“Darkness is different for me now. I know all its depths and textures”: the panoptical gaze in Sarah Waters’s "Affinity"

Authors

  • Elsa Adán Hernández Phd Student at the University of Zaragoza

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3762

Keywords:

Desire, gaze, (Neo-)Victorianism, panopticon, Sarah Waters, scopophilia, surveillance

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to analyse Sarah Waters’s novel Affinity (1999) from the perspective of the panoptical system of surveillance, based on the controlling power of the gaze, that was widely employed as a system of represión in Victorian society. It seeks to explore Milbank prison as a perfect example of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s ideas about punishment and imprisonment. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s notion of scopophilia, the essay goes on to explore the characteristics of the interaction and mutual attraction felt by two of the main characters, with the aim of proving that the gaze can be a powerful weapon to subjugate another person. Finally, it tackles the relevance of the third protagonist, Ruth Vigers, a lady’s maid whose job makes her invisible both to the readers and to other characters in the novel. The analysis shows that it is precisely her social invisibility that allows her to escape the gaze of this panoptical society and become the master puppeteer controlling everything from the shadows.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Elsa Adán Hernández, Phd Student at the University of Zaragoza

I am Elsa Adán Hernández, a PhD Student at the University of Zaragoza. I am actually starting the third year of my thesis. My main concerns are Victorian and (Neo-)Victorian Literature as well as contemporary literature, paying special attention to female writers who bring to the fore hidden and problematic questions. For that reason, I focus primarily on gender and class issues.  Besides, feminism is also omnipresent in my research, given the fact that it is becoming a quintessential aspect of our present society. 

References

Arias Doblas, R. 2005. “Talking with the Dead: Revisiting the Victorian Past and the Occult in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Sarah Waters’ Affinity.” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 13: 85-105.

Armitt, L. and S. Gamble. 2006. “The Haunted Geometries of Sarah Waters’s Affinity.” Textual Practice 20.1: 141-159.

Brindle, K. 2009-2010. “Diary as Queer Malady: Deflecting the Gaze in Sarah Waters’s Affinity.” Neo-Victorian Studies. 2.2: 65-85.

Carroll, R. 2007. “Becoming my own ghost: spinsterhood, heterosexuality and Sarah Waters’s Affinity”, Genders 45. Academic OneFile. <http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA179660939&v=2.1&u=lom_umichanna&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w/>. (Accessed 14 July 2018)

De Groot, J. 2013. “‘Something New and a Bit Startling’: Sarah Waters and the Historical Novel”, Sarah Waters. Ed. K. Mitchell. London: Bloomsbury. 56-69.

Foucault, M. 1991 (1875). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Trans. Alan Sheridan.

Gilbert, S. M., and S. Gubar. 1979. The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Heilmann, A. and M. Llewellyn. 2010. “Doing It with Mirrors, or Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic.” Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the in the Twenty-First Century, 1999 – 2009. Eds. A. Heilmann and M. Llewellyn. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 174-210.

Llewellyn, M. 2004. “‘Queer? I should say it is criminal!’: Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999).” Journal of Gender Studies 13.3: 203-214.

Mulvey, L. 1999. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introduction Readings. Eds. L. Braudy and M. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press. 833-44.

Newman, B. 1990. “‘The Situation of the Looker-On’: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America: 1029-1041.

O’Callaghan, C. 2014. “Sarah Waters’s Victorian Domestic Spaces; or, the Lesbians in the Attic.” Peer English: 122-138.

Onega, S. 2017. “Lesbian Invisibility and the Politics of Representation of the Lady and the Humble Servant in Sarah Waters’ Affinity.” Eds Isabelle Brasme, Jean-Michel Ganteau, and Christine Reynier. The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Centuries British Literature and Arts. Present Perfect series. Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée: Montpellier: 125-144.

Palmer, P. 2008. “‘She began to show me the words she had written, one by one’: Lesbian Reading and Writing Practices in the Fiction of Sarah Waters.” Women: a cultural review 19.1: 69-86.

Serrano Bailén, A. 2008. Historia e Identidad Sexual en las Novelas de Sarah Waters. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante.

Semple, J. 1992. “Foucault and Bentham: A Defence of Panopticism.” Utilitas 4: 105-120.

Semple, J. 1993. Bentham’s Prison. A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Waters, S. 1999. Affinity. London: Virago Press.

Downloads

Published

23-12-2020

How to Cite

Adán Hernández, E. (2020). “Darkness is different for me now. I know all its depths and textures”: the panoptical gaze in Sarah Waters’s "Affinity". Journal of English Studies, 18, 3–16. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3762

Issue

Vol. 18 (2020)

Section

Articles

License

The authors retain copyright of articles and authorize Journal of English Studies the first publication. They are free to share, redistribute, and/or reprint the article without obtaining permission from the publisher as long as they give appropriate credit to the editor and the journal.

Self-archiving is allowed too. In fact, it is recommendable to deposit a PDF version of the paper in academic and/or institutional repositories.

It is recommended to include the DOI number.

This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License