Wordsworthian Vision, Moving Picture Shows, and the Ethics of the Moving Image in Maria Jane Jewsbury'sThe Oceanides

Abstract

The essay traces Maria Jane Jewsbury's attempt to undermine embodied viewing practices (especially those related to affect and domesticity) for the purposes of questioning the colonial gaze and its control over gendered and racial bodies. In her ambitious poetic sequence, The Oceanides, Jewsbury wields both a version of the Wordsworthian imagination and a phantasmagoric aesthetics culled from the moving picture shows to create moving images that resist preconceptions of South Asia residing in reified language or landscape views. For example, she composes a double vision of landscape beauties such as cocoa trees to unmask their commodity status. At the sequence's end, Jewsbury conjures the image of a heedless, careless infant, which allegorizes a type of vision that cannot be fixed and is always partially occluded from view. In doing so, she proffers a poetics resisting the legacy of sensibility to delve into questions about perception, visuality, and epistemology. Even more, she presents an aesthetics of kinesis that insists on the traveler's inability to capture pictures as an ethical response to colonial terrain.

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