Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jeffrey D. Frame

Critical Essay by Jeffrey D. Frame

SOURCE: Frame, Jeffrey D. “‘Now will I to the chink, / To Spy …’: Scopophilia as Gender Sport in A Midsummer Night's Dream.” The Upstart Crow 19 (1999): 50-61.

In the following essay, Frame focuses on the voyeurism of the male and female characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream and suggests that the motif emphasizes the characters' maneuvers for power over one another.

No other period in history seems to have given more attention to the socio-cultural concepts of “looking” and “listening” than the modern-postmodernist twentieth century, and for obvious reasons. From Freud and Lacan to Hitchcock and Foucault, one can observe an evolving and now flourishing preoccupation in books and journals with the “gender gaze,” voyeurism, spectatorship, and an informed “optometric psychology” all largely propelled by the scopophilic nature of a cinematic, media-saturated society. When it is applied to literary studies, the natural ramification of this infatuation with the...
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