Cr
Patricia Mary Hodge
Cr Patricia Mary Hodge is a
Research Scholar in the Department of English at the North-Eastern Hill
University, Shillong. Her areas of
research interest include eco-feminism, eco-spirituality, ecotopia, dystopia,
post and trans-humanism, with particular emphasis in the genre of feminist
speculative fiction.
Abstract
Using Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, the
post-colonial interpretation of the “oriental” woman and the visual aspect of
the photograph, this paper situates the politics of the gaze within a
dystopian, consumerist setting that commodifies the female body, specifically
through the politics of sexual desire and control. Within this framework, the
paper reveals how the gaze can displace the conventional ways of seeing by
lingering in that ambivalent space between resistance and complicity, by
establishing Atwood’s female character Oryx’s gaze towards the camera as an act
of disrupting the male fantasies of ownership and of voyeuristic looking. The
act of looking back is also associated with the appropriation of the masculine
qualities of ownership and control. The focal point of the paper is how the
notions of looking and being looked at can alternatively function as modes of
female empowerment and disempowerment, especially in the realm of sexuality and
bodily autonomy.
Keywords: gaze, looking, objectification, image, Oryx, consumerism,
dystopia
When Laura Mulvey first emphasized the overarching
existence of the male gaze in the world of cinema, she specified the projection
of the male desire on the female body as the imposition of the fantasies and
obsessions of active male desire on “the silent image of woman still tied to
her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (Mulvey 15). Women become objects of projected desire in an
active and complicated intersection of empowerment and objectification as they
are forced to participate in the creation of the optimized ideal image that the
male onlooker desires. The enigmatic, Asian and hyper-sexualised Oryx becomes
the ideal object of the male gaze in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The mere existence of the male gaze and its
concentration upon her objectifies her and ironically makes her powerful, as
she is consumed by her audience while materializing into an irresistible visual
power. The male gaze here can be accessed through the post-colonial lens of
debate of the colonial fantasies of exotic “other”. The
term “oriental” which was used to describe artistic and literary depictions of
“eastern” subjects during the nineteenth century gained an entirely new meaning
after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. For Said, orientalism takes
perverse shape as a male “power fantasy” that sexualizes a feminized Orient for
Western power and possession. He writes “(Orientalism) viewed itself and its subject
matter with sexist blinders. This is especially evident in the writing of
travellers and novelists: women are usually the creatures of a male
power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid,
and above all they are willing” (Said 207). This fetish along with the
perceived inferiority of the Orient allowed for the white male gaze to paint
the Oriental Woman as available to satisfy desires that would normally
otherwise be socially and morally unacceptable if acted upon the bodies of
white women. The invention of the Oriental Woman also had the power to create a
fantasy strong enough to rationalize and justify acts of sexual objectification
that are often surrounded by extreme violence. Oriental women were and are
fetishized and their sexuality commoditized as exotic, promiscuous and
mysterious. The Oriental Woman is a type that relies on particular categories
of race, gender, religion, colonial subjectivity as well as other possible
personal identity categories, all defined by western standards. One can see how
in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,
Oryx is easily situated as the object of voyeuristic gazing as a result of the
facilitation of the voyeuristic viewing position for western audiences.
