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Second Sight: Re-Imaging the Optic Regime in Behn's, Southerne's, Smith's, and Mackenzie's Colonial Texts of the Long Eighteenth Century Megan L

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Second Sight: Re-Imaging the Optic Regime in Behn's, Southerne's, Smith's, and Mackenzie's Colonial Texts of the Long Eighteenth Century Megan L Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2009 Second Sight: Re-Imaging the Optic Regime in Behn's, Southerne's, Smith's, and Mackenzie's Colonial Texts of the Long Eighteenth Century Megan L. Campbell Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES SECOND SIGHT: RE-IMAGING THE OPTIC REGIME IN BEHN’S, SOUTHERNE’S, SMITH’S, AND MACKENZIE’S COLONIAL TEXTS OF THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY By MEGAN L. CAMPBELL A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2009 The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of Megan L. Campbell defended on December 5th, 2008. ______________________________ Helen Burke Professor Directing Dissertation ______________________________ Eundok Kim Outside Committee Member ______________________________ Barry Faulk Committee Member ______________________________ Candace Ward Committee Member Approved: _________________________ Ralph Berry Chair, Department of English _________________________ Donald Foss Dean, College of Arts & Sciences The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv INTRODUCTION 1 1. COMPLEXITIES OF THE GAZE IN EIGHTEENTH -CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE 12 2. LOOKING DIFFERENTLY: THE FEMALE SPECTATOR IN APHRA BEHN’S OROONOKO, OR THE ROYAL SLAVE 23 3. SOUTHERNE’S AFRICAN GAZE AND THE LIMITATIONS OF AMELIORATION 40 4. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MOTIVES FUELING CHARLOTTE SMITH’S SENTIMENTAL VISION 56 5. VIEWING THE AFRICAN ROYAL SUBJECT: ANNA MARIA MACKENZIE’S SLAVERY 81 APPENDIX 99 REFERENCES 110 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 117 iii ABSTRACT Since the earliest records of culture, mankind has represented its ocularcentric focus through images of sight. Freud theorizes that these images of viewership represent dynamics of power: those who see, actively control, and those who are seen, passively wait to be acted upon. In the archetypes of Western culture, these visual dynamics follow a gendered binary— active/masculine versus passive/feminine. Freud believes that these visual behaviors are determined during the psychosexual stages of development, and these roles are then reinforced through cultural norms. Freudian theory stood as the accepted model of behavioral analysis until late into the twentieth century when feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray, Laura Mulvey, and Ann E. Kaplan began examining and deconstructing patriarchal beliefs about visuality. These theorists agree that women can assume the masculine position of visuality and co-opt the active position of sight for themselves. This particular assumption of power can be seen in women’s colonial narratives of the eighteenth century, where European women were vested with power over colonial subjects, native men and women alike. In an interesting duality, European women simultaneously inhabited the object position of passivity vis-à-vis their male colonizer counterpart and the subject position of activity vis-à-vis the colonial Other. This multi- dimensional position allowed for identificatory bonds across gender and racial lines and resulted in contradictory images of spectatorship within women’s colonial narratives. This study examines the spectatorship imagery in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, Charlotte Smith’s Desmond and The Wanderings of Warwick, and Anna Maria Mackenzie’s Slavery, or the Times to account for the shifts in loyalty and explain the situational alliances that women forged both with their countrymen, viewing the Other as inferior and sub-human, and with the colonized, viewing them as subjects in their own right, as their equals. iv INTRODUCTION Pierre Mignard’s late seventeenth-century portrait of Charles II’s mistress Louise Renée de Penancoct de Keroualle, the Duchess of Portsmouth (1684), flanked by a black youth and swathed in material opulence (see Appendix A) has garnered much recent attention from postcolonial critics for its vivid, multi-dimensional depiction of imperial exploitation. In the image, the objectified bodies of woman and African are foregrounded and ensconced in extravagant fabrics and exotic jewels. The gaze of the spectator is captivated by the lush canvas of mutually commodified articles from around the globe: Far Eastern silks, Roman columns, South Pacific pearls, Caribbean coral, African slave, and European woman. Each object is akin to the other—an offering to the eye of the beholder of what lies passively waiting for his consumption on the shores of