Foucault and Wharton: Being Watched

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You’re sitting alone in the café drinking your coffee and reading the newspaper. You see out of the corner of your eye a little girl sitting with her mom at the table nearby. You keep glancing over and you notice the little girl is staring you down. No matter what you do she continues to watch your every move. You wonder how long she has been sitting there and why she is gazing at you. You are being watched just like the people Michel Foucault describes, people who are simply being under constant surveillance. Foucault's work, "Panopticism," features a central control tower from which all inhabitants are watched while in their surrounding glass-walled cells. The Panopticon creates an atmosphere in which the inhabitants never know whether or not they are being watched forcing them to assume that they are at all times. With this mindset, "the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole" (Foucault). In other words, the people control their actions and take care of themselves appropriately just on the fact that they think they are being watched. "In appearance, [panopticism] is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges" (Foucault). The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton portrays a society that functions much like the Panopticon. Newland Archer and his fellow New Yorkers are part of a very close knit group of people. Everyone knows what everyone else's business and the gossip that surrounds them, which makes privacy a foreign concept. The only way to be accepted is to know the right people, have the right connections and, of course, have money. Once a part of the group, everyone must follow a set of unwritten rules. The society forces everyone to act a certain way, and ev...

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...ther he was aware of it or not. Panopticism was created to control and dictate over people, and its techniques end up manufacturing people who are exactly alike. Archer's New York is the perfect example of this because everyone in it has to believe in the same thing, have the same opinions and ideas, look alike and have the same type of things. Anytime one differs from the rest, he or she never really speaks up from the fear of being an outsider. Newland Archer was heavily influenced by his society and stuck with it, even though he had a glimpse of an unexamined life outside of his panoptic New York.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. "Panopticism." From Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Pp. 195-228 translated from the French by Alan Sheridan 1977.

Wharton, Edith. Age of Innocence. New York: Signet Classic, 1996. Print.

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