GENDERING OF THE EYE: REPRESENTATION OF VISUAL PERCEPTION IN HAMLET
GENDERING OF THE EYE: REPRESENTATION OF VISUAL PERCEPTION IN HAMLET

Summary/Abstract: "Everybody (and every body) ‘sees’ in Hamlet but it is the woman who is most often deprived of her own independent visual perception. For this reason the literary representation of seeing, as it emerges in Shakespeare’s play, cannot escape the gendering of this sense experience. Gendering of the eye seems to be appropriate and inevitable for the exhaustive explanation of different representations of vision, presented in Shakespeare’s most interpreted drama. Perhaps one of the keys to the ‘mysteries’ of the play lies in deciphering the ‘sensory code’ of the ‘Mona Lisa of literature’. Perhaps the ‘sensory code’ is not to be decoded by the mind’s eye of a reader/critic but rather empirically sensed through their physical eyes. "[...]

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