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"Insane passions": Psychosis and female same -sex desire in psychoanalysis and literary modernism
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"INSANE PASSIONS": PSYCHOSIS AND FEMALE SAME-SEX DESIRE
IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY MODERNISM
Copyright 2001
by
Christine Elisabeth Coffman
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
May 2001
Christine Elisabeth Coffman
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UMI Number: 3027706
Copyright 2001 by
Coffman, Christine Elisabeth
All rights reserved.
___ < 9
UMI
UMI Microform 3027706
Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company.
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
C h i:is tj-n e ..* E lis A tie th ...G « fJ E lR 3,ri .
under the direction of her Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
D ate . . . J f oy. J - i . *. . 2 0 0 . 1
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
A b stract.................................................. iii-iv
Introduction............................ 1
I. Madness, Sexuality, and Early Twentieth-Century Novels..................1
II. Gender, Sexuality, and Medical Theories of Psychosis.....................4
III. The limit of the social...................................................................16
IV. Psychosis, Lesbianism, and Queer Theory...................................33
Chapter 1: "To understand is to condemn," or, "the human enigma of sex" 51
I. "The maid is the repressed of the mistress of the house".... 51
II. "[U]n raffinement de torture qu'on ne rencontre que chez les peuples
non civilises".................................... ........53
III. "There was nothing else between us".......................................... 61
IV. "What significance cannot be found?"...... ..................................66
V. "One doesn't speak to the other".... ...................................94
Chapter 2: Repudiating the Lesbian Double of "Mad Love:"
Andre Breton’s N ad ja.............................................................103
I. L'Amour fou....................................................................................106
II. "Une emotion violente et indefinissible"..................................... 115
III. "Sorties tout armees d'un chant de Maldoror.............................. 126
IV. "Descendre vraiment dans les bas-fonds de l'esprit".....................131
V. "Ces superbes betes de proie".....................................................139
VI. "L'absence bien-connue de frontiere entre la non-folie et la folie"... 148
Chapter 3: "What insane passion": Lesbian Narcissism and Psychical
Primitivism in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood................... 155
I. Discursive Overdetermination................................ 155
II. Representation and Sexual Outlawry.......................................... 160
III. "What insane passion"..................... 164
Chapter 4: “Prophetess Faced Prophetess”: Madness and the Female Visionary
in H.D.’s HERmione .......................... .....................................202
I. “To close the gap with signs”...................................................... 208
II. “The homosexual-maternal”.........................................................213
III. “A concentric friendship” .......... 216
Chapter 5: “Some net of wrong enchantment”: H.D.'s Asphodel and the
Lacanian G aze......................................................... 236
I. "You must cut. . . the cord . . . Umbilical cord to be exact" 240
II. “Some net of wrong enchantment”.................. 244
III. "Eyes don't look normally out of faces like that".......................... 253
Works C ited.........................................................................................................263
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iii
Christine Elisabeth Coffman Professor Peter Starr
ABSTRACT
INSANE PASSIONS: PSYCHOSIS AND FEMALE SAME-SEX DESIRE IN
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY MODERNISM
This dissertation reads the early writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan in tandem with novels by Andre Breton (Nadja), Djuna Barnes (Mghtwood),
and H.D. (TIERmione and Asphodel). Specifically, it traces out the way in which
early twentieth-century literary and psychoanalytic discourses on "narcissism" and "the
feminine" at times intersect in the politically charged figure of the "psychotic lesbian."
This figure is most famously exemplified by Christine and Lea Papin, two sisters
presumed to be lovers whose 1933 murder of the bourgeois mother-daughter pair who
employed them as maids scandalized the French public. Lacan’s fascination with the
“Papin Affair” is the subject of critique in my first chapter. The female psychotic was
to Lacan in the nineteen-thirties what the hysteric was to Sigmund Freud in the
eighteen-nineties: the privileged object of fascination for a clinician eager to derive a
revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Lacan claims that
the Papin sisters’ ostensibly “paranoid” crime was fueled by a perilously narcissistic,
homosexual dialectic that culminated in their sadistic assault on their employers.
Lacan’s mystifying rhetoric, however, provides less support for the truth of his claims
than it does illustrate the way in which psychoanalysis conflates lesbianism with
psychosis and positions them both as threats to the “civilized” human community.
While others have noted the similarities between modernist figurations of
human consciousness and the alienated mental states of schizophrenics, the frequent
rhetorical link between psychosis and femininity in early twentieth-century literary
texts has been little discussed. In subsequent chapters, I argue that the psychotic
woman that fascinates Lacan also occupies a key position in the history of modernist
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literature. Her actions are so enigmatic to others that they often are attributed to
homosexual "perversion" and explained away as evidence of her “primitive” psyche
(Lacan, Barnes) or of demonic possession (Breton, H.D.). By embodying perceived
threats to “civilization,” the “psychotic woman” marks the limit of linguistic and social
intelligibility in early twentieth-century psychoanalytic and literary discourse.
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1
Introduction
I. Madness, Sexuality, and Early Twentieth-Century Novels
In December, 1933, the young psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan contributed to the
surrealist journal Minotaure a short piece entitled "Motifs du Crime Paranoi'aque," an
interpretation of the mysterious criminal motives of Christine and Lea Papin, two
sisters who had murdered the mother and daughter pair who employed them as
maids. 1 A psychoanalytic narrative that presents the Papin sisters as paranoid
psychotics whose disavowed homosexuality and narcissistic over-proximity
culminated in murderous aggression and subsequent delusions, "Motifs" draws its
understanding of psychosis from Lacan's doctoral dissertation on a female psychotic
named Aimee. In discussing instances of presumed psychoses in women, Lacan's
"Motifs" differs substantially from many of the case studies that thus far have
animated feminist debate around psychoanalysis. As Kristin Ross suggests, the
female psychotic was to Lacan in the nineteen-thirties what the hysteric was to
Sigmund Freud in the eighteen-nineties: the privileged object of fascination for a
clinician eager to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental
illness (19-20). Yet "Motifs" is significant not merely because, as Lacanians remind
us, it contains the germ of Lacan's famous theory of the mirror stage.2 First
1. Trans.: "Motives of Paranoid Crime."
2. Elizabeth Roudinesco and Marcelle Marini both emphasize the importance
of the Papin article for Lacan's subsequent development of the theory of the mirror
stage.
