IN 1899 LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ published a collection of ten short stories called Menschenkinder, some of which had already appeared in magazines and journals, some of which would appear in magazines and journals in the first years of the twentieth century. The collection comments interestingly on the historical and cultural phenomena of woman's negotiation of identity at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe. Although it is evident that men and women negotiate the terms of their identity all the time, the turn of the twentieth century brought revised social expectations for women and a shift in the conceptualization of women's roles, sexuality, and psyches. Andreas-Salomé's repeated thematic commentary on the dilemma of woman's self-definition, her formal decisions about narrative perspective, and her repeated explicit treatment of men and women looking, both surreptitiously and otherwise, amount to a theory of the gaze, even if she was unacquainted with this late-twentieth-century terminology. Prefiguring Laura Mulvey's 1975 article on visual pleasure and the narrative cinema, Menschenkinder examines in narrative the relationship of gender to the gaze, how the gaze operates in relation to power, and how the gaze triggers both objectification and identification. Menschenkinder's treatment of looking and being looked at even prefigures later critiques of Mulvey's theory and indicates, among other things, how the gaze might be challenged and destabilized. Thus this collection raises questions that Mulvey, De Lauretis, Doane, Irigaray, and other feminist theorists, and in particular feminist film theorists, have been concerned with over the past forty years: Is representation possible without objectification?