ABSTRACT
Theories of the gaze appeared in the field of film studies in the 1970s to describe the male viewer's response to screen images of women. Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian principles, writers such as Laura Mulvey argued that the masculine gaze objectifies the female image by projecting desire on to it. Martha Edwards Howell Bennett Combe, for instance, played a maternal role when she fussed over John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt on their visits to her home on Clarendon Press Quadrangle in Oxford which she shared with her husband Thomas. The gazes of the other women who participated in the 'matronage' of Pre-Raphaelitism in its early stages displayed a similar mix of submissiveness and independence. Living at a time when social constraints permitted them little latitude and cultural codes discounted the contributions of females, these women necessarily practised a modified form of male patronage. Ellen Heaton stands out as the lone unmarried woman in this group of Pre-Raphaelite collectors.
