Victorian Female Identity Construction Under the Gaze: A Case of Esther in Bleak House

Rong OU, Bai LIU

Abstract


The gaze of desire is prevalent throughout Bleak House, most visibly manifested on the heroine Esther. When gazed by “the Other”, she is suspicious of her identity and existence, which causes her psychological conflicts step by step. Supported by Lacan’s gaze theory, the paper intends to analyze Esther’s psychological actions through the gazes from various aspects—obedience to the elder’s authority, oppression by the patriarchal society, and the anti-gaze of awakening female recognition—to reveal social surveillance of women and to present the female’s aesthetics of existence and the development of social ethos in the modern age.

Keywords


Esther; Lacanian gaze; Female; Identity construction

Full Text:

PDF

References


Beauvoir, Simone de. (1956). The second sex (H. M. Parshley, Trans & Ed.). Jonathan Cape.

Berger, J. (1990). Ways of seeing. Penguin (Non-classics).

Dickens, C. (2011). Bleak house. Signet Classics.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.

Lacan, J. (1977). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book Ⅺ: The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; A. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Levine, C. (2009). Narrative networks: Bleak house and the affordances of form. NOVEL A Forum on Fiction, 42, 517-523.

Marcus, S. (2007). Between women: Friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England. Princeton University Press.

Michie, H. (1989). “Who Is This in Pain?”: Scarring, disfigurement, and female identity in Bleak House and our mutual friend. NOVEL a Forum on Fiction, 22, 199-212.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16, 6-18.

Sharma, P., & Barua, A. (2017). Analysing. Gaze in terms of subjective and objective interpretation: Sartre and Lacan. Human Studies, 40, 61-75.

Wright, E. (2000). Lacan and postfeminism. Totem Books.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12364

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2022 LIU LIU

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

 

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture