In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe does more than declare the poetical nature of dying women. He also takes the public behind the scenes to watch the writer at work. Though writers “prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy,” Poe details the “cautious selections and rejections—… the painful erasures and interpolations” that a writer makes.¹ Poe had made such cautious selections and painful erasures when he trimmed down “Life in Death” (a tale he might have padded for economic reasons) in order to republish it in The Broadway Journal as “The Oval Portrait” (26 April 1845).² In “The Oval Portrait,” the brevity and unity achieved by torturous cutting and the image of the dying woman that has so long troubled feminist readers coincide. For through this tale Poe contemplates his aesthetic practice's reliance upon the silencing of the feminine Other. Situating the death of a beautiful woman at the center of his paradigm of the artistic process, Poe critiques the Western tradition of masking the fear of death and dissolution through images of feminine beauty and critiques his own contribution to this tradition.³ The aesthetic gaze of the artist, which objectifies and destroys his wife, attempts to maintain a distinction between self and female Other that would enable him to displace death onto the Other. In turn, the narrator assumes this adversarial position in relation to the woman when he must “shut from view” the portrait in order to gain “a more sober and more certain gaze” (Works [The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe], 2:664, 663). Poe, however, also depicts the failure of these attempts to maintain difference, a failure manifested through the narrator's and artist's increasing affinity to the woman in the portrait.

Though Poe engages in what could be considered feminist re-vision, dismantling and distancing himself from this paradigm, his own editorial revisions as he transforms “Life in Death” into “The Oval Portrait” suggest his inability to disentangle himself completely from a model he himself portrays as brutal. In the later draft, Poe excises precisely what in the portrait of the woman “confounded, subdued and appalled” the narrator: “I could no longer support the sad meaning smile of the half-parted lips, nor the too real lustre of the wild eye” (Works, 2:664). Poe's erasure of the woman's “sad meaning smile of the half-parted lips” effectively silences her “second” story, the term Cynthia S. Jordan applies to women's stories criminally suppressed by androcentric culture.⁴ His excision of her “wild eye,” moreover, suggests that ultimately he allies himself with the artist and narrator who find the uncanny female gaze and its emasculating effects unbearable. Though Poe erases the wild eye, the uncanniness that it engenders continues to haunt the tale, undermining the narrator's further attempt to fix his experience of the woman by re-aestheticizing her. Indeed, the absence of a concluding (and containing) frame in the tale enacts the dissolution that the aesthetic representation of a beautiful woman tries to disguise. “The Oval Portrait” thus underscores the fictional nature of artistic constructions that use women to disguise death—and Poe's own reluctance to abandon them.

Poe arranges the drama of his tale around the male aesthetic gaze and its attempt to define Woman as subordinate. Nancy K. Miller explains that “[be]cause the gaze is not simply an act of vision, but a site of crisscrossing meanings in which the effects of power relations are boldly (and baldly) deployed, it is not surprising that feminist theorists and writers should take it up as a central scene in their critique of patriarchal authority.”⁵ Here Poe shares feminist concerns about gender and power. The series of gazes represented in this tale enable him to uncover the power relations underlying the construction of male identity and male-produced art. The unnamed narrator, desperately wounded and assisted by his valet, has been installed in a recently deserted chateau in the Apennines. The action in the tale is almost entirely visual; only the narrator's eyes move about the room. He gazes first at several paintings that line the walls, then at the oval portrait, then at a critical text that describes “the paintings and their histories,” specifically, how the oval portrait came to be created (Works, 2:664). The gallery catalog—with its text framed by quotation marks to alert the reader (implicitly male) that he is, in effect, gazing at the same text as the narrator—depicts yet another scene focused on the male aesthetic gaze. The catalog describes the artist painting his wife. In the process of transforming her into art, he destroys her. The story concludes when the artist gazes at the finished product, the portrait, and cries out “This is indeed Life itself!” only to realize in the same moment that his wife is dead (2:666).

