Tess, tourism, and the spectacle of the woman

Jeff Nunokawa's chapter takes as its starting point the school of feminist psychoanalytic film theory founded by Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," a school that collates the subjectivity and subjection of women with their status as the object of a masculine gaze. However, it moves beyond Mulvey by historicizing a particular instance of the psychoanalytic scenario which has proven central to feminist theory in recent years. Nunokawa argues that Hardy's novel not only ratifies the perennial stationing of the feminine spectacle as the site of masculine violence, but also suggests that the historical particularities arranging this spectacle may surprise us. Tess's "to-be-looked-at-ness" results, at least in part, from her location in a tourist fantasy: the "pretty face and shapely figure" are illuminated as inhabitants of a traveler's panorama, an exotic vision of rural England, and of "underdeveloped" regions beyond, a scopophiliac pastoral sustained both by nineteenth-century sightseer's handbooks, and by a novel informed by them.