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The Politics of Gender and the Visual in Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter

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The Politics of Gender and the Visual in Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter The Politics of Gender and the Visual in Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter Caleb Sivyer Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Literature) School of English, Communication & Philosophy Cardiff University 2015 Summary This thesis investigates the relationship between gender and the visual in texts by Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter. Drawing on visual studies, gender studies and film theory, I argue that my selected texts present the gendered visual field as dynamic and layered, foregrounding both a masculine economy of vision and the possibility of alternative forms of gendered subjectivity and ways of looking. The Introduction discusses the key methodological frameworks used in this thesis, including Jonathan Crary’s account of the historical construction of vision, the debates around gender, mobility and visuality centred on the figure of the flâneur, and Laura Mulvey’s account of the cinematic male gaze. I argue for the importance of recognising that the field of vision is a site of contestation composed of an interplay of connected gendered looks. Chapter One focuses on the unresolved tensions between different gendered looks in Mrs Dalloway (1925) which take place across a number of spaces and are mediated by a variety of visual frames. Chapter Two turns to Orlando (1928) to explore Woolf’s playful subversion of a masculine visual economy through a protagonist who changes sex and dress. In addition to this vacillation of appearance, I argue that the text’s representations of London in the 1920s, in particular the department store and motor-car, contribute to a proliferation of gendered looks. In turning to The Passion of New Eve (1979), Chapter Three shows how Carter foregrounds the violence involved in the performance of gender, particularly as mediated through the cinema, and further subverts masculine vision by representing gender as a masquerade. The fourth chapter focuses on The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and argues that, despite its intended revolutionary purpose, Hoffman’s optical invention fails to transform the gendered visual field and instead reinscribes the patriarchal conventions of gender and looking that it has the potential to subvert. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the works examined foreground the gendered visual field as a site of contested forms of gendered subjectivity and ways of looking. The texts map out an unresolvable tension between the masculine, hegemonic conventions which exert a powerful influence in everyday life and the possibility of going beyond them. i Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………iv Introduction Historical Constructions of Gender and the Visual……………………………………1 The Historical Construction of Vision………………………………………………...6 Mapping Gendered Looks in Woolf and Carter……………………………………...10 Gendered Gazes in the Modern City – The Flâneur/Flâneuse Debates……………..12 Woolf, Gender, Visuality…………………………………………………………….17 Woolf Chapter Summaries…………………………………………………………...23 The Gendering of the Spectator in the 1970s………………………………………...25 Carter, Gender, Visuality……………………………………………………………..31 Carter Chapter Summaries…………………………………………………………...38 A Relay of Looks from Woolf to Carter……………………………………………..39 Chapter One: Sights of Identity: Mirrors, Windows and Mobile Views in Mrs Dalloway Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..41 The Space of the Street: Walking, Looking, Becoming………………………………48 This ‘was what she loved’: Clarissa Goes Street-Haunting…………………………..52 Undermining the Flâneur’s Gaze…………………………………………………….57 Transporting the Female Gaze – The Imaginative Space of the Omnibus…………….62 ‘She felt herself everywhere’: Clarissa’s Expansive Gaze……………………………70 Reciprocating the Gaze through the Synthetic Window………………………………75 Chapter Two: Veiling, Fabricating, Moving: Negotiations of Gender in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Introduction: Re-dressing Clarissa’s Party…………………………………………...82 Fashioning Orlando’s Ambiguous Body……………………………………………..90 Orlando as a Newly Born Woman…………………………………………………...95 Orlando as a Newly Dressed Woman: Sartorial Mobility and Immobility…………..98 Modern Shocks, Motor-cars, and Mobile Views: Orlando in the Modern World….108 ii The Department Store and the Consumer’s Gaze…………………………………..116 The Motorist’s Gaze………………………………………………………………...119 For ‘nothing could be seen whole’………………………………………………….129 Chapter Three: Cinematic Masquerades of Femininity in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve Introduction…………………………………………………………………………131 The Gendered Body in the Cinematic Field of Vision……………………………...138 Veiling