earticle

영어

The gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious as a prominent mode of vision in our culture, appears in several forms in Harold Pinter`s Old Times. Thus I want to propose a feminist reading of the platy, a reading which used the structure of the `gaze` for its focus, and which regards Old Times as a text that foregrounds the gaze as an instrument of power and dominance. The play explores the ideological uses of the voyeuristic gaze that demystifies and objectifies, and the narcissistic gaze serving as the vehicle for identification. And it dramatizes triangular relationships involving two members in contest for the possession of the third, which is governed by the gaze. The gaze structuring in the play affects the representation of Kate by drawing attention to the fact of Kate`s role as receiver of the gaze. Even as Kate keeps both Anna and Deeley at a distance, the two remain embattled over possession of her, expressing the desire to enfold the beloved in their gaze. Yet the position of detached observers that deeley and Anna wished to start with has now been fully undermined. They have become the objects the audiences watch for comparison and contrast. What play suggests is that reality is not only subjective and illusory, but that it is dependent on the observer. The audience can not be certain of a character`s nature, because it is altered by the very act of observation. Old Times reveals an instability inscribed within the very structure of the gaze. While the play examines the importance of the gaze for the elaboration of patriarchal power relations, it also deconstructs the scopic division of labor that cats man as active controller of the gaze, ad woman as passive object of the look. Pinter dramatizes the subversive potential of the gaze to deconstruct the gender-marked ideological solidarity between man/specular subject and woman/specular object.