Jeremy Hawthorn In chapter 27 of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2) the eligible young doctor Lydgate has been visiting his sick patient Fred Vincy and has been forced into contact with Freq’, pretty but superficial sister Rosamond. 's side when her husband was not in the house, and thus Rosamond was in the unusual position of being much alone. Lydgate, naturally, never thought of yet it seemed that the brief impersonal conversations they had together were creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness. They were obliged to look at each otherin speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried through as the matter of course which i really was. Lydgate began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant, and one day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet. But this turned out badly: the next day, Rosamond looked down, and the consequence was that when their eyes met again, both were more conscious than igate did not want to flirt, there seemed to be [Fred's mother Mrs Vincy] never left Fred's staying long with her, 33 | Theories of the gaze before. There was no help for this in science, and as Lyd no help for it in folly. It was therefore a relief when neighbours no longer considered the house in quarantine, and when the chances of seeing Rosamond alone were very much reduced. But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling some. thing, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with, The relevance of this short passage to theories of the gaze seems at first glance straight- forward; it draws attention to a number of the characteristics of interpersonal looking, among the most important of which are the following. « The exchange of looks between two individuals is an interactive, two-way process: in looking, and searching for information or contact, we reveal things about ourselves, including things that we may not wish to reveal or of which we are unaware. e Looking is a cumulative process: each look we give is informed by—and displays—the fruits of previous looks. As the narrator of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1923 story ‘All Saints’ comments: eyes that have learnt their lesson never forget. Looking is far from being a neutral process of information gathering: our looking activities are saturated with the residues of our social and cultural existence—for example, tMtose relating to class, sexuality, economics. But these comments stay at the level of the literal interchange of looks betwee? Lydgate and Rosamond, and neglect to comment on some interrelated forms of met" phorical looking. These include the way in which Eliot ‘sees’ her characters, the W2¥ #9 which her narrator does the same, and the way in which the reader, t00, ‘looks at’ Eliot's _med characters looking at each of < sng ate concemed, only the secong 100" «ane way @ reader, for example, ob 0 ts its saturated with our social an es yew of Lydgate and Rosamond chat we ' psa od and Lydgate may think th; jw better, con't we? At the same ti ing is ‘really’ jenly overlap with a traditional literary. critical interest in narr: “hnique; the 1p ; : arrative te 7 er term ‘point of view’ remains useful in reminding us of the er oe : in which we isual engage: i raturally use our visual engagement with the world as a mod lel or metaphor to encom- ss those oe studied Dy the narratologist. But while the study of ee a jn its dominant structuralist variety—has often shown little concern with culture, his. toy, politics, and, most of all, power—theories of the gaze are v these factors. ery much occupied by Origins - ‘The gaze’ does not denote a well-defined theoretical or critical movement or school. In some ways the term is used like ‘discourse’: as a means to encourage a particular way of considering a text or ani utterance, and relating it to broader socio-historical and ideo- logical matters. Theories of the gaze cannot be traced back to a single place of origin or time of birth; they build on and incorporate a number of traditional literary-critical concerns, along with ideas and concepts from movements and bodies of theory such as psychoanalysis, discourse studies, and film studies. As a familiar umbrella term, ‘the gaze’ is little more than a quarter of a century old. First published in 1972, John Berger's enormously influential book Ways of Seeing can be said to have prepared the ground for the development of theories of the gaze. Fundamental to Berger’s book is the assertion that the way we see things is affected by What we know or what we believe, and the different chapters of his book argue that the i i i detected in paintings historical traces of class-based power and gender inequality can be dete that em hie and illustrations, and in the ways in which these are seen. Ican ce Lore oe " . , jence; it was not just the = in the early 1970s was a liberating experience; i, a Le eee liscussion of Michelangelo to consideration of modern ar lenge sng such movement, that force Of the political claims accompanying snaividual readings and interpret- Modes of thought. However much some of Berger's indi510 | Futures and retrospects / ct of his book on ‘the way We see the e effe ations may have been challenged ao 1972, thi , rantial. way we see’ secant sense of how such Ideas led to reaper Of anew wi Perhaps the bes yes ily academic study 1s by starting with the single articte that theoretical area of specifically ’s 1975 article ‘Visual Pleasure ang , Mulvey’ ial in establishing it: Laura — com Starting with Mulvey's article also serves to remind us that theories of the gaze neither originate from, nor are limited to, literary studies. Laura Mulvey: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ The first subtitle of Mulvey’s article—The Political Use of Psychoanalysis’—is represen. tative of the thrust of the article as a whole. Mulvey takes a number of key ideas from Psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and his reinterpreter Jacques Lacan, and suggests ways of using them to further the political aims of feminism. