Projecting the Gaze: The Magic Lantern, Cultural Discipline, and Villette
2006; Canadian Population Society; University of Alberta, Population Research Laboratory; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/vcr.2006.0004
ISSN1923-3280
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoThe 1850s was a time of visual spectacle as entertainment: of looks and gazes, peeks and glances. Kaleidoscopes, panoramas, tableaux, circuses and freak shows, peep shows, and of course the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace all piqued the Victorian appetite for seeing and being seen. With its increasingly sophisticated use of pro jection, magnification, transparency, and mechanical optic techniques, one of the most popular amusements, both public and private, was the stereopticon or magic lantern show. The eighteenthand nineteenth-century rise of magic lantern enter tainment both parallels and echoes Foucault's shift in punishment from punitive spectacle to prophylactic surveillance. On one level, the magic lantern's seeing gaze pierces secrecy and turns bourgeois spec tators into voyeuristic self-police, a process that works to secure not only cultural submission but also assent. On another level, the stere opticon slide becomes a metaphor for the transparency and elision of discourse itself, dissociating seeing from being and suggesting the gap between visibility and non-visibility so important in the lantern show's dissolving views. Bronte's Villette, a novel preoccupied with the nature of vision. appropriates the magic lantern's imaginative projection, magnification, and subjective diffusion to provide literary penal theater that, in a Foucauldian view, privatizes repression even as it challenges strategies of ocular domination (Kazan 551). To begin with, a little preliminary magic lantern historical background may be useful, followed by a discussion of the theoretical aspects of cultural hegemony implicit in stereopticon shows. This groundwork
Referência(s)