Can there be a female gaze? By Marie Caruso
Teachers College Ed.D.Student Interdisciplinary Studies
In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argues that the gaze in cinema can only be male. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of a female gaze. Mulvey claims that if there is a female gaze, it is through male identification; that women have no gaze of their own. She builds her theories on the Freudian oedipal complex. My research will focus on models of female psychology that probe into the female psyche. As an example, I will interpretThe Piano, a film about a woman, by a woman, that speaks of the feminine.
Historically, women have been valued for their physical beauty rather than their intellect. Internalizing sexual objectification can have very negative results. Girls learn to adopt the observer’s view, developing poor self-esteem as impossible standards of beauty are ingested. For instance, there have been research studies on the media’s portrayal of thinnessin women as afactor in contributing to anorexia and bulimia in the late twentieth century.
Podiatrists spend a good deal of their time repairing damage caused by high heels. Women put up with painful and harmful shoes to “be” sexy anddesirable.
Body piercing and tattoos which have become increasing popular are unhealthy and damaging. In a recent fashion show in Paris, one of the models fell because she couldn’t see her feet. Some critics describe this show as misogynist. Another model looked as if she was being strangled with her own hair. Would a man do this to himself for the sake of being “desired?”
Educating females has been a major part of my life and understanding the issues of sexual objectification is necessary to facilitate any change.
One underlying concept in Freud’s oedipal model that Mulvey bases her theory on is that meaning to the world is given through the phallus. Masculinity emerges as dominating, while femininity is viewed as subordinate. This paradigm emerges in cinema in the form of a controlling ‘male gaze.’
The opposing concept is that the oedipal theory reduces woman to a contested point on the triangle, never allowing her to be a subject. That shift in focus can change the balance of power by envisioning solutions to subordination and objectification.
In both Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Mulvey argues that Hollywood cinema is based on voyeuristic and fetishistic ways of looking that create visual pleasure for the spectator, both male and female, through objectification of the female image. This objectification of the women’s image takes place because she is, without a penis, a striking reminder of castration.She is the “bearer of the bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it.” She links the patriarchal order in which we are ‘caught’ as part of this scheme as woman stands as signifier for the male other.
Scopophilia is one of the pleasures that Mulvey describes which takes women as objects and controls them with the ‘gaze.’ This creates pleasure for the male spectator, and for the woman spectator as well as she internalizes the message of being-looked-at-ness.
Fetishism is a different process in which identification takes place with the image on the screen,“builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself.” The woman becomes an icon.Marlene Dietrich is used as an example of this type of gaze.
Many questions are raised by Mulvey’s theory and subsequent articleswere written usingher argument as a springboard for further thought.Is it true that the gaze is always male, even from a female perspective? Can woman own active desire? Laura Mulvey argues that she can’t, and that if she did, it would be her masculine side.
Searching for other views, I turned to Patricia Mellencamp, a well-known film theorist, who discusses female desire in her book, A Fine Romance. She uncovers the great myth of romance that permeates our lives beginning in childhood when we are introduced to fairy tales – especially through Hollywood cinema. Women sacrifice themselves to male desire through the grand illusion of romance.
(Romance) teaches us relentlessly to define ourselves by outside standards, making our central measure of self being desirable for someone else or being in a constant state of desiring.1
Mellencamp believes that “it is a fiction that keeps women captive... and the story is defined by male desire.”2
In her book, Women & Film, E. Ann Kaplan adds to Mulvey’s work by bringing in the marginalized mother - a needed piece in understanding women’s place:
The male gaze, in defining and dominating woman as erotic object, manages to repress the relations of woman in her place as Mother.3
Kaplan suggests that the reason patriarchy represses Motherhood is because it binds women to women.
The body of the mother…is one toward which women aspire all the more passionately because it lacks a penis…By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself.4
Kaplan chooses a few films to focus on that represent women in different ways; all of which ultimately display how woman is “refused a voice, a discourse and their desire is subjected to male desire.” The fact that motherhood has been so marginalized in psychoanalytic theory is indicative of a repression of the feminine.5
Freud says that little girls turn away from their mothers when they realize that their mothers are missing a penis.Woman is doomed to envy the embodiment of desire that will forever elude her, since only a man can possess it. The phallus represents desire. Mulvey takes this view as well.6
But many studies and psychoanalytic theories have developed by women, about women. Chodorow has shown that female identity formation takes place with her mother. A girl experiences herself like her mother and has a stronger ability to experience her mother’s feelings. Girls tend to be more empathetic and relational but less differentiated, while boys separate and differentiate more easily but have problems with intimacy.7
Jessica Benjamin adds that infants see their mothers as extremely powerful, not as lacking a penis. She is powerful master of the home sphere; intimate and caring, but de-eroticized and pleasure-less.8 The mother’s hallmark is not desire but nurturance.
