Herrera also restricts consideration of compositional features to personal denotation based on statements by the artist and her colleagues. Citing Kahlo’s comments from a 1939 interview conducted by art historian Parker Lesley, Herrera explains the meaning of objects depicted in the painting: the pelvic bone represents doctors’ theories that injuries sustained in the 1925 bus-trolley accident prevented Kahlo from carrying a child to term; the orchid was a gift from Rivera; the snail represents the agonizingly slow pace of the miscarriage; and the infant stands for the aborted fetus, the “ ‘little Diego’ she hoped it would be.”38 Herrera’s direct correlation between the depicted miscarriage and the actual miscarriage is not without basis, as it is supported by Kahlo’s explanation. But artists’ statements also must be considered in relationship to social, historical contexts. As Schaefer argues, social directives dissuaded women from speaking critically about their lives: “If a woman spoke up, she was no longer dependent on others, nor on the interpretation and control of social reality, and consequently she was a threat to the status quo.”39 Kahlo’s description of the painting, as related by Lesley, clearly corresponds to social expectations, but it does not necessarily correspond to Kahlo’s attitudes toward motherhood.
David Lomas refers to broader social discourses that may have compelled Kahlo to publicly explain her paintings as nothing more than personal illustrations, and these also would have accounted for the fact that Kahlo’s contemporaries held her responsible for the miscarriage. He begins his analysis of the painting by noting, “In the culture to which Kahlo belonged miscarriage was a source of shame: the abject failure of a socially conditioned expectation of motherhood.”40 Lomas regards Kahlo’s use of personal circumstance as a vehicle through which she articulated not merely personal feelings but broader feminine experiences that go beyond the biological. The painting refers to socialization structures that delineate paradigmatic gendered characterizations. Thus the disjunctures and discontinuities of Kahlo’s painting represent her personal position in affiliation with, yet distinct from, the mythology of motherhood. On one hand, the painting exemplifies social prescription in ways that Herrera and Kettenmann discuss: the artist depicted herself as emotionally distraught over her lack of children, abandoned in a landscape devoid of human companionship, and haunted by her aborted son. On the other hand, the painting also challenges social directive by making explicit the limited realm (motherhood) in which women could be socially esteemed. The baby is at the center of the painting, analogous to a child as the central, necessary feature for completing the patriarchal family. Significantly Kahlo depicted a baby boy who would have inherited the masculine privileges of patriarchal society but who also represents the perpetual regeneration of the patriarchal nation. Without children, the wife’s subordination and the husband’s command are incomplete, and the woman floats in an enigmatic space.
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen articulate an approach to interpretation that moves away from identifying aspects of the painting as signifiers for Kahlo’s personal life and private emotions. They argue that Kahlo “uses the device of the ‘emblem.’ In Henry Ford Hospital, her body on the bed is surrounded by a set of emblematic objects, like those surrounding the crucified Christ in an allegory of redemption.”41 There is a significant difference between thinking about the objects in the painting as personal references, “symbols of maternal failure,” as Herrera proposes, or as emblems, “graphic signs which carry a conventional meaning, often in reference to a narrative subtext … or a common set of beliefs.”42 As personal referents, the bloody hospital bed stands as tangible evidence of her barren womb. The medical world, symbolically represented by the autoclave and medical models of a female torso and pelvic bone, diagnosed Kahlo’s responsibility for the miscarriage. However, if her miscarriage is considered a narrative subtext, then interpretation can incorporate broader social issues. As Lomas explains, medical practice “straddles the border of private and public,” enforcing public gender codes through an analysis of private culpability.43 Lomas further suggests that the Ford Complex in the background invokes capitalist standards. Thus Kahlo’s medical miscarriage is presented alongside measures of production and profit in which the “birth and death in miscarriage adds up to nothing.”44 In relationship to postrevolutionary issues, the miscarriage neither counts toward the perpetuation of family nor promotes symbolic stabilization. As Lomas explains, Kahlo’s detailed rendering of objects within an imaginary scene including a hospital bed on an industrial landscape is an “awkward disjuncture between two pictorial modes—schematic and naturalistic,” which can, given critical analysis, “render visible a blindspot” or unspoken narrative inscribed in cultural discourse.45
Her childlessness was a tangible social dysfunction, the first transgression that marked Kahlo’s unstable social status. As Kahlo became defined as a childless woman and an artist, she crossed gender boundaries, and interpretations of her paintings exemplify the tension under which social codes were imposed and resisted. The consistency with which writers describe Kahlo’s maternal longing and despair, alongside the absence of any expression in Kahlo’s letters of intense desire, suggests that she may have orchestrated a false notion that she yearned for children. Although hardly surprising given social expectations, her duplicity complicates the strict binary distinction between men and women in which motherhood defines woman, because it suggests that Kahlo covertly rejected an esteemed stereotypic female role for herself. According to a strict binary interpretation, if Kahlo does not crave feminine fulfillment, she must, by default, desire a masculine position. This would have been particularly unsettling to a society in which, as Almaguer suggests, “lines of power/dominance [are] firmly rooted in a patriarchal Mexican culture that privileges men over women and the masculine over the feminine.”46 Overt resistance against strict binary roles was extremely difficult in a culture that viewed, as Matthew Gutmann notes, las mujeres abnegadas (self-sacrificing women) as the popular opposite from machismo.47 During the 1920s and 1930s, women had little opportunity to effect political cultural changes, despite their organized fight for women’s rights, including the right to vote.48 Thus resistance to strict gender codes could effectively be enacted only in their personal lives. However, if a woman resisted actively enough, foregoing passive subordinate behavior, she fell into another category—the fallen woman, a potential traitor whose resistance is associated with an active, aggressive sexual drive.
According to Lesley, Kahlo explained that the orchid represented in Henry Ford Hospital was a flower that Diego gave her while she was in the hospital, but it also represented “the idea of a sexual thing.”49 Merely incorporating a subtle representation of sexuality was not in and of itself a serious transgression, but reports of Kahlo’s blatant acknowledgment of sexual connotations cast suspicion on her willingness to abide by social codes. Bertram Wolfe described Kahlo’s masculine manner. She chain-smoked cigarettes, drank to excess in public, and used “the richest vocabulary of obscenities … known [of] one of her sex to possess.”50 In other words, her behavior was resolutely unfeminine and thereby an overt challenge to gender dichotomy. This sort of challenge was typical of the “woman resistor” or fallen women and, Franco argues, was a significant element in social mythologies told through popular, postrevolutionary fictional written and filmed narratives.51 The fallen woman narrative ended either in a moralizing portrayal of an irretrievable psychological decline (for which only the woman herself was to blame) or in the jubilant recovery of a woman reentering the dominant order. Both of these themes are present in Kahlo’s life during the mid-1930s, at which point it became clear that she could not be “contained” within the category “mother,” and during which her feelings toward marriage are characterized as having transformed from blissfully domestic to vengefully dishonest. Biographies typically identify two primary catalysts for the transformation—Kahlo’s insistence that she and Rivera return to live in Mexico in 1933 and her despondence over Rivera’s infidelity. Both are relevant to gender stereotypes in that Kahlo transgressed and Rivera exalted in their respective female and male paradigms.
Kahlo’s letters indicate that she was aware of, and accepted, Rivera’s extramarital affairs, which began perhaps as early as their wedding day. (Herrera reports that Rivera got excessively drunk and disappeared for