Left: Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with Bouquet of Violets, 1872; Right: photo of Berthe Morisot

“It’s annoying they’re not men,” Édouard Manet wrote to fellow artist Henri Fantin-Latour, after meeting Berthe and Edma Morisot, two sisters from the Parisian upper crust who were promising painters. He found them “charming” and feared that because they were women, their accomplishments would inevitably go to waste. Manet thought the Morisot sisters should “further the cause of painting by marrying académiciens,” members of the jury who selected which works to display at the Académie des Beaux-Arts’s annual salon. The possibility that the Morisots might actually become artists did not seem to occur to him. Manet envisioned the Morisot sisters might make their mark in the annals of art as counselors to men in power—by influencing their tastes and sympathies, and convincing them of the worth of outsider artists (such as Manet himself).

Edma gave up her practice when she married in 1869. The next year Berthe destroyed the entirety of her own oeuvre and fell into a creative fallow period. She considered giving up painting for good. But though Berthe shared the same background as her sister, something allowed her to pick up the brush again. Perhaps it was in part a freedom born of being single. “People repeat ceaselessly that woman is born to love but that’s what’s hardest for her,” she wrote. “It’s the poets who’ve written the women lovers and ever since we’ve been playing Juliet for ourselves.” She did eventually get married (to Manet’s younger brother, Eugène), but waited until the age of thirty-thirty, when women were more likely to be widowed than plan a wedding. Read More

Robert William Buss, Dickens’s Dream, 1875, watercolor. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It must be Thanksgiving or some such holiday, because I have shown up at my brother’s house to find Mother and Father waiting. Mother stands in the front hall bearing her old smile of greeting, overlaid now with a touch of anxiety because, I realize, she doesn’t remember my name. “Lewis is here!” I call out, as if such announcements were our custom. I don’t want to embarrass her. “Lewis is here!”

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Sometime in the twenties in Berlin, a certain Dr. Kurt Lewin noticed that the waiters were very good at remembering the particulars of his restaurant bill—until the bill was paid. Soon settled, soon forgotten. Lewin wondered if he hadn’t stumbled upon a fact of mental life, that the finished task drops into oblivion more easily than the unfinished.

In 1927, a colleague of Lewin’s, Bluma Zeigarnik, designed a study that appeared to show that Lewin had observed a specific example of the general case, now called the Zeigarnik effect. “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones,” she concluded. That was her finding with adults; with children, the effect was stronger: not only did they remember tasks they’d been forced to leave unfinished but “not infrequently they would beg to continue the interrupted tasks even two or three days after the experiment was over.” Read More