The male gaze derives from feminist theory
that started in the 1970's by film psychologist Laura Mulvey, however, in
recent years the theory has been applied to arts and literature. The male gaze
looks at the ways in which women are presented as the object of desire through
the perspective of a male spectator. Women's bodies are displayed as an art
form in which they must allow men to inspect their bodies for their own sexual
pleasures. Traditionally the woman looks away and avoids eye contact with her
male spectator, while he controls a direct gaze upon her body. The term has now
become "...a feminist cliché for referring to the voyeuristic way in which
men look at women" (Chandler, 2000: lines 4-5). This voyeuristic
approach is something that Mulvey expands on in her essay “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema”. In this blog I will explore this idea in further depth in my
discussion of Mulvey’s approach as well as other key theorists of the
gaze.
When the concept was brought into the field of literature many
feminist writers, such as Jeannette Winterson, Michèle Roberts and Angela
Carter introduced this into their work. This allowed writers to criticise the
representations and treatment of women in patriarchal societies. In
this blog I focus my attention on the influential work of Angela Carter and her
collection of short stories in The Bloody
Chamber. Here I will investigate the techniques that Carter uses in order
to make an argument about the male gaze from a feminist perspective.
When the concept was brought into the field of literature many
feminist writers, such as Jeannette Winterson, Michèle Roberts and Angela
Carter introduced this into their work. This allowed writers to criticise the
representations and treatment of women in patriarchal societies. In
this blog I focus my attention on the influential work of Angela Carter and her
collection of short stories in The Bloody
Chamber. Here I will investigate the techniques that Carter uses in order
to make an argument about the male gaze from a feminist perspective.
The argument of
this blog discusses the following quote and responds to the ideas projected in
this paragraph:
“A woman
must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her
own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is
weeping at the death of her father; she can scarcely avoid
envisaging herself walking or weeping” (Berger). Critically analyse the
formal, thematic and theoretical (re)deployment of the ‘male gaze’;
‘voyeuristic’ or ‘fetishistic looking’; mirrors and surfaces; performance and
spectacle; and/or the figure of the flaneur/euse in the literary works of at
least TWO woman writers or texts studied on the module.
