Speaker Series | Allison Morehead "When We Nurses Awaken: Edvard Munch and New Medical Women"
Edvard Munch's numerous depictions of nurses - paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs - are haunted by the themes of Henrik Ibsen's last play,ÌýWhen We Dead Awaken, which the radical lesbian feminist author Adrienne Rich memorably described as about "the use that the male artist and thinker - in the process of creating culture as we know it - has made of women, in his life and in his work; and about a woman's slow, struggling awakening to the use to which her life has been put." This paper delves not only into Munch's representations of nurses, but also into how nurses posed for, interacted with, and represented themselves to Munch in ways thatÌýspeak to the fraught nature of theirÌýprofessional entrance into the fraternity of medicine.Ìý
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