ABSTRACT
In the year 1800, the Journal des Dames et des Modes touted the advice of a new conduct book by an Englishman called Dr. Gregory, published for the first time in France. Though the Journal’s success depended on fashion illustrations and commentary that encouraged women to draw attention not only to their garments but to the bodies they quite spectacularly revealed, the editors nevertheless applauded Gregory’s advice to his daughters to make themselves—and their gaze—as invisible as possible: “One of the great charms of women’s character is that modest reserve and that delicacy, friend of secrecy, that avoids the eyes of the public, disconcerted even by admiring the gaze of admiration.” 1 Gregory’s advice, seconded by other conduct books throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, might seem to provide further evidence for scholarship of the last two decades on the differences in men’s and women’s ways of seeing. For critics like Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath, and Kaja Silverman, women’s gaze is always “partial, flawed, unreliable, self-entrapping,” at best caught up in economies that co-opt it at every turn. 2 “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” 3 announces art critic John Berger in a much-cited essay that could be said to sum up a filmic and art historical discourse about the gaze that has been transformed, literally, into the story of the impossibility of representing women’s looking as an autonomous act, what critics have even referred to as the “law of the male gaze,” 4 as if it existed in a timeless ahistorical warp untouched by class, racial, or national distinctions. This has always seemed to me wrongheaded, because formulations such as Berger’s tend to obfuscate the nuances in the material conditions of vision. Advice such as Dr. Gregory’s testifies to a complex network of exchanges that served to bolster a fantasy of a “mastering gaze” 5 but never entirely consolidated a mastery of any kind. Indeed, such advice points to an enormous anxiety about what might happen if women met the eyes of those who looked at them. The story I have to tell about looking would require attention to the way the material conditions of vision are historically constructed. My own search for this supposedly invisible gaze has required a kind of detective work of tracking representations of those conditions in accounts, both visual and written, of the period associated with the invention of modern techniques of observation. 6 The story of that search began with my discovery of a text and an image of an “invisible woman.”
