His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art - Hardcover

Lesser, Wendy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674392108 ISBN 13: 9780674392106

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Looks at the portrayal of women in art, photographs, motion pictures, and literature, and argues that male artists do not inevitably misrepresent women

About this title

About the Author

Wendy Lesser is editor of The Threepenny Review.

Review

This is a wonderful book...lucid, cultivated, amiable...[His Other Half] is a model of the kind of flexible, interdisciplinary culture criticism that is desperately needed to bridge the gap between the general reader and the academic ghetto. Lesser, moving with graceful ease from literature and art to photography and cinema, is concerned with the image of woman as refracted through male imagination...Wendy Lesser has made an important contribution. (Camille Paglia Washington Post Book World)

Wendy Lesser bases her group of essays on the idea that certain male artists are in search of their own lost or hidden female selves, and that the success of their search can be measured by the way such rescued selves are freed by the artist and given independent life in his works of art...Ms. Lesser is excellent on the force of Dickens's sentimentality...Her discussion of Degas's nudes is very moving...[and] her discussion of Alfred Hitchcock is really magnificent. (Anne Hollander New York Times Book Review)

[A] stimulating collection of essays...His Other Half is an arresting work of criticism. Lesser writes with volatile wit, an eager, almost breezy confidence and a palpable pleasure in reading and looking and analyzing--and in the suppleness of her own cleverness. She ranges from Henry James to Alfred Hitchcock, with chapters on Cecil Beaton's photographs, Degas's pastels, Barbara Stanwyck as The Lady Eve and Stella Dallas, and shows the kind of zapping glee throughout that recalls the wisecracking heroines of screwball comedies. (Marina Warner Times Literary Supplement)

In this wise and generous book, Lesser enables her readers to go further than they might have expected, both in looking at the artists she has written about and in searching internally for their points of resonance. (Katharyn Eaton San Francisco Chronicle)

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0674392108
• ISBN 13: 9780674392106
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304