The Blazing World

Siri Hustvedt frames her 2014 novel, The Blazing World, as a compilation of texts by and about the fictional artist Harriet Burden. Hustvedt masks her own authorship of the book with her creation of Professor I.V. Hess, a scholar of unknown gender who has allegedly curated the posthumous biographical anthology and written its preface. In The Blazing World, Hess assembles writings from Burden’s twenty-four journals, interviews with her family and friends, and miscellaneous fictions and art reviews. Although Burden’s fame grows after her 2004 death, during her lifetime, the New York art world overlooked her work. To avenge herself, she perpetrated an elaborate hoax on critics with a project she titled Maskings.

While Hustvedt’s book is a “mashup” of many different documents and voices, including Harriet’s own philosophical digressions in her journal entries, it presents Harriet’s biography in a roughly chronological fashion. During the 1970s, early in her career as a multimedia artist, Harriet, or “Harry,” stages a few exhibitions that are ignored by the New York critics. When she marries the wealthy art dealer Felix Lord, who has little respect for her art, her duties as supportive wife and solicitous mother sideline her creative activities. She doesn’t feel resentful, however, even when Felix has extra-marital interests.

During Harry’s late 50s, Felix dies of a stroke. Suddenly her repressed artistic energies return, along with anger at the art world’s misogyny, to which she attributes her lack of success. Now a wealthy widow, Harry retreats from “the incestuous, moneyed” Manhattan art scene, settling into a renovated warehouse in Brooklyn. There she lives, creates, and takes in various vagrants, like the character called “Barometer.” She also takes a lover, Bruno, who adores her.



Harry is a brilliant oddball, and – at over six feet tall, with long arms, huge hands, and frizzled hair – looks the part. In an interview with Hess, Harry’s childhood friend Rachel notes that Harry’s life would have been easier had she been a boy, not only because her father would have preferred it, but also because eccentricity in males is better tolerated. As it was, Rachel says, the teenaged Harriet explicitly identified herself with Frankenstein’s monster.

As Frankenstein’s monster sought revenge, so does Harry. She concocts a scheme to expose the gender-bias of establishment critics who have judged her work “sentimental and embarrassing.” Over a period of five years, ending in 2003, she creates three large installations and recruits three different men who “mask” her authorship of the works by putting their own names on them.

For her first piece, titled “The History of Western Art,” Harry chooses a twenty-four-year-old aspiring artist, Anton Tisch, as her front man. Although he’s unknown in the art world and cannot speak intelligently about the intertextuality of the work he supposedly created, Tisch’s golden boy appearance inspires critics to celebrate him as a wunderkind. In his hands, Harry’s art sparks more interest than it ever did when identified as her handiwork, but their collaboration ends badly. Tisch accuses Harry of exploiting him and corrupting his “purity” as an artist; he abandons the New York art scene.



While Tisch’s success confirms Harry’s belief that an artist’s gender impacts the reception of her or his work, her Maskings project also aspires “to uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.” Thus, Harry’s next mask is Phineas Q. Eldridge, a gay, biracial performance artist who enjoys a moderate degree of fame. Doubly marginalized by both his sexuality and race, Phineas eagerly cooperates with Harry to dupe the white, male cultural elite. He masquerades as the creator of Harry’s “The Suffocation Room,” an installation featuring a series of rooms containing sparse furnishings. As viewers move through them, the rooms shrink, the furnishings expand, and the temperature rises, creating a sense of oppression.

“The Suffocation Room” doesn’t elicit as much excitement as Harry’s first “masked” prank. Because Phineas’s identity as black and gay diminishes his social capital, his signature on Harry’s art does little to elevate it. Phineas moves to South America with his partner, Marco, but remains on good terms with Harry.

For her last installation, “The Beneath,” Harry persuades Rune, a celebrated conceptual artist, to serve as her pseudonym. Bruno cautions her against this alliance, but she dismisses his concerns. Although “The Beneath,” a claustrophobia-inducing maze, closely resembles “The Suffocation Room,” with Rune’s famous name branding it, the work generates rhapsodic praise from the art world. When Harry finally steps forward to reveal herself as the true artist, however, Rune denies her claim, suggesting she is delusional. By and large, the critics side with him.



Harry meets her match in Rune, a nihilistic, ruthless manipulator who is himself a master of masks. He sadistically intimates that he was Felix’s lover, and then, in a final coup de grace, apparently kills himself after designing an artwork so interconnected with “The Beneath” that it cements his appropriation of the latter.

Adopting the pseudonym Richard Brickman, a phony professor, Harry publishes a letter in an art journal stating that Harriet Burden created the pseudonymous Maskings project as a ruse to expose the ingrained biases of the art establishment. When Harry is diagnosed with cancer, her children, Maisie and Ethan, come to her bedside, as does Phineas and Tisch’s one-time girlfriend, Sweet Autumn Pinkney. A new age healer intent on cleansing Harry’s chakras, Sweet Autumn is far removed from intellectual culture, yet she alone appreciates Harry’s final piece, a sculpture of the seventeenth-century author Margaret Cavendish surrounded by “wild” offspring. Admiring the work as the novel ends, Autumn says, “I saw their auras blazing out all around them.”

The title of Hustvedt’s novel is taken from Cavendish’s 1666 feminist utopian fiction, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. Cavendish, like Hustvedt’s Harry, struggled against the cultural perceptions of gender that stifle women’s potential. Perception is an important theme in Hustvedt’s book, inscribed in its very structure as a collage of texts that offers varying perspectives on its subject, Harriet Burden. The Blazing World was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.