Looking at Women Looking: Female Portraits in the Gender Crisis. — Page 7:
31 The discovery of literary point of view was not the sole achievement of canonical authors such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. As Talia Schaffer has recently shown, many forgotten female aestheticists anticipated highly subjective or even unreliable modes of narration. These authors' anxiety about their own femininity led them to develop self-defensive literary techniques designed to baffle the intrusively curious reader (Schaffer 4). Narrating from an interior focalization tied in with the general cultural emphasis on the role of the observer, and provided textual possibilities for the staging, exploration and reconciliation of competing models of femininity.
32 These innovations in literary narratives which generated an increasingly subjective fiction culminating in literary modernism can be related to the inventions and developments in optics and visual technologies which preceded it; both created an awareness of the unreliability of human perception (Crary). Non-fiction discourses in art criticism also relied on a more significant role of subjective observation. While the visual arts negotiated the boundary between art and spectatorship, new directions in the philosophy of art tended to consider aesthetics in terms of spectator response. The realist consensus in visual art derived from central perspective had rested on the assumption that objects represented are seen as these objects and not in an iconic duality of image-object. Now the reaction of the spectator became an indispensable element in creating the meaning of a work of art.
33 Walter Pater's notion of art as an experience enlarged the function of a mediating observer or spectator figure. He rejected a purely content-oriented neglect of the sensuous element in art, which causes almost everything that is essentially artistic to become "a matter of indifference" (Stamm 98). He illustrated this argument with some memorable reinterpretations of famous art works. Pater's ekphrastic description of "La Gioconda" in The Renaissance (1873) is written from the point of view of an impassioned observer giving free reign to his imagination and interpreting the Mona Lisa as an embodiment of the enigmatic nature of women. Pater read the portrait as a symbolist image of a predatory femme fatale: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants…" (80). His interpretation was largely responsible for the aura of mystery which surrounds Leonardo's famous portrait to this day. Its Orientalist and misogynist overtones recall Bronte's rereading of Cleopatra, which was supplemented at the turn of the century by aestheticist ekphrastic writings which read famous Renaissance nudes against the grain, completely subverting the gaze of male heterosexual desire. One example is the 1892 poetry collection Sight and Song by "Michael Field", the pseudonym of the collaborating authors Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913). The female poets' ekphrastic verses recast the extreme objectification of the female nude in paintings like Giorgione's "The Sleeping Venus" and Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" as an extraordinary and daring independence of male desire (Field 13-14). Similarly, Vernon Lee's fantastic stories made an imaginative but more subversive use of ekphrasis than Pater's description. All stories in her collection Hauntings revolve around the fatal consequences of male spectators looking at female beauty. In Lee's stories, women's portraits enact a fatal revenge on their Pygmalion-like admirers. Thus at the end of the nineteenth century the tables are turned on the sinister nexus of femininity, death and eroticism which a Romantic fascination had written into the art-life dichotomy in literary texts such as Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" (Bronfen 90).
34 Though Vernon Lee has been rediscovered by feminist literary criticism as a writer of fiction, her theory of art is still unfairly neglected. She developed this theory (originally in an article in 1897, later elaborated and published as The Beautiful) expanding the work of the German authors Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Theodor Lipps, who based aesthetic value judgement not just on the intrinsic qualities of the art work itself but paid increased attention to the act of observing. Lee's theory went beyond those of her precursors, because it assigned the mental and physiological experience of art a new significance. To Lee viewing art was a transfer process in which the object under scrutiny is invested with the physical and mental dynamics of the act of viewing, "we transfer from ourselves to the object not only the physical eye muscle movement but the thought and emotion which have been accumulated in our minds to that movement" (65). The movement and rhythm of the act of perception is then attributed to the inert representation. For Lee, art can thus become a tonic experience: "[...] movement and energy, all that we feel as being life is furnished by [the perception of shapes in art] and allowed to fill our consciousness" (74).
35 For Lee the beholder of art is involved in intense, complex, and reiterative, but not necessarily conscious mental and embodied activities she called "empathy" (155), a term she introduced into the English language. Like impressionist paintings, empathy aesthetics liberated the arts from the stranglehold of what Michael Fried termed the "supreme fiction of the beholder's non-existence" (71). Lee saw empathy as chiefly responsible for value judgements and "preference in aesthetic contemplation," obviously setting up a category of compassionate appreciation against the blasé connoisseurship she thought permeated her contemporary culture. Empathy is not sufficiently explained as an emotional identificatory response, and it also encompasses more than a hermeneutic act of constituting meaning. Empathy meant that "art can do nothing without the collaboration of the beholder and this collaboration far from consisting in the passive 'being impressed with beauty' [...] is [...] a combination of higher activities, second in complexity and intensity only to that of the artist himself" (Lee 128). In Lee's theory the collaborative energies of the beholder are needed to complete the project of art itself.