Language of the Eyes, The

Cover

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Front Matter

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Contents

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pp. vii-

Illustrations

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pp. ix-

Acknowledgments

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pp. xi-xiii

This book traces its origins to a short paper on voyeurism in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, written for Joe Butwin’s graduate seminar on the English 1870s at the University of Washington. The nascent ideas explored in that first essay subsequently grew into a seminar paper, ...

Introduction: A Feminine Language of the Eyes?

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pp. 1-20

To possess empowered eyes has traditionally meant to occupy a male subject position, to engender oneself as masculine. Masculine visual power is the defining feature of “My Last Duchess”: in putting the portrait of his dead duchess on view to another man—indeed, to any man whom he deems worthy ...

1 The Conduct of the Eyes: Feminine Discourses of Vision in Eighteenth-Century England

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pp. 21-72

Late-seventeenth-century England was dominated by two seemingly unrelated cultural controversies. The first concerned the antitheatrical debate over the morality of the London stage waged most famously between the English divine, Jeremy Collier, author of the notorious Short View of the English Stage ...

2 Ocular Reproduction, Sexual Difference, and Romantic Vision

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pp. 73-116

In the 1780s and 1790s, at the approximate historical moment when Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and other women writers were putting the finishing touches on the representation of domestic vision in the eighteenth-century novel, the most famous and highly regarded physician of his day, ...

3 The Descent of Sexual Selection: Evolution and the Politics of Female Vision in Victorian England

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pp. 117-178

Writing in his Autobiography in 1876, Charles Darwin reflects briefly on family connections in the making of his evolutionary theory. Recalling a conversation with a professor at Edinburgh’s School of Medicine, he invokes the memory of his grandfather, famous in his day but since fallen into relative obscurity: ...

4 Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, and the Modernist Female Spectator

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pp. 179-202

Sigmund Freud’s most important intellectual connection to Victorian England was with the work and figure of Charles Darwin. Darwin was Freud’s intellectual hero. The father of psychoanalysis, never known for humility, regarded his intellectual offspring not simply as a continuation but an embellishment ...

Conclusion: Clarissa Dalloway and Modern Female Visuality in England

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pp. 203-210

The first chapter of this book concluded by considering the Sapphist quality of Clarissa Harlowe’s desiring eyes. We close here by reflecting on the multifaceted eyes of that tragic character’s modern namesake, Clarissa Dalloway. What the English would call Clarissa Dalloway’s “Christian name” certainly appears ...

Notes

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pp. 211-244

Bibliography

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pp. 245-262

Index

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pp. 263-272