SOURCE: "Death-Watch: Terminal Illness and the Gaze in Sharon Olds's The Father," in Mosaic, Vol. 29, No. 1, March, 1996, pp. 103-21.

Tanner is the author of Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction. In the following essay, she applies the concept of the gaze in film and literary theory to Olds's description of her terminally ill father in The Father.

The publication of Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1978 [Screen, Vol. 16, No. 3] initiated a dialogue about the function of the "gaze" that has subsequently moved beyond the boundaries of film theory. Mulvey's discussion of scopophilic viewing in the cinema identified a voyeuristic dynamic in which the erotic identity of the viewing subject is clearly separated from the object (usually a woman) on the screen; the viewer derives pleasure from objectifying the screen persona and subjecting that persona to the power of the controlling gaze. The success...