Vision and gender: Looking relationships in the plays and teleplays of Harold Pinter

A good deal of Harold Pinter's work, specifically, his plays and teleplays, exposes the role of the technology of representation in creating gendered looking relationships both within the stage and screen space and between those spaces and their spectators. These works tend to focus on male characters and to be addressed to what Laura Mulvey calls a "masculinized spectator," apparently embracing "masculinity as point of view."; However, this study argues that many of Pinter's works denaturalize this idealized spectator position by exposing the function of the usually invisible technology of representation in creating it. Each of the works considered here exhibits an explicit consideration of the technology of representation (video, film, the stage) and the ideological implications of that technology for the representation of women. Further, this study will argue that Pinter's works expose the disruptive potential of the female image as it is positioned between two "masculinized" looking positions.; The first chapter of the dissertation explicates the role of a subjective camera and its relationship to female resistance in two teleplays, Tea Party and The Basement. The second chapter argues that The Collection and The Lover offer a rigorous demonstration of theatre's power to frame and immobilize female characters. The third chapter discusses the tension between weak male characters on stage and the strength of the genre itself to circumscribe female images. The final moments of The Homecoming depict a kind of stand-off between the framing devices of the theatre and Ruth's demonstrated power to resist the men around her. The fourth chapter turns to Pinter's more recent political plays and argues that the parameters of the stage that Ruth cannot fully escape in The Homecoming now, in One for the Road and Mountain Language, define a cruel theatre in which control over looking relationships equals absolute power.