In 1856, the 26-year-old English poet Christina Rossetti wrote “In an Artist's Studio,”
a sonnet in which she contemplates the intimate yet alienating
workspace of male artists. Rossetti suggests that these studios crackle
with the kind of desire that poisons the creative kinship between
painter and subject because the female body isn’t so much honored as
exploited. She describes the artist’s muse as a diminished vessel for
male fantasy: “Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; / Not as
she is, but as she fills his dream.”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
the poet’s older brother, was an artist, and she wrote the sonnet after
visiting his studio at Chatham Place, in London. She confronted the
same face on every canvas: that of Lizzie Siddal, an artist and a poet
whom history recalls as Dante Gabriel’s wife and muse. “One face looks
out from all his canvases,” the poem begins, “One selfsame figure sits
or walks or leans: / We found her hidden just behind those screens.” In
another context, the repetition of Siddal’s face might have signified
harmony or a unified artistic vision. Rossetti implies the more
pernicious effect of co-option. Each portrait conveys “the same one
meaning, neither more nor less,” she writes. Siddal is “a nameless
girl,” divested of nuance and the subjectivity that can result in a more
complex depiction.
Rossetti’s sonnet was published in 1896 but not until the late 20th
century was it hailed as a proto-feminist text. In 1985, editors Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar included it in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
Soon after, Victorian literary critics posited the poem as an early,
exemplary critique of gender inequality. (I taught it in this context
while in graduate school.) Rossetti’s relationship with the 19th-century
women’s movement was notoriously fraught—she argued against women’s
suffrage—but her sonnet is a vehement rebuke to the exploitation then
prevalent in the male-dominated arts. She anticipates John Berger’s 1972
TV series and book Ways of Seeing, in which he analyzes male
artists’ voyeuristic tendencies and their influence on women’s
self-perception. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked
at,” he writes. This “determines not only most relations between men
and women, but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of
woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself
into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Three years later, feminist film critic Laura Mulvey named this
phenomenon “the male gaze.” For Rossetti, the male gaze is a vampiric
obsession. “He feeds upon her face by day and night,” she writes in the
sonnet, “And she with true kind eyes looks back on him.” ... [mehr] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/147403/painted-ladies
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