Atwood’s Oryx is an enigma: a collection of
contradictions and tensions of female empowerment and hyper-feminine
submission, of liberated sexuality and male oppression, of the one who is gazed
at and who looks back. Through the novel, Oryx performs. She performs
specifically for the male viewer to fulfill his desire of the submissive and
passive female subordinate. At the same time, she performs consciously and
deceptively as the sexually willing and always compliant object of desire. The
singular instance where Oryx reveals her genuine feelings is a momentary gaze
into the camera that is recording her abuse. This gaze is Oryx’s display of
defiance for the system and people that abuse her daily. To understand this
gaze, it is first necessary to understand Oryx’s presence in the novel as an
inscription of the dystopian nature of hegemonic masculinity. Oryx’s
homelessness and namelessness make her the perfect site for the fulfillment of
violent masculine fantasy, as well as the reiteration of the colonial mentality
of possession and the Asian fetish alongside the hyper-capitalist consumption
of the objectified female body. Oryx’s ethnicity and
place of origin are never revealed to the readers or the other characters, or
more specifically to the white male Crake and Jimmy. Her own childhood memories
and stories are vignettes of poverty stricken villages where mothers must sell
their children: strong little boys like her brother and pretty little girls
like her, to strange Uncles from the city. These memories of an exotic Asian
somewhere in Vietnam, Myanmar or Cambodia are meshed together with Jimmy’s own
recollections of a pretty young girl-child forced to perform adult deeds for
the camera. In the city, Oryx learns of older white men who take a peculiar
liking for young girls like her and who secretly lead them to hotel rooms. When
she is older, the hotel room becomes a garage in the suburbs in America and
then Crake and Jimmy’s bed rooms. These men, she realises, like to play the
role of the benefactor, the white man who saves the exotic damsel from poverty
and abuse and received her loyalty, submission, beauty and body in return.
Oryx’s race and age become the primary reason
for her sexual abuse by white travellers to her country and her exploitation in
pornographic content targeted specifically at white men. Oryx is expected to behave like the hyper-sexualised
yet submissive Asian stereotype that can find its origins in Western
imperialism. The male gaze is a sexed gaze that defines a relationship of
looking and being looked at in a fetishised manner, where the male voyeuristic
tendency inhibits female agency. The first time Oryx is looked at this way, she
is just five or six years old selling flowers on the street in her oversized
dress, unknowingly attracting the perverted gaze of tall white hairy men who
would pay a lot of money to take young girls like her into their hotel rooms.
Two or three years later, Oryx would be selected out of a group of children and
sold to a man who put pretty little girls in movies. In the movies she was
supposed to look “pure-looking” (Atwood 164). This combination of innocent beauty and
fetisished body would permanently mark Oryx as a spectacle that is constantly
under the voyeuristic gaze and obsessive desire and ownership of numerous men
until her death.
The portrayal of Asian women in media, especially
pornography and the “Asian fetish” syndrome can be traced to the dominance of
the White heterosexual male in the East Asian Wars and the violence incurred by
the Asian female body. Sunny Woan links the white man’s fetish with Asian women
in pornography to early nineteenth-century Western imperialism. The
colonization of East Asian nations by Western nations required the deployment
of large numbers of troops which consequently led to the growth of the
prostitution centres near the areas where troops were stationed. Sexual
encounters became the main form of interaction that white men had with Asian
women, and they carried these generalizations of the sexually willing Asian
back to their countries. The sex-tour industry was then developed to sustain
this interest. It follows naturally then that the pornographic industry would
include a preponderance of Asian women (Woan 293). Oryx makes her initial
disturbing appearance on the computer screen as “just another little girl on a
porno site” (Atwood 103). She is simply identified by her features as an East
Asian female and is featured on a website that claims to show real sex-tourists
engaging in illegal acts with women and children in countries where “kids were
plentiful, and where you could buy anything you wanted” (103). In their study conducted in 2002, Jennifer
Lynn Gossett and Sarah Byrne discovered that out of thirty-one pornographic
websites that depicted the rape or torture of women, more than half showed
Asian women as the rape victims and one-third showed white men as the
perpetrator (Gosset 694). In the novel,
even the white camera-man would also assert his ownership upon the sexualized
bodies of the children. Jack “wanted to do movie things with her when there
were no movies” (Atwood 165).