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2
appearing in the journal Minotaure. the organ of a surrealist movement fascinated with
rebellious women, the article on the Papin sisters also is an important document for the
history of early twentieth-century literature.
Psychoanalytic case histories themselves have proven fruitful objects for
textual criticism in recent decades: the psychoanalysts' accounts of dialogues with the
patient, the narrative conventions used in the medical text, often offer themselves up to
the same kind of analysis appropriate to literature. Furthermore, a long-standing
tradition of literary criticism has remarked the parallels between the linguistic
innovations of modernist writers and Freud's understanding of the unconscious
mechanisms of symbolic condensation and displacement. Both of these early
twentieth-century movements explore the ways fragments produce meaning, the ways
narrative not only may be exploited for its positive content, but also for the
significance of its automatisms, its ruptures, its silences. Finally, a large number of
modernist texts share not only psychoanalysis' linguistic concerns, but also its
preoccupation with sexuality and desire: texts by such authors as Andre Breton,
H.D., and Djuna Barnes trope gender, sexuality, and mental illness in ways that invite
comparison with psychoanalytic writings.
The characteristic fragmentation of "modernist" literature often has been linked
to the symptoms of madness. Studies such as Louis Sass' encyclopedic Madness and
Modernism, for example, have outlined ways in which early twentieth-century literary
presentations of human consciousness parallel medical accounts of the alienated mental
states of clinical schizophrenics. Yet like many other critics, Sass writes off the
question of the political role gender and sexuality may play in medical— and, in turn,
textual— constructions of psychotic symptoms.
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3
The large body of feminist scholarship on early twentieth-century
psychoanalytic and psychiatric medicine, too, provides little help in understanding the
specific rhetorical links made between gender, sexuality, and psychosis: it has
focused on the widespread diagnosis of hysteria to account for the theatrics of women
who acted out in response to the constraints placed on women in the early twentieth-
century, yet largely has overlooked the ways in which the figure of the female
psychotic may mark the limit of the psychoanalytic paradigm.^
In this project I read psychoanalytic and literary texts to track the deployment
of ideologically informed, discursive links between psychosis and lesbianism. Yet to
consider, at both the thematic and stylistic levels, a text's deployment of the link
between homosexuality and paranoid psychosis requires neither a legitimating
reconfirmation of psychoanalysis' pathologization of queers nor a capitulation to
claims that individual characters are fundamentally pathological. Indeed,
antihomophobic critique often requires a healthy degree of skepticism about the
politics of sexuality that underpin medical definitions of sanity and insanity. Instead
of simply engaging in an uncritically "objective" attempt to "diagnose" madness at the
characterological level, then, I cross-read psychoanalytic texts with novels in order to
track the political investments of medical discourse— the way in which medically
authorized distinctions between sanity and madness hinge on socially constructed
gendered and sexual imperatives. To invoke a comparison between novelistic and
3. Helene Cixous and Catherine Cldment's Lajeune nee is a key text that
attempts to theorize hysteria as a point of distinctively feminine resistance to
phallogocentric language. The anthology In Dora's Case collects a series of essays on
hysteria. In The Female Malady. Elaine Showalter's discussion of the role of the
psychiatric institution in regulating and representing female madness focuses on
hysteria. While Showalter's book also includes a chapter on female schizophrenia, it
explicitly sidesteps the question of psychoanalysis' theorization of psychosis in favor
of a discussion of the way in which early twentieth-century psychiatric treatment of
female schizophrenic reproduced structures of female submissiveness.
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4
psychoanalytic discourse in the service of such analysis is not simply to use theory as
a diagnostic tool to identify the ailments of characters, as if they were patients, but is
instead to point out the way in which cultural assumptions about sexuality structure the
two texts' deployment of a link between homosexuality and paranoia in a comparable
manner.
This project turns around the figure of the psychotic lesbian, exemplified by
Lacan's Papin sisters, whose presence in early twentieth-century discourse haunts not
only psychoanalytic theory, but also a series of early twentieth-century experimental
novels by Andre Breton, Djuna Barnes, and H.D.. Discussing "psychosis" as a
diagnostic category that links delusions and linguistic disturbances to female
homosexuality and to the transgression of gender roles, I am concerned with its
political role in setting the limits of linguistic and social intelligibility in both the
psychoanalytic and literary texts at hand. The figure of the psychotic lesbian comes to
mark the limit of the social by embodying anxieties not only about women and
sexuality, but also about the often hazy borderline between sanity and insanity. If
"psychosis" appears within discourse as the limit of the social, as the index of a
person's refusal of fundamental social rules, then its textual appearances have as much
to say about the wider sociocultural conditions of its possibility as about the
vicissitudes of individual pathology.
II. Gender, Sexuality, and Medical Theories of Psychosis
The figure of the insane, murderous lesbian was not new to early twentieth-
century medicine. The fin-de-siecle had its own counterpart to the Papin sisters in the
cross-dressing Alice Mitchell, who in 1892 murdered Freda Ward— the seventeen-
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5
year-old "fiancee" who left her for a man (Duggan, "Trials of Alice Mitchell," 794).4
Instead of being tried in criminal court, however, Mitchell appeared at a "lunacy
inquisition" in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee (795). Like the Papin affair,
the murder of Ward spawned such literary rewritings as "The Long Arm," Mary
Wilkins Freeman's detective story.
Moreover, taking Alice Mitchell as a prototype for female homosexuality, fin-
de-siecle sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis would
promote a medical discourse that linked "(homo)sexual inversion" in women to
madness. Krafft-Ebing promotes a far more pathological version of homosexuality
than Ellis, strongly advocating therapeutic cure not only for the insane but also for
patients whose homosexuality is accompanied by only minor social maladjustment.
Havelock Ellis, on the other hand, does not unilaterally prescribe a cure, and attempts
to distinguish psychotics from the bulk of the homosexual population. Yet the
distinction he makes between male and female homosexuals uses an essentialistic
rhetoric to contrast healthy male "inverts" to the women, whose "feminine
emotionality combined with some degree of infantile impulsiveness and masculine
energy" he believes to be "a favorable soil for the seeds of passional crime" (201).
