The gaze theory in George Orwell’s 1984

الملخص EN

Set in London thirty-five years in the future, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is surely one of the best known novels of the century.

The novel displays how the world has greatly changed.

It tackles sundry themes; among the major ones is the power of the gaze.

Set in a futuristic and totalitarian society, the novel demonstrates how the gaze, the notion of seeing and being seen, alternately works as a method of empowering and disempowering the individual.

The eyes hold the power to observe, to intimidate and to desire another person, and this power can be used to serve a purpose if used with intention and care.Through the novel, we sense that the power of the gaze manifests itself in diverse ways.

Relying on Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Irene Visser’s article “ReadingPleasure: Light in August and the theory of the gendered gaze”and Henry krips’ article “The politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Zizek” as its main theoretical framework, this paper will mainly deal with how largely the power of the gaze is prensented in Nineteen Eighty-Four through various aspects.

It is within this framework of empowering and disempowering gazes that this novel provides the foundation for a literary analysis of the gaze.

The focal point of this analysis is to show how the gaze can both empower and disempower the protagonists within such a futuristic totalitarian regime they are bound to live in.