Review of Katherine Inglis’s ‘Opthalmoscopy in Charlotte Bront?’s Villette’

摘要

Katherine Inglis's intelligent article maximises her scrupulous research into nineteenth-century opthalmoscopy to advance a reinvigorated reading of the language of sight in Villette. Inglis eschews the arguably worn themes of vision and surveillance, drawing attention instead to the ways in which Bront. engages with the phenomenological experience of sight and nineteenth-century understandings of the embodied eye. This critical refocus facilitates an argument of real theoretical weight. The article's disquisition into Villette's dialogue with Victorian optics makes a significant contribution towards moderating the enthusiasm with which, in some quarters, theories of panopticism have been applied to nineteenth-century literature. It demonstrates comprehensively that Jeremy Bentham's theory of the Panopticon was but one of several discourses of vision current in nineteenth-century thought