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

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatre may seem an unlikely source for playing with the theories associated with the cinematic gaze that Laura Mulvey explores in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Indeed the very unlikeliness of exploring the cinematic gaze in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drama illustrates how gendering the cinematic gaze creates instabilities for the audience of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drama. The centrality of Mulvey's study to our understanding of the cinematic gaze is undeniable and has been used by theatre critics to analyze stage performances. By explaining Freud's association of "scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze," Mulvey illustrates how a cinematic audience identifies with the male lead as he objectifies the female lead by gazing on her performance (440). According to Mulvey's theory, in narrative cinema the controlling (or power) position is assigned to the spectator who is always male and the subordinate (or controlled) power position is given to the object who is always female. The performative nature of the woman's presence on the screen as erotic and the perfection of the male lead are the primary reasons for Mulvey that an audience identifies with the male lead and, thus, participates in a male gaze. And by gazing from the male perspective, the spectator is able to assume a position of power over the female object. Anne K. Mellor's assessment of the eighteenth-century theatre audience as masculine resembles Mulvey's gendering of the gaze as male. For example, Mellor argues that the eighteenth-century theatre "as a whole was culturally gendered as 'feminine,' as both the object of the male specular gaze and the arena of vulgar spectacle or display" (561). The performance on stage is an object that excites a male gaze (a controlling, desiring spectator who looks at an erotically displayed object) in the same way that the cinematic audience gazes identifies with Humphrey Bogart looking at Lauren Bacall.

Film critics since Mulvey have challenged the specific gendering of the spectator as male and the spectacle as female. Using Hitchcock's films, Tania Modleski in The Woman Who Knew Too Much (1988) addresses the question of why the spectator does not necessarily assume a male gender identity. For Modleski, the gender of the spectator is somewhat uncertain. Quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Modleski argues that the power position of a male gaze is unstable because of the "feminizing potential of desire for a woman" (40). As men desire (and gaze on) a woman, they can become entrapped by her and become powerless because they desire her more than they prefer to remain in power over her. Thus, Modleski is able to demonstrate that the gender assignments of spectator and object are extremely ambiguous: "what both male and female spectators are likely to see in the mirror of Hitchcock's films are images of ambiguous sexuality that threaten to destabilize the gender identity of protagonists and viewers alike" (5). This ambiguous nature of the sexuality of the object and the gaze destabilizes the power positions of the spectator and spectacle. The specific gender assignments in Mulvey's theory suggest a presupposed power position of the male viewer over the female object. By empowering the male as a spectator, the female remains powerless to the "controlling gaze." However, if the gender assignment of the spectator is ambiguous, as Modleski argues, then the power position of the spectator is also questionable.

One example in film theory that challenges assumptions concerning the power of the spectacle is Patrick Schuckmann's analysis of Suite 16. According to Schuckmann, Chris, the protagonist in Suite 16, is only able to perform sexually when he is being watched by the paraplegic who hired him to have intercourse with prostitutes. At one point in the film when Chris is asked to have sex with a prostitute, he is rendered impotent because, according to Schuckmann, he is not being watched. Being a spectacle for an audience is what empowers Chris; without the audience, he lacks the ability to do his job (i.e., he lacks potency).

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