In the framed (inner) tale, the artist-husband's gaze explicitly defines his wife as an object of art. As Beth Newman argues, Western culture has constructed the aesthetic gaze “as the privilege of a male subject, a means of relegating women (or ‘Woman’) to the status of object (of representation, discourse, desire, etc.).”⁶ And just as explicitly, Poe exposes the “evil” nature of the husband's method (Works, 2:664).⁷ Once a “maiden of rarest beauty,” the woman withers as he draws from her very cheeks the lifelike “tints which he spread upon the canvass” (2:664, 665). His palettes and brushes become “untoward instruments” as, in the process of abstracting her into “immortal beauty,” she is dissected into “a mere head and shoulders” (2:665, 664). Poe emphasizes that the artist “would not see” that he cannibalizes his wife's vitality for his art and suggests that the artist willfully conceals from himself the relationship between his art and his wife's slow destruction (2:665). Indeed, the wife's own painted image becomes her rival as the artist ceases to gaze at his wife and instead gazes with ardor at the image of her captured on his canvas. After all, Art had been his first bride. As Elisabeth Bronfen explains, the painter conflates his two brides, “transfer[ring] his living wife into the wife he already had.”⁸ Through his gaze, then, the artist assumes the authority of defining and controlling the woman's experience. This aesthetic process allows him to re-define, specifically to allegorize, his own experience as well. For through his creation of art, the husband veils the cruel dynamics of the process and his less-than-noble motivations.⁹ The catalog tells us that “evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter” (2:664-65). In other words, before marriage the woman held the subject position. His insistence upon painting her stems from his need to gain dominance. The wife seems to anticipate her end, knowing that it is “a terrible thing” to hear him “speak of his desire to portray” her, but she obediently and humbly allows him to consume her life in the interest of great art (2:665).

This process of objectification is repeated through the narrator's gaze at the woman in the portrait. Here, the aesthetic gaze of artist and narrator overlap, for both men seek to capture and contain the woman. The narrator finds himself suddenly confronting the image of the woman when he repositions the candelabrum and reveals what formerly had been in shadow, the oval portrait. He reports, “I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before. It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my eyes. … In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting” (Works, 2:663). Though the narrator's tale is primarily related in the past tense, his experience of the woman forces him to use the present participle—describing her as “just ripening into womanhood.” In the original version of the tale, Poe had used the past participle, “ripened.” This editorial revision insists that the woman in the portrait is both dead and undead and thus intensifies the narrator's perception of the “lifelikeliness” (Poe's emphasis) of the woman's image (2:664). In other words, like many of Poe's heroines, the woman in the portrait refuses to stay dead. This intensification of her uncanniness in the later draft, though, comes at the expense of a precise description of what makes her seemingly “too real” for the narrator and Poe. For in “Life in Death” Poe told us what “confounded, subdued and appalled” the narrator: “I could no longer support … the too real lustre of the wild eye” (2:664).

This scene in which male and female gazes cross merits close examination. The woman's eye, which “subdues” the narrator, threatens to disturb the male subject/female object relationship through which he maintains dominance, and by extension, his male identity. In other words, because the distinction between subject and object is inherently unstable, her gaze threatens to turn the tables, so to speak, to “fix” the narrator in the woman's gaze. Poe thus anticipates what Roland Barthes says in The Responsibility of Forms: “by dint of gazing, one forgets one can be gazed at oneself. Or again, in the verb ‘to gaze,’ the frontiers of active and passive are uncertain.”¹⁰ When a woman assumes the privilege of the gaze, though, she “confounds” the hierarchical oppositions that structure Western reality. Newman thus relates the terrifying effects of the female gaze to the transforming and castrating gaze of Medusa:

Perhaps the sight that makes the Medusa threatening to the male spectator may be understood as the sight of someone else's look—the knowledge that the other sees and therefore resists being reduced to an appropriable object. That is, Medusa defies the male gaze as Western culture has constructed it. … Such defiance is surely unsettling, disturbing the pleasure the male subject takes in gazing and the hierarchical relations by which he asserts his dominance.¹¹

For both the narrator and the artist, to become the object of the female gaze is, in Beth Newman's words, “to lose one's position of mastery and control—in short, to be emasculated.”¹² They attempt to “shut from view” the eye/I that asserts feminine selfhood, resists objectification, and threatens to diminish masculine authority.

Like the artist, who wrests the subject position from his wife by painting her, the narrator tries to gain control over the woman by focusing on the aesthetic qualities of her image. When he “again look[s] fixedly at the painting,” he refuses the meaning of the dead-yet-undead woman and examines her representation as “a thing of art,” concentrating on the vignette manner of the portrait and the “Moresque frame” (Works, 2:663, 664). Leland Person explains that “[b]y appealing to the artificiality of art, by emphasizing the frame and the form, [the narrator] is able to defend himself from its meaning. In this instance, aesthetic form is clearly used to circumscribe and devitalize content.”¹³ Bronfen also comments on the narrator's second gaze: “The narrator uses the thought he has formulated in the interstice between the two forms of vision to mediate between himself and the viewed object, to filter, distance and protect himself from the implication of his own mortality.”¹⁴