Oryx says that being
in a movie “was doing what you were told. If they wanted you to smile, you had
to smile . . . and you did it because you were afraid not to” (Atwood 163). On
that particular day that Crake takes the haunting screen-shot of her face, Oryx
smiles as directed. This smile however is hard and
forced as she looks over her shoulder directly at the camera. This is the moment
that Crake pauses and downloads. Oryx’s image, although suddenly taken from a
frozen screen-grab of a continuous scene, is deliberately posed like a
studio-photograph. The photograph has been understood as a tool to assert
colonial mastery and domination. Karina
Eileraas cites how the French mandated the use of identity cards by Algerians
during the Algerian revolution as a political tool to formalize the French
fantasy of empire by dictating citizenship (Eileraas 813-14). The
photograph formulates both the subject and object of representation, maps the
identity of the object being photographed and asserts ownership over the object
vis-a-vis the image. There is a basic level of violence in the colonial
practice of photography as it relinquishes the object’s agency and ability to
dictate his/her own representation. Jimmy keeps this picture of Oryx’s searing
gaze from the time he is fourteen well into adulthood. To him, this picture
functions almost like an identity card that renders Oryx visible to him all the
time without the need of her physical presence. The picture becomes a sign of
his ownership. This possession becomes so obsessive that when he learns that
Crake has been using her photograph as a digital icon on the internet, he is
possessed with feelings of extreme jealousy. Crake had stolen his “own private
thing: his own guilt, his own shame, his own desire”. “That’s mine! Give it back!” he thinks (Atwood 252).
The video and the photograph as a mode of reproduction
prompt questions regarding the precise nature and meanings of creation and
ownership. It exists as a tangible product of the relationship between the
camera, the photographer and the photographed subject. The anxiety of authorship has reflected
itself in literary and cultural studies of the mid-twentieth century giving
rise to questions regarding the nature of subjectivity, and all other
traditional aspects of the governance of the author-consumer relationship, with
this anxiety extending to the question of who owns or authors an image. The
photograph in its physical form can be said to exist in autonomy while the
image is attached to perception, subjectivity and thought. The photograph
preserves a moment in space and time, and merely captures the appearance of the
object in that moment but the image allows the photograph to remain open to the
processes of interpretation. This absence of the author, here the
photographer/cameraman, does not transfer ownership automatically to the
consumer who has had no creative agency in the production or interpretation of
the videos. Jimmy complicates his role as a consumer when he acquires a
personal physical copy of Oryx in the form of the photograph. With the author/photographer/cameraman
now non-existent, Jimmy asserts his ownership of Oryx, specifically her image
and the meanings he attaches to it. Barthes expresses this anxiety of the person
being photographed as:
I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming
an object: I then experience a micro-vision of death . . . I have become Total
Image, which is to say, Death in person; others – the Other – do not dispossess
me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their
mercy, at their disposal, classified in a file, ready for the subtlest
deceptions. . . (Barthes 14).
Oryx thus experiences a kind of death in her permanent
fixity as an image as she becomes the bearer or source of meanings that are
determined by the male gaze. The particular moment of the photograph is just
one in a continuous series of events that is specifically chosen by the ‘photographer’
for its aesthetic appeal. However the singular image of Oryx confronting the
camera is loaded with moments of encounter and a plurality of intersecting
gazes. Oryx’s gaze is the centre-point of the convergence of multiple troubling
moments and voyeuristic tendencies of control, classification and ownership.
The image of Oryx looking back at her gazer becomes the setting for aesthetic
dimensions, relations of representations and misrepresentations and
contestations of ownership and interpretations. The question here is not who
owns the photograph, but who owns the image. This positions Oryx as existing in
the critical and creative spectrum of the other’s gaze.
Laura Mulvey links
the concept of “scopophilia” in feminist film theory where she argues that
traditional Hollywood movies respond to the deep-seated masculine sexual drive
and pleasure involved in looking. Freud’s concept of scopophilia or the pleasure
in looking is associated with “taking people as objects, subjecting them to a
controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 17). This constitutes an act of erotic
pleasure derived from looking at another person as an object. Oryx evolves from the subject of the image into the
object of desire under the power of the one who gazes upon him/her. Her
existence is therefore beholden to the gaze and she can either return or avert
from it. At the same time, the camera and cameraman transform her trauma into a
spectacle for mass consumption, and Crake’s decision to freeze the frame
permanently locks her trauma and dehumanizes her into an image that can be
reproduced, shared and consumed.
