Engendering the gaze: Modernist fictions of the viewing subject

"Engendering the Gaze: Modernist Fictions of the Viewing Subject" examines representations of observers in modernist fiction through the intersection of cultural and literary history. The project considers the extent to which modern theorizations of viewing subjects, particularly psychoanalytic, Marxist and philosophical models, become a part of literary representations or can be used to expose the terms of their gendered construction. I argue that modernist fiction is an intimate participant in the period's broad and ambivalent preoccupation with visual perception, an heir to a tradition of Cartesian spectatorship whose assumptions of transcendent neutrality come repeatedly under assault. In the place of that Cartesian model, the gaze is increasingly defined discursively as a gendering, ideological machine, whether aligned with the mechanical apparatus of Marx's camera obscura or the psychic apparatus of the Oedipus complex. As the Cartesian spectator's posture of neutral detachment is continually denaturalized and subjectivized at the beginnings of the twentieth century, and the realist novel is gradually overtaken by the rise of modernism, I ask, how does 'the eye in the text' renegotiate its relation to forms of knowledge and power?;In Chapter one, "The Eye's Mind," I pair Henry James' The Sacred Fount (1901) with Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (1928) in order to show how the presence of the obsessive, voyeuristic gaze in James, and the circulation of the linguistic and representational eye in Bataille, each become the vehicle for extended critiques of the detached, omniscient postures of the Cartesian spectator. The chapter ends by using Vladamir Nabokov's The Eye (1930) to rethink the modernist observer's relation to the tactics of supervision normally associated with realist techniques of narration and representation. In Chapter two, "Spectacles of Violence, Stages of Art," I pair Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) with Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) in a consideration of individual observer's relations to social spectacle informed by Marxist theories of the transformations of visual culture in the modernist period. I conclude, in Chapter three, "Two Mirrors Facing," by pairing Blanchot's essay, "The Gaze of Orpheus" (1955) with the developmental narratives of Freud and Lacan, looking at the relationship between the gaze, the female body and symbolic activity.