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Recent developments in the theory of the gaze have much to offer critics who are interested in narrative, perhaps especially with respect to l9th-century realism. Telling a story and "looking" at characters are interrelated activities. As Beth Newman argues, such well-established narrative terms as "point of view" and "focalization" are rooted in the visual and "implicitly invoke a gaze: a look that the subject(s) whose perceptions organize the story direct at the characters and acts represented" (1029). "Looking" is not a simple, value-free activity, however. Michel Foucault makes clear that the gaze is connected to power and surveillance: the person who gazes is empowered over the person who is the object of the gaze. A number of art and film critics have focused on the gender implications of this power imbalance, noting that implicit in the structures of much Western art and many classic Hollywood films is the idea of the male gazer and the female object. Within this context, Linda Nochlin in particular has addressed the issue of "Women, Art, and Power," arguing that the male artist's right to represent women is interconnected with the assumption of general male power over and control of women in society (1-2).
These issues of art, the gaze, and the ways in which they are connected to the representation of women are at the foreground of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and George Eliot's Middlemarch, two classic realist texts that employ omniscient narration. The term "omniscient narration" in itself, of course, implies an all-powerful gaze-i.e., that the all-knowing narrator directs the reader's look-but, in addition, "seeing" and "vision" are also specific organizing motifs of each novel. James's concern with motifs of visual representation is indicated at the outset by his use of the word "portrait" in the title, as well as by Isabel Archer's key explanation of what she wants from life and the world: "I only want to see for myself" (134). Similarly, Eliot's fascination with vision reveals itself concretely in her narrator's famous discussion of the random scratches on a table forming a pattern of circles when illuminated by a single candle, "its light falling with an exclusive optical selection" (182), as well as at the climactic moment when, in the midst of her...