The Female Gaze in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

To possess the gaze has traditionally meant in Western culture to occupy a male subject position in relation to one’s objects of vision. While critics have often identified the omniscient narrator of George Eliot’s Middlemarch with the all-powerful male gaze, this paper aims to challenge and undermine the dominance of the male gaze in the novel by examining narrative points of view as well as the various masculine discourses of vision―such as artistic, scientific, and medical gazes―which subject women under the scopic dominance of the male. By applying the concept of the gaze to narrative stance as well as examining how women are represented through the male gaze, I claim that the male gaze associated with its omniscient narrative is not dominant or monolithic, but that it is possible to locate a version of the female gaze, as exemplified by Dorothea’s sympathetic gaze, that can be a powerful resistance and alternative to the masculine gaze and its scopic regime. By focusing on the interrelated issues of the gaze, gender, aesthetics, and narrative, this reading of Middlemarch clearly demonstrates the radical nature of the feminist project Eliot was engaged in her critique of oppressive masculine system of viewing and its power relations. (Konkuk University)