Second Sight

Since the earliest records of culture, mankind has represented its ocularcentric focus through images of sight. Freud theorizes that these images of viewership represent dynamics of power: those who see, actively control, and those who are seen, passively wait to be acted upon. In the archetypes of Western culture, these visual dynamics follow a gendered binary—active/masculine versus passive/feminine. Freud believes that these visual behaviors are determined during the psychosexual stages of development, and these roles are then reinforced through cultural norms. Freudian theory stood as the accepted model of behavioral analysis until late into the twentieth century when feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray, Laura Mulvey, and Ann E. Kaplan began examining and deconstructing patriarchal beliefs about visuality. These theorists agree that women can assume the masculine position of visuality and co-opt the active position of sight for themselves. This particular assumption of power can be seen in women's colonial narratives of the eighteenth century, where European women were vested with power over colonial subjects, native men and women alike. In an interesting duality, European women simultaneously inhabited the object position of passivity vis-à-vis their male colonizer counterpart and the subject position of activity vis-à-vis the colonial Other. This multi-dimensional position allowed for identificatory bonds across gender and racial lines and resulted in contradictory images of spectatorship within women's colonial narratives. This study examines the spectatorship imagery in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko, Charlotte Smith's Desmond and The Wanderings of Warwick, and Anna Maria Mackenzie's Slavery, or the Times to account for the shifts in loyalty and explain the situational alliances that women forged both with their countrymen, viewing the Other as inferior and sub-human, and with the colonized, viewing them as subjects in their own right, as their equals.