in a society in which machismo is an overarching, constructed measure of masculinity. As Marvin Goldwert argues, “From adolescence through his entire life, the Mexican male will measure virility by sexual potential.”52 Although Kahlo may not have liked her husband’s philandering, she purportedly tolerated Rivera’s promiscuity and the publicity surrounding it until he became sexually involved with her sister Cristina. Upon discovering the affair, Kahlo moved into an apartment in Mexico City. Her disillusionment with marriage is apparent in a letter she wrote to Ella and Bertram Wolfe during the separation: “I had trusted Diego would change, but I can see and know that it is impossible; it’s just a whim on my part. Naturally, I should have understood from the beginning that it will not be me who will make him live in this way or that way, especially when it comes to such a matter [as his sexual liaisons with other women].”53 In the same letter, Kahlo reflects on her life as the wife of Diego Rivera, succinctly characterizing the social position of the subordinate wife:
First, he has his work, which protects him from many things, and then his adventures, which keep him entertained. People look for him and not me. I know that, as always, he is full of concerns and worries about his work; however he lives a full life without the emptiness of mine. I have nothing because I don’t have him. I never thought he was everything to me and that, separated from him, I was like a piece of trash. I thought I was helping him to live as much as I could, and that I could solve any situation in my life alone without complications of any kind. But now I realize I don’t have any more than any other girl disappointed at being dumped by her man. I am worth nothing, I know how to do nothing; I cannot be on my own.
My situation seems so ridiculous and stupid to me that you can’t imagine how I dislike myself. I’ve lost my best years being supported by a man, doing nothing else but what I thought would benefit and help him. I never thought about myself, and after six years, his answer is that fidelity is a bourgeois virtue and that it exists only to exploit [people] and to obtain an economic gain.54
Clearly Kahlo was devastated by the affair and questioned the personal value of her domestic devotion. Rivera accordingly is castigated for his callousness, as well as his infidelity, in Kahlo’s biographies. However, she also is held accountable for Rivera’s affair with her sister, for Herrera asserts that Rivera may have had the affair with Cristina because he blamed Frida for their leaving the United States in 1933.55 Herrera’s interpretation intimates the social, gendered context that contained the moralizing consequences awaiting the wife who dominates her husband, “forcing” him to relocate and thereby not practicing “proper subordination.” Kahlo crossed an unspoken boundary that distinguished pervading gender paradigms when she actively made demands; she was no longer passively subservient and therefore suffered the consequences—her husband’s affair with her sister. This narrative, consistently recounted in biographies of Kahlo, parallels remarkably the moralizing films and published fiction Franco analyzes. There undoubtedly are aspects of “truth” embedded in the biographies, but the point is not to distinguish “truth” from moralizing fiction but rather to recognize the pervasiveness of cultural stereotypes and mythologies in order to question whether Kahlo’s paintings really promote social prescription as thoroughly as some biographies imply.
Kahlo and Rivera soon reunited, but Kahlo no longer appeared to embrace conventional bourgeois ethics regarding marriage and sexuality, for both she and Rivera had intimate, sexual relationships outside their marriage. Herrera attributes Kahlo’s sexual infidelity to extreme disillusionment and considers her pronounced sexual drive a conscious retribution against Rivera. Herrera suggests that in 1935 Frida had affairs with Isamu Noguchi and mural painter Ignacio Aguirre primarily because Rivera had been unfaithful.”56 Zamora notes, “some [of Kahlo’s] friends believed these dalliances were merely in retaliation for Diego’s transgressions; others felt they were expressions of her own sexual amorality.”57 Whether vengeful or sincere, Kahlo implicitly is cast as amoral, despite the spousal agreement; but it was not necessarily her sexuality, rather her active pursuit, that was most socially transgressive.
Comparing Rivera’s Today and Tomorrow: Modern Mexico mural in the National Palace (figure 4) to Kahlo’s painting A Few Small Nips (figure 5), both completed in 1935, demonstrates a double standard and contradictory perspectives regarding sexual promiscuity and infidelity. Franco argues that Rivera’s Today and Tomorrow: Modern Mexico characterizes the limited extent of women’s liberation in postrevolutionary Mexico.58 Kahlo and her sister Cristina are depicted as teachers, but there are significant differences between them. In the 1920s and 1930s, teachers and caretakers, “surrogate mothers,” were respectable social roles for women, particularly unmarried middle-class women, signifying participation through appropriate political service in postrevolutionary Mexico. Vasconcelos characterized women who carried out literacy programs in rural areas as national heroines. Despite the inclusion of women in the nation’s social reconstruction, as Franco points out, the teaching missions “placed women in a position that was rather similar to that of the nuns in the colonial period serving their redeemer. They were expected to be unmarried and chaste, they had little expectation of rising in their profession, and motherhood was still regarded as woman’s supreme fulfillment.”59 In the mural Rivera casts his wife, who is unable to realize “woman’s supreme fulfillment” through bearing children, as a teacher, the next best, socially respectable role. She rests her hands on a boy’s shoulder in a gesture of care and encouragement while, with the other hand, she helps him hold his book. Frida as teacher nurtures a child’s education, thereby guiding him toward a productive, active public role. Cristina also holds a book, but her attention, and the book, are directed toward the viewer rather than the children next to her. Remarking on the fact that Rivera was married to Frida and sexually involved with Cristina during the production of this mural, Franco asserts that the image presents a social message for women as well as “a male polygamous fantasy” suggested by Cristina’s “voluptuous look and upturned eyes of a woman in orgasm.”60 While appearing to demonstrate women’s professional “liberation,” Rivera’s mural also promotes an idealized masculine virility—both sexual and social—by depicting two women, one socially marginalized and the other sexually available. Women may have enjoyed a certain level of professional status and some loosening of sexual mores, they were not free of the passive/active axis that renders the woman professionally subservient and sexually submissive to the active male.
The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted
Figure 4. Today and Tomorrow: Modern Mexico. Mural by Diego Rivera, 1934. National Palace, Mexico City. Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.
The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted
Figure 5. A Few Small Nips, 1935. Oil on metal, 15″ × 19″. © Banco de México, Av. 5 de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, 06059, México, D.F. 1998. Reproduction authorized by the Banco de México and by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.
Kahlo’s painting A Few Small Nips depicts a socially resonant attitude toward actively promiscuous women. The painting is a bloody depiction of a woman with multiple stab wounds, lying on a bed while her attacker, splattered with blood and still holding a knife, stands over her mutilated body. The title was taken from a newspaper report of a man who brutally murdered his unfaithful wife. Upon his arrest, he explained, “But I only gave her a few small nips.”61 Kahlo’s preparatory sketch for the painting—in which the man explains, “My sweetie doesn’t love me anymore because she gave herself to another bastard, but today I snatched her away, her hour has come”—explicitly indicates that infidelity precipitated the murder.62 The woman wears one shoe with stocking and garter pushed down her leg. Her erotic accoutrements hint at the woman’s transgression, which crosses a boundary distinguishing a sexually passive woman from the promiscuous whore, the most culturally stigmatized female in Mexican society. In fact, Herrera characterizes the man as stereotypically macho and the woman a la chingada, a term which, on one hand, simply refers to