Book Description
In Eyes of Love, Stephen Kern offers a bold reinterpretation of women in art and literature. He shows that the frequent recurrence of the "Proposal Composition" in English and French nineteenth-century paintings and novels challenges assumptions about "the gaze"_that women are merely passive erotic objects, while men are active erotic subjects. The eyes of women express a more varied range of thoughts than those of men, and convey more profound emotions.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid Edward Burne-Jones shows the monarch in profile, humbly holding his crown in his lap, looking up idolatrously at his beloved. But she does not look at him: she stares frontally, with wide-open hypnotic eyes. In Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Angel Clare gazes intently at Tess when preparing to propose. She looks away ...

Stephen Kern identifies this pattern as a 'Proposal Composition'. It recurs frequently in English and French paintings and novels of the second half of the nineteenth century -- in works by Rossetti and Renoir, Dickens and Zola, Millais and Manet and numerous others. A man in profile looks at a woman, who looks away from him and in the direction of the viewer. Eyes of Love shows how the frequency of this composition calls for a reconsideration of a widely held argument about 'the gaze' -- that women are merely passive erotic objects, while men are active erotic subjects.