In its extreme forms, scopophilia can become fixated as a perversion,
“producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction
can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, the objectifies other”
(18). Oryx is immersed in a hermeneutically sealed world that mimics the
cinema, where the objects being observed are indifferent to the existence of
the audience, thereby allowing for the voyeuristic fantasy to play out. Her
gaze disrupts this fantasy, leading the viewer to come to terms with the
perverse nature of his pleasure. Her role as an object is twofold: as the
source of pleasure for the male character in the ‘movie’ and as the object
gazed at by the heterosexual male spectator. Oryx asserts that women
cannot escape the voyeuristic gaze of male fantasies. Her retaliation is to
play with the idea of the image-ideal and the distance between he who gazes and
she who is the object of the gaze through the façade of performance. She does
this particularly by investing agency to the stylized photograph that seeks to
freeze her into the ideal-image of Jimmy’s voyeuristic gaze.
The conventional close-up of the face is a part of the
narrative of eroticism while at the same time momentarily disrupts the
verisimilitude of the narrative. Oryx takes advantage of this momentary
disruption of the narrative to break the identification the spectator has with
the masked male protagonist who is the spectator’s surrogate on the screen. By
looking straight at the camera, she unmasks her spectator and as the voyeur is
caught off guard, she transfers his power to herself. This is important because
until that decisive moment, Jimmy, the consumer, had identified the events on
the screen as mere entertainment and refused to recognize the real cases of
exploitation that built the virtual fantasy world. Oryx’s gaze breaks through
this stimulation. Oryx disrupts the synchronicity of the
performer-camera-cameraman relationship and challenges the convention of women
as objects, dissolves the simulation of the instant gratification of
consumerist culture and implicates those who gaze at her with her singular,
permanent, unending gaze of defiance. In
the hyper-consumerist model, the fantasy of instant gratification dictates the
creation of the simulated reality of unlimited choices and pleasure. In such a
model, it is the media that dictates these consumerist desires that devolve all
things into objects. The visuals and objects of pornography are specifically
created by the media that makes them available to the ones who desire them and
also substantiated by the mainstream objectification of the female body as the
object of male desire. In this sense, the visuals and images that allow
unrestricted access to the female body and its duties towards male pleasure
allow for the ownership of the female body on the screen and the print,
reestablishing the visual medium of the camera as a tool to assert domination. Oryx
asserts that while women cannot escape the voyeuristic gaze of male fantasies,
they can play with the idea of the image-ideal and the distance between he who
gazes and she who is the object of the gaze through the façade of performance.
She does this particularly by investing agency to the stylized photograph that
seeks to freeze her into the ideal-image of Jimmy’s voyeuristic gaze.
In the actual moment that Oryx gazes back at the
camera, she momentarily reverses the power dynamics of the relationship and
violates the viewer in return. The returned female gaze in the moment of the
photograph is at complete opposites with the spectacle occurring around her. For
a brief moment when the camera shifts from the overall scene to her face, Oryx
is no longer framed by male desire. The frame is focused on her face, forcing
the viewer to experience the exact moment with her. A natural question arises as to why Oryx’s gaze
was even noticed by Crake and Jimmy. It was momentary enough to be dismissed
and Oryx did not stall in her activities to make too much of a difference on
the entire video. The answer is that Oryx’s confrontation of the camera and the
viewer challenges her established role as a mere object and the compliance
expected of her. Her look is not one that is inviting, submissive or dreamy. It
is aggressive and challenging, with an almost angry look in her eyes that Jimmy
claims burnt him like acid. Her smile is forced and she looks over towards the
camera from her original position, almost in an “I can see you” gesture instead
of the coy, come hither over-the-shoulder look that is associated with women in
sexual scenarios. In this sense, despite the aesthetic, feminine positioning of
her body, her face embodies the masculine traits of assertion and challenge.
Her embodiment of what would be described as the masculine in the dichotomous
gender system represents her attempt at empowerment through an aggressive stance.
This becomes particularly noticeable because Jimmy cannot see through the
masquerade of her commercialized hyper-femininity, even in her actual physical
form, and therefore notices her sudden foray into the ‘masculine’.
