She certainly is positioned at the center of the canvass and her face draws our eyes. And is it my imagination or does she have a shadow of a mustache? There is another woman in the picture, standing to the far right half out of the frame, arms crossed, who is sporting a distinct 'stache. Did Jiménez y Aranda like his women masculine, or is that just how they do it in Sevilla?
The gaze issue (a fellow graduate student of ours, whose name I won't mention, went so far as to refer to 'gaze theory' on one occasion) puts me in mind of Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas at the beginning of The Order of Things, which seems not entirely off-topic here. It includes such predictably Foucauldian passages as the following:
"we are looking at a picture in which the painter in turn is looking at us. A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another's glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross. And yet this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints. The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by the gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange. No gaze is stable, or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvass, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity" (4-5).
Very Borgesian. Did anyone ever read this passage with CBJ? I'd be interested to have heard his take on it. I remember him riffing on the gaze and power in a reading of a passage from Montemayor's Diana in which a jealous shepherdess, hidden behind a bush, watched a shepherd compose a love song to another shepherdess further away, whom he in turn was watching. Talk about a 'loco ameno,' CBJ certainly was one.
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I did not read this passge with CBJ. But I do miss the days of the UCLA seminar in which grad students would propose such radical new ideas as “Gaze Theory,” (or, for that matter, “La teoría de la basura blanca”). Now, when I want to expose myself to such cutting edge theories I pick up the _PMLA_.
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