For the sexologists, the term "sexual inversion" encompassed not only sexual
practices, but bodily morphology as well; assuming desire to circulate from a
masculine to a feminine pole and vice versa, this model accounted for sexual attraction
by describing as "inverted" those individuals whose bodily sex did not correspond to
the 'sex' of their desire. While researchers such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Karl
Ulrichs fought against their counterparts' conflation of madness with homosexuality,
all sexologists understood homosexuality as a form of sexual "inversion." Their
4. See also Duggan's Sapphic Slashers for a book-length analysis of Mitchell,
as well as Katz for a brief discussion.
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6
formulation would come to appear in subsequent literary texts and would eventually
influence psychoanalytic understandings of gender, sexuality, and m a d n e s s . ^
When he founded the discipline of psychoanalysis with the 1900 publication of
The Interpretation of Dreams. Sigmund Freud prompted a revolution in the
conceptualization of the psyche: he presented a new theory of the unconscious as
animated by an unruly language of symbols. By insisting that the unconscious
motivations of all humans are irrational and difficult to decipher, the psychoanalytic
theories of Freud and his followers have led to a new understanding of madness: not
simply "unreason," madness is the result of a failure in psychosocial development, of
the madman's unsuccessful progression into adult heterosexuality.6 Yet certain of his
texts complicate Ellis' and Krafft-Ebing's simple equation of sexual transgression with
psychopathology. At times, he took care to distinguish between a view of
homosexuality as inherently pathological, and his own understanding of
homosexuality as benign yet socially inconvenient (qtd. in Bayer, 27). Nonetheless,
his writings on paranoia— particularly his famous analysis of the paranoid Daniel Paul
5. Later in the century, Anglo-American feminists would attempt to articulate a
similar impasse by distinguishing between "sex," "gender," and "sexuality;" in this
view, the "sexed" body is mediated by "gender," those cultural constructs put upon it.
Yet as recent feminist philosophers such as Elizabeth Grosz have pointed out, the use
of "gender" to signal the social mediation of "sex" is tautological: supposing "sex"
itself to be a discursive construct, Grosz argues that it is unnecessary to distinguish it
polemically from "gender" ("Experimental Desire"). This impasse, too, remains
unresolved. See Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex"; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Epistemologv of the Closet: Biddy Martin, "Sexualities Without Genders and Other
Queer Utopias" in Femininity Played Straight: Elizabeth Grosz, "Experimental Desire:
Rethinking Queer Subjectivity" in Space. Time, and Perversion: and Judith Butler,
"Against Proper Objects" and Gender Trouble.
6. Prior medical and popular understandings of madness emphasized the
difference between the normal capacity to reason and the madman's ostensible inability
to do so; this perspective is discussed by Foucault in L'Histoire de la folie a l'age
classique. and by Showalter in The Female Maladv.
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Schreber's Memoirs of Mv Nervous Illness— propose "latent" homosexuality as the
kernel of the disease, the cause of a pathological regression to unresolved homosexual
tendencies whose repeated refusal takes the form of psychotic delusions. In this case,
homosexuality remains at the core of pathology.
Perhaps because of the prominence of the Schreber case amongst Freud's
studies, male homosexuality has been the focus of recent queer theoretical attempts to
read the psychoanalytic theory of psychotic homosexuality against itself7 While such
studies have yielded the insight— important for both queer and feminist theory— that
Western patriarchy is constituted through the paranoid disavowal of its own
homoeroticism, they have failed to elucidate the specificity of psychoanalysis'
classification of female p s y c h o s i s . ^ I propose in this dissertation to train my lens on
the as yet underanalyzed question of the relation psychoanalytic theorists draw
between female homosexuality and psychosis.
Indeed, while recent queer theoretical work has taken up the project of
critically rereading Freud’s “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”
along with his essays on “Femininity” and “Female Sexuality,” relatively less critical
attention has been given to his other sustained analysis of a purportedly homosexual
woman-"A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytical Theory of the
Disease." It is in this latter study that Freud’s work on female homosexuality crosses
problematically with that on male homosexuality, which itself often is articulated in the
analysis of ostensible paranoid psychoses.
A large body of feminist and queer criticism has pointed up what Luce
Irigaray, in her trenchant critique of psychoanalysis, calls the "hom(m)osexuality" that
7. See Hanson, Hocquenghem, and Sedgwick (Between Men).
8. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's groundbreaking Between Men and
Epistemologv of the Closet.
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draws all sexuality as male homosexuality, as a male-centered mirroring of the phallus
(Speculum of the Other Woman 98). Jacques Derrida similarly has critiqued
psychoanalysis for its inability to represent sexuality outside of a logic in which the
phallus plays the lead role. The privileging of the masculine, which Derrida calls
"phallogocentrism," conditions both psychoanalysis' concern with the homosexual
effeminization of men, and its self-contradictory accounts of desire between w o m e n . 9
Because of his privileging of male sexuality and the phallus, Freud's texts
become especially tangled when confronted with female psychosis. 10 Freud's
analysis of a woman who believed herself spied on during an illicit heterosexual affair
is a contortedly insistent hunt for a homosexual kernel to her delusions ("Case of
Paranoia"). Even more so than in his work on paranoia in men, homosexuality
appears in the course of Freud's study of women as a central, and dubious,
explanation for psychosis.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's famous "return to Freud" opens up
a route for considering these questions, at the same time as it exacerbates the problem
of heterosexism and phallogocentrism inherent in Freud's understanding of psychosis.
9. "'A Child is Being Beaten,"' "Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy,
Paranoia, and Homosexuality," and the Schreber case are three amongst many
instances of Freud's preoccupation with the often masochistic effeminization of men.
That Lacan uses these texts on male homosexuality to draw a portrait of the Papin
sisters as paranoid confirms my reading of "Motifs" as an example of
"hom(m)osexuality." "Femininity" and "Feminine Sexuality" differentiate between the
development of heterosexual and homosexual women, understanding the latter as
underdevelopment, the result of the girl's inability to separate from an original
attachment to her mother-despite the fact that for men, the same attachment's
persistence is the index of sexual normalcy. "The Psychogenesis of a Case of
Homosexuality in a Woman" can theorize female homosexual desire only by
portraying the 'true' lesbian's desire as masculine in nature.
10. Few of Freud's texts discuss femininity and female homosexuality in
detail; the most significant are "Femininity," Feminine Sexuality," and "The
Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman."
