SOURCE: “Women or Boys? Gender, Realism, and the Gaze in Adam Bede,” in Women's Writing, Vol. 3, No. 2, June, 1996, pp. 113-27.

In the following essay, Levine analyzes the importance of the gaze as it questions the relationship between looking and loving in Adam Bede..

In the past two decades, critics from Laura Mulvey to Mary Louise Pratt have concerned themselves with the politics of looking.¹ They have compelled us to recognize that vision is not passive, but active—even constitutive. The world is not simply given to sight: it is shaped through the interested eyes of the tourist, the artist, the colonizer, the ordinary man—and yes, it may well be a man—on the street. Suddenly we find that it is crucial to consider who is looking, and how; who is seen, and for what reasons.

Looking, in Adam Bede, is an activity which reappears with startling persistence...