Vision, Gender, and Power in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, 1860–1900 (review)

The act of looking is often contentious. Theories of the gaze invoke the relationship between subject and object, their gendering, and the subsequent implications for perpetuating gendered power imbalances. In her study of American women's writing in the last forty years of the nineteenth century, Birgit Spengler effectively situates her engagement with the act of looking in both historical and theoretical terms.

From the start, Spengler makes clear that her focus is not "on vision in terms of style or point of view, but on vision as action, vision on the level of plot and content, vision as a cultural and social practice" (4). In the works of Elizabeth Stoddard, Metta Fuller Victor, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Anna Katherine Green, as well as in a single story by an unknown writer, L. E. Lee, Spengler maps the changes in human cognition and interpersonal relationships that form the prelude to Henry James's stylistic innovations and Edith "Wharton's concern with observers and beautiful objects" (6).

Spengler contextualizes her approach in two ways: 1) through the advances in cognitive science beginning in the early nineteenth century, particularly as they relate to the physiology of vision, and the subsequent rapid development of visual technology; and 2) through twentieth-century theories of vision, the gaze, and power. For the first context, Spengler relies almost exclusively on the research and conclusions of Jonathan Crary, who articulates well the movement away from "the Cartesian notion of a disembodied monocular observer" to a model of vision that repositions seeing in the body of the observer, taking into account "the viewer's role in the scopic field" (11). For the second, she effectively draws on Michel Foucault, Jean Paul Sartre, George Simmel, and Laura Mulvey to facilitate her exploration of "a diverse range of visual relations" in which she sees power, dominance, and gender as shifting, destabilizing entities (8).

While Spengler's starting point is Foucault's assumption that "the onset of modernity" occurs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the paradigm shift from a society of spectacle to a society of surveillance, it is her engagement with the thinking of Simmel that opens up especially suggestive possibilities for her investigations (7). While Simmel's thoughts on looking are infrequently invoked in literary studies in North America, Spengler isolates in his work the concept "of the mutual glance" that functions "to establish reciprocity in human interaction" and is thus "a mechanism of human bonding" (64, 66). Several of her readings use this idea especially effectively: Instead of seeing two female characters as antagonists, for example, Spengler's analysis of Spofford's "Desert Sands" connects the women through "Simmelian glances of understanding" that counteract the male protagonist-narrator's attempts to control the female gaze (121). Thus, she offers an alternative feminist reading to the dominant narrative. In her reading of Stoddard's The Morgesons, Spengler suggests Cassandra's developing maturity and increasing sense of female autonomy through her active initiation of a mutual visual relation with Desmond; she argues that Cassandra resists becoming the object of Desmond's male gaze by looking first—and looking desirously—thus enabling a space for mutual, reciprocal gazing that highlights "their willingness to assume both subject and object positions in their scopic relations" (266).

The most satisfying sections of Spengler's volume involve the detective stories and novels of Victor, Spofford, and Green, since detection itself is directly involved with ways of seeing, surveillance, visual technology, and their implications for power. Spengler's study points to the unacknowledged place that these women writers occupy in the development of the detective story genre. In contrast to Edgar Allan Poe's and Arthur Conan Doyle's interest in ratiocination, nineteenth-century American women writers are more concerned with theories of vision and visual practices and the social positioning of both detection and the detective. They openly...