On The Backward Gaze
Susan Felch’s “The Backward Gaze,” puts forth a vision of editorial scholarship in which a text is “always a prism that refracts light” (21). Because Felch did not explicitly revisit this image in the body or at the culmination of her essay, and because the image was so vivid, providing a concrete concept for my mind to grasp onto, I found myself wondering how her argument throughout and at the conclusion of her text ties back to this image of text-as-prism, editor-as-interpreter/follower-of-that-prism’s-trajectory. If a text is a prism and the results of it are colored beams of light emanating, then it is the editor’s job to examine what happened before the prism refracted that light, first and foremost, before tracing where that light goes, in this vision. I found a prism-like statement on the final page of the essay, when Felch describes (1) the contexts in which the early modern women were writing and (2) the organizational models for editorial scholars to use:
“Not only are the contexts multiple, but so are the challenges of presenting them. Do we picture them as strands, layers, overlapping circles, features of a unified landscape, or aspects of dominant, residual, and emerging cultures? Each of these organizational models takes our imagination, our questions, and therefore our answers in somewhat different directions” (39).
Here, Felch uses a different image from the prism, yet a similar one which invokes multiple “strands, layers, overlapping circles”; refracted, colorful beams of light are similar to “strands,” which might make up a woven tapestry, or might constitute “layers” of that initial white light similar to layers in, say, a cake or lasagna. These images differ, though, from Felch’s initial image of a prism in that the end product—a woven tapestry, a layered dish—appears as a unified whole, not refracted light made beautiful because of its separation, until it is viewed close up, and/or dismantled whether visually or physically (as Wordsworth puts it regarding critical examination of art—or was it nature?—murdering to dissect). If the text is a prism, then what goes into (precedes) the text, for Felch, here, at the end of her essay, is just as multilayered as that which emanates from (follows) the text. The text is “always an endpoint, a conclusion, a summary statement” (21); its context, before and after, is as light, strands, layers, overlapping circles, features of a unified landscape” (39). How editors determine to see the contexts, before and after, is left up to them, so long as they see the text as in a fixed, solid state such as the prism. This image illuminates Felch’s “problem” with editors assuming “that early modern male editors alter women’s texts because they are female-authored” (33). This assumption renders the context, not the text being examined, fixed, the same before as it is after. Thus, here, the backward gaze is one that chooses to see the refracted colors as having occurred before the prism, when the author could not have seen that deconstruction happening before constructing the prism which played its cultural part in making that previously unified structure of light visible.
Work Cited
Editing Early Modern Women, pp. 21-39