Oryx’s gaze marks a moment of recognition, as Jimmy is
confronted with the reality of his misrepresentation of the ‘characters’ on the
screen. His lack of guilt or moral culpability stemmed from his reasoning that
the videos were simply entertainment or beyond his control, thus reducing his
participation to a mere viewer. When Oryx looks right into the camera, Jimmy
feels personally violated because she is looking “into the secret person inside
him. I see you, that look said. I see you watching. I know you. I know what
you want.” (Atwood 104). This accusation makes Jimmy responsible for her
abuse when he identifies himself with the masked male character who must avoid
public identification. He feels that her gaze is one of contempt, of silent
judgment of what he had been viewing online and leaves him with the mixed
emotions of guilt and desire. It is at this moment that Jimmy, for the first
time, feels morally culpable for the exploitative, sexual videos he regularly
consumes. The gaze haunts Jimmy well into his adulthood. Years later his dreams
are filled images of the young girls in ribbons and garlands in the videos.
“These girls were in danger, in need of rescue. There was something – a
threatening presence – . . . perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the
danger” (307). Then they would smile at
him, their smiles mimicking the all-knowing, powerful smile of Oryx, smiles
that said, “Oh honey. I know you. I see
you. I know what you want” (307).
Oryx implicates
Jimmy in her sufferings and does not allow him to vindicate himself of his role
in her abuse. Jimmy listens as she recalls Jack and his perversions and
distances himself from the man who shot the videos that he himself watched.
“Why do you think he is bad?” said Oryx. “He never did anything with me
that you don’t do. Not nearly so many things!”
“I don’t do them against your will”, said Jimmy. “Anyway you’re grown up
now.”
Oryx laughed. “Where is my will?”
she said (166).
While Jimmy realizes his culpability, he desires to transcend the
voyeuristic-scopophilia of the screen to be physically present with Oryx, to
rescue her and to own her. Jimmy negotiates his complicated feelings of guilt
and desire by separating the sexual identity of Oryx in the video from his
scopophilic objectification, and instead identifies her image as her only true
representation. In doing so, he transfers his libido to his ego by demanding
that the object in the photo solely belongs to him, as opposed to the object in
the video that belongs to everyone. In doing so he is able to maintain his
fascination with Oryx. Jimmy’s attempts to forcibly blend the child and adult
Oryx can be explained through Lacan’s concept of méconnaissance or misrecognition, a state where the mirror self
does not coincide with the physical self, resulting in a relation between image
and identity based upon the ego’s misrecognition (Lacan 167-68). Jimmy
establishes a relation between the image of Oryx and her real-life persona
through the “organization of affirmations and negations” (167) to which he is
attached in an attempt to ‘fix’ her. However, her adult-self does not embody
the victimhood of the helpless exotic in the picture, and he cannot embody the
role of the white colonial master who saves her. Instead he uses his ownership
of her mirror self to entitle him to construct her entire childhood according
to his narrative of victimhood. This causes him to constantly interrogate her
for stories, which he then questions and dissects until he can somehow
associate them with his own deflated ego as the failed white saviour.
Along with this post-colonial interpretation, Eileraas
explores the concept of misrecognition as “a disavowal of socially sanctioned
identity, or a strategic dis-identification” (811). In this sense,
misinterpretation is not simply the non-recognition of the image which is
declared to be false, but a “strategic dis-identification” where an attempt is
made “to provocatively employ fantasy, as an inevitable element of history,
memory, and identity, in one’s own becoming” (Eileraas 811). Oryx employs the
fantasy behind the photograph and its contradictory and discontinuous
relationship with the still image to authorize her own narrative of personal
history. This places Jimmy in a state of limbo, where he cannot own her
physical existence because she has distanced herself from the image that he has
established as the point where her narrative begins. When Jimmy presents the photograph to the adult Oryx, she
assumes the position of the beholder of the gaze and chooses how she will
interpret the picture. She refuses to acknowledge that the girl in the
photograph is her. “ “ It has to be!” said Jimmy. “Look! It’s your eyes!” “A
lot of girls have eyes,” she said” ” (Atwood 105). Jimmy demands that she
recognize herself in the picture. He identifies the photograph as real,
and the physical Oryx as the misrepresentation of reality. Oryx, on the other
hand, plays upon this misrecognition and as such establishes herself as not the
represented subject who is frozen by the camera, but as constantly shifting and
unable to be properly captured by the fixating lens. This explains how Oryx was
able to assert her identity and disarm both the camera and the viewer by
dismantling the representation that they both demand of her.
