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

Abstract or Introduction

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.