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud associates what he terms ‘scopophilia’, with ‘taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze’. For Mulvey, such pleasures can be re-created in the cinema: {T]he mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, Portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world.? Mulvey further argues that pleasure in a world ordered by sexual imbalance is split between the active male and the passive female; the male 8aze projects its fantasy on to the female figure, while in their traditional exhibitionist role women are both dis played and, as it were, coded to connote ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. We will see below how such a division of labour in the economy of the gaze can also be applied to the distinc- tion between colonialist and colonialized, “To exemplify her argument, Mulvey refers to various films, including Alfred Hitch- cock’s classic Rear Window (1954), Jeff, the main male character in this film, is a photog: tapher who has broken a leg taking a Photograph at a race track, As a result, he Is man in the block of apartments visible from his window has murtered his wife, and heTheories of the gaze | 511 and more interested in this man and (until she starts to share his interest ore ye? oe pe seen ‘out of the window) less and less in Lisa, Crucial to Jeff's obsessive i jsthe one-way, non-interactive form it takes—a form that may remind us of the * en observation of Lydgate and Rosamond in Eliot's Middlemarch. At one ft Jeffs referred to a8 a Peeping Tom, aterm that comes from the mythic gait intl ay Godiva. When Lady Godiva rode naked through the town, Peeping Tom Fog of b2AY Ter, and was struck blind for doing so, The myth usefully ilustrates @ 8 ofthat the gaining of sexual pleasure from watching a woman secretly 2 re and invites impotence (blinding being interpreted asa form of symbolic atts estingly, at the end of the film, the suspected murderer detects Jeff's osttln) rm, and looks straight at Jeff. In doing so, he looks straight at the sberaton tus, the audience. The identification between the Peeping Tom in the ee those in the cinema auditorium is complete. ~ Ba acl has been citicize for dealing inadequately with the issu - wer, who seems to have to identify both with Lisa’s ‘exhibitionism’ and Jeff's But it has been enormously influential in establishing that the forms of cted ina work of art cannot be separated from the forms of looking ducted by reader or spectator, even though these latter forms of got e of the female vie ism. poking that are de} atthat work of art con vnkngare literal in the case of the cinema and metaphorical in the case of the readin; literature. Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ The same year that Mulvey’s article was published also saw the first publication (in its aiginal French) of another key theoretical text on the gaze, Michel Foucault—a thinker dificult to categorize, but one who can be inadequately described as a historian of culture and ideas—included in his 1975 book Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (in tnglsh, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977)) a chapter dealing with ‘Tanopticism’, The term—meaning ‘all-seeing’—is taken from the writings of the English = Dhilosopher Jeremy Bentham, Bentham used the cognate term ‘Panopticon’ in a pro- een in 1791 fora prison in which all of the prisoners had individual cells in a ae building, and could thus be observed from a tower placed at the hub of this ring. eae Lydgate and Rosamond, and (until the end of the film) the suspected a a Rear Window—were subject to a gaze that they could not return. Unlike the oo ee however, the whole point of this arrangement was that the prisoners ee a they were being observed—or, crucially, that they might be being oy tetera constant possibility is always present in the prisoner's mind, and thus for, bur eens is no longer just ‘outside’, and capable of being avoided or hidden “elsciptine act in the prisoner's own mind. Absolute surveillance leads to absolute . As Foucault summarizes the situation, ‘in short ... the inmates should be SSand retrospects , 512 | Futures f which they are themselves the bearers’.? Controver, tion of wl See an arrangement is more cruel than systems reliant on, cl sially, Foucault suggests that su sical torture. in. The comment is that it is worth Bs one qualificatio and aze At this point, one at while Laura Mulvey’ article implicitly associates the male g Sonsiering the fact " a eftis confined toa wheelchair, symbolically castrated, and more