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TUGR HOME SHORT STORIES |
The industrial revolution in England
changed the basic way that people conducted their lives. No longer was the population more
rural than urban. The transportation industry exploded, and it was no longer difficult to
travel or to move goods from one part of the country to the other. For the first time
there was easier access to people beyond the home village. The explosion of new factories
and the mechanization of jobs inside those factories destabilized British social mores.
Machines began to depersonalize the way that people made their living. No longer was the
family a basic unit of production, and women went out to work in factories, instead of
working at home. These changes had enormous effects on the balance of power between the
sexes. Everyone was afraid of the effects of all these changes in society; people were
afraid that women were going to abandon their homes and to desert their children. Somehow,
society was going to have to keep an eye on women to see that they stayed at
home—under the cautious gaze of their husbands, brothers and fathers. Even men like John Ruskin, who
believed in a certain amount of women’s rights, still believed that women should be
subject to the control and the surveillance of men. In “Of Queen’s
Gardens,” while ostensibly taking a pro-female stance in the debate about female
education, Ruskin called for women to be “differently directed” in their
education away from subjects that he deemed only proper for men. Woman must stay inside
her garden—in her own sphere; otherwise she, “the majestic child” would be
tempted away from the control of her family and of society as well (197). Using this idea of surveillance over
women, an examination of three nineteenth-century books, Agnes Grey,
The Return of the Native, and The Woman Who Did, reveals this idea in action. All
the female protagonists in these novels are subject to the male gaze, and generally suffer
from the effects of the gaze. Each woman reacts to this power and control in different
ways, with different outcomes. The first novel, Agnes
Grey, does not include the overt sexual element to the surveillance that the second
two show so plainly. Using Michel Foucault’s discussion
of the Panopticon from Discipline and Punish as
a basis for discussion, it becomes obvious how pervasive surveillance could be. This form
of social control, especially in the prison system, sets up a way for the group with the
power to be able to observe (or gaze upon) those whom they had power over and to control
their behavior at all times. Foucault wrote: “Inspection functions ceaselessly. The
gaze is alert everywhere” (195). If this gaze is ceaseless and everywhere, the women
characters in the three novels must cope with its effects, either by acceding to its power
or fighting it. In prisons of the nineteenth century, a
system of surveillance over prisoners was established that ensured that the prisoners
believed they were being observed by guards all the time. This surveillance would control
prisoners’ behavior and the prison would be more orderly. Foucault wrote about the
effects: “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state
of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So
to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is
discontinuous in its action, the perfection of power should tend to render its actual
exercise unnecessary” (201). It is significant that the inmates, who believe
themselves to be watched continuously, are not. Only the belief that they are watched
alters their behavior. They still feel that something is watching, and they feel subject
to surveillance. This desired result would work the same way outside of the prison system. Extending this idea of social control to
the idea of keeping women under surveillance, another element, the sexual aspect, has to
be added to the mixture. If women were indeed “majestic children” as Ruskin
believed, this surveillance of women by men gendered the power. All the power to make
meaning would lie with men, as well as the power to derive pleasure from the experience.
This scopophilia, or pleasure from viewing another in a sexual way, is a quest for control
of the female. Laura Mulvey discusses this concept in her essay “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema.” Although she is specifically addressing scopophilia in cinema, the
concept applies here. She writes: Woman
then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic
order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command
by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of
meaning, not maker of meaning. (804) Since the male gaze or surveillance is
the signifier, females can only derive their identity from the male, and cannot create
their own identities. This means that women are always bound by someone else’s
definition of them, and are never allowed to develop their own interests or to make
meaning for their own lives. How did this apply to the protagonists in the three novels?
