The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman's entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to examine the sexual politics of metaphors of vision in a literary text that is controversially argued to be a voice for the subordinated Indian immigrant women in the US. As one of the most influential schools of thought in Western philosophy, the Sartrean paradigm of sexual difference is employed to investigate this allegation by identifying the latent binary system at work in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has garnered substantial yet controversial critical attention over her representations of gender. Specifically, this essay focuses on Lahiri's prefatory story to her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), to unravel the manner her exercise of vision in this narrative perpetuates the dichotomies of a male subject and a female object pre-established in the traditional hierarchies of gender in the West. In this story, Lahiri (un)wittingly privileges masculinity over femininity and reduces the latter to a typically disgusting Sartrean female body of holes and slime. Hence, notwithstanding infrequent emasculated images of the male subject, it is ultimately the masculine that, in the battle of looks between male and female, nihilates the Other to the state of "being-in-itself" and enjoys supremacy over the feminine.
AbstractTheOEDdefines “theatricality” in essentially negative terms, as the degraded cultural progeny of the theatre itself, and in the process associates it with spectacle. Assuming cultic proportions in late-Regency London, theatricality, I argue, comes full circle to engulf theatre itself. Epitomized by the mesmeric Kean and an increasing reliance on spectacular effects, this is the point at which Lamb enters the argument. A combined study of theatrical culture and periodical writing in the Romantic period, I demonstrate how such a spectacularization of theatre informs Lamb’s performance with Elia of an “essayistic figure”.Through Elia’s ludic, phantasmal ontology in theLondon Magazine- in which the illusion of autobiography is enacted and the essay form transcended with assertions of fictive liberty - Lamb’s use of a persona is, like theatricality itself, derivative of theatre. Yet the frequent readjustment of expectations that Elia’s playfulness demands of the reader clearly designates Lamb’s as areaderlymode of theatricality that diametrically opposes the dominant model of ritualistic spectatorship.Indeed, Lamb’s career seemingly embodies the Romantic ambivalence over theatre identified by Mary Jacobus. Both failed playwright and avid theatre-goer, Lamb famously priveliges the reader’s over the audience’s experience of Shakesperare’s tragedies, then later - as Elia - celebrates artificial comedy for the escape it affords from the “diocese of strict conscience”. Elia can perhaps, therefore, be read as Lamb’s attempt at managing theatre on his own terms: an appropriation of its illusory, emancipative qualities to the unspectacular format of the familiar essay.
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