Cycnos | Volume 30.1 - The House of Mirth. Une esthétique de la diversion | I Modèles et émancipation dans The House of Mirth

Résumé :

From a traditional feminist perspective, the male gaze is supposed to construct the spectator’s perception of female characters in classical cinema. Insofar as Terence Davies acknowledges a debt to classical melodrama in The House of Mirth (2000), it seems relevant to pay attention to the way the character of Lily Bart is defined in terms of her « to-be-looked-at-ness », a term coined by Laura Mulvey in her founding text of 1975. However, Lily’s strategy of resistance through the female gaze, combined with the empowering potential of that gaze that seems to form part of the legacy of the woman’s film as such, makes it impossible to sustain a reading of the film that reduces her to a mere passive object of male gazes.

Mots-clés : The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton, Terence Davies, gaze gender, look, melodrama, patriarchy, woman’s film

Date de publication : 2018-09-11