{"id":1057,"date":"2016-10-11T22:22:38","date_gmt":"2016-10-11T22:22:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2016-10-13T12:49:41","modified_gmt":"2016-10-13T12:49:41","slug":"close-reading-of-the-fair-dreamer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2016\/10\/11\/close-reading-of-the-fair-dreamer\/","title":{"rendered":"Close Reading of the Fair Dreamer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1988.21.68_Prim-LoRes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/collections.troutgallery.org\/Obj18182?sid=59379&x=612537<\/p>\n

The image that I chose is entitled the Fair Dreamer<\/em>. \u00a0The main subject of the image is a beautiful (fair) woman who appears to be asleep or is waking up as she is\u00a0sprawled\u00a0against the trunk of a willow tree. \u00a0The setting is on the banks of a lake. \u00a0There is also a parasol in one corner of the image and a rowboat in\u00a0the other. \u00a0What intrigues me the most about this image is the posture of the woman. \u00a0She is stretching but in a way that looks exposing or inviting. \u00a0Her arms are stretched above her with one lying across her forehead, her legs aren’t crossed, and her eyes are closed, possibly hinting that the body language of the woman could be interpreted as one of relaxation, fragility, or sexual desire. \u00a0Her parasol, a tool that is used to shade\/protect one’s self, also appears\u00a0to have been tossed aside, which can imply that she is willingly giving off a sign of acceptance.<\/p>\n

All of this reminded me of the readings that we covered in class that were about the female as a sexualized object. \u00a0Elizabeth Lee’s article on the Victorian Web, the Femme Fatale as<\/em> Object<\/em>, discusses the fascination with the female body that many male artists of the Victorian Era felt. \u00a0According to Jan Marsh, the femme fatale<\/em>, a seductive and dangerous woman, became idealized to the point where they were “rendered decorative, depersonalized; they [became] passive figures rather than characters in a story or drama… women [were] reduced to an aesthetic arrangement of sexual parts, for male fantasies” (Lee 1). \u00a0In short, male artists feared the “sexual destructiveness” of the femme fatale<\/em> and thus\u00a0began to view their female human models as perfect, sexually attractive objects with a lack of a real identity.<\/p>\n

I think that Elizabeth Lee’s article can be connected to the Fair Dreamer\u00a0<\/em>because the women of this image is similar to a female model that a male artist from the Victorian Era would desire. \u00a0As mentioned before, the body language of the woman is one of passiveness and sexuality. \u00a0Though she is fully clothed, she is still beautiful with an inviting posture and a tranquil\/gentle expression on her face. \u00a0She is also asleep in nature, which further romanticizes the image and shows that she can be an example of a “femme fatale<\/em>, whose dangerous sexual powers artists felt the need to reign in somehow to make her more palatable to Victorian audiences” (Lee 1). \u00a0By making her asleep, the artist has successfully quelled her “threatening” side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/collections.troutgallery.org\/Obj18182?sid=59379&x=612537 The image that I chose is entitled the Fair Dreamer. \u00a0The main subject of the image is a beautiful (fair) woman who appears to be asleep or is waking up as she is\u00a0sprawled\u00a0against the trunk of a willow tree. \u00a0The setting is on the banks of a lake. \u00a0There is also a parasol in … Continue reading Close Reading of the Fair Dreamer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111380,111423,135948],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-360-victorian-sexualities","category-fall-2016","category-trout-gallery-collection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}