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In using Freud’s work on male homosexuality to hypothesize about ostensible
homosexual psychoses in women, Lacan’s early work symptomatizes a
phallogocentric elision of sexual difference. From the beginning of his career, Lacan
noted the transgression of gender roles as a theme of psychotic language and delusion.
De la psvchose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalite. his 1932 doctoral
dissertation on a psychotic named Aimee, focuses on Freudian concepts such as
narcissism to legitimize his reading of his patient as driven into psychotic frenzy by
her unacknowledged homosexuality. Lacan reads both Aimee's attachment to a sister
and her fantasies of masculinity as evidence of a dangerously repudiated
homosexuality. His 1933 article on the murderous Papin sisters makes similar claims,
finally using linguistic evidence— Christine Papin's statement, "I really believe that in
another life I must have been my sister's husband"— to bolster its argument for the
sisters' psychosis. H "Motifs" focuses on the ''contemporaneity" of pathological
narcissism with homosexuality, thereby refusing the Freudian distinction between
healthy adult homosexuality and perilous, paranoiac regression. I argue in my first
chapter that the incoherence of Lacan's argument in "Motifs" marks the limit of
psychoanalytic theories of psychosis, homosexuality, and the transgression of gender
roles. Unable to see past its own phallogocentrism, psychoanalysis can only represent
the Papin sisters' revolt as a manifestation of pathological sexuality.
By the 1950's, Lacan will fuse Saussurean linguistics with Freud's view of
the differences between the sexes into a necessary relation between linguistic
positionality and "sexual difference." Both his seminar on Les psychoses and "D’ une
question preliminaire a tout traitement possible de la psychose" (in Ecrits) present the
psychotic as having "foreclosed" the phallic signifier— that is, as having refused to
H. Translation mine. Orig. "Je crois bien que dans une autre vie je devais
etre le mari de ma soeur" (28).
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10
accept the phallus as the anchor of the symbolic order. In so doing, the psychotic has
refused "sexual difference" itself, and therefore is subject to its grotesque return in the
form of delusions of 'abnormal' gender behavior and sexual positionings. Lacan's
understanding of the linguistic conditioning of the social makes the manifestation of
"inversion" in written and spoken language a crucial factor in the diagnosis of
psychosis. His understanding of psychosis as the refusal of the Name of the Father
demands that one either accept paternal law or be intelligible only as society's
constitutive outside: as the insane utterer of incoherent syllables, as the fantastic
flipside of the sexually normative.
In contrast to the sparsity of discussion in Freud's writing, Lacan's early
studies constitute a substantial body of work on female homosexuality and psychosis.
Yet surprisingly enough, there has been meager scholarly inquiry into the implications
of Lacan's figuration of the psychotic lesbian as the limit of social, sexual, and
psychological normalcy. Thus far, the most substantial work on Freudian and
Lacanian theories of homosexuality and psychosis has focused on the delusional
phantasies of male effeminacy that dominate Freud's work on Schreber. However, if
"Motifs" points us to a psychoanalytic literature on femininity and psychosis
unremarked in earlier feminist and queer work on psychoanalysis, it does not render
the voice of the female psychotic any more audible than Freud's work did the voice of
the female hysteric. *2 Instead, as I demonstrate in my first chapter, phallogocentrism
creates a constitutive blindness that structures Lacan's "Motifs" around the enigmatic
and threatening figure of the "psychotic lesbian." Thus Lacan's early work allows us
to gain a fuller picture of the way in which psychoanalytic theory, at least at the
12. See Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria for a famous
example of a psychoanalytic case study whose framework renders illegible the motives
of its ostensible subject, while casting her behavior as a series of resistances to the
"master" analyst's Oedipal narrative.
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11
beginning of the century, entails the repeated formation and politicized regulation of
concepts of "normalcy" and "psychosis" along heterosexual lines.
If Lacan's early work is strongly marked by phallogocentrism, so are the
writings of one of the most innovative intellectuals writing in his wake-Julia Kristeva.
Whereas the structuralist phase of Lacan's work theorizes psychosis as the refusal of
the signification of the phallus, or foreclosure of the Nom-du-Pere, Kristeva's work
on psychosis and the "homosexual-maternal" fleshes out the space of such a refusal by
distinguishing between the Symbolic, the order of paternal law, and the Semiotic, the
realm of pre-Symbolic maternal affect. For Kristeva, the implicit homosexuality of the
Semiotic order's mother-daughter relation carries the potential for rupturing and
ultimately subverting the paternal Symbolic.
In "Matemite selon Giovanni Bellini," Kristeva characterizes this Semiotic as
psychotic. She figures psychosis as the phantasmatic return to a pre-Oedipal stage of
both blissful and aggressive fusion, a lack of differentiation between mother and child;
this "homosexual-maternal" is characterized by "a whirl of words, a complete absence
of meaning and seeing; it is feeling, displacement, rhythm, sound, flashes, and
fantasized clinging to the maternal body as a screen against the plunge" ("Motherhood"
239-240). She argues that there is a double causality to the desire for motherhood: on
one hand, there is the wish to bear the father's child, thereby perpetuating the reign of
paternal law; but on the other hand, there is a "nonsymbolic, nonpatemal causality,"
implicitly homosexual in its nostalgia for reunion with one's own mother, which
remains a "prelinguistic, unrepresentable memory." Kristeva argues that through "the
homosexual facet of motherhood," a woman "is simultaneously closer to her
instinctual memory, more open to her own psychosis, and consequently, more
negatory of the social, symbolic bond" (239). And just as in Lacan's account of the
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12
Papin sisters, which implies that the dangers of female overproximity can be
circumvented by the woman's appropriate submission to (heterosexual) desire for
paternal substitutes, Kristeva figures "the symbolic paternal facet," or "the desire to
bear the father's child," as that which introduces an element of "melancholy" to
motherhood, mitigating the aggression of the "homosexual-maternal" and allowing the
woman to emerge from "aphasia."