Oryx dismantles this misrepresentation and
communicates her resistance while still within the confines of the fantasy
world she is confined in. She harnesses the desire of her viewer through the
positioning of her body and the sexual setting to generate a momentary
disruption where she disarms the voyeurism of her audience. In this process,
she momentarily becomes the master of her own image. She is still in the
position demanded by the camera but ceases her role as a representative of the
viewer’s fantasy just long enough to disrupt the determined and desired
sequence of events. Oryx accomplishes much more than a disruption when the
singular pause becomes permanently existent in the photograph. Oryx returns the
other’s gaze. She stares directly into the camera in defiance and hostility,
while still maintaining her provocative pose. This disarms the viewer who is
unable to process the recognition of the perverse nature of his fantasy when
confronted with the complex image of defiance and willingness. She
maintains the innocence and naiveté demanded of her role, establishing the
distinction between sexual inexperience and sensuality, confessing to the
former, but possessing the ability to use the gaze to her advantage. She contests the narrative of dominance and mastery
when she makes the ‘master’ aware of the wretchedness of his deeds and the
perversion of his gaze. At this moment she asserts herself as more than another
naked body on the screen, but the victim of a culture that preys on female
bodies and allows the production and consumption of pedophilic material. She
also asserts that she knows of the
perverted nature of her viewer’s desire and disarms them of the comfort of the
safety of their secret. Her gaze that gazes back becomes a powerful tool that
accuses Jimmy of his complacency and breaks him out his desensitization towards
the graphic violent commodification of bodies.
In this sense, Oryx’s returned gaze can break down the
simulation of hyper-consumerist dystopian reality. Jimmy’s desensitization to
graphic violence on the internet stems from the normalization and easy
availability of such material for the consumer. Consumerism is built upon the
satisfaction of desires, and these same desires are created by the media that
influences consumers. This traps consumers in a constant cycle of desire and
satisfaction. In a hyper-capitalist consumer industry, desires are generated
quickly and satisfied just as quickly. Jimmy is easily drawn into this niche on
the internet that functions as a simulation of the violence and fragmentation
of the real world without the pretence and moral culpability. This simulation is concerned only with the
instant gratification that can be achieved from a multiplicity of unrestricted
available choices. It succeeds because the images and objects on the screen
cannot be perceived as real and allows the viewer to distance himself/herself
from the violence occurring on the screen. The simulation stops functioning for
Jimmy when it fails to guarantee its promise of gratification of desires. This
dissolution of simulated reality occurs when Oryx disrupts the voyeuristic
fantasy world with her gaze, bringing Jimmy to the realization that he is
watching real human beings on his screen and that he is in some way culpable
for Oryx’s sexual exploitation. What was once mere staged entertainment is
revealed as reality.
Oryx is juxtaposed against the doll-like figure Jimmy
associates with her child-self. This signifies the infantilised female
sexuality she is constantly associated with. When Jimmy first sees Oryx she is
eight or looks about eight-years-old. She was “small-boned and exquisite, and
naked . . . with nothing on her but a garden of flowers and a pink hair ribbon
. . . She was on her knees.” (Atwood 103). As an adult, she embodies that
coveted body from her childhood that Jimmy desperately wanted to posses and leaves
him unable to escape the fetishisation for the unavailable body. Jimmy
describes the older Oryx as “so delicate. Filigree. . . She had a triangular
face – big eyes, a small jaw. . .” (133). This juxtaposition of the doll-like
Oryx as a symbol of both sexuality and childhood is a reflection of the
dystopian consumerist culture of objectification of the female body and the
male desire for female submission and ownership. Oryx’s initial work in the
city was as a flower-seller, specifically targeting foreign travelers. She
succeeded because she was “so small and fragile, her features so clear and
pure. She was given a dress that was too big for her, and in it she looked like
an angelic doll” (151). She becomes the object of desire for pedophiles and
Uncle En uses this to his advantage by baiting her to such men, catching them
in suggestive situations and then blackmailing the culprit in return for his
silence. Oryx views all of this as a game, because “it made her felt strong to
know that the men thought she was helpless but she was not” (155). Oryx engages
in various sexual acts, both on and off camera. She narrates these events to
Jimmy with no sense of coercion or abuse. This discombobulated narrative of the
adult Oryx of the memories of childhood abuse are narrated through the
world-view of her child self and presents her child-self as emptied of
ideological childhood innocence in order to assert connections of imposed
desires of infantilized female sexuality.