Were they truly only allowed the meaning for their lives if the males defined them? In Agnes
Grey, written by Anne Brontė and published in 1847, eighteen-year-old Agnes is
restless and unhappy as she watches her middle class family’s gradual slide from
middle class comfort to the edge of poverty as a result of her father’s bad
investments. She has no experience and no skills except the education given her by her
accomplished mother. Indeed, she never has been responsible for anything in her life, and
she is viewed by her family as a child who cannot make any decisions of her own. In a
quest to help her family, and because she thinks her efforts would be
“charming,” she persuades her parents to let her become a governess, virtually
the only career available to a woman of her class (9). With this move, she will get away
from the immediate gaze of her family and subject herself to another family’s
control. She is hired as a governess by the
Bloomfield family to take care of seven-year-old Tom and Mary Ann, who is almost six. From
the first moment Agnes meets Mrs. Bloomfield, she is struck by her coldness and lack of
sympathy. It is obvious that Agnes is viewed as part of the household machinery by her new
employer and is there to serve her pleasure. This inauspicious beginning shows, without
any doubt, that Agnes’s lot is to have meaning applied to her by her employers and
her charges. From the very first, Tom is in control of the schoolroom. On the first day
she meets him, she realizes that he is the favored child, allowed to dominate his sister
and also his mother. His gender gives him a status in the household that he quickly learns
to exploit. He starts his relationship with Agnes in a controlling way, attempting to
exert his male control over the new governess. This behavior is not viewed as anything out
of the ordinary by either his mother or sister. Indeed his miniature version of the male
gaze is already active. He insists that Agnes watch him ride his rocking horse, “loudly calling on me to attend to it.” Then,
“ordering his sister to hold the reins, he mounted, and made me stand for ten
minutes, watching how manfully he used his whip and spurs” (17; emphasis added). For
Agnes to accede to the domination of this seven-year-old undermines her authority from the
very beginning. Tom has symbolically taken the reins of this relationship with his new
governess, by virtue of his sex only, and ensures her compliance with his orders. She
never really gains control of the schoolroom back from Tom. She recognizes this and makes
these comments: My task
of instruction and surveillance, instead of becoming easier as my charges and I got better
accustomed to each other, became more arduous as their characters unfolded. The name of
governess, I soon found, was a mere mockery as applied to me; my pupils had no more notion
of obedience than a wild, unbroken colt. (24) Agnes’s position is untenable.
Unable to control either of the children because she has never been given any authority to
enforce normal rules, she sums up her position as a mere mockery, acknowledging that she
never would be able to gain the disciplinary power that she needs with these children. Her
female gaze is ineffective, and she knows it. Even what little surveillance she does
accomplish means nothing. Agnes finally loses her position with
the Bloomfields because she is unable to control the children that she isn’t allowed
to discipline. Every time something happens in the schoolroom, Agnes is to blame for it.
When Tom, exerting his male priority once again, misbehaves badly he is not disciplined
for it. In reality, he is rewarded for his behavior. In a typical incident in the
schoolroom, when Tom is told to pick up his possessions he indulges in a temper tantrum,
knowing that he will not be punished. Tom was
in such a fury that he flew upon the table, scattered the bread and milk about the floor,
struck his sisters, kicked the coals out of the coal-pan, attempted to overthrow the table
and chairs, . . . but I seized upon him, and sending Mary Ann to call her mama . . . and
when the matter was explained to her, all she did was to send for the nursery maid to put
the room in order, and bring Master Bloomfield his supper . . . ‘There now, Miss
Grey! You see I have got my supper in spite of you: and I haven’t picked up a single
thing! (40-41) An incident like this effectively
undermines any authority Agnes might have had with any of her charges. It is quite typical
of her experience with the children of this family. Her gaze, her surveillance, is
ineffective, simply turned aside as of no value by a seven-year-old boy whose gaze is
worth more than hers is because he is male. In her next governess position, Agnes
walks into a situation that is nearly as bad as the one at the Bloomfields’. The
children are older and more unruly. The Murray children pay no more attention to Agnes
than the other children did. When she ventures to complain to Mrs. Murray, she is told
that if she wants to keep her job she must let the children have their own way. Once again
Agnes is found wanting by the gaze of the people in power over her. Like the Bloomfields,
the Murrays expect her to exert authority with their children, while giving her none of
the tools to do so. So, in their eyes she is incompetent. They never see or care about the
tentative relationship Agnes forges with one of the children. Agnes’s new charge, Rosalie,