with disempowerme ’s sexuality), for Bentham a, interested in his neighbours’ secrets than nu ae ‘noses ee a Foucault the gaze is unambiguously a meai is, for Bentham and Foucault, he who decides ar eer a a Sere is associated both with male disempower, rena aed ah aaa ae eae eer contradiction as it ment (impotence) and with the exertion of male cot may at first appear. The rapist is typically a man who is unable to enjoy consensual and mutually rewarding sex, but he is also a man who exercises brutal power on an innocent victim. Jeff’s ‘rape’ of those whose privacies he invades is purely symbolic, but this cannot be said of the main male character in the film Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), probably one of the few films ever to have a character utter the word ‘scoptophilia’ (the form of the term used in early translations of Freud). This man actually photographs the expression of terror on his victims’ faces while he murders them. I will return to the {dea of the camera asa metaphor of rape in my discussion of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, but I want to draw attention to the fact that the voyeuristic observation of a woman bya man Is not just a convenient metaphor for physical violence such as rape; in the real world itis often directly linked to and even a prelude to such violence. The qualification I mentioned above concerns ‘knowing that one is being watched’, I said earlier that the situation of those ‘observed by Jeff in Rear Window was different from the prisoners in the Panopticon, because the former did not know that they were under observation. However, as various commentators on Hitchcock's film have pointed out, Rear Window was made at the height of the Cold War and of what is known as McCarthy- ism in the United States (after the ted-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy), a time when neighbours were being €ncouraged to spy on one another so as to detect and unmask Communists. There is little doubt that the paranoia induced by such Political pressures can be detected in the film, so that although Jeff's neighbours are apparently quite unworried about being observed, this Peace of mind is not shared by the film's first the secrets of everyone in an partment block can by © uncovered by a man in a wheelchair with a camera equipped with a telephoto lens, ” The gaze in interpersonal Psychology Theorists of t! i ori ot me aus humanities in Seneral, and in literary criticism in particulat, y little attention to ‘writings about the gaze fron. within social psyct™Theories of the gaze | 513 terpersonal psychology. Michael Ar; seo nse as Of interacting individuals), including much useful ate ae in oe variations in looking behaviour, But it is a work that ae lt athe itical or ideological implications of such behaviour, or in any m a : ae nsions of tHE concept, Even so, Argyle and Cook's work is useful a tor ial ynformation about forms of literal looking that form the basis for more er ie ical extensions of the concept. extensions yptheories of the gaze come from a range of different sources, they have also been applied and! developed in a number of different bodies of theory. | want to mention, briefly, three these. cat feminism. It should be clear from my discussion so far that considerations of poth the literal and the metaphorical gaze are inseparably connected to an interest in differential gender roles. In the standard formulation: men look, women are looked at. Not just this, but if the owner of the gaze has power, then this gendered relation to the gze|sboth the product of patriarchy (the power exercised by men ‘over women) and also avay of reinforcing male dominance. Inan interesting article on the ‘American poet Emily Dickinson, the critic Lisa Harper tas argued that theories based on the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reflect the fact that he has little to say about the gaze of a woman, One result of this, she argues, is that the desiring gaze is constructed as the gaze of a male subject at a female abject, so that little room is left for the active gaze of a desiring woman and no place for herdesire. Theories of the gaze have thus alerted feminist critics to the need to resist that particular variant of what has been dubbed ‘immasculation’: the pressure on a female teader to adopt the viewpoint of a man while reading. Outside theory and within literary works, however, the interactive gaze ofaman anda woman is recurrently portrayed by authors ‘of both sexes as a space of mutually perceived equality, There is a democracy in the unaggressive, shared look, a democracy that serves many authors as a model of what the relationship between men and women, and aman anda woman, might be but rarely is. Feminist critics have also pointed out that women eee ave traditionally had to be more skilled in using their own eyes and observing the eyes ‘ed in the works of women of others than have men, and that such skills can Be t2¢ authors, , Te Pama eeretecpn arate acca tn fon at a woman is pressured to adopt is of interest not just to feminist theorists but te theorists of narrative more generally. If the g32° ofa fictional narrator is a male and if the narrator is explicitly of implicitly gendered as male (think of the a concern with the ‘reading pos-514 | Futures and retrospects eudonym ‘George