Yet if the "homosexual-maternal" is characterized by "aphasia,” it is only
because of its illegibility within the terms of the paternal symbolic. While the
unrepresentability of the "homosexual-maternal" would seem to be one of Kristeva's
points, she uses it to tautological effect: the paternal symbolic is called in to save a
woman from the "aphasia" that its own terms have construed as illegible lack, as the
dangerously psychotic outside. The "homosexual-maternal" thus is a ruse of the
paternal symbolic, an otherness called into being (or non-being) through the
symbolic's own linguistic and social structurations. Indeed, as Diana Fuss notes,
“any ‘pre’ [such as the pre-Oedipal] is a construct of the ‘post,’” that is, already
stamped by paternal law (59). The mother's ostensible "nostalgia" for the
"homosexual-maternal" is therefore not ontologically prior to the inscription of
symbolic law, but is instead a retroactive construction of the s y m b o lic . 13 Much like
Lacan’s article on the Papin sisters, then, Kristeva’s theory of the “homosexual-
maternal” should be read as a phantasy produced by and through the phallogocentric
symbolic.
In Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Kristeva revises her earlier work on the pre-Oedipal
by asserting that the experience of abjection traces out the incipient subject’s efforts to
13 in Gender Trouble. Judith Butler makes a similar point somewhat
differently, through a reading of Kristeva's distinction between the Symbolic and the
ostensibly subversive "semiotic."
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13
separate from the pre-Oedipal mother and to take his or her place within the symbolic
order. She asserts that “[1]’abject nous confronte . . . a nos tentatives les plus
anciennes de nous demarquer de l’entite matemelle avant meme que d’ex-ister en
14
dehors d’elle grace a l’autonomie du langage” (20). As Kelly Oliver explains,
“[t]he mother is made abject in order to facilitate the separation from her” at a point at
which “the mother is not-yet-object and the child is not-yet-subject”; the mother-as-
abject “takes the place of the Other that will be occupied by the mother once the mirror
stage is traversed” (56-57). Yet as Kristeva insists, it is a “[djemarquage violent et
maladroit, toujours guette par la rechute dans la dependance d’un pouvoir aussi
securisant qu’etouffant” (Pouvoirs 2 0 ).^ Abjection takes place at the borderline
between the pre-Oedipal and the paternal symbolic, continually enacting the pain both
of separating from the mother and of ceding to symbolic imperatives; it recognizes
both the maternal body and paternal law in the reiterated act of attempting to exclude
them. At the same time as he or she attempts to exclude the influence of both the
symbolic father and the pre-Oedipal mother, the “de-ject,” as Kristeva calls the
subject-in-process of abjection, nonetheless is under the sway of the symbolic order as
situated through the Other. Kristeva writes that
Je n’eprouve de l’abjection que si un Autre s’est plante en lieu et place de ce
qui sera ‘moi.’ Non pas un autre auquel je m’identifie ni que j ’incorpore,
mais un Autre qui me precede et me possede, et par cette possession me fait
etre. Possession anterieure a mon avenement: etre-la du symbolique qu’un
pere pourrait ou non incarner.^ (18)
. Trans.: "The abject confronts us . . . with our earliest attempts to release
the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the
autonomy of language” (13).
Trans.: “a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant wish of
falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (13).
Trans.: "I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and
stead of what will be 'me.' Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate,
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Thus, what Kristeva calls "the abject" is the residue of the mother that emerges
through the subject's struggle to enter the symbolic. The incipient subject engages her
own body in a struggle against itself, against a maternal body only poorly
differentiated from her own; she fights a war against "son corps defendant, avec ce
qui, de la mere, deviendra un abject" (20). 17 From within the symbolic, the mother
as object is always already lost, and can only be accessed through the violent
mourning of abjection: Kristeva writes that "l'abject est la violence du deuil d'un
'objet' toujours deja perdu" (22). 18 For Kristeva, then, "the abject" is the residue of
the maternal body, experienced corporeally by the subject as if in mourning; "the
abject" thus signals the unrepresentability of the maternal body, and the mother-
daughter tie as well, within the paternal symbolic. Kristeva's "abject" is no less
problematic than her "semiotic," however: tom between the symbolic father and the
pre-Oedipal mother, the "de-ject" experiences abjection as a struggle with the terms
through which the symbolic constructs his or her experience.
Feminist critics have questioned the politics of Kristeva's selection of
lesbianism as the chosen site of feminist political subversion. As Kaja Silverman
points out, Kristeva’s “La Matemite” equivocates on the nature of the “homosexuality”
accessed in the homosexual-maternal, repeatedly denying “that ‘homosexual’ means
‘homosexual" (Acoustic Mirror 110). And as Teresa de Lauretis argues, Kristeva’s
but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me
to be. A possession previous to my advent: a being-there of the symbolic that a father
might or might not embody” (10).
17 Trans.: "her reluctant body, with that which, of the mother, will become
an abject." Roudiez' translation, "a reluctant struggle against what, having been the
mother, will turn into the abject," obscures the original version's suggestion that the
abject emerges as the subject struggles against her own body (13).
18. Trans.: "The abject is the violence of mourning for an 'object' that has
always already been lost" (15).
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15
theory is only one of many texts that deploy a fantasy of female sexuality (whether
mother-daughter, bi-, or fluid) in order to “ project. . . onto female sexuality certain
[communitarian] features of an idealized feminist society;'” these theories depend upon
the “equivocation on the term homosexuality” by eliding the carnality of female
homosexuality in the service of their feminist ideal (185-6). Silverman and de Lauretis
both intimate that Kristeva’s work may be of little use to theorists of lesbianism
because of a radical disjunction between its rhetorical deployment of female
“homosexuality” and that term’s carnal referent.
Moreover, in questioning the usefulness of Kristeva’s work on the quasi-
psychotic "homosexual-maternal" for theorizing both female and lesbian subjectivity,
feminist critics often have focused on her claims’ pathologizing thrust. For Butler,
Kristeva’s strictly Laeanian views on “the law, language, and drives” lead her to
“identif[y] lesbian experience as the psychotic alternative to the acceptance of
paternally sanctioned laws” [Gender Trouble 87). And for de Lauretis, “it is difficult
to see why any feminist would want to salvage something out of [Kristeva’ s] dismal
view of female subjectivity as structured by paranoia, exacerbated masochism, ever-
lurking psychosis, and absolute dependence on the fruit of the penis” (180).
Yet we must notice the undecidability attending Kristeva’s theorization of the
homosexual-maternal: on one hand, she relegates female subjectivity (and its ideal
form, female homosexuality) to the apparently pathological realm of psychotic
unrepresentability; on the other hand, she idealizes the psychotic discourse of the
“semiotic chora” as site of revolt against and subversion of the patriarchal symbolic.