although a generally unsympathetic character, is subjected to her own version of the male
gaze. She is virtually sold off to a man she doesn’t love, in her family’s quest
for an advantageous marriage. She repents her choice and turns against the husband who
curtails her money supply and takes her off to the country so that she cannot go out into
society. The only time overt rebellion occurs against the male gaze in the novel is after
Agnes’s father has died, and her grandfather communicates with the family for the
first time in 30 years. He requires Agnes’s mother, Mrs. Grey, to repent of the bad
marriage that lasted so long. If she does so, he will let her back into the family fold,
and will make her daughters his heir. She refuses, preferring to make her own living. The
book ends conventionally with Agnes marrying the man of her own choice, presumably to live
happily ever after under his gaze. The protagonist in the next novel, The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy,
published in 1878, never lives a really conventional life. This novel strongly includes
the element of surveillance on several levels. If it is possible to anthromorphize the
landscape, it has a malign gaze—for Eustacia Vye. She hates the heath and considers
it a prison. Hardy wrote this description of the heath, giving it life as its own entity
and explains the malignity that Eustacia feels: The
place was full of a watchful intentness now. When other things sank brooding to sleep the
heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await
something; but it had waited thus, unmoved during so many centuries, throughout the crises
of so many things, that is could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final
Overthrow. (4) This anthromorphic landscape lends a
foreboding feeling that permeates the book. If the heath actually does have a personality
and could be watching, listening, and awaiting, what message does it intend for the humans
on it to hear? Perhaps that the heath has always and will forever exist, as the humans
will not, humbling the efforts of man to change its appearance and deny its gaze. Eustacia Vye is also under the gaze of
her community, which includes her eventual husband Clym Yeobright, her former lover Damon
Wildeve, and Diggory Venn, a reddleman who is in love with Wildeve’s wife Thomasin.
Diggory intends to protect the interests of the woman who has rejected him. He knows
Eustacia and Wildeve have been involved before and may be reviving their relationship. He
makes it his business to watch both of them. Everywhere they go, he’s there,
threatening with his presence, to tell Eustacia and Wildeve’s respective spouses what
he knows about them. His gaze and his attempts to thwart Eustacia and Wildeve subjects her
to his ideas about how she should behave. Eustacia’s first appearance in the
novel is on Guy Fawke’s night. She is out on the heath with a bonfire that she
intends to use, like a conjurer, to summon her lover, Damon Wildeve. He was supposed to
have married Thomasin that day, but did not because of an administrative mix-up. Eustacia
believed that he was going to choose her instead of Thomasin. Her attempt to control her
former lover by her anarchic gaze, symbolized by the bonfire, is her way of usurping the
male power that she knows and recognizes and to which she does not want to submit. Hardy’s description of Eustacia
demonstrates the sexual power of this woman. Her physical description in the book is a
clear image of a transgressive woman. Probably half in love with her himself, he likens
her to the “raw material of a divinity.” He also describes her as having
“pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries” (63). This is no ordinary submissive
woman, because Eustacia exudes a mysterious sexual power. She is attempting to return the
male gaze, using the power of her sex to gain what she wants, first Wildeve, then Clym,
and then to go to Paris, away from the heath that is so threatening to her. Wildeve escapes her gaze and manages to
marry Thomasin after all, though he does not really love her. Then Eustacia sets her gaze
on Clym Yeobright, newly returned from Paris. She believes that he will take her
there—away from the all-seeing heath that she hates so much. Clym, the native who
returns to the heath, intends to start a school in the village and plans never to return
to Paris again. When this ill-suited couple does marry, it starts a chain of events that
does not end until Eustacia and Wildeve are dead. Clym refuses to move back to Paris after
their marriage, and Eustacia is devastated. She had put all her hopes into being able to
convince him to do so. After Clym has problems with his eyes, he turns to furze-cutting on
the heath to earn a living, a lower class occupation that upsets his wife. She turns again
to her former lover Wildeve, and they almost start their affair again. Of course, this
transgressive woman has to die for attempting to return the male gaze and to capture the
power of it for herself. When Clym finds out that Eustacia did not answer the door when
his mother arrived to see him, he is horrified. Clym had quarreled with his mother about
his marriage with Eustacia, and he desperately wanted to make up with her. When he learns
that his mother died on her walk back home, he is furious with Eustacia, and their
marriage is effectively over. Eustacia leaves their home and returns home to her father.
