Moussa Pourya Asl
Abstract
Current feminisms have emphasized the systematic nature of women’s oppression. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray insist that woman’s difference and otherness is a matter of male-dominated institutional definition: because the woman is theoretically subordinated to the concept of masculinity, ...
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Current feminisms have emphasized the systematic nature of women’s oppression. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray insist that woman’s difference and otherness is a matter of male-dominated institutional definition: because the woman is theoretically subordinated to the concept of masculinity, she is seen and objectified by the man as his opposite, described as an absence, a lack, and, most notoriously, the other. The metaphor of vision, or the panoptic gaze, is thus faulted with a construction of “sexist norms”, and with the institutional definitions of gender and sexual difference. This paper examines the contention in the key theoretical writings of men—Freud, Lacan, and Sartre—who are engaged with the notion of femininity. Their conceptualizations on the notions of scopophilia, exhibitionism, and narcissism are specifically examined to explore the way the dichotomy of a male subject and a female object is formulated and perpetuated through heterocenteric assumptions about the gaze. It is concluded that within the masculine framework of Western metaphysics, a woman’s entry into a presiding scopic economy contributes to her ineluctable limitation to passivity and her socio-sexual victimization. In this regard, the panoptic gaze is endowed with a constitutive influence upon the subjectivity of the individuals—appropriating the woman into a definable being.
Ahad Mehrvand; Moussa Pourya Asl
Abstract
Attempts to present a definitive rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in 1847. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, each taking one element of the novel and extrapolating it towards total ...
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Attempts to present a definitive rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in 1847. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, each taking one element of the novel and extrapolating it towards total explanation, make the need for this research timely. This article focuses on ways to achieve a truer and more rational interpretation of the novel. The study indicates that in order to solve the enigma and crack the codes of the novel, the conscious and unconscious thoughts of the author, performing within the text, have to be discovered. The research approach adopted in this study is what is referred to as psychobiography or the Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. Freud's ideas have been employed due to the increasing shift to him in the recent decades, particularly in the discipline of psychobiography. The findings of this research underline that: First, Emily Brontë grew up in an oppressive milieu, and she compulsively created phantasy worlds within which she continuously repeated certain patterns; Second, nearly all the characters of the novel are stricken by their mother's death, and they not only undergo the processes of dejection, melancholia, and hysteria, but also suffer from certain core issues—fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment, fear of betrayal, low self-esteem, insecure or unstable sense of self; Third, in Wuthering Heights, religion, civilization, and conventional principles of Victorian novel writing are satirically rejected. The main conclusion to be drawn from this article is that Emily Brontë was a neurotic person whose unconscious obsessions of psychoanalytic love of mother and hatred of father are projected in Wuthering Heights.