The narrator's defensive gaze, however, eventually fails when he finds himself being subdued by the portrait. He returns the portrait to the shadows and shifts his gaze from the portrait to the critical account of her portrait. The woman's eye in the portrait pierces his defensive gestures, but the woman in the text is depicted as captive. She becomes, as Judith Fetterley says of other Poe women, “a character trapped in [a] male text.”¹⁵ For this shift in the narrator's gaze defines her once more as art. In this way, the critical history of the portrait, framed by quotation marks, serves the same purpose as the “Moresque frame” that surrounds the oval portrait: both attempt to isolate the image of woman, to free her representation from reality and to allegorize (and dehumanize) it as art.¹⁶ Furthermore, both serve to redefine this “wild” image as knowable and therefore controllable. Louis Marin explains that an object enclosed within a frame is represented as accessible: “the frame thus marks the possibility of accession to the object by the gaze, as a readable object.”¹⁷ Reading about how the woman came to be painted, then, safely substitutes for his desire to gaze at her, since reading about her re-establishes the authority of the male subject position. The narrator once more can derive pleasure from gazing at her.¹⁸

The narrator's pleasure in reading the critical account of the portrait makes manifest a mode of seeing that has been tacitly operating throughout the tale: the gaze of the implied male reader. For this series of overlapping gazes assumes the male gaze as the norm. The quotation marks that frame the gallery catalog also insist upon the male reader's gaze, insist that he is peering over the shoulder of the narrator to gaze upon the same sexually charged scene. The concluding scene thus treats narrator and reader as voyeurs. The series of framing devices function as a constricting aperture, narrowing the reader's attention until it focuses solely on the private scene played out between husband and wife.¹⁹ The light, “dripped” from above, illuminates the woman and canvas and further trains the reader's attention on the sexual drama. What the narrator and reader see is the artist expending his “fervid and burning pleasure” on the “task” that transforms his wife into art. He becomes “passionate, and wild,” but the object of this ardor is the image of his wife, rather than his flesh-and-blood bride. Indeed, he rarely turns his eye from this image, “even to regard [her withering] countenance.” Poe writes ambiguously of the painter's “deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well” (Works, 2:665). The image of the woman captured in her portrait thus becomes a substitute for the husband's gaze.²⁰ The artist's relationship to the portrait parallels the narrator's relationship to its critical history. Importantly, the story never moves back out to its frame, to the story related by the wounded narrator. The reader is left, so to speak, with his eye at the keyhole.

Though Poe points out the tangled mix of violence and eroticism at the heart of this aesthetic model, he also leaves it up to the male reader to understand the relationship between his own pleasure in reading this tale-within-a-tale and the slow torture of the woman that is its core. The publication of “Life in Death” coincides with the publication of the Dupin tales, the stories that Jordan argues mark Poe's developed awareness of the criminal nature of suppressing female experience. But “Life in Death” as well as “The Oval Portrait” lack a character such as Dupin who will detect and disclose the woman's story. Instead, the narrator continually tries to suppress the significance of his experience, literally submerging the portrait back into the shadows of the unconscious. He also perceives the language in the gallery catalog as “vague and quaint,” suggesting that the tale it tells is antique and obsolete (Works, 2:664). But the adversarial position he assumes in relation to the woman in the portrait—mirroring the artist's position—belies his attempt to distance himself from this timeless story. What Fetterley argues for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is also true for “The Oval Portrait”: Poe both “exposes and facilitates the mechanisms of masculinist reading.”²¹ Like the sailor in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” who watches in fascinated horror as his pet orangutan acts out a male script of murdering a woman, yet who can comfortably dissociate himself from his pet's actions, the narrator and reader of “The Oval Portrait” can assert their own innocence and dissociate themselves from the “crime” committed against the unnamed woman. Again, Fetterley's argument for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” provides insight into “The Oval Portrait”: the victim's sex is “the hidden spring that has to be there to make the story work.”²² In other words, this tale is not just about art; it is about the relationship between art and sex, specifically, the female sex.²³

The narrator's life-threatening wound indicates why this relationship between art and woman is so important. The narrator's wound is but the literal version of what motivates the painter's figurative quest for immortality through his art. For both men repress death “by localizing [it] away from the self, at the body of a beautiful woman.”²⁴ Bronfen explains that the aesthetic gaze allows the male viewer to distance himself from his own weakness and serves to protect the self from the fear of dissolution and disintegration: “The beauty of Woman and the beauty of the image both give the illusion of intactness and unity, cover the insupportable signs of lack, deficiency, transiency and promise their spectators the impossible—an obliteration of death's ubiquitous ‘castrative’ threat to the subject.”²⁵ However, Bronfen also notes the instability of representations, the slippages that occur as they “repress what they purport to reveal and … articulate what they hope to conceal.”²⁶ Poe captures the instability of the woman's representation through the narrator's perception of her “lifelikeness.” Poe coins and highlights this word to suggest the slippage between the portrait's perfection and imperfection, to suggest that its lifelike quality is only an artificial approximation of life. Thus, the narrator is initially “startle[d] … into waking life” by the portrait because its immortal beauty momentarily obscures his own wounded condition (Works, 2:664). Paradoxically, though, his attempt to control the image by reaesthetisizing it also enforces its artifice. The gap between image and reality defeats his protective posture and leaves him subdued, thus collapsing the gap between the narrator and the woman who has been subdued by her husband's art.

