Surveillance and Death in The Real Charlotte: A Foucauldian Reading

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which Somerville and Ross’s Irish novel The Real Charlotte is engaged with the act of surveillance. Both Charlotte and Francie, the heroines of the novel, function as objects and instruments of disciplinary power under the surveillance system. Unlike Francie whose sexual appeal constantly makes her the object of the gaze, Charlotte’s ugliness impels her to choose the act of surveillance as a way of fulfilling her desires. Her performance as a quasi-doctor, for example, at the moments of others’ death (or illness), though momentarily, enables her to achieve what she desires. Charlotte’s success, however, like other successes, is limited in the power structure of the novel where power moves constantly and operates unexpectedly. Death in The Real Charlotte illuminates such a point. Even though it has helped Charlotte achieve her ambition to some extent, it deprives her not only of her most desired object but also of any further possibility of fulfilling it. Charlotte’s disclosing to Lambert of her plotting revenge against him, at the very moment of Francie’s unexpected death, precludes her from winning him when he is at long last available again. Furthermore, Charlotte, in place of Francie, becomes the object of the narrative surveillance. Unfolding its narrative in ways that reveal Charlotte’s real character via her tricks and manipulations, The Real Charlotte makes it clear that no one can be free from the operation of power.