Male Gaze in Andrew Marvell's Poetry

Abstract

The research entitled “Male Gaze in Andrew Marvell’s Love Poetry” explores the semiotics of Marvel’s love poetry which displays a kind of obsession b yportraying men- women relation in a manner that caters to male voyeuristic gaze. The overall structure of Marvell’s love poetry show how an all pervasive psychological force accelerates to monopolize the readers as only males by positioning the women characters therein as passive sexual objects who can only exhibit to-be-looked-at-ness and the male characters and the male characters as the principal viewer. This paper examines ‘male gaze’ in the lightof the theoretical possibilities provided by psychoanalysis, where the idea of voyeurism andfetishism are central and the Foucauldian concept of gaze, where the activity of looking images under certain spectacles provide privileged power for dominion overwhat is being looked at. The research thus takes on to illuminate how the combination of these two effects contribute to ideological formation