Because this undecidability should give us pause in reading her claims as unmitigated
pathologizations of female homosexuality, I hesitate to follow Butler and de Lauretis
in so simply denouncing Kristeva’s work as homophobic. Instead, I contend in my
fourth and fifth chapters that early twentieth-century writers like H.D. attempted to
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carve out a space within patriarchy for lesbian subjectivity through a revision of Freud
that in some ways anticipates precisely those same Kristevan theories of pre-
Oedipality, and furthermore, that they were able to do so in a way that complicates the
easy distinction, presumed by Butler and de Lauretis, between sanity and psychosis.
III. The limit of the social
Although one might think that texts from the early twentieth century draw a
clear line between heterosexual normalcy and psychotic lesbianism, that is not always
the case. As I will show in my first and second chapters, which consider texts by
Jacques Lacan and Andre Breton, insane lesbianism appears as a conceptual space
through which to contemplate the madness of love in all its manifestations.
La Prisonniere. a play by Edouard Bourdet that was successful-and
controversial— in 1926 in Paris, New York, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, is filled
with the same rhetoric of lesbian "madness" that appears in much literature from the
beginning of the century (Faderman, Surpassing. 3 4 7 ). *9 The plot turns on the
"imprisonment" of a young woman named Irene, whose pretended engagement and
eventual marriage to her friend Jacques is both as an escape from her possessive father
and a screen for the identity of her real lover, Mme. dAiguines. Not only Irene but
also her fiance are called "mad" by the other male characters in the play: Irene, for her
love for another woman; Jacques, for his doomed love for a lesbian.
The terms through which Bourdet's play represents Irene's passion for a
woman allow one to discern the position of lesbianism within a patriarchal social
order, as well as to observe the forms of cultural anxiety incited by desire between
19. See Katz, Gay American History, for a discussion of the controversy
surrounding the New York run of The Captive.
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17
women. Despite Irene's attempt to escape Mme. d'Aiguines through marriage to
Jacques, she nonetheless is drawn back to the lesbian relationship, which she calls "a
prison to which I must return captive, despite m yself (171). Irene's "madness" is
characterized by a mysterious lack of agency that implies that lesbian desire is
especially threatening because its exact mechanism is elusive: as much as Irene insists
that she is evacuated of all agency in the presence of Mme. d'Aiguines, it remains
unclear exactly which connivances of the predatory lesbian lead to the younger
woman's enslavement. Indeed, to the men whose commentary on lesbianism
provides much of the play's moral framework, lesbianism is "terrible" and dangerous
precisely because it is "mysterious" to them: it is "l'alliance secrete de deux etres qui
s'entendent, qui se devinent parce qu'ils sont pareils, parce qu'ils sont du meme sexe,
d'une autre planete que lui, l'etranger, l'ennemi" (102).20 Within this logic, the
presumed similarity of women immediately and inevitably puts them in a passionate,
inextricable, and "secret alliance" that can only destroy themselves and the men around
them.
This construction of lesbianism as mysterious to and potentially destructive of
a patriarchal social order typifies early twentieth-century accounts of lesbian passion.
The construal of the female psyche as automatism is frequent not only in
psychoanalytic texts, but also in the larger body of medical and quasi-medical literature
from the beginning of the century, from Max Nordau's claim that woman is a "mental
automaton" to Clerambault's studies of "mental automatism" to Lacan's accounts of
20, Trans, "secret alliance of two beings who understand one another
because they're alike, because they're of the same sex, because they're of a different
planet than he, the enemy" (149-50). Here I cannot resist remarking on the continued
appeal of this dichotomous view of sexual difference in American pop psychology:
the immensely popular Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus trades on the
same myth that men and women are so different that they must be from different
planets altogether.
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the automatic psyches of the psychotics Aimee and Marcelle (Nordau 41; Copjec 88-
91; Lacan. De la psychose. 191). Clerambault's later substitution of "syndrome of
passivity" for "mental automatism" is telling: stymied by the unpredictable
manifestations of a seemingly mysterious agency, the physician can only conclude that
her mind has been "prey" to forces from without (Copjec 88; Breton, Nadja. 57).
As I will argue throughout thus dissertation, the lesbian psyche appears in
early twentieth-century texts as a sort of enigma or paradox, one whose apparently
"automatic" motivation can only be explained as the result of psychosis or of demonic
possession. These lesbian women are so fascinating because of their apparent
incomprehensibility within traditional understandings of subjectivity: like the
workings of the unconscious, like the unfolding of the dreamwork, indeed like the
virtual reality of delirium, these women are subject to an agency that seems to exceed
their conscious intentions.
For both Lacan and Breton, the enigma of lesbian passion is both fascinating
and threatening. Lacan can only explain the murderous motives of Christine and Lea
Papin by recourse to the claim that female homosexuality itself leads to psychosis; he
tells a tale of lesbian criminality that is more effective in revealing psychoanalysis'
blind spots than in elucidating the sisters' motives. And if in surrealism more
generally, the production of "automatic writing" depends upon the artist's ultimately
repudiated identification with femininity as the site of "automatism," the tale presented
in Breton's Nadja exhibits a similar pattern: in chronicling his eventually repudiated
identification with an artistic madwoman, Nadja, Breton also tells of his fascination
with a play that turned on the enigmatic, seemingly demonic motives of two lesbian
murderers.
Working at both the characterological and textual levels of their experimental
fiction, Bames and H.D. take up the construct of the enigmatic, automatic, "primitive"
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female psyche and explore its viability~or lack thereof— as a model of desire between
women: in Barnes' Nightwood. the doomed lovers, Nora and Robin, slide in and out
of the same subject position while never fusing completely; in H.D.'s HERmione. the
protagonist and her lover, Fayne, automatically experience creative visions as a form
of possession that is both artistically productive and psychically dangerous, and that
they eventually must move beyond.
Even though many of these texts present inexplicable and inextricable passion
as uniquely characteristic of lesbianism, the same kind of passion might be said to
drive all love. Here, Bourdet's La Prisonniere again is paradigmatic. As we recall,
not only the lesbians but also the men who love them are cast as "mad." Bourdet's
play not only figures the lesbian as the destroyer of other women and men, but also
uses her experience as an allegory for the entrapments of love— of the possibility of
losing one's self in another person. The lure of lesbianism is a rhetorical stand-in for
the lure of subjectivity itself.
