Abstract

Eliza Haywood's 1741 novel narrativizes the object-centered discourse of the visual field as described by contemporary optical theory. In eighteenth-century visual theory, the "object" of the gaze is not the one who is seen but the one who sees. Such a notion seems counter-intuitive; we have naturalized the theory of the dominant/male gaze. Anti-Pamela explores, first, the gendered implications that attended assumptions about vulnerable "subjects" and empowered "objects," and, second, the material (as well as symbolic) limits to the kind of empowerment that intromittist theories about vision and ontology seemed to promise to women in real social spaces. This essay makes a twofold contribution. First, it fashions a fresh theoretical lens from optical philosophy; as theorized by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries, the dialectics of the visual field, informed by the empirically generated nexus of seeing, knowing, and being, exceeds modern equations between sight and agency. Second, this essay focuses in on a particular text, Anti-Pamela, to show how this novel's attention to the nature of visual exchange is informed by contemporary optical theory and popular (as well as urban / material) contexts. Anti-Pamela explores the empirical and narrative implications—and the symbolic and gendered / material limitations—of the theory that the seen object occupies a primary, causal status in its ability to transform the seeing subject's ontology.

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