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"BUT THIS IS WHAT I SEE; THIS IS WHAT I SEE": RE-IMAGINING GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH THE WOMAN ARTIST IN PHELPS, JOHNSTONE, AND WOOLF
Title
"BUT THIS IS WHAT I SEE; THIS IS WHAT I SEE": RE-IMAGINING GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH THE WOMAN ARTIST IN PHELPS, JOHNSTONE, AND WOOLF.
Creator
Wayne, Heather, Jones, Anna, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description
Since the publication of Laura MulveyÂÂ's influential article ÂÂ"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,ÂÂ" in which she identifies the pervasive presence of the male gaze in Hollywood cinema, scholars have sought to account for the female spectator in her paradigm of gendered vision. This thesis suggests that women writers have long debated the problem of the female spectator through literary depictions of the female artist. Women...
Show moreSince the publication of Laura MulveyÂÂ's influential article ÂÂ"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,ÂÂ" in which she identifies the pervasive presence of the male gaze in Hollywood cinema, scholars have sought to account for the female spectator in her paradigm of gendered vision. This thesis suggests that women writers have long debated the problem of the female spectator through literary depictions of the female artist. Women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesÂÂ--including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Johnstone, and Virginia WoolfÂÂ--recognized the power of the woman artist to undermine the trope of the male gazing subject and a passive female object. Examining PhelpsÂÂ's The Story of Avis (1877), JohnstoneÂÂ's A Sunless Heart (1894), and WoolfÂÂ's To the Lighthouse (1927) illustrates how the woman artistÂÂ's active vision disrupts MulveyÂÂ's ÂÂ"active/male and passive/femaleÂÂ" binary of vision. PhelpsÂÂ's painter-heroine Avis destabilizes the power of the male gaze not only by exerting her own vision, but also by acting as an active object to manipulate the way she is seen. Johnstone uses artist Gasparine to demonstrate the dangers of vision shaped by either aesthetic or political conventions, suggesting that even feminist idealism can promote the objectification of its heroines. Finally, Woolf redefines the terms of objectification through painter Lily Briscoe, whose vision imbues material objects with subjectivity, thereby going beyond the boundaries between male and female to blur the distinction between subject and object. Through their novels, Phelps, Johnstone, and Woolf suggest that depictions of human experience need to be radically re-thought in order to adequately represent the complexity of subjectivity.
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Date Issued
2010
Identifier
CFE0003291, ucf:48491
Format
Document (PDF)
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0003291
Concerning the Perceptive Gaze: The Impact of Vision Theories on Late Nineteenth-Century Victorian Literature
Title
Concerning the Perceptive Gaze: The Impact of Vision Theories on Late Nineteenth-Century Victorian Literature.
Creator
Rushworth, Lindsay, Jones, Anna, Philpotts, Trey, Campbell, James, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description
This thesis examines two specific interventions in vision theory(-)namely, Herbert Spencer's theory of organic memory, which he developed by way of Lamarckian genetics and Darwinian evolution in A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1864), and the Aesthetic Movement (1870s(-)1890s), famously articulated by Walter Pater in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873 and 1893). I explore the impact of these theories on late nineteenth-century fiction, focusing on two novels: Thomas Hardy's Two...
Show moreThis thesis examines two specific interventions in vision theory(-)namely, Herbert Spencer's theory of organic memory, which he developed by way of Lamarckian genetics and Darwinian evolution in A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1864), and the Aesthetic Movement (1870s(-)1890s), famously articulated by Walter Pater in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873 and 1893). I explore the impact of these theories on late nineteenth-century fiction, focusing on two novels: Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882) and Edith Johnstone's A Sunless Heart (1894). These two authors' texts engage with scientific and aesthetic visual theories to demonstrate their anxieties concerning the perceptive gaze and to reveal the difficulties and limitations of visual perception and misperception for both the observer and the observed within the context of social class.It is widely accepted by scholars of the so-called visual turn in the Victorian era(-) following landmark works by Kate Flint and Nancy Armstrong(-)that myriad anxieties were associated with new ways of seeing during this time. Building on this work, my thesis focuses specifically on how these two approaches to visual perception(-)organic memory and Aestheticism(-)were intertwined with anxieties about social status and mobility. The novels analyzed in this thesis demonstrate how subjective visual perception affects one's place within the social hierarchy, as we see reflected in the fluctuating social statuses of Hardy's star-crossed lovers, Swithin St Cleeve and Lady Constantine, and Johnstone's two female protagonists, Gasparine O'Neill and Lotus Grace.
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Date Issued
2019
Identifier
CFE0007527, ucf:52624
Format
Document (PDF)
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007527