Scouts Panoptic Cell: Adapting Ladyhood through Sartres Theory of the gaze in Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird
. Javeria Batool & Muhammad Afzal Faheem
Abstract
- This paper provides an examination of the principal character of To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise Finch’s development from her youthful tomboyishness to her mature womanhood, through the critical lens of panopticism. Michael Foucault in the book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, theorizes Bentham’s architectural structure of a panopticon as a polyvalent, optical schema of surveillance, and a cruel cage designed to impose a particular form of behavior. In the Panopticon, power is achieved through transparency of the subject, parallel to Sartre’s theorization of the “look”, which apprehends a forced submission of a subject to a space they cannot escape. They are seen and they are vulnerable. This research ensues the journey of Jean Louise Finch in the carcass of the Panopticon, as she gradually becomes a prisoner in the women’s cell, as a result of constant surveillance and discipline. This investigation maps the walls of the panoptic structure that confines women into ladyhood as defined by society. The strict gender roles followed in Maycomb are regulated through multiple guards, who discipline the subjects that reject the enforced behavior, through punishment, social ostracism, and verbal cues. Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird can be observed as a space of narrowed gender roles enforced through the predecessors of Scout. Scout fails to develop a communicative and friendly relationship with the other women of Maycomb and her inquisitive behavior goes untended. She succumbs to the imposed expectations by virtue of effective surveillance. Such an inquiry validates the claim that each individual is securely confined to a cell and becomes the object of information but never a subject in communication.
Index Terms- Harper Lee, Panopticism, the Look, Surveillance, Punishment, Womanhood.
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