Looking Like a Woman: The Female Gaze in Sappho and Lafayette

Looking Like a Woman: The Female Gaze in Sappho and Lafayette Joan DeJean W ITHIN [THE LOGIC THAT HAS DOMINATED THE WEST since the time of the Greeks], the gaze is particularly foreign to female eroticism. . . . [Woman’s] entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies . . . her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation.” In This Sex Which is Not One, Luce Irigaray offers this categorical denunciation of an erotic econ­ omy dominated by the gaze. It could be objected that she follows too closely the logic which, from the time of the Greeks, has decreed that, since desire operates through the eyes, Woman should not be allowed to look directly on the male. However, Irigaray offers a challenge to this axiom dictating acceptable female behavior. She argues that “ Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking.” According to her theory, there is no need to forbid the gaze to women, for women do not speak their desire through the eyes. And why would they want to? The gaze, Irigaray argues, is the instru­ ment of a pleasure that is as restricted as it is restricting. “ Can pleasure be measured, bounded, triangulated, or not?,” she queries. Behind her question is a never explicitly formulated attack on the concept articulated by René Girard, the triangulation of desire. In Girard’s theory, male desire is never original, but is inspired by the desire of a male rival. (In Girard’s model, the desiring subject is always a man or a woman, like Emma Bovary, created by a man.) Both the functioning of the gaze as Irigaray presents it and the triangulation of desire act to objectify Woman, to deny her an active role in the economy of desire. It seems logical to assume as Irigaray does that “ Woman’s desire does not speak the same language as man’s.” However, what seems miss­ ing from Irigaray’s reformulation of the language of desire is a reading of representations by women writers of the creation of a female erotic language. The gaze has been forbidden to women, but that does not mean that they have not used it. It may be that readers have not been sen­ sitive to Woman’s invasion of “ the dominant scopic economy” because the female erotic gaze does not function according to the model that male representations have schooled us to expect. I would like to examine two 34 W in t e r 1988 D eJ e a n of the founding texts of an erotic literature in which women authors por­ tray a female desiring subject in the process of expressing her desire. These texts run counter to the logic Irigaray develops, according to which Woman situates herself outside the erotic geometry constructed with the gaze, for they depict Woman openly speaking her desire through the eyes. Furthermore, they suggest that there may also be a female variant or variants of the triangulation of desire: in both these texts, female desire expresses itself voyeuristically, through a gaze that is mediated, although in ways that are not recognizable on the basis of male-oriented discussions of the triangulation of desire. The women’s texts I have in mind also refute the rare portrayals by male authors of women who take an active role in “ the dominant scopic economy.” Without exception, male depictions of a female desiring sub­ ject who looks openly upon the object of her desire reveal that Woman adopts what is assumed to be a male language at her own risk. Woman is a dangerous speaking subject because she comes to language in order to speak about sexual desire. No one expresses with more complexity the power of Woman’s prise de parole and its threat to the social order than Racine. Racine estab­ lishes female desire as a dangerous force that must be annihilated when he portrays the desiring woman as active subject controlling the gaze, and when he allows her to propose a novel triangulation of desire, in which the object of desire is doubled, rather than the desiring subject. In the two famous scenes where Phèdre avows her forbidden love for Hippolyte (1:3, 2:5...