distant seas. Srinivas Aravamudan summarizes what is offered by the Mignard portrait: “all the exoticism of colonial venture and commodity acquisition, identifying a female consumer who is herself an object of display” (37). This portrait is one of many examples from the long eighteenth century imaging this mutual display; there are numerous portraits from the era that exhibit exotic goods enveloping black bodies alongside that of their female mistresses (see Appendices B-E). Critical discussions related to these visual texts appropriately recognize evidence of the period’s global consumerism and specifically of the use of Africans as props; however, this focus minimizes the parallel objectification of the African and the female body, ignoring the inevitable identification between them as they sit passively together in silence and captivity. The Mignard portrait attests to this relationship as the duchess rests an affectionate arm upon the young African’s shoulder, an image of fondness and warmth similarly reproduced in Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Mary Davis who touches an African child under the chin (see Appendix F). These gestures symbolize the bond between woman and African as each is looked upon as an object of display, mutually experiencing the oppression of the spectator’s gaze. Yet, as both white and black bodies become objectified from beyond the portrait, levels of spectatorship simultaneously occur within it, and the European woman clearly controls the vantage point as she looms in stature above her African counterpart, who sits child- like and servile. Numerous layers of spectatorship are evident in these examples of eighteenth- century portraiture, and they are similarly present in the imagery of the literature of the period. 1 A study of these viewing practices enlightens contemporary discussions about power and control in the colonial world. Most contemporary discussions of sight, knowledge, sex, and power are informed by Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of the gaze. His beliefs about a statically gendered gaze, substantiated by literary examples across time and space and by the portraiture mentioned above, controlled ideas about viewership during his time and throughout much of the twentieth century. In the past thirty years, however, Freud’s principles of vision have been directly challenged by feminist theorists. The purpose of this project is to study the earlier points of contention to Freudian theory that exist in women’s colonial literature from the British Enlightenment. These texts will be used to interrogate Freud’s gaze theory and to illuminate current discussions of female agency in the eighteenth century. Before discussing the primary literature, it is important to track the trajectory of Freudian gaze theory and to survey the feminist theory that challenges its original assumptions. Freud’s theories link the human instinct for knowledge with the scopophilic instinct, his psychoanalytic moniker for the biological instinct toward observation. In fact, Freud theorizes that the instinct for knowledge has its genesis in the scopophilic instinct; curiosity, therefore, is driven by the energy of sight, founded in the developmental need to solve sexual problems. Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality associates the behavior of scopophilia with subjecting others to a controlling and curious gaze through which a voyeur gains pleasure; in his analysis, scopophilia is highly active. This powerful, active behavior, where a voyeur will literally fix his or her stare upon a subject in order to capture the essence of that being, is represented in the verb “to behold,” for as Martin Jay notes, it is the eyes only that can “obey the conscious will of the viewer in a way denied the other more passive senses” (Downcast Eyes 10). Echoing Freud, contemporary visual philosopher Jean Starobinski explains how the gaze “involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery or reconquering what is about to escape” (The Living Eye 2-3); it involves taking people as objects and conquering, controlling, and owning the objects beheld. What interests Starobinski most in this phenomenon is “the fate of the impatient energy that inhabits the gaze and desires something other than what it is given…of all the senses, sight is the one most obviously ruled by impatience. A magical wish, never entirely fulfilled yet never discouraged, accompanies each of our glances: to seize, to 2 undress, to petrify, to penetrate” (3-4). Here, Starobinski refers to the element of control within the gaze; he describes the power of the viewer over the object beheld “to seize, to undress” (I would add to his list “to capture” and “to own”), but he also concedes that through the gaze, the desire to own the being beheld is “never entirely fulfilled,” so “the pursuit of
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