 |
|
Spectacular Spectators: Regendering the Male Gaze in Delariviere Manley's Julie Anderson continued . . .
|
|
|
As the play begins, Orra's guardian demands that she agree to marry his son. Because Orra is in love with another suitor, she refuses and is banished to a haunted castle. Orra is fascinated by tales that create fear in her heart, especially tales in which the supernatural watches humans. After Orra is banished to the castle, her maid tells her a story about seeing the dead (at this moment in the text, Orra is most like her audience: she is listening to a gothic tale of ghosts). This story disturbs Orra so greatly that when her suitor comes to rescue her as the ghostly huntsman who is rumored to haunt the castle, Orra faints. When she awakens, she has lost her mind and is unable to recognize her friends. The final scene of the play presents Orra as a raving lunatic, a perfect spectacle for an audience to watch. In the final scene of the play when Orra provides her insanity as a spectacle, she is simultaneously an object and spectator of the audience's gaze. In this scene, the characters gaze upon Orra to restore her sanity. One character claims "when she beholds us, / She'll know her friends, and, by our kindly soothing, / Be gradually restored" to sanity (257). The characters hope that by voluntarily objectifying themselves, they will be able to empower Orra with knowledge. By positioning themselves as objects for viewing, the characters are encouraging not only Orra to view them, but also the audience. The power associated with being a spectator has not eluded these characters, and their choice to be objects rather than spectators is reminiscent of Homais's self-objectification to gain Levan's attentions. Because Orra is presented throughout the text as the object to be viewed by others, when the spectators become objects, the audience's position as mere spectators is challenged. Can the audience maintain a position of spectator when the text changes their spectacle into a spectator? Unfortunately, the characters' attempts to bring Orra to sanity fail. As Orra's own words testify, their gazing at her while they make themselves objects of her gaze traps her in insanity. Orra requests that they remove their gaze: Take off from me thy strangely-fasten'd eye: I may not look upon thee, yet I must . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unfix thy baleful glance: art thou a snake? Something of horrid power within thee dwells, Still, still that powerful eye doth suck me in Like a dark eddy to its wheeling core. (258) Their gaze emphasizes Orra as spectacle and, in turn, encourages her to gaze at them which reaffirms her fear and forces her to remain insane. By intertwining Orra's fear of being watched with her own watching, Baillie permits the tragic heroine to be both spectacle and spectator. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Next Node | 8 | Works Cited
|
