Bar At The Folies-Bergere Analysis

In Edouard Manet's painting Bar at the Folies-Bergere, T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and Susan Glaspell's Trifles, the women's physical and metaphorical distance emphasizes male fear of the feminine world that the male figures cannot understand. Manet focuses on the woman at the bar, who looks detached and unhappy, in contrast with the women in the reflection who enjoy the ambiance of the bar. The man in the mirror seems to approach the barmaid anxiously and without acknowledging her distant stare. His anxiety may stem from a fear of meaningless intimacy. Perhaps he cannot easily form a natural relationship with people, in contrast with those in the reflection. He instead must purchase intimacy from a woman who does not …show more content…
The mirror not only adds another layer to the image, but it also reverses the subject, distorting the actual image. Manet’s implementation of a mirrored world, rather than portraying the crowd directly, seems to suggest an unreliable and distorted world in which the wealthy patrons live. The only direct objects the viewer sees lies in the foreground; everything and everyone else is distorted in the reflection in the mirror. The one person the viewer sees directly is the barmaid; everyone else the viewer sees indirectly. The barmaid is trapped between the man who wants to buy her and the world that refuses to acknowledge her. Manet depicts this confine with the mirror: the people behind her in the painting are also in front of her in reality. Though she is physically in their world (which she seems to try to convince herself of as she leans on the physical bar), she is not mentally or socially in their world (shown by the direction of her eyes). The bar acts as a physical divide from the patrons and as a metaphorical divide from their worlds. Manet sets up differing perceptions for the viewer which symbolize the different worlds at the bar. The indirect world consists of the wealthy crowd that buys drinks, entertainment, and people. The direct world, the world in the foreground, seems obvious to the viewer, yet hidden and unnoticed in the painting’s world. At first glance, Manet seems to be simply painting a moment at the bar, but he really implicates the viewer to be forced to see the normalcy of the negative in the world and address the often overlooked