Gaze And Counter-gaze

Marina Carr(1964-)is the most successful female playwright in Irish theatre after Mrs.Gregory.Since the performance of her famous Midlands plays: The Mai(1994),Portia Coughlan(1996)and By the Bog of Cats...(1999),Carr has won Irish Times Award for Best New Play,E.M.Foster Award for Literary Achievement and many other awards.As a female writer,Carr uses her female identity to reflect on the social and family attributes and functions of women,which is the normal expression of contemporary feminist consciousness.However,her play 16 Possible Glimpses which is staged in 2011 is based on Chekhov’s male perspective.The four women living around him are all suffering pain,and the male’s perspective remains unchanged.It is still Carr’s resistance to patriarchy and concern for women.The research on Marina Carr’s works at home and abroad has always focused on the analysis of artistic skills and Irishness in her works,and rarely involves thinking about her views on feminist writing.Based on this,this thesis uses 16 Possible Glimpses as the research context,through the study method of close reading,with the theoretical guidance of existential feminism and male gaze,analyzes the role shaping in the text,and then explores Carr’s feminist writing and the unique value of this play.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter mainly introduces the Irish playwright Marina Carr and 16 Possible Glimpses,the current status of research on Marina Carr at home and abroad,the core concepts of existential feminism and male gaze,and points out the predecessors’ views on Carr’s feminist writing.There are blank in the study of Carr’s writing view,and at the same time the research significance of this thesis is explained.The second chapter summarizes the group portraits of the four core female characters in the play.They share some common traits: trapped in otherness and femininity.First,women lack self-awareness and eventually become the Other;second,men and women jointly lead to the rigidity of women’s self-femininity,and at the same time,rigid femininity helps men to bind women in the predicament of immanence;third,women’s internalization of femininity eventually leads to the disappearance of transcendence and the appearance of immanence.The third chapter summarizes Carr’s feminist writing using the conclusions of Chapter two.It starts with the male gaze to explore the reasons for the formation of women’s predicament.Women are the Other,femininity is solidified and bound to immanence,because men gaze at women and discipline them,leading to women’s predicament.But Carr chose to counter-gaze at men,deconstructing the gaze and discipline of women in a patriarchal society.The male character in 16 Possible Glimpses does not have "masculinity" which is depicted in traditional plays,that’s to say she "castrates" the male character.The fourth chapter adopts the feminist writing of the gaze and the counter-gaze obtained in the third chapter,sorts out the main works of Marina Carr in the past,and then discusses the unique aesthetic uniqueness of16 Possible Glimpses.From the perspective of feminist writing,female characters were disciplined by the male gaze,and male characters were "castrated" by the female counter-gaze in her previous works.These male characters were wretched,depraved,incompetent,and ugly both physically and mentally.In terms of aesthetic uniqueness from the writing perspective,16 Possible Glimpses rarely cuts in from the male perspective,expressing Carr’s questioning and resistance to the discourse of patriarchy.In the meanwhile,she expresses her thoughts on writer’s occupation and writing view through the mouths of Chekhov and Tolstoy.In terms of themes,Carr goes out of Ireland and turned her attention from Irish women to the world,no longer limited to the expression of "Irishness",and to some extent it represents the trend of globalization written in Ireland.The fifth chapter is the conclusion.Carr’s use of feminist writing of gaze and countergaze disintegrates the binary opposition of patriarchal society,deconstructs the unidirectional gaze of men on women,and turns two opposing subjects into a complex dialectical relationship.She acknowledges that there are differences between the opposites,but there is no difference between superior and inferior,no hierarchical order.There should be penetration between the two,and no centralized subject and otherized object,but all turn to differentiated subjects.She actively explores de-gendered writing,weakens her female identity,and focuses on universal experiences with "consensus" rather than purely gendered experiences.At the same time,she turns her attention from Irish women to global women,which not only plays a leading role in the new generation of Irish female writers,but also expands the international market and influence of Irish literature in the context of globalization.