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Spectacular Spectators: Regendering the Male Gaze in Delariviere Manley's Julie Anderson continued . . .
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Homais's husband closes the play by blaming Homais's eyes for the death of so many: he laments, Oh, horror, horror, horror! What mischief two fair guilty eyes have wrought, Let lovers all look here, and shun the dotage. To Heaven my dismal thoughts shall straight be turned, And all these sad disasters truly mourned. (261) The reference to Homais's "two fair guilty eyes" recalls the numerous references throughout the play to the power of her eyes. From the beginning of the play to its end, Homais's eyes are the driving force behind the play's central action (the destructive power of sexual desire). However, by blaming the tragedy on Homais's eyes, her husband reminds the audience of the spectacular nature of Homais's actions, especially the passage in which her slave seduces Levan, and her husband also invokes the audience (represented in the text as lovers) to look at the situation. Although Homais's eyes are blamed for the tragedy, the audience has gazed and enjoyed the performance. In fact, the closing lines by Homais's husband encourage the audience to continue gazing: "Let lovers all look here" he commands. This request to be viewed is not all that different from the request Homais makes (indirectly) through her slave at the beginning of the play to be viewed by Levan. When Homais's husband calls the audience to gaze, he also is returning their gaze. Just as Levan becomes the object of Homais's gaze, so to does the audience become the object of the character's gaze in these last lines as he commands the audience to look. In this play, the refractive nature of the gaze is centered in desire: the desire of a woman for a man and of a man for a woman; of an audience for a play; and of a play for an audience. All of these scenarios switch the position of the spectacle and the spectator. Manley uses association to refract the gaze; the audience is invited to identify with the male character who is gazed at by the female object. In Joanna Baillie's Orra, the female object becomes the spectator of the male audience when she gazes through the fourth wall directly at the audience. In Orra, Baillie presents a female character as the tragic object of the spectator's gaze. Like Homais, Orra invites the other characters and the audience to gaze upon her as a spectacle. In the Introduction to the volume of plays that contains Orra, Baillie states that she crafted Orra to be "an improper object to excite dramatic interest" (229). Orra's actions are meant to entice the audience to watch her in the same way that the descriptions of Homais entreat the audience to gaze upon (or objectify) her. When Orra presents herself as an object to be viewed, she displays fear rather than sexual desire to arouse the male gaze. Orra's fear in the text is the fear of being watched by the supernatural (especially, ghosts). By choosing a female protagonist who is afraid of being watched, we might suspect that Baillie presents an example of Mulvey's cinematic theory that the object of the gaze is feminine and the spectator is male. But, like Manley, Baillie refracts the gaze by doubling Orra's role: Orra is both a spectacle and a spectator in this play. And like Manley, Baillie places her audience in the precarious position of being spectators of Orra's performance and spectacles of Orra's gaze. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Next Node | 7 | 8 | Works Cited
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