5. Recycling Patriarchy's Garbage: George Eliot's Pessimism and the Problem of a Site for Feminism

Theorists have long considered the way Western metaphysics has formed around metaphors of sight. Our notions of reality are informed by our understanding of what the visual means, es­ pecially by the assumption that the observation of empirical data somehow offers access to universal truth and natural law. So too literature and literary theory have always been intrigued by the relations be�een the linguistic and the visual . The conventions of literary realism rely on verbal imitations of such supposedly objec­ tive observation, proceeding as if a thousand words can actually equal a picture . Recent post-structural literary theory and criticism have investigated in particular this privileging of sight and the way language attempts to lay claim to it. One feminist approach, influ­ enced especially by Lacanian psychoanalysis, foregrounds the im­ portance of gender in its unraveling of the epistemological assump­ tions implied in questions of representation. By focusing on what critical shorthand terms "the male gaze," these feminists have demonstrated how the scapegoating of women within the specular economy mars its transparency and brings its assumptions to our attention. 1 But more recent-Foucauldian-approaches to the stra-