Venus, the goddess of love, is featured in several of Michael Field\u2019s poems including \u201cVenus and Mars\u201d where she is depicted alongside the God of War and some satyrs.\u00a0 The poem brings up questions of female power and specifically challenges the mission of objectivity stated in the preface of \u201cSight and Song.\u201d\u00a0 Michael Field begins the poem by describing Venus \u201cin her sovereign place\u201d seated in nature watching Mars who is naked and unconscious (8).\u00a0 The choice to classify Venus as a sovereign in nature shows how Michael Field is claiming that female power is a natural thing.\u00a0 In the painting, Venus is fully clothed and awake while Mars is unconscious due to Venus\u2019s beauty and sexuality.\u00a0 By stating that Venus is in her sovereign place and so is Mars, then in a way Michael Field is claiming that Venus has power and control over Mars in both a sexual way and a natural way.<\/p>\n
Later in the poem, Michael Field goes on to emphasize female power by describing Venus as \u201clone and sadder than the dawn, too wise to weep\u201d (75-76).\u00a0Venus has seen the work that her kiss has done to Mars and feels upset that she is now bound to sexually please him.\u00a0However, in spite of her sadness, Michael Field describes Venus as too intelligent of a woman to weep.\u00a0 This moment challenges the stereotype of women being too emotional or more prone to crying more than men.\u00a0 By describing Venus, a beacon of femininity and female sexuality, as a strong person who will not allow herself to weep in spite of her true feelings, Michael Field is making a claim about women being more than just the stereotypes that the late 19th<\/sup>century British society has given them.\u00a0Furthermore, the very end of the poem states that Venus is \u201ca cold enchantress doomed to please her victims one by one\u201d (83-84).\u00a0 Venus\u2019s victims, as portrayed by Mars, are all men and by marking her as a magical enchantress, Michael Field is claiming that she has a duty to please men, but at the same time holds a certain amount of power over them.<\/p>\n The preface of \u201cSight and Song\u201d states that Michael Field has the intention of providing an objective understanding of the paintings and claims that the gazer can read the poems, which are said to not contain any personal messages or poetic opinions, in order to better understand the painting.\u00a0 Reading more about Michael Field\u2019s life in biographical literature such as Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo\u2019s \u201cMichael Field, The Poet\u201d allows one to see that the claim of eliminating subjectivity within Sight and Song is a complete lie.\u00a0 Michael Field was actually the pseudonym for two women, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper.\u00a0The women chose to publish under the name Michael Field because they knew that they would not be taken seriously if the public knew they were women writers.\u00a0 This fact speaks to the presence of female power in many of the poems but particularly in \u201cVenus and Mars.\u201d\u00a0 Two women made a choice to use a male name in order to conform to societal norms but chose to still publish their work even though they were women and were not supposed to stray from the domestic sphere.\u00a0 Michael Field\u2019s choices are a form of female resistance against societal norms of the fin de si\u00e8cle, just like Venus\u2019s decision to not cry and her classification as an enchantress over men she is doomed to please is a form of female resistance.\u00a0 Michael Field argues in the preface that they are not trying to impose any of their personal opinions or messages within their poems about art, but in fact are doing the opposite of that and using the poems as a mechanism for social resistance.\u00a0The gazer of \u201cVenus and Mars\u201d is not simply reading the poem or looking at the painting without any subjective thoughts, they are actually reading Michael Field\u2019s attempt to encourage female power and agency in the face of social barriers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Venus, the goddess of love, is featured in several of Michael Field\u2019s poems including \u201cVenus and Mars\u201d where she is depicted alongside the God of War and some satyrs.\u00a0 The poem brings up questions of female power and specifically challenges the mission of objectivity stated in the preface of \u201cSight and Song.\u201d\u00a0 Michael Field begins … Continue reading Gazing at Female Power<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3874,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3874"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}