An Analysis On Female Characters Of The Age Of Innocence From The Perspective Of Gaze Theory

Edith Wharton is one of the most significant female writers in the history of American literature in the early 20 th century.Her novel The Age of Innocence has attracted wide attention from readers and critics at home and abroad since its publication.In 1921,Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature,which led her to the peak of literary creation.In The Age of Innocence,Wharton focuses on the status and fate of women under the shackles of the Old New York society,which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology.Based on the gaze theories of Jean Paul Sartre,Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault,this paper analyzes the life and thoughts of women as well as the gender status in the Old New York society from a visual perspective,and explores the deconstruction of women's subjectivity and the construction of their self-identity under the oppression of power and desire in the Old New York in the behavior of seeing and being seen.Firstly,this paper analyzes that women suffer from the men's desire gaze and the whole society's constant discipline gaze.In the male-dominated Old New York society,women are male accessories and the object of men's desire.Old New York,like a big panopticon,is also a power society full of discipline gaze,constantly supervising and disciplining women,not allowing them to have the slightest exception.It shows the tragic image of women being oppressed,both as a subordinate to men and as a tool for the upper class to consolidate their rights.Then,it explores women's self-alienation under the gaze.The traditional women in the old New York society lost their self under the gaze of others.In order to gain the recognition of others,womengradually internalize other's values to recognize the world according to others,and follow other' s ideas as well as change their will to cater and please others.It shows the meaningless and self-less life of old New York women under the gaze of others.At last,it analyzes the women of the novel who redefine the identity by counter-gaze and completes the construction of the identity through their own efforts.Women bravely gaze back at those who have great power and high social status.By intuitively violating the old New York's rules and tradition,women do not succumb to the cage of marriage and the social imprisonment of women's status and strongly pursue a new life with independent personality,which presents the resistance and independence of women under the oppression of patriarchal society.Through the analysis of female characters in the text,the gaze is ubiquitous and oppression is inevitable for women,but the subject and object of gaze are not unchangeable.When facing the gaze of the other,women should not blindly follow and compromise,nor lose themselves as prisoners under gaze,but should dare to convert from the state of passive to active in the practice of gaze,break the shackles and seek independent self.