The Summer I Was Sixteen

The specificity of the phrase “gaze of a boy” (Line 4) alludes to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s 1975 critical essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze.” The allusion hints to the unspoken societal attitude that the female body is only valuable when it is desired by men—an attitude that Line 4 suggests the girls have internalized. While the gaze present within “The Summer I Was Sixteen” is not as sinister or eroticized as that of Mulvey’s essay, its mere presence indicates the poem’s subjects understand themselves with a bias to male desire.

Connolly introduces the “gaze” (Line 4) in the first stanza because of the element’s power to alter every subsequent description; the image of the girls “shaking water off of [their] limbs” (Line 5), their satiation (Line 7), their “loosened / thin bikini straps” (Lines 17-18) all become less childlike and more sexual due to the masculine onlookers. Even the “lip” (Line 7) of the pool’s rim takes on a decided sensuality. The age of 16 is a kind of advent for this experience, as it symbolizes a maturing sexuality. Similarly, the theme of the male gaze interacts directly with—that is, marks a significant departure from—the theme of childhood innocence. The allusion to the male gaze precedes the confections’ likeness to “furtive kisses” (Line 13), and even the “torches” (Line 13) dimly echo the notion of desire, recalling the figurative idea of “carrying a torch.”

The male gaze is the first thing to break the “mirage” (Line 3) of Connolly’s memory. While the poet could have kept up the illusion that life would forever be like it was at 16, she is not writing as her 16-year-old self; she is writing about her, forced to acknowledge that life did not remain as rosy as the poem originally suggests.