Thus far, we've encountered dozens of apparent contradictions within the texts, contexts, and interpretation of the texts and contexts that we've been reading. Some apparently contradictory situations actually exist simultaneously, and
I'm interested in looking a little more closely at some of them. The germ of this thought actually started in my art history class, (this will seem like I'm going on a tangent, but bear with me) while we were looking at slides of Verrocchio's David. Our professor started discussing the homoerotic overtones of the statue, but this statement makes an implicit assumption that the gaze looking on the statue is male. Obviously, given Marymount's rather unique gender ratio, there were about four guys in a class of about 35 people. So, while definitely making a valid obseration about the qualities of the statue, the professor was implicitly dismissing the female gaze in favor of the implied male gaze. The idea of the "male gaze" has come up repeatedly in examinations of works of art or literature. Basically, it is the assumption that the "gaze" or the consumer of a certain work is male, and this interplay between the work and the maleness of the viewer's gaze raises some interesting questions. So, here we have something of a contradiction between what is assumed and what is real. By this I mean that while traditional examinations of literature are made from a male-oriented point of view, Watt reminds us that most readers of the burgeoning novel (such as Pamela were female. Here we have a work of literature created by a male author with a female protagonist, created for the consumption of a reading public that has a large ratio of female readers, yet at the same time examinations of these works often assume the primacy of the male gaze. This paradox repeats itself when we consider that our class is overwhelmingly female. As a reader, I make a conscious effort not to divorce myself from the work I am investigating. That is, I am conscientious of where I stand as a reader in relation to the text, both in consideration of my historical context and my gendered hermeneutic. I hope I'm not going too out on a limb here, but I am fairly certain that my interpretation of Pamela will be different than a male reader (even one in the same historical and educational context as myself) precisely because of the gendered nature of my interpretation. Obviously I am not attempting to post this as a question of opposing, "right or wrong" intepretations but rather making an observation that I feel is relevant to the contents of this novel. This implies all sorts of interesting developments to the ideas of power, property, sexuality, and male/female discourse as presented within the novel itself.
Before this post turns into me being a complete blowhard, I'm very interested in what my fellow readers think about this idea of the male/female gaze of the reader affecting the interpretation of the novel.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
The (fe)male gaze and Pamela
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2 comments:
Alana, you raise an interesting question, particularly for this novel. I love Verrocchio's David and noticed from the moment I saw it the effeminate way in which David stand's over Goliath's head. It's a wonderful visual interplay. Certainly it's an effort for me to try to look at art from a female perspective, and though I may try to give an unbiased critical approach, I inevitably have to come back to my own view of the world. How much of it is the male part specifically must be left open to debate. Perhaps because I am male, I look at the statue wondering about how it makes me feel about violence and masculinity and even male sexuality. And yet, living in a world that has historically been so male-centered, I don't notice implicit preferences to "my" gaze.
Reading Pamela, though, I am struck by the fact that the male author of the book is passing off comments on female and male action from a female perspective. As in many other genres when men try to present women, the viewer/audience tends to find a male fantasy of what the artist wants women to be like, rather than an objective view of what they are. My biggest issue with considering the "male gaze" is the implicit primacy given to the author's intention. In some ways the assumption that other interpretations are only from the male point of view is pure chauvinism, and yet it also assumes something about whom the author might be addressing his work. In Richardson's case, it's easy to view the work as his attempt to influence women, or his attempt to encourage male fantasies of how women are, but I find it more useful to ignore what Richardson might assume about his readership and more about what his work states. I'm actually intrigued by what Richardson presents about men in Pamela since there are a variety of men whom Richardson could write intimately and without much conjecture, unlike his unlikely, unrealistic heroine.
I think that Alana is definitely on to an important critical mytheme here--typically, we *do* tend to imagine "the gaze" as "the male gaze." This is a tradition in Western culture, however, that has in the past twenty years become visible as a discourse of power. Who gets to see? Who is seen? The nature of the individual agency there is clearly gendered--though I agree with Alana that we may not want to simply "agree."
Judith Fetterley, an important feminist critic, has coined the term "immasculation" to define the process whereby women learn to read as men, from a male perspective--and thereby privileging the attendant masculine values (order over disorder, activity over passivity, high over low, complex over simple, white over black, and so on). I wonder to what extent we can escape reading from a masculine perspective, especially--as Liana points out in her post--given the fact that Richardson is only dressing himself in Pamela.
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