gaze

Formsgazes, gazing, gazed

Pluralgazes

1. 1
   verbintransitive

   To look steadily and intently at something, often in wonder or deep attention.

   Visitors gaze in awe at the cathedral's painted ceiling.

   He gazed across the valley as the sun went down.

   Similarstare, gape, look, peer

   Oppositeglance

   Note

   The everyday verb takes no direct object, so what is looked at arrives through a preposition: at the stars, up into heaven in the King James Bible of 1611, far away into the distance in Joyce's Ulysses (1922), across the moon-washed garden. The preposition sets the direction, often toward something distant or out of reach. When the object follows with no preposition, you have the transitive use.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A fixed, continued look, often one of eagerness, wonder, or admiration.

   She fixed the crowd with a gaze of quiet admiration.

   His gaze never left the horizon as the ship approached.

   Similarstare, look

   Oppositeglance, glimpse

   Note

   The noun usually belongs to someone, and the classic thing to do with it is to meet it. In Emerson Hough's The Purchase Price (1910), a captain feels helpless "as he met her steady gaze." Meeting a gaze means looking straight back into it, which turns one person's look into an exchange. Steady sits naturally beside the word, because a gaze is already a look that lasts.

3. 3
   verbliterarytransitive

   To look upon someone or something with a long, fixed stare.

   Strait toward Heav'n my wondring Eyes I turnd, / And gaz'd a while the ample Skie

   1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost

   I searched for form and land For years and years I roamed I gazed a gazeless stare.

   1970, David Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World

   Similarbehold, regard, contemplate, eye

   Note

   Verse lets the verb take its object directly. In Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) the speaker "gaz'd a while the ample Skie," with no at in between. David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World (1970) bends the pattern further with a line where the object is a kind of look rather than a thing seen. In ordinary prose the bare object sounds like a dropped word, so keep it for poetry or deliberately elevated writing.

4. 4
   noun

   In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject's relationship to both the desire to look and the awareness of being able to be looked at.

   Like the moment at a window when you realize the person outside is looking back at you.

   Lacan's concept of the gaze captures the unease of knowing one can be observed while observing.

   Feminist film theory borrowed the gaze to analyze how cinema positions its viewers.

   Note

   Lacan's gaze is not the viewer's eye but the sense of being seen that shadows every act of looking: the look returning from the field of the Other. Feminist visual theory adopted the term, and the male gaze is its best-known phrase. Amelia Jones's The feminism and visual culture reader (2003) sets the female spectator against it. In this usage the word names a concept, the gaze, rather than a single look.

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