In his 1972 television series Ways of Seeing, John Berger introduced a definition of what later became known as the male gaze. Simply put, it is the way in which men monopolize the visual representation of women in art and in photographic media.
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. 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.
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger – with his clothes still on.
In the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity.
Even when an artist has painted lovers, the woman doesn’t look at her partner, she looks away or she looks directly at the viewer. The same effect can be seen in pornographic videos that feature what’s called the POV – “point of view.” The woman in the video who is having sex with the man doesn’t look into his eyes but into the camera.
Feminist theory expanded on Berger’s ideas, which weren’t merely applicable to painting or photographs: the male perspective is in evidence everywhere around us. Lately – in the last fifty years – the ubiquity of the male gaze has been challenged by a growing number of women artists, filmmakers, and novelists who have presented to viewers that are no longer presumed to be male another order of experience.
John Berger warned that the deliberate shifting of this traditional dichotomy away from the standard of centuries of European art can be disruptive:
Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. If you have any doubt that this is so, make the following experiment. Choose … an image of a traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man. . . . Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.
The “violence” that Berger mentions, the juxtaposition of the object and the spectator, the shaking up of assumptions, is one of the ways artists are trying to wrest us away from the male gaze, which has long since become immensely boring. Since 1988 Alan Hollinghurst has been writing some of the best novels in English. He is gay and explores gay life in his work. Edmund White called Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library “the best book on gay life yet written by an English author.” (Never mind Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, published in 1964.)
Hollinghurst’s next novel, The Folding Star is narrated by a 32-year-old gay Englishman who arrives in a highly idealized ancient Flemish citadel to teach English to two teenaged boys. Edward Manners is quite average in appearance, bespectacled, somewhat overweight, intensely self-aware. He falls in love with one of his pupils, 17-year-old Luc Altidore and some critics have likened Edward to Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, while others threw in Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita. I think neither comparison makes much sense. The only resemblance is Luc’s making the first move, just as Lolita does with Humbert.
Before he can have Luc, Edward has to engage in some amateur detective work to find out Luc’s sexuality. And because of his position, Edward finds he can’t avoid duplicity - but then, subterfuge was always a part of closeted gay life. Given the exotic historical setting, an ancient city replete with its own canals, and the scholarly work Edward has undertaken, one could almost view Luc as Edward’s Aspern Papers. When Henry James’s unnamed narrator is offered the much sought-after letters by Miss Tita in exchange for his marrying her and he runs away, I laughed out loud. If I wasn’t apprized of James’s sexuality before I read the book, the scene would’ve been far more puzzling than it already is.
The Folding Star is hardly an erotic novel, yet the word “cock” appears fifty-five times. Despite several erotic scenes, including Edward’s recounting of his first time, the novel doesn’t belong to the erotic genre at all. What really animates the book, and Hollingsworth’s writing, is Edward’s love. As Edward puts it, “My life seemed to be one of understandings based on sex and misunderstandings based on love.” Almost heroically, Hollinghurst makes the explicit erotic accounts bearable through art. His success is against formidable odds, as Richard Howard told an interviewer about translating French into English:
Almost all of our language that has to do with the body and its functions is problematic. The French language accommodates the corporal without judging it--it deals with the body quite readily. The French have a verb, se figer: Baudelaire talks about le sang qui se fige, and one has real difficulty deciding between drying, stiffening, clotting, caking, whatever blood does. In English we frequently miss the right word for what the body does, or the right descriptive word for the body and its organs, so that much pornography is lowered into the gutter or sidelined into the laboratory by our necessities in English. (1)
What I found most alluring about The Folding Star was its evocation of a “dream-Belgium”:
I knew nothing about this country, to me it was a dream-Belgium, it was Allemonde, a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures, miracles and martyrdoms, corners where the light never shone. Not many would recognise it, but some would. I seemed to have lost Luc in it. It was his wildness that had brought me to him and now it had taken him away. I studied my situation with a certain aesthetic amazement.... This was what Helene had hinted at on our evening walk—it seemed the embodiment of something I had always felt about the old town, and found shadowed forth in many of Orst's eerie lithographs, a sense of dying life, life hidden, haunted and winter-slow.
Hollinghurst’s quite dreamlike descriptions of Belgian weather, the mysterious gloom that surrounds houses and landscapes, reminded me powerfully of a forgotten Belgian film called Belle, released in 1973, with which I have been haunted for forty years.
There are two more beautiful evocations that, among others, will stay with me:
For a long time I watched the candle burning, the flame tugged away by a harmless draught. When I blew it out and saw the thin-walled cup of wax at the tip cool into darkness I thought how for centuries the world had fallen asleep with that sweet singed smell in its nostrils.
Edward Manners also passes on to the reader his impeccable taste in music:
At school we were played some bits of Janacek, which were the most convulsively life-like music I had ever heard. I gathered up the scraps of Supraphon record-sleeve information, cryptically condensed and obscured by translation, that were all that could be found out by an English boy, and was amazed by the lateness of his flowering and the fact that this bristling old gent should be the one to confirm everything I felt at seventeen about life and sex and being out at night with winds and stars.
Hollinghurst placed a poem at the beginning of the book by the symbolist poet Henri de Régnier that neatly evokes the novel’s plot:
Les grands vents venus d'outremer
Passent par la Ville, l'hiver,
Comme des étrangers amers.
Ils se concertent, graves et pâles,
Sur les places, et leurs sandales
Ensablent le marbre des dalles.
Comme des crosses à leurs mains fortes
Ils heurtent l'auvent et la porte
Derrière qui l'horloge est morte;
Et les adolescents amers
S'en vont avec eux vers la Mer!
[The great gusts coming from overseas
Pass through the city, in the winter,
Like bitter foreigners.
They make plans, solemn and pale,
In the plazas, and their sandals
Silt up the marble flagstones.
As if their strong hands hold rifle butts,
They slam into the awning and the door
Behind which the clock has stopped.
And the bitter adolescents
Go with them to the sea!]
(1) Paul Mann, The Translator's Voice: An Interview with Richard Howard
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