She does not receive a letter from her husband asking her to come home and arranges to
leave the heath with Wildeve’s help. In a driving rainstorm, she loses her way and
falls into Shadwater Weir and drowns. Wildeve jumps in and dies trying to rescue her. Another example of the surveillance that
the community subjects Eustacia to is a woman named Susan Nunsuch, who believes that
Eustacia is involved in witchcraft. Convinced that Eustacia is a witch, Nunsuch finds it
necessary to construct a wax doll and stick it with pins, then throw it in the fire, while
reciting the Lord’s prayer backwards, in order to summon what Hardy terms
“unhallowed assistance” (361). This unhallowed assistance, coupled with the gaze
of the heath and the community, is part of the surveillance of Eustacia, helping to ensure
the loss of her powers if she is really a witch. After all this trauma, Clym goes blind
and goes off to preach to the people of the heath. His blindness leaves him with no gaze.
He is essentially emasculated because he no longer has the power to gaze upon anyone, male
or female. Even though Eustacia has died, as a consequence of her transgression and of her
attempt to return the male gaze by seizing power over her own life, her sin has a
devastating effect on her husband and by extension the community to which she belonged.
Still watching, listening and waiting is the heath that was so destructive to Eustacia. It
has triumphed in the end, and still and always will exist, perhaps in concert with the
“unhallowed assistance” that Susan attempted to summon. While nothing quite so otherworldly
happens to the protagonist in The Woman Who Did,
Herminia is as transgressive as Eustacia Vye. The novel, written by Grant Allen and
published in 1895, chronicles the life of a woman who openly defies society and refuses
outright to submit to any man’s scopophilic gaze. She refuses to marry a man she
loves because of her belief that love should be free and unfettered. If any woman ever
kicked down the gates of her Ruskinian “garden,” certainly Herminia did. From
the first moment she meets Alan Merrick, Herminia declares herself free from conventional
rules. She was a “Girton” girl dissatisfied with the education she received at
this progressive school before she left to support herself. She tells Alan that “if
we women are ever to be free in the world, we must have in the end a freeman’s
education. But the education at Girton only made a pretence of freedom” (27). She
criticizes the education that was offered to women of the time as an effort to “push
a woman’s education without the faintest danger of her emancipation” (27).
Preferring to make her own way, with her own rules, she leaves and provides for herself by
teaching and writing for a newspaper. She is going to defy the power structure and to
emancipate herself and to conduct her life as she wishes. Alan is a conventional man who she
completely confuses with her ideas. He loves her and even as she tries to tell him the
basis of her beliefs, he wants her to conform to the social mores by marrying him. He
tries to convince her to do this by telling her how completely she would be ostracized if
she did not. In effect, Alan is trying to impose the confinement of the male gaze on this
entirely free spirit. He gently attempts to impose his will on her with his plea for
marriage. He says, “But if you love me so much, surely, surely, it is a small thing
to trust your future to me” (53). She loves him too, but refuses to compromise her
vow never to marry, but does agree to live with him. Both of their families ostracize
them. Herminia’s father is a clergyman, and he completely disowns his daughter when
he finds out what she is doing. Alan’s family is also scandalized and rejects this
unlawful union. In the eyes of the male power structure, Herminia is too transgressive to
tolerate, so both families cast the couple out. In an odd reversal of characterization,
Grant Allen turns his independent, transgressive woman into a bastardized version of
herself. Herminia, while giving lip service to her own independence, suddenly starts
allowing herself to be guided by Alan. The narrator states: Herminia
was now beginning to be so far influenced by Alan’s personality that she yielded the
point with reluctance to his masculine judgment. It must always be so. The man must needs
retain for many years to come the personal hegemony he has usurped over the woman; and the
woman who once accepts him as lover or husband must give way in the end, even in matters
of principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman, and he less a man,
were any other result possible. (63-64) Why the author felt this reversal
necessary is difficult to determine. It appears to be an attempt to rehabilitate Herminia
and to soften the effects of her transgression against the male power structure. Now that
she is no longer a virgin and is having a physical relationship with a man, she is a
potential mother. To be both sinner and mother at the same time would deeply threaten the
Victorian world, where appearances are all important. The author had to rehabilitate her
somehow in order to ensure sales of the book and to appease Victorian propriety. Alan
and Herminia move to Italy, where Alan dies of typhoid fever, leaving Herminia pregnant.
He never changed his will to make her his heir, and his estate devolves to his father, Dr.
