Watching the Subject: The Mother's Gaze in Dickens's "David Copperfield" and Kafka's "Der Verschollene"

Kafka's Der Verschollene and Dickens's David Copperfield share paradigms of looking and being seen that are intricately connected to the main protagonists' struggles to become subjects. Moreover, it is principally the mother's gaze that determines the subjects' senses of sub...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monatshefte (Madison, Wis. : 1946) Wis. : 1946), 2001-04, Vol.93 (1), p.53-72
Main Author: Gustafson, Susan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Boats
Eyes
Infants
Mothers
Nothingness
Novels
Spectacle
Subjectivity
Visual fixation
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Kafka's Der Verschollene and Dickens's David Copperfield share paradigms of looking and being seen that are intricately connected to the main protagonists' struggles to become subjects. Moreover, it is principally the mother's gaze that determines the subjects' senses of subjectivity. Dickens inverts Lacan's notion of the antinomy of eye and gaze through the depiction of the unifying function of the mother's gaze. Self and other converge as David mirrors and replicates the eye and gaze of his mother. In contrast, throughout Der Verschollene Karl is forced to see himself from the point of view of the mother (within the antinomy of eye and gaze) from a point in which he constitutes nothing. Karl's sense of subjectivity is shattered, fragmented, and extinguished by the annihilating looks of a series of mother-surrogates. Although the mother's eye and gaze function centrally in both novels, Karl finds his expunction in the mother's gaze, while David discovers his subjective wholeness.
ISSN:0026-9271
1934-2810