Queens
The Queens are based on women who have ruled in their own right. They have discovered an autonomy, although this is always with the aid of an attribute which symbolises the absent masculine. In the case of the Singing Queens, this attribute is the voice.
Amongst the Queen paintings … there are the writers George Eliot, Daphne du Maurier and the Danish writer, Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen)...The act of writing, which is to put words into the world, is a penetrating one. I think Lacan says that words themselves transform our world into a symbolic and patriarchal order. The male attribute of the writer is the phallic pen.
In Eliot and Dinesen’s case, they also adopted a male name, whilst Vita Sackville-West and Vernon Lee chose to wear men’s clothes.
EM 2007