and Unveiling the Female Body as Femme Fatale………………………...146 Re-suturing the Masculine Subject…………………………………………………158 Lessons in Femininity, Cinema Magic and the Medusa’s Gaze……………………165 Unveiling the Feminine Cinematic Masquerade……………………………………169 Beyond the Cinematic………………………………………………………………177 Chapter Four: Kaleidoscopes, Phantasmagorias, and Peep-Shows: The Technological Gaze in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Introduction…………………………………………………………………………184 Contextualising Hoffman’s Revolution: Surrealism, Godard and the 1960s………190 Visual Order and Disorder………………………………………………………….195 The Ambiguous Albertina in the Phantasmagoria………………………………….200 Sleeping-Beauty through the Peep-Show: Photography and Stereoscopy…………209 Tragic Femininity, the Cinema, and the Mirror…………………………………….216 Meatifying Woman in the House of Anonymity……………………………………220 Male Fantasies of Femininity in Nebulous Time…………………………………...224 Inside the Dream-Factory…………………………………………………………...227 ‘Unbidden, she comes’: The Albertina-Effect……………………………………...232 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….237 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………...244 iii Acknowledgements I would like to begin by thanking my supervisor, Dr Becky Munford, for her immense support and encouragement. Her patient and detailed feedback, her corrections and suggestions, and her intellectual guidance have played a significant role in bringing this project to fruition. I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Carl Plasa for acting in a supervisory role in the final stages of my work. I have benefited from a lively and friendly academic environment at Cardiff University and I wish to acknowledge my colleagues for their support and for the stimulating discussions which we have had over the past few years. In particular, I would like to express thanks to Claudio Celis, Catherine Han, Jernej Markelj, Siriol McAvoy, Mirona Moraru (Molander), Rhys Tranter, and Emma West. I would also like to single out Marija Grech for being a supportive colleague, a friendly housemate, and most of all a loyal and close friend. I also wish to acknowledge the staff and technicians in the School of English, Communications & Philosophy and the Arts and Social Sciences Library for their help and support. In particular, I would like to thank Rhian Rattray for her assistance with many of the administrative aspects of my studies, and for her positivity and friendliness. I am grateful to the Art and Humanities Research Council for funding my PhD at Cardiff University and for providing extra financial assistance for archival research carried out at the British Library. I am deeply grateful to my parents for supporting me throughout not only the last few years but for more than a decade now of academic study. Their unfailing support, encouragement and faith in me has been essential in my ongoing studies. I also wish to acknowledge Judit Minczinger, who has not only helped me with my research and read portions of my thesis, but has more importantly been a frequent source of emotional support. Very special thanks to Francesca Ferrari for her daily support and love. She has listened patiently, read my work with great attentiveness, and tirelessly encouraged me. Caleb Sivyer Cardiff University 2015 iv Introduction [M]odernity is inseparable from on one hand a remaking of the observer, and on the other a proliferation of circulating signs. – Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer From the middle of the nineteenth century, as if in a historical relay of looks, the shop window succeeded the mirror as a site of identity construction, and then […] the shop window was displaced and incorporated by the cinema screen. – Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. – Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Historical Constructions of Gender and the Visual Clarissa Dalloway sits before her mirror feeling the disparate parts of her self being assembled into a dartlike specular double, while in Evelyn’s eyes Leilah seems not to recognise the person in the mirror as herself. Orlando views the mind as a phantasmagoria, while Desiderio remembers Albertina as a series of images in the kaleidoscope of desire. Orlando’s cross- dressing increases her pleasures and multiplies her experiences, while Albertina’s ‘extravagantly oversignified’, androgynous costume unsettles the discerning gaze of Desiderio.1 Speeding in her motor-car, the countryside appears to Orlando as a series of ‘green screens’, while Desiderio aboard a ship looks up at the sky as a cyclorama. As examples like these reveal, the writings of Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter are peppered with visual devices, surfaces and looks, which produce various effects and perceptions of gendered subjectivity. Objectified and fetishised bodies, misrecognised identities, commodified images 1 Maggie Tonkin, Angela
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