"We All Want to Be Seen": The Male Gaze, the Female Gaze and the Act of Looking as Metaphor in Emma Cline's The Girls

Emma Cline's 2016 novel The Girls, famously inspired by the Manson family and the murders committed by the group in 1969, is in fact a feminist bildungsroman. Its middle-aged protagonist-cum-narrator reflects not only on her own life and identity, but, most importantly perhaps, on what it means...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Polish journal for American studies : yearbook of the Polish Association for American Studies 2020-04, Vol.14, p.71-140
Main Author: Piechucka, Alicja
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bildungsroman
Cline, Emma
Female gaze
Feminism
Gender equity
Gender pay gap
Girls
Historical fiction
Male gaze
Mass murders
Massacres
Metaphor
Motion picture directors & producers
Novels
Patriarchy
Self concept
Self image
Sexism
Victimization
Women
Writers
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Summary:Emma Cline's 2016 novel The Girls, famously inspired by the Manson family and the murders committed by the group in 1969, is in fact a feminist bildungsroman. Its middle-aged protagonist-cum-narrator reflects not only on her own life and identity, but, most importantly perhaps, on what it means to grow up as a woman in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The present article centers on the ocular trope which Cline uses in her novel in order to showcase issues such as self-perception, self-worth and the shaping of young women's identity. Focusing on the metaphorical dimensions of the act of looking, I propose to read Cline's novel in light of Laura Mulvey's seminal feminist theory of the male gaze and the opposite notion of the female gaze formulated by later feminist scholars. My analysis foregrounds those aspects of The Girls which make it a protest novel, denouncing the female condition in patriarchal societies and suggesting ways of opposing the objectification and indoctrination which lead to women being manipulated and victimized.
ISSN:1733-9154
2544-8781