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BOOK REVIEWS comforting to the grip, and still to be picked up for a couple of dollars a volume in second-hand bookshops the world over. Keith Wilson ___________________ University of Ottawa Pre-Raphaelite Art & Literature Lynn Pearce. Women/Image/Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. xiii + 161 pp. Cloth $85.00 Paper $24.95 THIS BOOK is an exercise in "Symptomatic Reading," a Marxist-feminist technique Pearce traces to Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation ," Raymond Williams's corrective notion of competing ideologies, and Pierre Macherey's idea of the recentered text. She sets out to answer a cluster of related questions: What can the twentieth-century feminist reader/viewer actually do with male-produced nineteenth-century images of women? Is it ethically legitimate to deconstruct/reconstruct a text in which the dominant ideology is blatantly sexistymisogynistic and make it "work for feminism"? And, if so, is it possible to appropriate all texts in this way, or are there aesthetic/ideological factors intrinsic to each which enable or frustrate such activity? Pearce's interrogative approach is the strength of her study. She is willing to test her methodology and not afraid of negative answers. But the closing words of her introduction suggest an assumption at odds with this open-mindedness: "To read as a woman is always to read," she insists, " 'against the grain' " (28). Feminist criticism must, in her view, be a criticism in opposition. And this unrelenting sexual warfare results in a series of readings that mingle insight with perversity. I am sympathetic to Pearce's focus on the "gaps" and "absences" of texts, but disturbed by her tendency to treat male artists as univocal constructs susceptible (on occasion) to feminist recuperation. Despite the sophistication of her critical apparatus, she seems content with remarkably unsophisticated generalizations about Victorian men and the art they created. Pearce takes it for granted, for example, that "men prefer to view their object of desire without interference of competition" (111)—a view that ignores the compelling argument of Eve Sedgewick's Between Men and the larger question of mediated desire. One of the successes of feminist scholarship has been showing us how much unrecognized power women actually had in nineteenth-century England, but the binary rhetoric of 501 ELr=VOLUMESO^ 1992 Pearce's argument has no place for such complications. Thus, she boldly asserts that "in the case of Victorian art (and, to a lesser extent, literature), we have to acknowledge the fact that we are dealing with commodities that have been produced exclusively by and for men" (23). True, the producers of Victorian art were largely male and true, in the economic world of Victorian England, men usually paid for paintings. But Victorian women played a significant role in deciding what art would enter their homes, and artists worked with an awareness that women would be consumers of their products. Pearce cites William Cowper-Temple's commission of Rossetti's Beata Beatrix as evidence of male exclusiveness. But Cowper-Temple's wife, Georgiana, was an intimate friend of Ruskin, the strongest public advocate for Rossetti's work, and it was through this relationship that Cowper-Temple became acquainted with Rossetti. As for literature, Pearce's mild qualifier ("to a lesser extent") is inadequate to correct her misrepresentation of women's importance both as producers and consumers. With Foucault, Pearce rejects "the old, clichéd ideas of a "Victorian frame of mind' " (12), but her concept of the Victorian patriarchate is as clichéd as any other chestnut of social or intellectual history. Pearce uses the term "Pre-Raphaelite" in its broadest sense, including a range of works from Keats's Isabella to the late nineteenth-century paintings of Holman Hunt and John William Waterhouse. Her book consists of eight short studies of juxtaposed texts and paintings, framed by an extended theoretical introduction and a brief concluding chapter. Pearce's opening examination of Rossetti's Girlhood of Mary Virgin establishes her approach. Rejecting the "slavish analysis of consensual symbolism" (34), she acknowledges the possibility of multiple interpretations of the painting per se. But she takes the two sonnets Rossetti inscribed on the frame of...

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