Masculinity and Spectacle in Mew's "A White Night": Into the Cave, Not Up the River

Masculinity and Spectacle in Mew's "A White Night": Into the Cave, Not Up the River Bryn Gribben Northwest Missouri State University "A FEMINIST counterpart of Conrad's apocalyptic Heart of Darkness " is what Elaine Showalter calls the 1903 Charlotte Mew short story "A White Night."1 Her analogy seems apt, to some extent: in each story, a central spectacle separates the civilized from the primeval; the observers of the spectacle are granted power over it, while its participants are granted only horror. In Conrad's novella, Marlow and company journey upriver to witness the multilayered deterioration of Captain Kurtz; and in Mew's work, a newlywed couple and the wife's brother journey into a Spanish cloister, where they are trapped overnight and witness a woman's live burial. However, while Heart of Darkness is arguably a confrontation of the "civilized" self with the unknowable self,2 Mew's narrative is more precisely a frightening allegory of patriarchal silencing , one in which the veneer of the exotic and foreign contributes little by way of the ritual's motive or explanation. Showalter claims the story's most disturbing element is not the burial, but the "voyeuristic [male] Cameron, a photographic presence, a camera eye who voyeuristically watches events";3 he is "a detached bachelor observer" in the vein of "Conrad's Marlow or the narrators of Henry James."4 Reiterating the words of Cameron's sister Ella, though, Showalter notes that there is a particular difference in this "feminist counterpart": whereas all eyes focus on Kurtz to find meaning, even as meaning is lost, for the male observer, Cameron, "'the woman didn't really count.' She is only a spectacle."5 We might do better, then, to consider "A White Night" not as an exploration of the "self" and "other," but in terms of a gendered crime, instigated and perpetuated by a masculine notion of spectacle, which Cameron repeatedly—and mistakenly—calls "art." In fact, Mew's story 311 ELT 49 : 3 2006 is less a counterpart to Heart of Darkness than it is an illustration of Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just and the ethics surrounding the experience of beauty. Scarry insists that beauty "swings" one forward to engage with it, rather than allows one to remain in a safely objective position; moreover, beauty never involves the harmful objectification of the viewed. Invoking Simone Weil, Scarry claims that "at the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering . Beauty, according to Weil, requires us 'to give up our imaginary position as the center.... A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.'"6 The episode in Mew's literary cloister, not only demonstrates the slippery slope between the un-beautiful and the beautiful, that which is spectacle and that which is art, it seems to insist that the murder of an unwilling woman can never be art7 and that a viewer must always do something more than watch. What is most significant about Showalter's equation of "A White Night" with Heart of Darkness is its implicit criticism of Cameron's confusion of "society" with humanity. For this reason, he is the character who most clearly illustrates the problems involved with what might be called "ethical viewing." Narrating the spectacle of female sacrifice, Cameron chooses to—even forces himself to be—oblivious to the spectacle 's broader implications, regarding the social narrative of passive femininity. Observing the killing, Cameron is devoid of the very feelings that make one a social creature, calling into question the humanity of civilization. The "bachelor narrator" illustrates that one can only see and interpret events without compassion if one has the luxury to perceive the body viewed as object and not subject, as "art" and not as life. From the story's onset, Cameron frames the events as a problematic of reading. In differentiating between art and the real, he underscores how the spectacle is necessarily a combination of both. Nevertheless, such a combination results, persistently, in an unsatisfactory position for him, reducing the "live" pleasure of the aesthetic to a superficial report of stark cruelty: "The...