Seeing is Believing: Power and the Gaze in Charles Dickens’s The Adventures of Oliver Twist

Behind the misleadingly singular term 'the gaze' a set of disparate and at best loosely related bodies of theory can be found sheltering. Within present-day social psychology the term has a purchase that is more literal than metaphorical, and makes reference to studies of looking behaviour in groups and dyads, often focussing upon the varieties of such behaviour that are appropriate to different social circumstances or that are associated with individuals from different social or cultural backgrounds. Within the humanities, and especially within literary or film studies, the term evokes a complex body of theory emanating from a number of sources. First amongst these is Michel Foucault's metaphorical extension of Jeremy Bentham's 'Panopticon', an extension used to describe that condition of internalized surveillance to be found (according to Foucault) at the heart of modern western culture.1 A more diffuse tradition that develops Jacques Lacan's critique of Jean-Paul Sartre is represented in its most influential manifestation by Laura Mulvey's 1975 article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. Mulvey attempts to link looking behaviour in the classic Hollywood film with forms of gendered audience identification and viewpoint — and further with the ideological position that these support.2