Looking at Women Looking: Female Portraits in the Gender Crisis.
1 Today's visual media have redefined the value and status of images. Cultural commentators like Nicholas Mirzoeff and W.J.T. Mitchell assign agency functions to images which they define as active players in global culture (Mitchell 10). Images have always appealed directly to emotions or to affective response, as is evident in their earlier cult or ritual status. This direct impact is part of the power images hold over us and part of the power we invest them with. At the same time, the images a culture produces are caught up in existing power relations. Visual Culture Studies have from the beginning made efforts to analyse the role of the visual in the discourses and praxes sustaining power, and more particularly the gendered distribution of power.
2 The inundation with images we are subjected to and participate in today resulted from stunning new visual technologies invented in the nineteenth century which produced radical changes in understanding and producing representations. Recent research has been much occupied with this explosion of visuality in the nineteenth century, when many new optical devices, theatrical and illusionist effects on stage, optical instruments, techniques of reproduction and experiments in representation were complemented by the visual challenges of everyday urban life, such as high speed transport. The iconographical revolution of the nineteenth century, especially the beginnings of photography and film, initiated the cultural shift that led to today's pictorial turn.
3 In this paper I want to look at nineteenth century image culture to show a historical trajectory which gradually favoured increased observer participation. Going back into the historical development of specific images can delineate the evolution of the conditions of perceiving and codes of depicting to ultimately throw light on how these conditions correspond to subject positions and expose power relations. Ways of seeing and their concomitant constructions of spectatorship, the gaze and the glance, practices of viewing, observation and visual pleasure are constantly being reorganized. And because questions of perception and seeing reach into the constitution of identity, investigating vision and visual representation necessitates a central focus on how issues of gender, sexuality and power are inextricably connected (Pajaczkowska 1). While the central gender focus is an advantageous starting point, it has in the past created set pieces of formulaic assumptions.
4 Visual observation and a ubiquity of surveillance have been identified as dominant forms of sustaining the gendered hegemony of power in post-industrialist Western society. This common assumption results in the suspicion of the visual which derives from Foucault's thesis of a society of surveillance which replaced an earlier model in the European enlightenment. According to Foucault modernity shifted the means of exerting power towards invisible strategies of observation and containment which inscribed themselves into the individual's methods of self-control. Many feminist analyses of nineteenth century culture echo this idea of a resolutely ocularcentric power regime in modern society (Jay 3-28), deploring a panoptical observational power that would confine women within the limited space of a heavily regulated private life. Another enduring notion concerning the nineteenth century is the separation of spheres with the dominant concept of Victorian femininity geared towards the angel-in-the-house role model repressed not only in terms of sexuality but in terms of total exclusion from civic and public life.
5 In painting, the female portrait with its conventional composition, framing and objet d'art character exemplifies a restrained construction of female subjectivity within an imaginatively rationalized space oriented towards a male gaze. Following Alison Conway who called for a differentiation of the totalizing assessments mentioned above (5), I am going to examine portraits of women as well as contemporary art criticism to show how the second half of the nineteenth century increasingly placed ideas of theatricality and the aesthetics of beholding at the centre of its representations. Painting as well as theories of spectatorship increasingly foregrounded an implied spectator's gaze. Portraits of women, those representations which specifically address gender issues, most particularly emphasized the beholder's participatory agency as did theories of aesthetic experience. I argue that the period, in which narrative fiction also shifted from an omniscient eye, capable of occupying multiple visual sites, to a subjective point of view, must be seen as transitional and ambivalent. The transition from a narrative omniscience to an individual view-point has a structural analogy in portraiture's overdetermined construction of an implied observing situation and theory's excessive use of an embodied observer. This shift involves a rejection of the realist consensus dominant in earlier Victorian times which yet remains ambivalent: It allows women to become subjects, rather than objects of the gaze but it presents itself in the guise of a profound disturbance. Thus while my discussion has profited greatly from earlier feminist diagnosis of patriarchal spectatorship, I want to point out a tendency towards counter-discourse and resistance which is often lost in generalizing evaluations.