University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Supervised Undergraduate Student Research Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects and Creative Work 5-2014 Power, Self-Transformation, and Looks: Capturing the Gaze in Jane Austen Victoria R. Knight University of Tennessee - Knoxville,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Knight, Victoria R., "Power, Self-Transformation, and Looks: Capturing the Gaze in Jane Austen" (2014). Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/1806 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Power, Self-Transformation, and Looks: Capturing the Gaze in Jane Austen Chancellor’s Honors Program Honors Thesis Victoria Knight Advised By Dr. Misty Anderson May 6th, 2014 I. Introduction In 1975, the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey published a paper in the journal, Screen, on the revolutionary concept of the “male gaze” in film. The premise of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” posited that films were shot from a distinctly male perspective, and the way the camera would pan down a woman’s body illustrated the intentional objectification and a desire for pleasure. Mulvey continued to argue that males were the active “gazers”, while women were the passive “looked-upon”, and thus, women had no agency of their own.