Does the phallocentric gaze permeate the narrative, or do the narratives provide readers/viewers with tools with which to critique and question the dominant patriarchal order?

Prompt for Essay 2
HMS 201A Professor Kramer Spring 2023
For Essay 2, you will be writing about Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and two other texts that we’ve read (or watched) together during this second part of the course. For this essay, you will be exploring the ways in which desire and power dynamics are portrayed in the narratives you’ve chosen to write about. Your theoretical framework should be informed by Mulvey’s essay, and you are welcome to (but not required) to include additional theoretical texts to support your readings.
In her essay, Laura Mulvey argues that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (833). Mulvey further claims that:
[t]he magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order (834-5).
Writing about literary texts (and possibly also the film, Life Lessons), you will explore whether you see the language of the dominant patriarchal order in your two narratives. Does the phallocentric gaze permeate the narrative, or do the narratives provide readers/viewers with tools with which to critique and question the dominant patriarchal order? Is there a power imbalance in the narrative, and if so, how is this conveyed? Mulvey argues that cinema provides the ultimate conditions for coding “the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order” in part, because of “its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure” (834-5). In your essay, consider whether you agree with Mulvey, and if so, whether literature provides more possibilities for critiquing the objectification of women. Or, if you disagree with Mulvey, explore how the narratives you are writing about might show different power dynamics at play. Is the gaze as present in the literary texts (and possibly the film) you are writing about as it is in Hollywood film? Do you think that literature might be equally capable of presenting a perspective that is complicit with objectification of women, or do the texts you are writing about challenge the objectifying gaze?

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