Yet to argue that the mad lesbian appears in many early twentieth-century texts
as a means of contemplating the madness of all humanity is not to claim that there is no
specificity to the appearance of a distinctly feminine madness. Though La Prisonniere
positions lesbian passion as the privileged example of the insanity of all love, the play
also positions it, in the figure of Mme. d'Aiguines, as mad love's sole cause. The
play places full responsibility on lesbians for the madness of the men who love them,
and, by focusing on the destruction of marriages by lesbian wives, further intimates
that female homosexuality is responsible for the collapse of the social order itself.
We can see a similar pattern at work in Lacan's writings. The young Lacan
was particularly fascinated by the psychical and linguistic automatism he viewed as a
symptom of female psychosis: from "'Ecrits 'inspires': Schizographie," his 1931
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analysis of the psychotic language of "Marcelle," to his doctoral thesis on Aimee,
Lacan constructs the female psychotic through a reading of her seemingly "automatic"
use of language. In "'Ecrits 'inspires,'" Lacan and two other researchers use the
writings of the schizophrenic "Marcelle" in order to elucidate the automatic
mechanisms of her psyche. Asked by the doctors for a brief essay on "un sujet
technique qu'elle etait censee connaitre," Marcelle produced instead a text full of
fantastic, disjunctive, and often violent images (379).21 The physicians find a
repetitive structure organizing the images, an automatic framework "fixed in advance,"
comprised sometimes just of a rhythmic base, but often comprised as well of sets of
words, aphorisms, sonorities and assonances that stereotypically recur in seemingly
disparate images (380-1). A structure underlies her hallucinations, but it is
nonetheless one that can be read entirely from the outside. The psychiatrists attribute
the curt phrases that often intrude as strange punctuation amongst the schizophrenic's
production of images to the "automatic phenomenon," though by the patient they are
"thought to be exterior" because they "appeal to a deficit in thought" (382). Thus the
hallucinations that appear to the patient to come from the outside are instead intrusions
of her own, unconscious automatism. Lacan makes a similar argument about
psychotic structure in his thesis: he emphasizes the "traces of 'automatism'" in
Aimee's writing, as well as her narcissism and disavowed homosexuality, to support
his diagnosis of her psychosis (De la psvchose paranoi'aque 191).
Lacan's early studies of female psychotics provide the groundwork for what,
from his famous 1949 essay on "Le stade du miroir" onwards, would become a more
general theory of subjectivity: both (female, lesbian) psychosis and normalcy are
21. Trans.: "a technical subject with which she professed familiarity.”
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structured through the psychical automatism of the narcissistic dialectic.22 One sees
in Lacan's early work on psychical automatism a suggestion of his later account of
psychosis in his 1955-6 seminar, in which the signifiers foreclosed in the Symbolic by
the psychotic subject return again in the Real, and are falsely perceived as coming
from without. However, whereas "Schizographie" discusses automatism as a sort of
punctuation testifying to the themes organizing hallucination, Lacan's later work
proclaims it to be the mechanism that sustains the very rootlessness of psychotic
discourse: he concludes the seminar on psychosis by noting that if the psychotic's
language indeed "parle tout seul," then it is regulated by "Vautomaton . . . ce que
pense vraiment par soi-meme, sans lien a cet au-dela, l'ego, qui donne son sujet a la
pensee" (346).23 In this later view, automatism animates the hallucinations but does
not signify in and of itself. Psychotic hallucinations are never testimony to the
patient's inner essence, but instead are engendered externally as he puts his
subjectivity on trial: he interrogates the act of making meaning as his speech is
situated in opposition to "the underside of his or her own discourse," with the "self'
as "an object that tries to solve the mystery of a signifier by recourse to hallucinatory
meaning" (Ragland-Sullivan 208).
The later Lacan's understanding of "automatism" also ties into his formulation
of the unconscious. As Zizek notes, the "Lacanian definition of the unconscious" is
"the automaton . . . which leads the mind unconsciously [sans le savoir] with it"
(Sublime 37). Instead of a "hydraulics" of pressure between inside and outside,
22. There is evidence that Lacan began developing the propositions in "Le
stade du miroir" as early as 1936, when he delivered an early version of the piece to
the fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Conference (Ecrits: A Selection xiii).
23. Trans.: "speaks alone"; the "automaton [which] is that which truly thinks
for itself, without link to that beyond, the ego, that gives its subject to thought" (307).
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above and below, conscious and unconscious compartments of the mind, Lacan
diagrams "interference-pattems" between the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders of
the subject's identification and signification (Bowie 71). The three orders neither lie in
a relation of interiority or exteriority, or of above and below to one another; instead,
Lacan describes them as forming a Mobius strip, thereby problematizing the spatial
and temporal terms upon which hydraulic models of the psyche depend (Bowie 192-
4). For Lacan, the unconscious is not radically different from, but instead constituted
by the workings of the symbolic, as Zizek explains:
The externality of the symbolic machine ('automaton') is . . . not simply
external: it is at the same time the place where the fate of our internal, most
'sincere' and 'intimate' beliefs is in advance staged and decided . .. we
already believe without knowing it; our belief is already materialized . . . in
other words, we already believe unconsciously, because it is from this
external character of the symbolic machine that we can explain the status of
the unconscious as radically external. (Sublime 43)
Far from being below consciousness, as if subconscious, the Lacanian unconscious is
articulated at the surface of language. Even though the unconscious is linguistic,
however, it is not fully available for us to see. For Lacan, the subject comes into
being through a radical split that
brings into being a surface, in a sense, with two sides: one that is exposed
and one that is hidden. Though the two sides may not ultimately be made of
radically different material— linguistic in nature— at any given point along the
surface there is a front and a back, a visible face and an invisible one. Their
value may only be local, as in the ease of the Mobius strip, where, if you
draw a long enough line along any side, you eventually wind up on the flip
side due to the twist in the strip. Yet there is an at least locally valid split
between front and back, conscious and unconscious. (Fink, Lacanian
Subject. 45)
Also, if psychical "automatism" characterizes the movement upon the Mbbius-like
surface of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders in both normal subjectivity and
psychosis, the latter nonetheless is distinct in its complete exteriorization of these
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unconscious processes: as Lacan notes, "[i]l est classique de dire que dans la
psychoses, l'inconscient est en surface, est conscient" (Les psychoses 20).^4
In appearing within discourse as the site of inexplicable and threatening
automatism, I suggest, the psychotic lesbian is rendered legible, yet only at the
furthest limit of representability, as the very limit of the social itself. She thus is not
consigned by patriarchy to the realm of the invisible, as the many calls for increased
"lesbian visibility" assume. Even though her violence is marked as evidence of a
criminal psychosis radically different from "normalcy," her violent automatism stands
in for that which is unacknowledged in subjectivity itself. Her appearance thus breaks
down the distinction between sanity and insanity, betraying the constitutive violence of
the social. In an apparent paradox, the psychotic lesbian appears to threaten the
collapse of the very social order her appearance nonetheless works to sustain.
