ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that both Michael Field and Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson subvert gendered ideologies of possession in collaborative texts that perform a critique of contemporary aesthetics; and they do this specifically by implementing a new and different discourse of looking. It shows that, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson's study of psychological aesthetics, "Beauty and Ugliness", functions as an eroticized site where otherwise unacceptable same-sex desires are sublimated, practiced and voiced; furthermore, their collaboration both facilitated the ideas that drive their study and provides a distinct rhetoric to describe it. The chapter examines Michael Field's Sight and Song, a collection of 31 picture-poems depicting secular and sacred paintings, mostly by Grand Masters of the Italian Renaissance. It explores two collaborative texts that, through their creative, and performative reframings, endow new authority upon the possibilities of a female gaze. The chapter contributes current historical inquiry about the female aesthetes of the 1890s in particular and theoretical speculation about queer-feminist spectatorship in general.
