The Issue of Voyeurism in T.C. Boyles Short Story "Peep Hall"

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,7, University of Bamberg, language: English, abstract: This term paper deals with the issue of voyeurism in Thomas Coraghessan Boyle-s short story -Peep Hall-. In times of Reality TV, internet pornography and discussions about public surveillance it is not surprising to find the theme of voyeurism, in the work of a contemporary writer as Boyle is. Though Boyle is an American bestseller author who publishes a new novel or several collections of short stories nearly every year, literature about him and his works is hard to find. Also researches on online-voyeurism are rare even though you get 24.7 million hits on the term -voyeur- at google.de and fifteen of the first twenty hits contain explicit sexuality. Starting a research on a new phenomenon, like online-voyeurism, needs new complex structures to gain serious information. I think it will take years to work scientifically on this complex new media, the internet. That-s why my studies are based on several psychological manuals on sexual behavior and of course the short story itself. I tried to find a psychological profile of a typical voyeur, but I couldn-t find a whole work on voyeurism. This sexual deviation seems to be less important from a criminological aspect in psychological analysis. Based on the different definitions of a voyeur and articles from psychoanalytical manuals on sexual behavior I will try to give an impression on what a voyeur defines, in the first part of my term paper. In the second part I will adopt that impression on the main character Hart Simpson and clarify the question; is he a voyeur or not? In the third part I will try to show what an impression of the term voyeur the different characters Hart and Samantha with their different perspective on that topic have.