Love and Authority in the Work of Paula Rego: Narrating the Family Romance

Rosengarten explores the narrative operations of Regos work by mobilising both psychoanalytic theory and social history. She confronts, as case studies, three complex figure paintings from different moments in Regos oeuvre: The Policemans Daughter (1987), The Interrogators Garden (2000), and The First Mass in Brazil (1993).

The content of the three specimen paintings links them to the political context of the Estado Novo, the fascist-inspired regime that dominated Regos childhood. Plotting links between the spheres of the political and the personal, Rosengarten throws light on the complex intertwining of state power and parental authority in Regos work, focusing on the labour of socialisation and resistance that Regos work evinces in relation to the Freudian model of the family romance.

Rosengarten unveils the political context of Portugal under Salazar, and the workings of colonial fantasy, Catholic ideology and gender construction. In prodding the inalienable link between love and authority, this study offers a reading of Regos work that interrogates, rather than subverts, the Oedipal model structuring the patriarchal family.