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5 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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In a paper by Priscilla Walton her focus is on the The turn of the screw as a story by a male novelist whose narrator is a young woman whose narrative is related by a man (Douglas). She suggests that James would have found it necessary to validate the words of a young governess by creating a frame story involving men telling the story round the fire. In doing this James gets to write from a feminist perspective without losing his male authority in telling a story.
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It could be suggested that Turn of the Screw is a feminist text. This essay intents to discuss and analyse Henry James’ Turn of the Screw using Mulveys theory of the male gaze.
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This essay intents to discuss and analyse Henry James’ Turn of the Screw using Mulveys theory of the male gaze.
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If we apply this theory to literature thinking that Henry James as author is the camera as it records the profilmic event, that the audience watching is the reader and that character interaction on screen is the character interaction within a novel then we can begin to analyse The Turn of the Screw as Mulvey analyses cinema.
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The Male Gaze – Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the look
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Hollywood women characters of the 1950s and '60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness" while the camera positioning and the male viewer constituted the "bearer of the look." Mulvey suggests two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era:
"voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing woman as image "to be looked at") fetishistic" (i.e. seeing woman as a substitute for "the lack of penis," the underlying psychoanalytic fear of castration). |
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Jaques Lacan – described how the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of ego.
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This mirror moment comes before language and is the first way male or female gets a sense of self or ‘I’.
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It is with the introduction of language however that feminists who support Lacans work remind us that language is a realm of public discourse.
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The language learned reflects a binary logic that opposes such terms as active / passive, masculine / feminine, sun/moon, father / mother, head / heart. Therefor the structure of language is phallocentric. This supports Mulveys theory of the male gaze in that the binary opposition is that of active male looking and the passive female being the object of the gaze.
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