But Poe carries this erasure of distinctions even farther. In the end all three characters—narrator, artist, and woman—dissolve into one another through Poe's characterization of them as pallid. They reach a certain equality by assuming a passive role. We have seen how the wife turns pale as the artist draws off her life “tints” and transfers them to the portrait. When the painter finishes his work, he “stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid” (Works, 2:665-66). Likewise, the narrator's final confrontation with the portrait leaves him “appalled.” As these different forms of the word pall suggest, the three characters have all become victims of the aesthetic gaze. Though artist and narrator use art to maintain difference between self and female Other—between self and death—the instability of the woman's representation refuses this illusion. What most horrifies narrator and artist is their unwilling recognition of the fictive nature of the very oppositions that support their identity and authority.

Poe thus demonstrates that this aesthetic is based on the inherently unstable distinction between subject and object, viewer and viewed, male and female, reality and art. In other words, the structure of Poe's story undermines the very distinctions that the narrator and artist try to enforce. As Joan Dayan suggests of Poe's other tales about women, “identity dissolutions suspend gender difference as a component of identity.”²⁷ Poe begins this process of erasure in the tale's opening reference to Ann Radcliffe's gothic romance The Mysteries of Udolpho. For the narrator describes the chateau in which he takes refuge as “one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Apennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe” (Works, 2:662). Like Radcliffe's heroine Emily St. Aubert, the narrator struggles to “calm and subdue [his] fancy” (2:663). The narrator's susceptibility to being subdued by his fancy—and thus in a sense feminized—highlights his affinity to the woman in the portrait. Furthermore, his overactive imagination makes suspect his narrative authority. Michael Davitt Bell suggests that this kind of gothic ambiguity “remove[s] the narrator to the position of nonprivileged reporter, permitted only to infer motives and meanings from phenomenal appearances.”²⁸ Finally, though the first draft of the tale, “Life in Death,” establishes the narrator as a Byronic hero who has retreated from an “affray with the banditti,” his wound also makes him vulnerable (2:667). His desperate condition situates him not just on the border between sleeping and waking, “half sitting” and “half reclining,” but like the woman in the portrait herself, between life and death (2:664).²⁹

Poe makes it clear that, even though this aesthetic strategy may seem heroic at first glance because it grants the subject a feeling of omnipotence, ultimately it involves doing violence to the object, that is, seizing possession of its force, in this case, the woman's life-force. Poe reinforces this violence through the tale's setting. The recuperating narrator describes the chateau as decorated with “manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque” (Works, 2:662). By placing the “modern” paintings “together with” armorial trophies, Poe places art within the realm of conflict and domination. He also foreshadows the narrator's struggle for control with the woman in the portrait and overrides his attempt to depict the story related in the catalog as quaint and obsolete. The “spirited” paintings, moreover, presumably have imbibed their spirit through the same process the oval portrait has. The artist gains his inspiration, Poe writes, as his wife's spirits wither. She grows “daily more dispirited and weak,” until the “spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp” and is totally extinguished (2:665). The male artist's violence endows the portrait with the spirit of his young wife. Art lives as its object dies. And Poe is aware that both artist and viewer share responsibility.

What does it mean, then, that Poe chose to remove “the wild eye” when he revised the story as “The Oval Portrait”? By erasing this image, he retreats from outright rejection of the very artistic model his tale critiques. Although Poe distances himself from this paradigm by revealing its brutality and instability, he refuses to give up the very strategy that protects his control as an artist. Clearly, one should not confuse Poe with his narrator. But his painful erasures ally him with the narrator and artist who must occlude the female gaze that destabilizes masculine authority. Without the wild eye, the woman herself becomes less individual and more abstract, more like all the other beautiful women whom Poe kills off in other stories. However, Poe also refuses to return the story back to the narrator. We are left wondering if he lives or dies and how he reacts to the portrait's history. Without this containing frame, the tale seems to admit its own imperfection, the very quality that the aesthetic representation of a beautiful woman tries to disguise.

