“I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her:” Examining the Gaze in Villette, The Woman in White, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles

This thesis explores Victorian sexuality and normative behavior as a direct result of the (male) gaze and Michel Foucault’s theory of panopticism. The primary texts used for the analysis are Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I will build on Foucault’s theories with feminist theory in order to examine the expansive and adaptive nature of the gaze. The panoptical structure is important to the understanding of Victorian sexuality because it is ingrained in normative behavior and ideology, and thus functions as a lens through which we can understand the development of the sexual identities of the heroines in Victorian literature. This thesis will argue that the gaze functions as an extension of the panoptical structure within (Victorian) society, and that it operates on different levels and manifests itself in different forms, and that gazing is not exclusively and inherently male. Each novel exemplifies a different aspect of the gaze: in Villette, it is judgmental and enforcing and mostly female. The gaze in the novel is institutionalized, with Lucy Snowe being a voyeuristic outlier. In The Woman in White, the gaze takes on a more sexual tone, as well as introducing us to a more direct male gaze. Again, the most important gaze is female (Marian Halcombe), but this time it is censored by the male gaze. Unlike the two previous novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles presents a more obviously layered form of gazing, stretching from the diegetic characters to the narrator, to the reader, all implicated in the novel’s scopophilic schema: with the novel presenting the most sexualized and objectifying gaze, obliterating the image of woman. Most feminist critique bases its analyses on established gender norms, and thus reduces the range that the analyses might have obtained, narrowing the field rather than expanding it. The aim for this thesis is thus to break down established gender binaries and norms by exploring the different ways women in Victorian literature enact and understand their own feminine identity