles into the woman’s arms as she strokes its ears and stomach. Her left breast is exposed below the wolf’s mouth, underscoring both the intimacy of the image and the trust between woman and animal. Most notably, the woman and the wolf are depicted as equals. Their bodies occupy approximately the same amount of space on the paper (allowing for the expanse of the woman’s body behind the wolf) and neither figure overwhelms the other. Furthermore, in the context of a fairytale embroiled in sexual allegory, the embrace between woman and wolf reinstates the erotic without violence. The two figures’ bodies are intertwined with one another, appearing to the viewer as if interlaced young lovers. The wolf has been tamed and shows no signs of aggression or wildness. Indeed, the positioning of the woman’s arms around the wolf is similar to that of the grandmother’s arms around her granddaughter in Born, indicating a softness of touch that negates the brutality of the original lore. No longer are the two figures embroiled in a race between predator and prey. Rather, they are permitted to exist as companions in the textured-paper reality that Smith has created.
In Lying with the Wolf, Smith does not merely turn the patriarchal narrative of Little Red Riding Hood on its head, making the female characters the owners of the story. Instead, she removes traditional, gendered behavioral signifiers from the image entirely, thereby creating a completely new type of narrative without differentiating between protagonist and antagonist. In the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida’s assessment of the role of “animality” in sovereignty, The Beast and the Sovereign (2002), he sets the traditional roles of virgin girl against sovereign wolf in folkloric texts as the foundation for a broader discussion about the gendering of power in modern nation-states. Derrida describes the role of the sovereign as the “alpha male” wolf, whose behavior is categorized as beastly and primeval, thus classifying the animal as the most masculine. Smith’s depiction of the wolf is starkly different from Derrida’s classification; instead of an overtly masculine and violent figure, the wolf is gently contained within the embrace of his human lover, at equal standing with the woman.
Figure 4: Kiki Smith, Genevieve and the Wolves, 1999. 6’ 2⅛ x 4’ 3½ inches. Ink on Nepal paper. Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica.
Derrida further categorizes the role of the virgin girl as that which exposes and disrupts the patriarchy, which is tantamount to sovereignty. As the object of desire in Little Red Riding Hood, the virgin girl has no power in this narrative. Her deflowering by the wolf (representing the opposition between nature and culture, bestiality and order) reveals what Derrida purports to be an essential philosophical question about society: whether the “puppet strings” controlling man (and beast) are manipulated by a sovereign power or by man himself. Smith’s depiction of the woman in Lying with the Wolf again differs from this interpretation of the narrative. The figure’s visible, developed breast and adult face offer evidence of the character’s maturity. She is not a virgin girl. In fact, she is an equal to the powerful male wolf, who has been stripped by the woman (and by Smith) of his violent tendencies. As a result, the characters are able to peacefully coexist in a loving relationship governed by equal respect as opposed to the social inequities embodied in sexual desire and fear. In the original narrative, the puppet strings enforce opposition and inequity resulting in violence, rape, and death, but Smith’s characters are unaffected.
Many of Smith’s works sharing content with Lying with the Wolf depict Sainte Geneviève, the Catholic patron saint of the city of Paris. Smith was raised in a Catholic household and has described Catholicism as a “body-fetishized religion,” relating her body-focused oeuvre to its often Catholic undertones. Smith stated that Sainte Geneviève was renowned for her ability to domesticate wolves and that she was rumored to have been born from the womb of a wolf. In addition to its rethinking of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, Lying with the Wolf is likely an illustration of the saint given its formal relationship to a series of drawings and sculptures entitled “Sainte Geneviève.” Many of these drawings exhibit illustrations of naked women peacefully coexisting with wolves in a manner beyond a simple role reversal of the Little Red Riding Hood narrative. Genevieve and the Wolves (Figure 4), for example, is a 1999 drawing portraying a naked woman standing next to a wolf with one of her arms around its torso. The wolf stands on its hind legs and places its front paws on the woman’s shoulders. Again, the woman and the wolf occupy equal amounts of space in the composition, each filling about half of the page. Following Smith’s telling of the myth of Sainte Geneviève, this drawing most likely takes place after the saint’s domestication of the wild wolves. However, the wolf may also have recognized Geneviève for one of its own due to her being born of a wolf.
Kiki Smith’s depictions of Little Red Riding Hood and Sainte Geneviève go beyond just subverting gender roles of traditional fairytales and Catholic lore. Instead, the artist alters the status of both portrayed genders—the female protagonist and the male wolf antagonist—so that both characters become multidimensional beyond the scope of masculine and feminine characteristics. Smith creates an “alternative feminine mythology” in which gender roles do not determine dominance. She goes farther than simply vanquishing the unchecked, beastly power of the sovereign wolf and instead manufactures a space for characters traditionally set against each other to experience each other in a loving embrace, free of fear and expectations.
Notes:
2 It is important to note that very little literature exists about this work of art in relation to this topic. Much of this paper will consist of educated speculation and analysis from both existing literature and interviews with the artist conducted in non-scholarly publications.
3 Wendy Weitman, Kiki Smith: [brochure] prints, books, & things: December 5, 2003-March 8, 2004 (New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003), exhibition catalogue, 1.
4 Weitman, 2.
5 Weitman, 3.
6 Weitman, 4.
7 Weitman, 5.
8 Stephen Coppel et al., The American Dream: Pop to the Present (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2017).
9 Coppel.
10 Carola Maria Wide, “The Female Genius: Voices and Images in Angela Carter’s and Kiki Smith’s Re-Imaginations of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’” 2014, 21.
11 Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2003), 36.
12 Wide, 23.
13 Wide, 23.
14 Kiki Smith and Wendy Weitman, Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Things (New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 38.
15 Weitman, 5.
16 Although this paper will not explore the artistic tradition of the reclining female nude, it is interesting to note that the wolf, a traditional depiction of masculinity, is guarding the woman’s nude figure from the prying eye of the viewer. The intended viewer for Renaissance paintings portraying a reclining female nude was, most commonly, male. The depiction of the wolf guarding the woman’s body – instead of exploiting it for its sexuality – is in direct contrast with both traditional tellings of the fable and traditional portrayals of men and women in painting.
18 Derrida, 214.
19 Derrida, 215.
20 Derrida, 215.
21 Jack Zipes, “7 Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre,” in Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 135-156, 143.
22 Michael Kimmelman, “The Intuitionist,” The New York Times (The New York Times, November 5, 2006), https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/magazine/05kiki.html.
23 Zipes, 135. Note: I have been unable to find documentation of this myth outside of literature about Kiki Smith.
24 “Kiki Smith,” Shoshana Wayne Gallery, accessed December 8, 2020, http://shoshanawayne.com/artists/kiki-smith/.
25 Amanda Hess, “The Wild Woman Awakens,” The New York Times (The New York Times, December 17, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/arts/Women-Who-Run-With-the-Wolves.html.
