"My Eye!": The Trope of Sight and Vision in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Literary Texts

Paper Title
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“My Eye!”: The Trope of Sight and Vision in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Literary Texts

Author Name
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Vivien Jiaqian Zhu 朱嘉倩

Country
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USA

Page Number
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18-22

The sixteenth century novel The Plum in the Golden Vase goes lengths to portray characters peeping and spying in the narration, suggesting a sense of voyeurism. Sight and vision in The Plum in the Golden Vase mainly stem from direct observation of characters’ quotidian life. Characters see or happen to see what happens in front of their eyes. Physical sight relies on characters’ physical proximity to what is being caught sight of. In later seventeenth century texts such as Li Yu’s Xiayilou and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both texts point out an attempt to look into the distance. To mediate a geographical distance, Qu Jiren in Xiayilou extends restricted scope of human eyesight and observes what happens in the Zhan family through a use of the telescope. Resonating with Jiren’s extended vision, The Tempest draws on Ariel’s supernatural power to move across the space to extend Prospero’s vision, thereby creating a narrative telescope through the agency of Ariel’s sight. With a consideration of Zhang Dai’s “Mid- September on West Lake” in The Dream Recollections of Tao-an, the essay further draws attention to the subject and object of sight and to the question—who sees whom, implying a paradoxical fact that a spectator is simultaneously sighted by another spectator. This overlap of the subject and object of vision complicates the scope of human sight by emphasizing the scope of the subject of vision.

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