The father is important as he represents freedom from the powerful mother. The phallus is not the symbol of desire but the symbol of revolt and separation from mother. The meaning of the penis as symbol of revolt and separation derives, then, from the fantasy of maternal power, not maternal lack.9
The imbalance of power in patriarchy is deeply imbedded in society. In the oedipal story, Freud overlooked Laius’s transgression – his attempt to murder his son. The picture changes when you put this back into the story. Laius is a man who doesn’t want to be replaced by his son – he cannot bear to give up his omnipotence. It is this type of power that controls by domination and cannot recognize subjects other than themselves.“This means that women must claim their subjectivity and so be able to survive destruction.”10
Jessica Benjamin claims that the psychological foundation of the idealization of male power and autonomous individuality comes from the father. “Why not assume that girls are trying to identify with their father and thereby find recognition of their own desire?”But Benjamin points out that the father is more likely to see her as a sweet adorable thing, “a nascent sex object.”11
Thus girls are confronted more directly by the difficulty of separating from mother and their own helplessness. Unrecognized as a subject by their fathers, they relinquish their entitlement to desire. They grow to idealize the man who has what they can never possess – power and desire.
Freud said that woman is made, not born. Female desire, like femininity, is not static.Many feminists were dissatisfied with the notion that female film viewers identify with the male gaze. The female spectator as a subject was dismissed. What if the protagonist is an older female? What if the protagonist is not sexy? Does Mulvey’s theory apply to all races and cultures? How have postmodern feminist films changed the gaze?
We have already seen this reflected in films that have experimented with the gaze, such as Thelma and Louise, The Full Monty; the American Gigolo, and Orlando, Blue Steel, and BrokebackMountain.
I have chosen to interpret The Piano because it was written and directed by a female, Jane Campion. The protagonist of the film, Ada (Holly Hunter), is mute – perhaps too obviously symbolic for women’s historical role of not having a voice. Ada arrives onto the beach by boat, much like Venus emerging from the waters, with her daughter and piano. This is a striking image of the birth of the feminine. Her daughter, Flora, is both her voice and her inner child (sometimes her inner parent). The intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship is sealed as a dominant theme of the film from the start.
The piano is so much more than a piano.Ada’s piano-playing is her main source of expression, and helps her feel grounded connected. I believe that the piano is a fetish – not of the missing phallus, but of the missing mother – her mother.
She is thrown into the world of male domination and married to a man who does not recognize her needs. The piano is taken away, which at once symbolizes both her separation from mother and her need to be recognized by father.
And when her husband punishes Ada for falling in love with Baines, he wields his power and anger, by cutting her finger
off - reminding her that she is the bleeding wound of castration and she cannot do as she desires but must cater to his will. It was a phallic moment for him, but not for her. For her it was the cruelest, sadistic violence that could have been inflicted on her.
In the end, the piano becomes the item that is too heavy a burden; as it falls overboard, the cord wraps around Ada’s foot and brings her deep down into the ocean. Ada sets herself free from this symbolic umbilical cord as she chooses life – she desires life - in spite of all the victimization that she experienced.
I think that this film raises some interesting questions about women and their place in patriarchal order. Having a different model of psychoanalysis allows film to be interpreted in the spirit of the feminine. Female desire and gaze is a topic that requires deep inquiry into the female psyche.
In summary, Females are raised with romantic myths where they learn the desire to be desirable. The mother is refused a voice and is marginalized in order to perpetrate the male gaze. The Oedipal model helps perpetuate the male/dominance – female/subordinate dyad. Women have trouble separating and individuating because they are so much like their mothers and have difficulty finding recognition as subjects from their fathers. The complex matter of gaining subjectivity must start with Women’s desire to claim it.
ENDNOTES
1 Patricia Mellencamp, A Fine Romance: Five Ages of Film Feminism, ed. Robert Sklar (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
2 Mellencamp 77.
3 E. Ann Kaplan, Women & Film: Both Sides of the Camera (Great Britain: Methuen, Inc., 1983).
4 Kaplan 6.
5 Kaplan 7.
6 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975).
7Nancy J. Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (London: Yale University Press, 1989).
8 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (USA: Pantheon Books, 1988), 92.
9 Benjamin 94.
10 Benjamin 221.
11 Benjamin 109.
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