'Gates Pure and Shining and Serene': Mutual Gazing as an Amatory Motif in Western Literature and Art
1969; Iter Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.33137/rr.v22i1.12174
ISSN2293-7374
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoD espite the many literary studies on the theme of amorous gazing/ no historian of literature or art has ever discussed the motif of lovers gazing mutually into each other's eyes.Literary love gazing is for the most part one way, either a dart-like glance from the beloved which penetrates the lover's eyes and wounds his heart,^or an equally devastating glance of the lover at the physical beauty of the beloved.As love's metaphors of darts, arrows, wounds and sickness imply, the lover is too overwhelmed to Tire' back amorous glances of his own.Mutuality then is less impor- tant to most literary love gazing than metaphors of one-sided devastation and surrender before the irresistible power of erotic desire.The present study will explore the motif of mutai gazing in love themes, with a focus on Renaissance works and their earlier sources.As we shall see, these works represent a love which is essentially reciprocal and non-violent, a love often conjugal and free from the devastation of eros so important for the more common literary motif of one way glances.That love starts from sight and is intimately connected to it is already a commonplace in ancient love poetry.^Despite this, not many texts speak of mutual gazing.Oy\d^% Amores mentions an ocular 'discourse of my eyes' which 'secretly receive and send forth, these signals of our love."*At the same time, one of Propertius' Cynthia poems reads, 'While fate allows, let us feed our eyes with love.A long night comes and day will not return.'^Herethe eyes sum up all that is physical and satiable before the long night of death.The same mutual and erotic ocular feeding appears at least implicitly in the more famous opening lines of Lucretius' De RerumNatura (The Nature of Things), where Mars lies in the lap of Venus.^It
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