Page 214 - Cultural Theory

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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

how the ‘male gaze’ and the ‘observing eye’ have been given cinematographic form
in a number of contemporary films, including Bernado Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky,
based on Paul Bowles’s novel (1949), and … David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch after
the novel by William Burroughs (1959)’ (ibid.). The focus of the following summary
is on Bertolucci’s film The Sheltering Sky. My choice here is partly related to my great
empathy with Curti’s intelligent analysis but also to a personal fascination with Jane
Bowles’s work and to Bertolucci’s cinematographic representation.
The inflection of the male gaze in both Paul Bowles’s novel and Bertolucci’s film is
apparent in the ‘distorted vision of Jane’s sexual promiscuity … where the encoun-
ters taking her away from her partner are heterosexual from the outset’ (ibid.: 125).
However, the signifiers in novel and film are of an even more defining order. As Curti
notes in Paul Bowles’s novel, the ‘heroine’s’ main motivation is to escape the Western
world and in both the novel and the film, there is the sense of this being ‘her final
flight’. She (the heroine) decides to ‘lose herself in nothingness, the nothingness that
is the Western signifier of losing yourself: “going native”’ (ibid.). The ‘going native’
process of ‘annihilation’ begins with her absorption in ‘her sexual enthralment with
her Arab lover’ (ibid.). The signifiers of death and personal destruction are frequently
represented as female, as Said points out, this association is one of the common traits
of ‘orientalism’. Said notes that ‘[t]he Oriental was linked thus to elements in west-
ern society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an iden-
tity best described as lamentably alien’ (Said, 1978: 270).
This indecipherability of female behaviour is in the traditions of representations of
the ‘female hysteric’ and, as Yegenoglu notes, ‘the typography of femininity as enig-
matic, mysterious, concealing a secret behind its veil, is projected onto the iconog-
raphy of the Orient’ (Yegenoglu, 1992: 49). Curti makes an interesting point about
Yegenoglu’s work, in that while her observations are interesting, she fails to raise the
notion of the ‘ambivalence’ of the veil and its contestation of the ‘Orientalist vision’
(see Trinh, 1988b). Yengenoglu ‘sees Western women as complicitous in the Orientalist
vision’ (Curti, 1996: 137).
Jane Bowles’s only finished novel Two Serious Ladies and her short stories reveal a
different emphasis to those aspects of her life emphasized through the ‘male gaze’ of
her husband Paul Bowles and Bertolucci’s film. Curti notes that ‘[i]t is the spiral
dialectic on travelling rather than the linearity of narrative that is fundamental to
Jane Bowles’s writing’ (ibid.: 130). The emphasis in her work is on the conflict
between the safety and stability of what is familiar and ‘leaving the safe shelter of
their culture and home’ for what is seen as ‘a moral imperative’ – travelling. Curti
points out that while Jane Bowles’s writing is related to her life, it is not autobio-
graphical. Bowles’s novels deal with the ambivalent relationship between sexual
ambiguity and ethnic difference. Curti points out that ethnic diversity and racial
hybridity give an ‘interzone character’ to Bowles’s work:

It could be said that Jane Bowles embodies the Westerner’s gaze on the other
culture, to exercise her power and impress her presence on the subaltern
woman, ultimately to possess or try to possess her. She could be described as

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