Aesthetic Consumption and the Cultural Production of Michael Field's Sight and Song

The ekphrastic poems of Michael Field's Sight and Song suggest commodity forms that do not make women the object of exchange. In doing so, they revise masculine signifying economies in which women are typically the collectible objects that enable the constitution of the male aesthete's subjectivity. While Michael Field's consumable bodies become the surfaces onto which female homoerotic desire might be inscribed, the status of this volume as itself an aesthetic object places limits upon the ways in which the work may be understood as entirely resistant to ownership and possession, making visible the bourgeois aesthetics within which it was written and consumed.