British literature Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Scott Paul Gordon

Critical Essay by Scott Paul Gordon

SOURCE: “Voyeuristic Dreams: Mr. Spectator and the Power of Spectacle,” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 3-23.

In the following essay, Gordon argues that the figure of Mr. Spectator, the fictional editorial voice of the Spectator, was designed to be “a mechanism to reform London society,” part of the journal's “disciplinary regime based on omnipotent surveillance and the threat of public exposure.”

Mr. Spectator seems to anticipate precisely the “Eye of Power,” the voyeuristic gaze which disciplines subjects by observing them, that recent theory detects in social institutions from the prison to the cinema to the hospital. The supposed “author” of the Spectator (published daily, except Sundays, from March 1711 to December 1712) is an invisible but omnipresent God-figure who can observe all his readers simultaneously. This character differentiates the Spectator from other early eighteenth-century periodicals—even from the Tatler (1709-11), its immediate...
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