Middle-class Morality as Panopticon: A Foucauldian Reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

This research presents a reading of Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in the light of nineteenth-century middle-class morality which strictly imposed on women a particular socially accepted model of respectability the deviation from which meant condemnation and loss of social status. The reading will be informed by the writings of prominent social philosophers of the time which defined the spirit of the age and set the standards for social acceptance and respectability. The methodology relies on Foucault’s theory of Discipline and Punish, with particular emphasis on the concept of panopticism as a disciplinary mechanism. The analysis also incorporates Foucalt’s concept of the relationship between power and knowledge and their contribution to creating and maintaining obedience. A parallelism between nineteenth-century European middle-class morality and panopticism is drawn to bring to the fore the complexity of both the panoptic scheme of discipline and this social morality which involves similar techniques of disciplinary control. The analysis will raise several questions and attempt answering them through the analogy drawn between nineteenth-century social ideology and Foucault’s theory of panopticism as a control system. Among these questions are: What does the rebellion of the main characters suggest about social ideology as a disciplinary pattern? How successful is the socially endorsed knowledge structure in fulfilling its socially ascribed expectations?