Abstract
During the 1960s and 1970s, a time of volatile political activism of liberation movements of racial and sexual equality, Hollywood was ending a fifty year golden period. In this period female film roles were limited to marginal stereotypic sex objects, as noted by critics Laura Mulvey, Molly Haskell and others. In the Hollywood classical era — prior to 1981 — a plot formation about a woman striving for personal freedom rather than for a husband was ridiculous, if not untenable. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (TFLW) is one of the earliest commercial films to represent the shifting consciousness of feminine aspiration for sexual liberation and equality. As a major Hollywood/British commercial film, TFLW breaks with the prevailing ideology of the stereotypic female characteristic of the time. Through its unique use of mirrors in nine significant scenes, the 1981 release of TFLW into mainstream film subverts the classic ideology by disturbing the illusion of the film narrative and inverting the gaze of the female role.
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Dean, J.S. (2003). She Looks in the Mirror: The Ideologic Shift of the Feminine Gaze in the Film The French Lieutenant’s Woman . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Gardens and the Passion for the Infinite. Analecta Husserliana, vol 78. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1658-1_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1658-1_18
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