Wendy Lesser "His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art."
Looks at the portrayal of women in art, photographs, motion pictures, and literature, and argues that male artists do not inevitably misrepresent women.
is is a wonderful book... lucid, cultivated, amiable... "His Other Half' is a model of the kind of flexible, interdisciplinary culture criticism that is desperately needed to bridge the gap between the general reader and the academic ghetto. Lesser, moving with graceful ease from literature and art to photography and cinema, is concerned with the image of woman as refracted through male imagination...
This is an interesting assortment of revisionist feminist essays on literature, painting, photography, and film. From her Freudian stance, Lesser denies charges of gender-theory stereotyping--i.e., misogyny--in works by Dickens, Gissing, Degas, Lawrence, Henry James, Cecil Beaton, Jarrell, Hitchcock, Brodkey, and Sturges: "There is no single meaning that women have for men, no single manner in which men use the feminine in their art." The chapters on Degas, Marilyn Monroe, and Barbara Stanwyck are more successful. Hard-line feminists understandably will dismiss many conclusions here since Lesser entertains the premise that gender differences are somehow to be related to the romantic myth of the divided selves told by Aristophanes in the Symposium . But the book has much to recommend it.
Hardcover. 1991.
New book. Minor shelf wear.