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Spectacular Spectators: Regendering the Male Gaze in Delariviere Manley's Julie Anderson continued . . .
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The tension in the above passage between Orra's desire to look and not be seen by those looking at her is confused by the performative nature of her role as a character on stage. Like the characters on stage, the audience is also watching Orra's mad performance. If the audience identifies with the characters on stage by gazing at Orra, then perhaps Orra gazes not only at the other characters but at the audience as well. The audience, like those on stage, becomes a spectacle of Orra's gaze; the audience's position as spectator is uncomfortably changed to spectacle as the mad Orra watches them watching her. The intensity of this closing scene is increased by the audience's awareness that they are placed in the position that Orra feared the most: they are watching someone watch them. Although Baillie wrote Orra to be performed on stage, it never was. In fact, the character Orra was created specifically for the famous nineteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons. Jeffrey N. Cox suggests that "Orra's madness would have provided Sarah Siddons with a great scene" (57) because a performance by Siddons would have enabled an audience to appreciate the spectacle of Orra's madness while they enjoyed Orra's reciprocating gaze. The "great scene" that Siddons could have provided emphasizes the spectacle of the performance on stage which parallels Mulvey's theory that the audience maintains a male gaze on a female object. However, Siddons' performance would have emphasize the refractiveness of the gaze to turn the spectators into spectacles. Julie A. Carlson says that "What is clear [about Siddons' acting] is that the effect of her acting feminizes audiences, particularly powerful men" (172). In Orra, the audience is feminized when it is trapped like Orra herself is of watching others watch the self. Clearly, had Siddons performed Orra, this feminization would be much more powerful than what occurs when the images remain in the mind of the reader. Even without Siddons' performance, the text of Orra itself changes the audience's role in the same way that Manley's play objectifies the spectators. The performance of the gaze is created in the mind of the reader because in the texts of Manley's and Baillie's dramas the female objects become spectators of those that gaze on the women. The act of reading the text is an act of gazing. And although the objects of the gaze remain in the mind, the refractive quality of the gaze allows the text as represented by the characters to gaze back at the reader. As Mulvey argues, the audience's (or reader's) association with characters that gaze places the audience (or reader) in a precarious position of moving from the powerful position of the gaze to the impotent position of an object. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next Node | Works Cited
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