Gradually, the viewer's pleasure of being the knowing doctor shifts to the pleasure of socially-sanctioned unwilling penetration: "But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it," says the doctor as he grows angry with the girl's intransigence. Mulvey might assert that the girl's illness makes her into a kind of erotic object, a being that can be legitimately observed and penetrated by both the doctor and the viewer, which the doctor takes pleasure in subduing. The reader's alignment with the doctor's thought processes grows closer and closer as the penetration is about to take place. The doctor tries to 'sweet talk' the girl, and is frustrated by the protections of the mother, almost as if he were a suitor:...
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