Historicizing the Gaze

Jean I. Marsden’s Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660–1720 (Cornell, 2006) will seem like a breath of fresh air to scholars working on the intersection of gender and eighteenth-century culture. In this study, Marsden constructs a shrewd, nuanced, and much-needed history of the “gaze”—long a staple of feminist, theatrical, and cinematic theory. Fatal Desire “explores the impact of the theatrical spectacle of female sexuality on the world of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater” and “focuses on the impact of women on the stage and in the theater, examining the ways in which their material presence altered the representation of women in drama and even reshaped dramatic form at a time when theater was the most public and most debated literary venue” (3). What makes Marsden’s study so exciting is that rather than hewing to the traditional argument that public representations affected private lives, she presses her investigation fully into the realm of public argument and reveals the often nuanced ways in which acting not only rendered the actress’s body public but also made her body available as a heuristic tool that educated women and men alike in the proper methods for both viewing and interpreting women as such. Marsden moves her argument through six chapters that begin with the roots of “she-tragedy” in the 1680s and the intimate relationship between anti-theatrical diatribes and drama of the period.

Chapter 1, “Female Spectatorship, Jeremy Collier and the Antitheatrical Debate,” frames Marsden’s project and carefully defines the cultural problematic she intends to explore. It is a particularly important feature of Marsden’s study that she foregrounds the scant evidence of women’s self-perceptions, a problem endemic to research and study on women of the period, particularly non-elite women and a recognition too seldom admitted by many scholars working in the period, yet one that fundamentally alters the kinds of projects we can realistically undertake and the kinds of materials we can research. Marsden’s candid acknowledgement that “no woman published her views, leaving us without a firsthand account of theatergoing in the Restoration and early eighteenth century” (19), however, frees her to emphasize both the formal constructedness of the “gaze” and, most importantly, the historicity of those forms. As Marsden points out, Fatal Desire explores the ways late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century culture imagined the female spectator—a “phantom woman,” a “figure whose shadowy existence and dangerous gaze, it was argued, could lead to moral corruption and social catastrophe” (19).

The second chapter, “Women Watching: The Female Spectator in Late Seventeenth-Century Comedy,” moves on from the anti-theatrical diatribes of the 1680s and 1690s to argue that the “problem” of female spectatorship was differentially engaged through different genres. Here, Marsden focuses on two plays, William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676/77) and Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife (1697), which define the spectrum of comedic discussions of the female gaze and provide the ideological underpinnings for the eighteenth-century she-tragedies that dominated the stage in the ensuing decades. Among the most fascinating claims that Marsden makes in this chapter is the observation that The Provok’d Wife constituted something like the primal scene of the transformation of female spectators into female spectacles. Vanbrugh, Marsden argues, “presents a picture of women who are endlessly objectified, on the stage and within the theater itself. Female spectatorship, in other words, is simply another occasion for the commodification of women, this time staged by the woman herself” (56). It has, of course, long been a staple of feminist criticism that patriarchy relies on the objectification of women to sustain an elitist distribution of social and political power. The force of that assumption, however, has often been weakened by the difficulties of answering the question of what happens to women’s social and political status when they too are spectators? Marsden’s careful reading of the plays in her second chapter not only adds crucial historical subtlety to feminism’s conventional claims about patriarchy, but also supplies feminist critics with much-needed historical evidence to plot specifically the...