Merrick. Dr. Merrick travels to Italy to see his son before he dies, and does not make it
in time. He rejects Herminia again, because there was no marriage before Alan’s death
that would have legitimized the child that is coming. Herminia bears her child, names her
Dolores and does what she must to support them, living only for her child. She will make
the effort to train Dolores to take up her fight for emancipation. To support them, she
writes a novel and manages to get it published. It does not sell and earns only one very
bad review. Herminia gives up the life of a novelist and supports herself and her daughter
as well as she can. When Dolores is six years old, her
mother discovers that she is not interested in the great quest that her mother started.
She wants a conventional life and is fascinated by the aristocratic world that she sees at
a distance. Herminia is horrified that her daughter, whom she had raised to continue the
fight for the emancipation of women, is uninterested in her cause. Dolores unknowingly
meets her paternal grandfather on the street and is attracted to him. When she falls ill
the grandfather, a doctor, attempts to remove her from her mother’s care. Herminia
does not allow this to happen, again doing her best to repudiate the gaze of the
grandfather, for herself and for her daughter. She declines another marriage proposal from
Harvey Kynaston who, unlike Alan, will not live with her outside of marriage. As Dolores
grows up, her name gradually changes to the more conventional Dolly. This name switch on
the part of the author is particularly interesting, considering that this book was
published in 1895. Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” was staged in England for
the first time in June of 1889, only six years earlier, and caused a sensation in the
press. It provoked such bad reviews that concentrated not on the quality of the production
or the acting, but on the moral ambiguity of the title character, Nora, who leaves her
husband and children because she feels that she has been turned into a “doll” by
her autocratic husband. It caused such a furor from the Victorian establishment that
condemned the moral decline that they believed this play would cause. One unsigned review
in The Daily News of 8 June 1889 said this
about Nora’s actions: “In spite of Ibsen or any other theorist, it may be
confidently asserted that no woman who has ever breathed would do any such thing”
(Egan 104). The review really implies that nobody
should ever dare to behave as Nora did, without being ostracized and ignored by the
moralistic male powers of the day. Allen’s choice to alter Dolores’s name
to Dolly needs to be considered in the light of this furor. Dolly grows up and inevitably falls in
love and wants to marry. She finally learns the truth about her illegitimacy and condemns
her mother for her sins. She is so traditional that she has accepted the condemnation of
the powerful male gaze and turns completely against her mother. Herminia is completely
destroyed by her daughter’s denunciation and commits suicide by swallowing prussic
acid. Herminia has not quite given up her ideals though. She leaves a letter behind for
Dolly when she commits suicide. What is not clear is her motivation for doing this. It
could be considered an attempt by Herminia to control her daughter from the grave and to
convert her in death to the cause of emancipation, something that she could not do in
life. It is either the ultimate guilt trip or an attempt to impose her ideals on her
daughter by convincing Dolly that she is to blame for the death of her mother. To return to
Foucault’s idea of the Panopticon, the system set in place for surveillance of
prisoners, and Laura Mulvey’s ideas about gendering this surveillance, the parallels
between the prisoners and the women in the novels are startling. All are subjected to
surveillance in one form or another. Agnes, in Agnes
Grey, is subject to the gaze of her employers and is never able to satisfy either of
them that she is capable of being the governess that she is trying so hard to be. She solves her dilemma by falling in love and marrying. She subjects herself to her husband, whose gaze
may be more benign than what she experienced as a governess. Eustacia Vye, always
resisting the gaze and trying to return the gaze to obtain more power, has to die for her
audacity. She is too strong and powerful to be allowed to live; her anarchy is too
threatening to the society in which she lived. Herminia also has to die. Her sins are too
numerous to allow for any leeway from those in power. She dared to live with a man out of
wedlock, and to bear a child without being married. Her culture could not allow this
behavior to go unpunished and, indeed, she suffers the loss and disdain of the daughter
she had hoped would follow her in the fight for the emancipation of women. The gendered
gaze destroyed them.
Works
Cited
Brontė, Anne. Agnes Grey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Egan, Michael, ed. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1972. Foucault, Michel.
“Panopticism.” Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison. Alan Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Ruskin, John. “Lilies: Of
Queen’s Gardens.” The Literary Criticism
of John Ruskin. Harold
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