Mortifying the Master’s Eye: Intersubjective Vision in Pride and Prejudice

Austen narrates these perspectival shifts through scenes of discomfiting visual experience that destabilize narrational authority and dissolve what is initially interpreted as the master’s gaze. Austen’s most known romance presents a method of relationality that rejects the psychological possession...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nineteenth-Century gender studies 2022-01, Vol.18 (3)
Main Author: Coons, Jayda
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Austen, Jane (1775-1817)
British & Irish literature
Consciousness
English literature
Eroticism
Eye movements
Marriage
Otherness
Visual perception
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Austen narrates these perspectival shifts through scenes of discomfiting visual experience that destabilize narrational authority and dissolve what is initially interpreted as the master’s gaze. Austen’s most known romance presents a method of relationality that rejects the psychological possession of the other and proposes, somewhat surprisingly in a marriage plot of this era, that companionate love relies upon mutual recognition of the other subject’s irreducible, ungraspable alterity. The novel’s investment in narrating her visual perception grants Elizabeth at least equal status as an observer and reader of human behavior, and despite her inferior wealth, status, and connections, she returns his gaze to subtly dislodge his authority. (1) Martin Jay notes that visual “perception is intimately tied up with language . . . [and a]s a result, the universality of visual experience cannot be automatically assumed,” but must instead be read within “what has been called ‘visuality’—the distinct historical manifestations of visual experience in its possible modes . . . [and] different scopic regimes” (13).
ISSN:1556-7524