'Conversations on the Arts': Writing a Space for the Female Viewer in the Repository of Arts 1809 15

Abstract

But if art was 'accessible' to all, Hazlitt was equally insistent that only the 'few' could feel the power of art and respond with true understanding.3 Excluded from the few was the female sex, whose interest could at best be only personal and particular, or, as was more likely, restricted to the level of superficial and fashionable commodity consumption. I will return to Hazlitt at the end of my article but for the moment want to suggest that the cultural formation of 'Hazlitt' as a critic and writer on art (i.e. as a liberal male intellectual) can be partly understood in terms of oppositions and differences encompassing the economic, political and private spheres, and defined in terms of class and gender. I want to argue that Ackermann's Repository ofArts4 provides a useful means of exploring the other side of these differences the construction of the bourgeois female viewing 'subject' as a 'proper lady'5 in the context of a magazine which celebrated individual capitalist enterprise, commerce, manufacturing and fashion. It was also politically and ideologically conservative, being dedicated to promoting the benefits of the Prince Regent's rule. Unlike Hazlitt, Ackermann did believe that it was possible to improve public taste by the promotion of the arts in the spirit of trade, and he also regarded the 'fair sex' as his most important consumers. I want to ask what happened to the 'female' viewer when privatised values, a new emphasis upon the particular and concrete in nature, and the rise of 'domestic' genre painting might appear to have privileged the woman's viewpoint, or at least to have offered the potential for so doing. If, as argued by John Barrell, women had been excluded from eighteenthcentury formulations of the 'republic of taste' on the grounds that they lacked any public or political voice or space, and because they were held to be intellectually incapable of generalising or abstracting from the particular;6 and if they were being increasingly excluded from institutional and professional artistic structures and practices as producers of art,7 they were nonetheless very much an important part of the expanding 'public' for art in the early nineteenth century where the public is understood in terms of an aggregate of private individuals as spectators, viewers, patrons, potential patrons, amateurs, readers and consumers. Moreover, it was a fragmented 'public' which was being defined, framed and controlled in terms of identity and difference according to class fraction, politics, gender and interest, in the many newspapers and periodicals of the day.8 This shift towards privatised values and viewpoints required the rewriting and/or reproduction of earlier formulations of gender difference in order to reinstate the dominance of the male viewpoint and to assert the authenticity of individual male experiences of art. At the same time, women, designated as the principal readers or consumers of fashionable novels and periodicals like Ackermann's Repository of Arts, were increasingly being defined as trivialising and superficial consumers of fashionable 'art commodities'. I want to offer an analysis of two 'representations' of the female viewer in the early nineteenth century to exemplify the way in which the periodical press functioned to construct or interpellate the reader as a 'viewing subject' in terms of class and gender. In doing so, I do not want to suggest that my examples exhaust the range of subject positions available to women at the time. I also recognise the danger of slipping from ideological formations and constructions within the text to making assumptions about the way real women looked at, responded to, and understood art. No art form was so widely regarded as being