Eliot’), ther « the ps yt hen ‘poing of fi tin, vr ees oi mae on ee Perspective that carries with ita lot of ideological Sees Third, post-colontalism. It is not just men who look anc 7 he ate looked a, Rulers look, and those ruled—including the ‘subject races ° ieee PEOPLES ayer their eyes. I can find no better illustration of the relevance of the Ge £0 Post-coloniaisy theory than the following comment made by Jean-Paul Sartre to the French readers = anthology of African texts edited by Leopold Senghor. enjoyed for three | want you to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. For the white man has thousand years the privilege of seeing without being seen. It was a seeing pure and ‘uncomplicate, {ie light of his eyes drew all things from thelr primeval darkness. The whiteness of his skin Was further aspect of vision, alight condensed, The white man, white because he was a man, White tke the day, white as truth is white, white like virtue, lighted like a torch all creation; he unfolded the essence, secret and white, of existence. Today, these black men have fixed their gaze upon u, and our S2ze's thrown back into our eyes. ... By this steady and corrosive gaze, we are picked to the bones However, it was only following the publication of Edward W, Said’s book Orientalism in 1978 that the use of the look to empower the colonizer and disempower the Colonized began to be theorized more actively. From the start of his book Said insists that orien. ReadingsTheories of the gaze | 515 I's settled thing; next week we sl ae 8 ‘of outlandish things does they Seer ee Pat iN ors vefeocoa-nut—coral reefstatooed chles—and a ed Rous sean ed yee ove auit-tees carved canoes dancing on the flashing bl ain oe rr egy noble idols—heathensh rites and human sacrifices ce aa wee me tne teangelY jumbled anticipations that haunted ime during ou st oun! fetan irresistible curlosity to see those islands which the ected aa lu sjences amongst the Typee are certainly informed and structured by the ; ae en oul peas includes references to myths of the ange, ne Case an erminate fairyland that Is like the enchanted A jn the fairy-tale, an e ‘Happy Valley’ of Samuel Johnson’s The History of ges (1759)- But if significant parts of the text satisfy such expectations, Melville’s cts the inhabitants of Typee challenging the gaze of the North American he finds tert 280 dep! ‘When he and his companion encounter a group from Typee, jnterlopers inset objectified by their gaze. vem in particulat, who appeared to be the highest in rank, placed himself directly facing. me; ne of th t at me with a rigidity of aspect ‘under which I absolutely qualled. He never onc® opened his re expression of the countenance, without turning his face aside for @ ined his seve Never before had 1 been subjected to s0 strange and steady a glance; it revealed ind of the savage, but it appeared to be reading my own.” the moment is an electric on® the white man has his gaze, a5 Senghor puts it, thrown tackinto his eyes, he is ‘picked to the bone’ by this ‘steady and corrosive gaze’ Just aS the spectator is—briefly—at the end of Rear Window. ‘The disturbing challenge of the returned gaze has, by the end of the nineteenth century, become established as 4 symbolic claim for that shared humanity denied by colonialist attitudes. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), for example, the .d for Africa, witnesses a boat from the shore, ‘paddled nanator Marlow, on a ship boun byblack fellows’, and reports that they were 4 great comfort to Jook at. But later on in the novel Marlow is extremely disconcerted when his dying helmsman Jooks at him in a manner replete with an intimate profundity that seems to claim distant kinship from him, Looking at the oppressed is a great comfort; having them return your look makes dams on you. In Africa, Marlow finds that Europeans such as the Russian and the Accountant are unwilling to meet his eyes, while ve ‘superb’ African woman, IR Con” trast, looks at the Europeans with a glance characterized by unswerving steadiness. put maintal je moment. rohing of the mil pss The male gaze A , book that I have already mentioned, John Berger's book Ways of SeeiN8, provides a \seful start l starting-point here. looked at. This tch themselves being | en to men. Women wa! so the relation of wom Men act Grand wore eppeat Men look at wo! es not only most relations between men ‘and women but aland retrospects 516 | Future: erself s male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns heey themselves. The surveyor of woman in Se ‘of visioni a sight. into an object—and most particularly an ne " plished in 1972, the year in whicl Bi a 0d’ nove, fo een eer ned In Atwood's novel the violence congealed into they, rege os instakingly and painfully revealed. In the most shocking Se lone of ite two male characters, David, who claims to be makin : pee ey aie amples, forces his wife Anna to strip naked so that he can film her, " aa Sane narrator and her male friend. But the threat of violence jg always behind how Anna presents herself to David—and, as Berger suggests is the case for ™any ‘women—to herself, . Anna is there, still in her sleeveless nylon nightgown and bare feet, standing in front of the wa yellowish mirror. There's a zippered case on the counter in front of her, she’s putting on makeup, | realize I've never seen her without it before; shorn of the pink cheeks and heightened eyes her face ig Curiously battered, a worn doll’s, her artificial face is the natural one. The backs of her arms have g00se pimples. “You don’t need that here,” I say, ‘there's no one to look at you’... Anna says in @ low voice, ‘He doesn’t like to see me without it’ and then, contradicting hersel, ‘He doesn’t know I wear it.’ Later on in the novel the truth comes out. ‘God,’she said, ‘what’m I going to do? I forgot my makeup, he'll kill me.’ | tudied her: inthe twilight her face was grey. “Maybe he won't notice,’ I said, ‘He'll notice, don't you worry. Not now maybe, it hasn't all rubbed off, but in the morning, He wants me to look like a young chick all the time, if I don’t he gets mad,”!0Theories of the gaze | 517 ore self-aware, more self-consciou: works 8. It has also for eo re not just a matter of gathering information; hake oer the i s complicity ations | power rela 9 oso" to unequal po' r relationships in our world. oO . i a eh READING .@ Cook, Mark, Gaze and Mutual Gaze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, sachael a i ‘sandal Social-psychological account of interpersonal looking behaviout. jonn of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972). & popular, polemical, pro- wot dase for the view that our ‘ways of seeing’ are impregnated with the I equalcies ghustrated se" .d our history. Mor corore an m.poats ‘The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999): Contains a ex entitled ‘Optics and Power in the Novel’ that Is critical of ‘Foucault-derived a? attempts to compare the observer in the “panopticon’ to the author's oF to fiction’ and of pter constitutes a counter-view to my ow? ai © jationship to fictional characters. This cha A. can nathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cat@- ‘Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). Presented as ‘a ook about vision and its historical construction’, veepan extremely rch study of the overlapping of ‘problems of vision’ and ‘questions about the . sody, and the operation of social power’. Good too on the historical changes that mean that ay mages no longer have any reference {0 the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world’. tarper, Lisa,‘ “The Eyes ‘Accost—and Sunder”: Unveiling Emily Dickinson's Poetics’, Emily Dick- 18, A good illustration of the productivity of theories of the gaz ‘es that many theories ofthe gaze have left ison Journal, 9/1 (2000), 21-4 wen applied to the work of a single Writer Harper argu nse dictates and as Dickinson's poetry clearly articu- no room for the fact that, ‘{als common sel late, women do look with desire’. Aaton, Laura, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from ‘Clarissa’ to ‘Rescue 911° (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999).A difficult but rewarding book that argues that sentimental’ texts from novels to TV S0aPs conceal a sadomasochistic desire for control. lndudes chapters on Simuel Richardson's Claris Gustave Flaubert’s L’ Henty James's The Portrait ofa Lady, and Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights. rae Ann, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (London: Routledge, ere it deals with film rather than Iiterature, this stimulating book reveals how and post-colonialist approaches to the 8976 have much to offer each ‘other. Also contains and ‘gaze’, for example). nae 4 . | discussion of terminology (proposing 2 distinction petween ‘look «Tree Books and Two Filins (The Mouton: Hague. 1979). icean Athoug Robert M., Narcissus anid the Voyeur: of Nate it pre-dates recent theories of the 8226 this book contains thought-provoking analyses See ae Hawthome's The Scarlet ener and Herman Melslles TYPS® EAC, The Medieval Poet at Voyeur (cambridge: Cambridge Univers press, 1993). A subtle Vey patently interesting application of mor eories of the gaze t© medieval literature. at on the symbiotic relationsh!P ate-public distinction 2nd the Na and surveillance. othe mete (¢4), Reading Images (Houndmills: patgrave, 2000), A most useful collection ' thal anche ae atrnets associated wir the BA2S: ve jades Michel Foucault oP e recent thi between the priv518 | Futures and retrospects 's article ‘Of the Gaze as “Objet Pe 1's Las Menifias, Jacques Lacan's at : tit Pre cakes Ser He ai hhooks's article ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female , Rosal . Spectators’, and other central texts. NOTES 1. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, $ 2. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, first pub. 1975, written 1973; repr. in idem, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 17- ; 3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 201. First pub. in French 1975, and in English 1977. 4. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 294-S. Sartre’s comments are.cited from Black Orpheus, trans, S. W. Allen (Paris: n.p., 1976). S. E.Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (London: Routledge, 1997), P. 78. 6. Herman Melville, Typee, ed. Ruth Blair, The World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 13, 7. Ibid. 90. 8. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972), p. 47. 9. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1972) (London: Virago, 1979), pp. 43-4. 10. Ibid. 122. 1965), p. 299.