Gender Relations and The Male Gaze in Harwood’s Prize-Giving

Much of Harwood’s poetry is concerned with the issue of gender. She is interested in the ways that
gender stereotypes shape the way that men and women see each other, but also with the way that
gender stereotypes shape the way we see ourselves.

Harwood did not call herself a ‘feminist’, but she was clearly conscious of the ways in which
patriarchal social structures work to disempower women. In the early years of her poetic career,
Harwood felt frustrated by the sexism of the Australian literary establishment. She noted, with some
bitterness, that her poems were more likely to be acknowledged, published and paid if she wrote
under a male pseudonym. She felt that the fact that she was a woman led to male editors dismissing
her work; they judged her on her sex, not her talent.

This sense of frustration led Harwood, in what became a newsworthy scandal, to submit two hoax
poems to Australia’s leading literary magazine under an assumed name. These poems used acrostics
to encode insulting messages to the editors, which they then unwittingly published. When these
messages were decoded, the Bulletin was threatened with a criminal charge of publishing obscenity
and had to withdraw the issue from sale, which cost the magazine a lot of money. The titles of these
two hoax poems, ‘Abelard to Eloisa’ and ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, make reference to a famous true love
story from the middle ages, in which a powerful male intellectual, Peter Abelard, is led into disgrace
by his love for an intelligent and beautiful teenage prodigy, who becomes his student, Héloïse
(Eloisa) d'Argenteuil. When Eloisa, scandalously, became pregnant, her uncles forced her into a
convent and castrated Abelard. Harwood’s choice of title for her hoax poems seems hardly
accidental – the Bulletin hoax can be seen as a symbolic castration of the powerful male
intellectuals. Harwood was perhaps also implicitly identifying herself with the brilliant woman Eloisa,
who was rejected by Abelard and forced against her wishes to become a nun under the patriarchal
rule of her society, but never gave up her intellectual investigations into religion and philosophy.

Several of Harwood’s satirical poems dramatise encounters between women and men who
underestimate and devalue them. In some cases, such as ‘Prize-Giving’, this male arrogance is set up
for a fall by the actions of a subversive woman, who challenges the male character’s sense of his
own dominance in the situation. These subversive women often expose male pretensions to
authority by the use of sexuality and music – forces that cannot be reduced or tamed by rational
calculation. These encounters between arrogant masculinity and subversive femininity often seem
to draw on Harwood’s own teenage experiences as a talented musician, with an intellectual capacity
far beyond her years. (See her poem ‘A Simple Story’ below for another example of this motif.)

Feminist thinkers have identified the ‘male gaze’ as one aspect of gender relations which
systematically oppresses women in a patriarchal society. The idea is complex, but it boils down to a
couple of simple propositions:

1. People feel anxious when they feel themselves ‘looked at’ or ‘viewed as an object’ by others.
1.1. When we see ourselves through other people’s eyes, we become aware of ourselves as
objects – incomplete ‘parts’ rather than a unified ‘whole’.
1.2. This makes us aware of the uncomfortable fact that the self is not a self-contained
independent whole – we are dependent on others for our own sense of identity. We rely on
them to mirror back to us the self we want to see.
2. To have power over somebody is to make them into the object of our gaze.
2.1. An ‘overseer’ on a building site, or a ‘supervisor’ in an exam room or a ‘warden’ in the
‘watchtower’ of a gaol has the power to ‘look down’ on workers or students or prisoners, to
pin them down as things to be seen, not people in their own right.
2.2. When we ‘objectify’ others, we turn them from a subject to an object – we take away from
them the power to ‘look back’ at us. This is reassuring, because it tells us that they have no
power to challenge our own sense of selfhood.

3. Women in a sexist society (like 21st century Australia) are more often objectified than men.
3.1. Sexual inequality is, at least partly, shaped by unequal ways of seeing.
3.2. Women are often described in a way that reduces them to their bodies: they are judged on
whether they are worth looking at, not on whether they have anything worth saying.
3.3. The gaze which makes women into an objects actively divides them up into body parts –
thus a woman can be described as a ‘redhead’ or a ‘nice set of legs’ or given a score on a
scale of sexual appeal to an observing man ‘she’s a definite 10’.
3.4. Men are given the privilege in our society of escaping this gaze: they are usually positioned
as viewers, not viewed. Men in the public eye are more often judged on their ideas than on
their body shape.
3.5. Men often feel they have the right to objectify, see and judge women. They are often
surprised and offended if they are objectified, seen and judged themselves.
3.6. Women are sometimes so conditioned to the male gaze that they tend to see themselves
through the judgemental eyes of men – they anxiously scrutinise their own bodies against
the male-defined ideals of beauty held up in the media.