She serves as a reflection of the perverted desires of dystopian desires
of control and violence, disguised by the utopian trope of childhood innocence.
Jimmy’s obsession with Oryx or the representation of
Oryx that he has created and owns can be looked upon as representative of the
dystopian act of imaging that is fed by a hyper-consumerist culture. Throughout
the novel and even after her death her body continues to remain the central
axis of her self-image. Her attempts at establishing a positive and liberatory
self-image are contradicted by the constant fixation on her appearance,
mannerisms and body. Oryx’s body continues to remain the focal point for both
the feminist attempts to study her embodied experienced in relation with the
cultural construction of the female body as well as the historical denigration
of the female body as the object of desire or as a social good. Oryx discovers
at a young age how her heavily desired hyper-sexualized femininity and
infantilized sexuality can become tools to subvert traditional gendered
dominance and even contest her objectification. The second time Jimmy sees Oryx
is as a teenager on the television screen. He is filled with “pure bliss, pure
terror” (Atwood 362) at the realization that his one-dimensional image has
metamorphosed into a tree-dimensional living being. He compares her image on the screen with the
photo in his possession and notes that “the look was the same: the same blend
of innocence and contempt and understanding.” (300). Once again Oryx performs
as the male viewer desires. She appears to be “simple, truthful, and sincere”
and portrays herself as an unfortunate victim who would have been left to rot
in the pornographic industry had her Mister not bought her and brought her to
the United States (299). She whole-heartedly performs her role as the
submissive, passive Asian who would always remain grateful to the white saviour
who rescued her from abuse. Once again, it is her gaze at the camera that
betrays her true feelings.
In her adulthood, she encourages this infantilized
view of womanhood and the association of the doll with passivity and more
importantly, childhood. Oryx evolves her
performance to one that is hyper-feminine, and overtly sexual, thus allowing
herself to be objectified by the traditional Eurocentric male gaze. She designs
herself as a material, consumerist product by mirroring this gaze and
stereotypes herself along hegemonic gender lines. By ironically embodying the
qualities of male desire, Oryx defies Jimmy’s attempts to form her like a
modern-day Pygmalion. Jimmy’s failed attempts at constructing her identity
through her stories are misogynistic endeavours of the master’s dream to build
and own his possession. Jimmy’s conceives of Oryx in the picture as different
from all the other girls and women on the computer screen, as being better than other women. Oryx becomes
his simulacrum and an almost non-human figure he desperately wants to possess.
She understands this when she asks him, “You have a lot of pictures in your
head, Jimmy. Where did you get them? Why do you think they are pictures of me?”
(132). Jimmy fails at establishing a connection with Oryx, other than the
physical because she is not the representation of all that he has modeled upon
that singular photograph.
