Eyes of Love ― The Gaze in English and French Culture, 1840-1900

Stephen Kern has discovered in Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist art a recurring pattern for arranging the sexes: a profiled man gazing at a woman who looks away from him and toward the viewer, while she ponders an apparent offer. Kern draws on such images to challenge the claim of some feminist critics and historians that gazing men monopolize subjectivity and turn women into sex objects. So intent are these writers on viewing women as victims of the male gaze that they ignore the lively expressions of women, who in fact reveal a commanding subjectivity. Compared with the eyes of men, women's eyes are more visible, consider more varied thoughts, and convey more profound, if not more intense, emotions.
An authoritative and highly original survey of European art and literature, Eyes of Love also challenges another widely held belief. While a double standard has clearly governed how society judged the sexes, Eyes of Love convincingly demonstrates that a single moral standard governed how men and women in love judged one another and that women were more committed to it. Victorian women were thus more moral in loving, because they were more faithful, honest, and resolved to make love flourish.
Kern further interprets men's highlighting the eyes of women as confessional of men's own romantic failures and celebratory of women's superior capacity for love. He supports these startling interpretations of Rossetti, Millais, Hunt, Burne-Jones, Tissot, Renoir, Manet, Degas, and Gauguin with evidence from novels by Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Dickens, C. Bronte, Gaskell, Eliot, Hardy, and James.

Stephen Kern is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University.