Empire and the power of the gazed upon in Victorian fiction

Abstract

Some characters solicit onlookers’ attention to their face and physical appearance in Victorian fiction. My dissertation examines how characters who are the object of others’ gaze construct and control visual power. Drawing upon Edward Said’s Orientalism and Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, I argue that characters exhibit themselves as objects, exercising control and desire over their observers. They manipulate how they appear to others in order to: protect their faces from the penetrating, judging and pleasure-seeking gaze as well as gain visual pleasure and explore their identities. Chapter One analyses characters who resist the power of infiltrating eyes by rendering their faces indescribable: Ezra Jennings in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, the two women working at a trading company in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chapter Two argues that characters frequently wear disguises to incapacitate the judgemental gaze of viewers: the three Indians in The Moonstone, the masked beggar in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, and the transformed Edward Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Chapter Three considers how characters impersonate different identities to enjoy the pleasure of being watched, and to explore their desires: Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Henry Jekyll in Jekyll and Hyde, and Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray. I conclude with a discussion of further possibilities for analysing power relations between the Empire and the gazed upon in fiction.