Class privilege shapes whether characters can survey a city from above

Evidence

The difference is, crucially, one of class: Perowne’s privileged position is reflected in his heightened ability to survey the city; Levy and his wife are down among the flotsam and jetsam of urban life. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 627

Categorization

• XREF: Scopic power, the panoptic survey gaze, connects to ideas about surveillance and the privileged detached observer in post-9/11 fiction.
• DEFINE: A compact analytic term — the class-based ‘scopic privilege’ of survey — useful for reading how narrative point of view encodes power.