Jimmy wants, and almost demands that Oryx should reciprocate
his feelings. Jimmy mirrors and projects his feelings back onto himself because
Oryx refuses to acknowledge him as anything more than “for fun” (368). She not
only refuses to meet his gaze mutually but inverts traditional gender relations
by asserting her non-gaze. Oryx initiates their physical relationship not for
the gratification of desires, as encounters initiated by the male gaze usually
do. Instead, she infantilises Jimmy and disarms him of any opportunity at
owning her. She addresses him as though he is a child. “ “I didn’t want to see
you so unhappy Jimmy,” was her
explanation. “Not about me.” ” (367). She refers to their physical activities
as mere play. Jimmy has no control over Oryx’s arrivals and departures and is
forced to accept that their encounters will occur around her schedule. Jimmy is also required to share her with
Crake. While he is resentful, she looks upon her relationship with Crake as
mere business and that with Jimmy as mere fun. She also never abandons her
façade of the sexually available object of desire and never allows Jimmy to
catch another glimpse of the truth he once saw in the photograph. She
disassembles the necessity of mutuality Jimmy desires in their relationship by
allowing her entire existence to be reduced to objectophilia. In doing so she
asserts that there is no reciprocity of feelings, evoking the feelings of
Jimmy’s initial emotional attachment to the virtual presence on the screen and
a frozen image on paper. Jimmy realizes that he cannot own Oryx, because by
willingly becoming exactly what the male gaze desires of her, she has denied
those who objectify her power to declare they created her. Jimmy cannot
decipher which image of Oryx he has frozen in his brain is the real Oryx. He is
unsure if he can even connect one image to the next:
“Enter Oryx as a young girl on a kiddie-porn
site, flowers in her hair, whipped cream on her chin; or, enter Oryx as a teenage news item, sprung
from a pervert’s garage; or, Enter
Oryx, stark naked and pedagogical in the Crakers’ inner sanctum; or, Enter Oryx, towel around her hair, emerging
from the shower; or, Enter Oryx, in a
pewter-grey silk pantsuit and demure half-high heels, carrying a briefcase, the
image of a professional Compound globewise saleswoman?.... Was there only
one Oryx, or was she legion?” (361-62).
Oryx is conceived by her male spectators a product the
determining male gaze that projects its fantasy onto the female body, demanding
that she be displayed and looked at. She is meant to spend her entire life as
an erotic spectacle which must hold the male gaze and play to the male desire.
Oryx moves beyond this orchestration by the male gaze by utilizing her
aesthetic commodification to disrupt hierarchical relations. Oryx is not an
imitation of the photograph. On the contrary, she embodies the objectification,
the vulgarity and the commodification of her child-self which Jimmy wishes she
would contradict. In doing so she forbids Jimmy from embarking on the sexist
fantasy of escapism of generating a living work of art that only he can
possess. Oryx overcomes the colonial master’s desire to fix and create her by
fixing herself permanently as the object of his original gaze, thus depriving
him of the fulfillment of his messiah complex and the desire to fix his own
guilty conscience. Oryx destroys the narrative of Jimmy’s Pygmalion fantasy
that attempts to reduce the traumatic experiences as merely existing to either
reiterate or complicate Jimmy’s conception of her reality. Instead, she
presents readers with a much more potent reality of dystopian Pygmalion-like
treatment of the female body that is determined by a hyper-consumerist culture
that is characterized by the dominance of the male gaze and is fixated on the
gratification of the male desire.
The act of looking back at the spectator is an act of
feminist confrontation and empowerment. In
doing so, the woman derives her power through the means that sought to
disempower her. It is through this process of defiantly gazing while
paradoxically performing her sexualized hyper-femininity that Oryx is able to
make her spectators emotionally engage in her performance, making them vulnerable
to her wants and desires, while imbibing in them the false sense of ownership. She employs the power of the photograph, its
contradictory qualities of fixity and multiple interpretations to embody a
multiplicity of images in her behaviour and appearance to avoid ownership. Her
gaze in the photograph accomplishes the same thing in that it embodies the
complexities of the visual as a theatrical performance of fantasy through
assimilation and subversion. Oryx’s gaze is politically powerful in that it
displaces the conventional ways of seeing by lingering in that ambivalent space
between resistance and complicity. Silverman suggests, “the look is not truly
‘productive’ until it effects one final displacement: the displacement of the ego.
It does not fully triumph over the forces that constrain it to see in
predetermined ways until its appetite for alterity prevails over sameness and
self-sameness” (Silverman183-84). Here, Oryx’s gaze creates a sense of self and
worth that defies her objectification as she both appropriates and subverts the
spectator’s gaze. Atwood asserts that if women are looked at, they can look
back too. Their looks will be accusatory, disturbing and disdainful looks of
feminist defiance, forcing the male spectator to recognize the perversity in
his gaze.
Works Cited
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