4. If women are to liberate themselves, they have to challenge this male privilege to look and not
be looked at. They have to return the male gaze, to reclaim their position as subjects, not objects
of vision.

One way of understanding how the male gaze works to disempower women is to look at the history
of art. In Western culture, women have usually been positioned as objects of art, not as artists in
their own right or even as viewers of art.

There is also a big difference between the way that men and women have been depicted in Western
art. Women most often appear in paintings as nudes – they are passive, vulnerable objects of vision,
reduced to their bodies. They are there to be looked at, like these demure women painted in the
guise of the ‘Three Graces’ by Rubens.
This can be contrasted with the way that men are depicted. Even where they are shown as nudes,
the male subject of art is usually just that – a subject, not an object. The ‘heroic nudes’ of Ancient
Greece, like this sculpture of a discus thrower by Myron, showed men as active, doing things, making
a difference to the world – to be admired for their power, not judged on their attractiveness.

The two artworks referenced by Harwood in Prize-Giving make an intertextual reference to this
sexist tradition in art. Rodin’s sculpture, The Thinker, is a modern celebration of masculine heroism
in the tradition of the classical male nudes. The male subject is shown as a hero of thought, not of
action, but he is still powerful, massively muscled and active (mentally if not physically).

This is the pose assumed by the poem’s self-appointed ‘hero’, Eisenbart. He assumes his position on
stage and looks down on all he surveys. The girls he views dismissively are reduced by synecdoche to
objects, parts: a ‘mosaic’ of heads, a procession of ‘virgin hands’, all judged uninteresting and
predictable by the Great Man from his unchallenged and lofty viewpoint.

His arrogance is challenged by the ‘Titian-Haired’ girl’s response to his gaze. Her mimicry of him not
only ‘steals’ a pose that is supposedly reserved for men, but shows him that he is seen, mirrored and
judged. Here, Harwood makes another subtle intertextual reference.

Among the many nudes painted in the Renaissance for the pleasure of men, one – Titian’s Venus of
Urbino – stood out because the naked woman shown does not look demurely down, as was
conventional. Instead, she looks back out at the viewer, returning the male gaze and conveying the
impression of a woman with a self-possessed sexuality of her own. Like the girl in Harwood’s poem,
she as a slightly mocking expression, red hair and dark eyes.
 Titian, Venus of Urbino (1583)

This painting was seen as particularly obscene in its historical context – not because of the nudity,
but because of the woman’s suggested agency – her power to act. This painting later inspired
another scandalous nude, Manet’s Olympia, which went further in showing the nude subject directly
returning, indeed challenging, the power of the male art-viewer to look at her body. Here, the
subject is identified (through certain symbols) as a prostitute – her pose suggests that she not only
possesses her own sexuality, but rejects male claims over this it. This painting caused riots when first
displayed in Paris in the late 19th century – the male gaze could not cope with the implicit challenge
offered by its return.

Eduard Manet, Olympia (1865)

In the same way, Eisenbart feels threatened by the girl’s return of his gaze (he ‘suffers’ her ‘dark
eyes’) as she seizes the initiative. In his desire for her as she plays, he realises that he is not
complete, self-possessed and in control of himself – there are things he lacks and cannot ‘summon’
and bring under control. Music and sexual need cannot be ‘mastered’ by scientific knowledge. The
girl has looked at him, judged him and does not need him. He suddenly feels exposed to the gaze of
the audience and sees himself, turned upside down, not as a hero, but as a slightly ridiculous figure,
a ‘sage fool’. He has become ‘trapped’, fixed in place, pinned down as the object of a woman’s gaze.
A Simple Story

A visiting conductor
when I was seventeen,
took me back to his hotel room
to cover the music scene.

I'd written a composition.

Would wonders never cease -
here was a real musician
prepared to hold my piece.

He spread my score on the counterpane

with classic casualness,
and put one hand on the manuscript
and the other down my dress.

It was hot as hell in The Windsor.

I said I'd like a drink,
We talked across gin and grapefruit,
and I heard the ice go clink

as I gazed at the lofty forehead

of one who led the band;
and guessed at the hoarded sorrows
no wife could understand.

I dreamed of a soaring passion

as an egg might dream of flight,
while he read my crude sonata.
If he'd said, 'That bar's not right,'

or, 'Have you thought of a coda?'

or, 'Watch that first repeat,'
or, 'Modulate to the dominant,'
he'd have had me at his feet.

But he shuffled it together,

and said, 'That's lovely, dear,'
as he put it down on the washstand
in a way that made it clear

that I was no composer.

And being young and vain,
removed my lovely body
from one who'd scorned my brain.

I swept off like Miss Virtue

down dusty Roma Street,
and heard the goods trains whistle
WHO? WHOOOOOO? in aching heat.

Gwen Harwood