Smallwood, Carolynn Aileen2024-08-152024-08-1519961996https://hdl.handle.net/1828/19774The novels of Charlotte Bronte, with their frequent and sustained scenarios of inter-personal, erotic gazing between female and male characters, are receptive to the application of feminist film theory which focuses on spectatorship and its relation to desire, to the construction of gender, and to issues of subjectivity. With particular emphasis on The Professor, Jane Eyre, and Villette, this thesis explores the inherent ambiguities of Bronte's gaze apparatus: the imbrication of a male scopic economy which denies the female gaze and subjectivity with disruptions of that system. Similar to the methodology of feminist film criticism, this thesis also deploys the discourse of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis (frequently cited concepts in the thesis include the oedipal crisis, castration anxiety, defence mechanisms such as voyeurism, fetishism, sadism, and masochism) as a political weapon to expose the patriarchal unconscious which informs Bronte's texts. In Bronte's first novel, The Professor, the censorious subtext which suggests William Crimsworth's monstrousness fails to mitigate the effects of a sadistic male gaze (and narrative voice) which negate Frances Henri's subjectivity. Despite the representation of Jane Eyre's gaze and her subversive strategies to evade spectacularization in Jane Eyre, these attempts to incorporate female subjectivity collapse under the weight of Rochester's canny and relentless masculine surveillance system which is aided by the overall masculine scopic economy. In Villette, Lucy Snowe's partial transvestism in the school play becomes a metaphor for her spectatorial transvestism: her seeming alternation between a masculine spectatorial position with its access to agency and desire, and a feminine position typified by passivity and a figurative or literal immobilization of her gaze. However, transvestism is recoverable as a metaphor and consequently, the patriarchal gaze apparatus consistently reconfirms the fixity of Lucy's feminine gender identity. Bronte's novels perfectly illustrate the vicissitudes of the female gaze and subjectivity typical of texts which simultaneously address issues of female subjectivity yet also endorse traditional gender roles. Although the patriarchal imperative which underlies the novels ultimately circumscribes the female characters, Bronte's legacy resides in the attempt to envision moments--howsoever transitory--of resistance to that system.84 pagesAvailable to the World Wide WebThesis