Spectacular Spectators: Regendering the Male Gaze in Delariviere Manley's
The Royal Mischief and Joanna Baillie's Orra

Julie Anderson

continued . . .

The ambiguous assignment of gender and power for the spectator that Modleski and Schuckmann explore is similar to what I term the refractive quality of the female gaze in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British drama. Although drama introduces different generic elements of direction and staging that are not necessarily a part of film theory, using film theory to understand how these dramas play with the gaze is still appropriate. I am analyzing those moments in the plays that contain embedded stage directions; that is, I am examining the textual moments in the plays that call for the actors and/or characters to use the gaze to engage the audience.

The blending of the changing gender identity of the spectator and the empowering of the spectacle characterizes the use of the gaze in Delariviere Manley's The Royal Mischief and Joanna Baillie's Orra. Manley and Baillie provide examples of female spectacles that are empowered by their audiences (both viewing and reading) to gaze back at their audiences. Two female protagonists, Homais in Manley's The Royal Mischief and Orra in Joanna Baillie's play by the same name, are both objects of male spectatorship and spectators of male objects. These female characters are introduced to the audience as erotic objects to be looked at, but they look back at the objectifying gazers and place the gazers in the precarious position of being both spectators and spectacles. The refractiveness of the female/object's gaze (the returned gaze as opposed to the "male" originating gaze) suggests that unlike Mulvey's cinematic gaze, a theatrical gaze is not constrained by gender: the spectacle does not remain female nor the spectator remain male. The power position that the audience may assume as a male spectator shifts as the gaze is returned by the female spectacle. Homais and Orra are empowered because they are watched; by being spectacles, they become spectators. In cinema, Mulvey argues that the gendering of the gaze can threaten the audience's pleasure because the female object signifies the castration threat to the male. In Manley's and Baillie's dramas, however, the audience's pleasure is intensified by the refractiveness of the gaze that causes the audience to experience both the male and female gaze, becoming both spectator and spectacle.

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