Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity (review)

In her book on Victorian femininity, Beth Newman seeks to penetrate the "layers of cliché" that surround the term "gaze," and to explore the social and psychical aspects of seeing and being seen as they are represented in nineteenth-century fiction. Newman argues that, in literary and visual-cultural studies, the urge to be the object of another's look has been neglected: the gaze can be uncanny, disciplinary, or castrating, but to be its object may be pleasurable nonetheless. The reasons Newman provides for this sense of gratification and delight join psychoanalytic theory with historical, social, and narratological thinking. Yet this is a book about the contradictory consequences narrators—and the authors who created them—visit on female characters who seek too easily to please by being looked at (exhibitionists who enjoy display) and those who seek shelter from being looked at (by adopting "vigilant inconspicuousness" [36]) through a "gendered code of visual relations" (128).

Newman's methodology articulates Freudian psychoanalytic structures of sexuality and seeing, the Foucauldian disciplinary gaze, and the Lacanian diagrammatics of the uncanny or reversible gaze/look (seeing oneself seeing oneself, seeing oneself being seen). She is indebted to critics of gender and the visual such as Kaja Silverman, Joan Copjec, and Jacqueline Rose. Newman's use of Silverman's work is especially apt, for it enables her to focus on "the screen as a locus of cultural intervention in visuality" (20). Yet her real subject, Newman admits, is psychoanalytic subjectivity, for she believes that in the current critical climate too much attention has been devoted to the economic relations and material conditions of Victorian Britain and too little to an "understanding of the way subjectivity and desire fit into the social world" (144).

In Subjects on Display, Newman creates a genealogy of the ideal middle-class nineteenth-century heroine under the gaze. Ranging between Jane Taylor's Display (1815) and Jennifer Egan's tour de force, Look at Me (2002), Newman reads canonical fiction by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James. She focuses on the representation of heroines as figures of desire for display and exhibitionism or for ideal inconspicuousness: Fanny Price, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson, Gwendolen Harleth, Dorothea Brooke, and James's unnamed and desperate governess. Whether they display themselves or evade notice, these heroines all experience, Newman maintains, a struggle about "which side of looking the proper middle-class woman is supposed to be on" (117). Thus what Newman calls "the relations of looking" represented in these canonical Victorian novels "are inevitably suffused with social meanings" (especially those of gender and class) that are historically constructed (117).

Each chapter of Newman's book considers how narratorial discourse manages conflicts about class, gender, and looking. Thus Newman investigates the ways writing gratifies "ordinary female exhibitionism" in Brontë's two major novels; how the omniscient narrator of Dickens's Bleak House (1851–53) reproduces through fictional form "an ideology that tethers femininity to [Esther's] body" (80); the ways the narratorial voice in Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Middlemarch (1872) reveals and conceals the writing subject's (and author's) desire to be seen, recognized, and acknowledged; and how James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) insists through form on the nonexistence of a "transcendent gaze" in favor of "partial, embodied looks" (132).

Although there is much that is familiar here, Subjects on Display offers many original and thoughtful readings. Its most illuminating moments link historical and psychoanalytic interpretation with the visual tropes of fiction. In Freudian fashion Newman understands Esther's falling ill with smallpox to resemble Krook's spontaneous combustion because the former immediately precedes the latter; the likeness of her "pus-filled lesions" and his ashes' "yellow liquor" inscribes Esther's body into a text that seldom mentions it (81). She reads David Copperfield's struggle in the "professional pecking order" at Doctor's Commons as describing the Victorian legal...