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Manet The Railway Analysis

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Manet’s The Railway, 1873, was made famous by its abstruse nature and lack of clear subject matter, and has remained a topic of interpretation to this day. Standing at roughly three by four feet, the work was accepted into the academy but was highly controversial due to its confusing content and lack of a concrete message. While the work initially seems to illuminate industrialization with its view towards the Gare Saint-Lazare train station, Manet obscures this industrial feat which critics believed should have been the focus. The scene forces the viewer to think about many uncertainties: who are these girls, what is their relation, why are they there, what is the viewers relation to them? Through these questions, the viewer is drawn to both the iron bars and the steam rising behind them. These two contrasting objects seem to keep the …show more content…

In this confinement, Manet gives these objects great significance as he uses them to portray the divisions created by Victorian era standards of etiquette, especially for women. When quickly glancing at this piece, one may interpret the bars lining the railway to in fact be a cage confining these two figures. The young girl’s clutch on the bars and her outward stare inspires this idea, as she seems to be longing to be on the other side of the bars, indicating that these bars are restricting her freedom. The older woman does not seem to share this desire, as she stares emptily at the viewer, indicating no desire to escape the ‘cage’. In creating this theoretical enclosure, and having two Bourgeois women inhabit it, Manet pushes the viewer to the questions “why are these women in the cage”, and “what put them in there”? With growing stratification within the Bourgeoisie during the Victorian era, members of the class adhered to strict rules of etiquette in order to

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