A Reading Of The Volcano Lover In The Light Of Gaze Theory

Susan Sontag lived in the stage of evolution and battleground of modernism and postmodernism.On the one hand,she was deeply influenced by modernism,while on the other hand,she had to absorb some elements of postmodernism.Her novel writing was initially in postmodern style,radical and experimental,but from The Volcano Lover,she turned to the more conservative modernism.This essentially reflects her deep fascination with modernism.Although she lived in the era when the peak of modernism had passed,she had a special love for modernism and is defined as “the elegiac modernist”.The novel covers a wide range of topics and contains a large number of critical statements that express Sontag's thoughts on modernity and postmodernity.One article of Brigitte Pucker,“Watching and Touching: Spectacle and Collection in Sontag's Volcano Lover”,begins with a clear statement that the novel is a forum for the ideas of the visual and has a deep connection with the Gaze.Unlike traditional fictions,The Volcano Lover does not aim at depicting the characters and reproducing the reality of imagination.There are a lot of direct comments by the author,which all point to her thinking about modernity.From the perspective of gaze,this paper explores the three most prominent themes in the novel: volcano,collection and beauty,and finds that the novel reflects Sontag's thinking on the issue of subject,which is core of modernity.The thesis explores the subject issue contained in the novel from the perspective of Gaze Theory.The theory of gaze was originally developed due to the modern subject issue,and its theoretical foundation has been based on theories of authorities on subject issue such as Sartre,Lacan and Foucault.The thesis' s main body is composed of three chapters.The second chapter reveals the deep connection between Gaze Theory and the novel,and reviews the development course of Gaze Theory.The third chapter studies the subjectivity of the protagonist: the first section analyzes the protagonist's subjectivity constructed through the volcano,employing Gaze Theory in the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan;the second section analyzes the protagonist's subjectivity constructed through the collection,mainly using the theory of gaze in the context of postmodern visual culture.The last chapter studies the subjectivity of the female protagonist,adopting Gaze Theory in feminist context.The subjectivity of the protagonist is always based on the Other.As a collector,or aesthete,he is only interested in the volcano,collections and the beauty Emma.In fact,the volcano and the beauty Emma are also his collections,but these two collections are impossible to be “collected”,for ultimately,the volcano will erupt and destroy everything around,and the beauty will leave him due to the awakening of her self-consciousness.He possesses these “collections” through vision and thus establishes his own subjectivity.Nevertheless,the subjectivity based on the Other is unreliable and doomed to disillusionment.Therefore,the construction of subjectivity is an endless signifier chain,and the self keeps slipping away in this chain.In fact,even the real collections do not really belong to him.The female protagonist,Emma,is the Other under male gaze.She enters the upper class by catering to the male protagonist,but she does not completely lose her own subjectivity.After finding her true love,she bravely pursues her happiness,becoming a desiring subject and a rebel against male gaze.