“My Last Duchess” or “The Radiance of the Painting”: Jean-Luc Marion Reads the Poetry of Robert Browning

Summary

To Marta, in dear memory of the day in Pisa when we were surprised by a look from behind a glass door and felt invited to join the feast …

Gaze insatiate

Sonnet XX by William Shakespeare offers a surprisingly modern version of the theory of gendered gaze, associating the inattentive, unconcerned look with female inconstancy and praising the eyes of the speaker's male lover for being: “more bright than theirs [women's], less false in rolling, / gilding the object whereupon it gazeth” (lines 5–6; emphasis added). The praise may sound slightly ambivalent, though, as the eye of the man is complimented for covering objects with a thin layer of sun-like glitter. One can therefore discern in these lines a note of irony, if the superficiality of “gilding” the object is associated with the inattentiveness of the nearly homophonic “gliding” over it. Far more straightforward is the famous temptation scene in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton surely makes most of Satan's appropriating gaze, as the Enemy of Mankind contemplates Eve's beauty, simultaneously turning her into an inert object of his attention (and desire) and trying to convince her (and the reader) that his looking at her is a form of the highest respect, equivalent to the pious adoration of a holy image. The suggestion of idolatry in the passage that follows is too insistent to be easily overlooked. The gorgeously adorned serpent, its neck coated with “verdant gold” (IX, 501), its eyes burning like precious stones (“and carbuncle his eyes” [IX, 500]), patiently winds his way towards the woman “with tract oblique,” like a conqueror on “a ship, by skilful steersman wrought/ Nigh river's mouth, or foreland, where the wind/ Veers oft” (IX, 510–515), … or like a basilisk in the mating season.