FEMALE OBJECTS

As we have seen, Pyrocles's disguise entails both sympathetic identification with women, and also, at the same time, the pursuit of a woman as erotic object. Similarly both Arcadias, while in some ways extending a welcome to women readers, are simultaneously far from immune from the deployment of a ‘male gaze’ which reduces women to sources of specular pleasure.

The procession of portraits of women behind Artesia, each of which is commented upon and assessed against standards of ideal beauty, establishes the idea of women as to-be-looked-at (NA, pp. 157–61). Philoclea in particular is repeatedly eulogised in blazons which reduce her to alluring body-parts, not only in the poem already mentioned, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell’ (OA, pp. 207–11, NA, pp. 287–91), but also in the second Eclogues (OA, pp. 144–5; NA, pp. 432–3), and during Pyrocles's defence to Musidorus of his adoption of female dress: ‘her body (O sweet body!) covered with a light taffeta garment, so cut as the wrought smock came through it in many places, enough to have made your restrained imagination have thought what was under it … the apples methought fell down from the trees to do homage to the apples of her breast’ (NA, p. 146).