Lucrece's Gaze | I
I
In Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece Tarquin's and Lucrece's acts of seeing precede their speaking. I shall argue that a specific, constructed experience of social space produces their ability to speak through a sequence of narratable actions. This spatial figuration projects along gender lines. How vision is socially put together reveals the linguistic means by which Lucrece, Tarquin, 'their' narrator, and the narrative's audience come to be screens for the imaginai projection of gender.
A useful beginning may be to investigate the phenomenological acquisition of sight as documented in clinical situations. When patients who had been blind from birth first started receiving cataract operations, records of the doctors' reports on the patients' progress were collected in a study by Marius von Senden.1 As it turned out, such "newly sighted" patients were not merely confronting a surfeit of new, different data. Their task was to learn a...
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