“The Oval Portrait” thus becomes a pivotal tale in the continuing discussion of Poe's attitude toward women. The tale follows and seems to reflect on his better known tales involving dying women, namely “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and coincides with the publication of the Dupin tales, which feature a male protagonist who makes it his business to excavate dead women's stories. Though Jordan argues that Poe's tales increasingly reflect his commitment to feminist re-vision, “The Oval Portrait” suggests that her argument oversimplifies the complexity of Poe's attitude toward gender issues and of his relationship to his art.³⁰ Through “The Oval Portrait,” Poe examines the assumptions and traditions underlying his own aesthetic method, but he never succeeds in breaking their hold over his imagination.³¹

Notes

1. Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 14.

2. Richard W. Dowell points out that Poe published “Life in Death” soon after his wife Virginia burst a blood vessel while singing. Poe may have padded the tale, mocking his rule of brevity, because he needed the money. See “The Ironic History of Poe's ‘Life in Death’: A Literary Skeleton in the Closet,” American Literature 42 (1971): 478-86.

3. In Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), Elisabeth Bronfen explains that Poe is not unique in his “aesthetic coupling of Woman and death.” Rather, this conjunction “appears as a popular though diversely utilised thematic constant in literature and painting from the age of sensibility to the modern period.” Bronfen argues that we invest in images of feminine beauty in order to disguise our fears of dissolution and decay: “The idea of beauty's perfection is so compelling because it disproves the idea of disintegration, fragmentation and insufficiency, even though it actually only serves as substitution for the facticity of human existence one fears yet must accept” (60, 62).

4. Cynthia S. Jordan notes how often women's “vocal apparatus” becomes the “target of their male attackers” in Poe's tales. This seems to hold true in “The Oval Portrait” as well. See Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 134.

5. Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 164.

6. Beth Newman, “‘The Situation of the Looker-On’: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights,” PMLA 105 (1990): 1031. See also chapters 2 and 3 of John Berger's Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corp. and Penguin Books, 1977).

7. The artist-husband's “evil” aesthetic gaze is connected to the evil eye. Quoting Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes explains that the effect of the “direct, imperious gaze” of the evil eye is to “arrest movement and to kill life.” See The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 239.

8. Bronfen, 111.

9. I am indebted here to Michael Davitt Bell's observation that allegory differs from romance (and from Poe's arabesque obscurity). Bell writes that allegory “appeals normally to objective ideas, possible conceptions, abstract notions. Instead of striving to reveal the hidden or inexpressible, it embodies ideas already verbalized.” Bell downplays the degree of the artist-husband's “unconscious fantasies,” but I would argue that these fantasies play an important role in the tale. See The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 137, 140, 139.

10. Barthes, 238.

11. Newman, 1031.

12. Newman, 1032.

13. Leland Person, Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988), 43.

14. Bronfen, 116.

15. Judith Fetterley, “Reading about Reading: ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 159.

16. Mary Ann Caws argues that the frame functions to isolate what lies within the borders. The frame seals off the picture as a “completely self-contained and non-referential art object removed from the ‘sphere of possible action’ in order to attain the status of art.” See Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 12.

17. As quoted in Caws, 13. For an alternate translation, see Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Metle Hjort (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 34.

18. I am indebted here to Newman's reading of Wuthering Heights. Newman writes, “Hearing a story about the object of his desire becomes a means of satisfying his desire to gaze at her, becomes a substitute, a metaphor, for the pleasure of looking” (1033).

19. Though Caws treats this scene differently, she also argues that the “reader's gaze is trained in the same way as that of the narrator, within a range progressively narrower” (88). For the notion of male spectator as voyeur, I am indebted to E. Ann Kaplan's important essay “Is the Gaze Male?” from Powers of Desire: The Politics Of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 309-27.

20. It is important to note here that the last two strokes of the brush are applied to the woman's mouth and eye (again, the two parts of her face specifically removed from the revised version). Only then does the painter stand “aghast” at his work.

21. Fetterley, 156.

22. Fetterley, 155.

23. Bronfen argues that Poe himself problematizes the conventional reading of “art” in the tale as involving merely “transformation of living matter into inanimate form” (111).

24. Bronfen, vi.

25. Bronfen, 64.

26. Bronfen, vi.

27. See Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66 (1994): 244.

28. Bell, 81.

29. Bronfen (114) also reads the artist as a liminal character.

30. Jordan, 149-50.

31. In “Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying Women,” in New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, ed. Kenneth Silverman (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 113-29, J. Gerald Kennedy also argues that labelling Poe a feminist fails to account for the complexity of his attitude toward women.