How can this be? The proposition that violence is at the heart of the social is,
of course, nothing new to psychoanalytic mythology: in Totem and Taboo. Freud
famously founds psychoanalysis' account of the social on the myth of the murder of
the father. As the story goes, one day a group of sons rose up against the feared and
envied "primal father" who violently had driven them away so as to keep all of the
women for himself. Despite their initial hostility to one another, the vengeful sons
united against the "primal father": they "killed and devoured their father and so made
an end of the patriarchal horde," yet were left with a sense of guilt that "made the dead
father... stronger than the living one had been," and that thereby founded the "two
repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex"-to murder the father and to sleep with the
mother (141-3). The repression of Oedipal wishes constitutes the social order Lacan
24. Trans.: "[i]t's classically said that in psychosis the unconscious is at the
surface, conscious" because of its linguistic nature (The Psychoses 11).
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later would term the "symbolic." For Lacan, the unconscious is the violent, criminal
kernel of subjectivity: the son's repressed patricidal and incestuous desires both
animate the unconscious and set into place a symbolic order founded on (hetero)sexual
difference and regulated by the Law of the Father.
As Elizabeth Grosz points out, Freud's foundational narrative is tautological in
that it "does not in fact explain patriarchy, for it already presupposes it" (Jacques
Lacan 69). Moreover, as a consequence of psychoanalysis' doctrine of "sexual
difference," homosexuality is consigned to the cultural unconscious: because the
constitution of the symbolic can be accomplished only through "la reduction forcee de
l'hostilite primitive entre les freres," the resultant brotherly love takes the form of a
(male) homosexual desire that ostensibly "devra etre depassee pour aboutir a une
moralite socialement efficace"— that is to say, heterosexuality (Lacan, "Motifs," 28)25
From Luce Mgaray to Eve Sedgwick and Lynda Hart, however, feminist readers of
psychoanalysis have shown us that this homosexual "phase" never ceases to mark the
symbolic. Sedgwick argues that the required transformation of homosexual desire
into male bonding creates a "homosocial" order that, even for the most
developmentally 'successful,' normative male subject, is homosexually charged
(Between Men). A sexually charged male homosociality thus remains "the necessary
but invisible ground of the patriarchal symbolic" (Hart, Fatal Women. 84). The
framework of classical psychoanalysis thus consigns male homosexuality to the realm
of the pathological-to underdevelopment (the man unable to move "beyond" brotherly
love) or even to psychosis (Schreber).
25. Trans..: "the forced abatement of primitive hostility between brothers";
"must go beyond . . . in order to arrive at a socially effective morality" (Lacan,
"Motives," 10-11).
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The psychotic would render conscious the homosexual aspects of the cultural
unconscious, lashing out against a social order that consigns homosexuality to the
limit of the social. We should recall that, for Lacan, both the repudiation of symbolic
mandates and unmitigated aggressivity characterize the structure of psychosis.
Aggressivity is not, however, exclusive to psychosis; it subtends "normal"
subjectivity as well.26 Yet the psychotic's violence is distinct in form, appearing as
the repudiation of the symbolic, of the social bond. The psychotic's violent protest
against the symbolic thus makes legible, rather than obfuscates, the tautological
violence upon which the social order itself is founded. As Fink acknowledges,
"psychosis can be understood as a form of victory . . . over the Other," indeed over
the symbolic itself: if normal subjectivity requires that one make the "forced choice" to
follow symbolic mandates, the psychotic decides to bypass those mandates (Lacanian
Subject 49-50). In lashing out against the symbolic order, the psychotic necessarily
lashes out, too, against the tautological premises of "sexual difference"-against its
strictly dichotomous circumscription of masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality
and homosexuality. Psychotic violence attempts to set in place a new symbolic on the
psychotic's terms, which often results in arrangements that appear to psychoanalysts
as sexual "inversion." Psychoanalysis' problematic interpretation of this refusal of
"sexual difference" as "delusional" will be my subject soon. At the moment, we
should note that the psychotic's violence heralds the abolition of the symbolic order
through the failed iteration of whose terms he came to be. Thus his recontainment
through the force of the clinical diagnosis, through the construal of his protests as
signs of "psychosis."
26. See Lacan, "L'aggressivite en psychanalyse," Ecrits.
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If the heterosexual presuppositions of classical psychoanalysis cast male
homosexuality as a psychotic protest against the symbolic, they stymie accounts of
female psychotics altogether, rendering her actions all the more inexplicable— and all
the more threatening. Elizabeth Grosz asserts that "[l]esbianism has been left largely
unexplained by psychoanalytic theory . . . And it seems as if this area of obscurity is
not simply contingently or accidentally obscured through oversight or neglect, but
rather, as if this blind spot is constitutive of the psychoanalytic project"— at least of the
specific psychoanalytic projects of Freud and Lacan (Grosz, "Labors," 277).
This "blind spot” determines the appearance in psychoanalytic theory of female
sexuality, especially lesbian sexuality, as what Freud, in a text from 1926, famously
calls a "dark continent"— a region unknown to the masculine, Western observer
(Freud, Question. 38). Freud maps out the female body as an unexplored territory
whose exterior reveals little to the observer. Yet he feels no imperative to explore the
interior before drawing general conclusions about female sexuality: tautologically, he
cites the appearance to psychology of female sexuality as a "dark continent" as a
reason that "we need not feel ashamed" of this lack of knowledge in which he
presumes his readers to be complicit (38). Projecting his own lack of knowledge onto
the female body, Freud concludes that female sexuality itself is what Lacan later would
call "lack": he presumes that in infancy, the girl (like the psychoanalyst) knows
nothing of her sexual organs and therefore develops an "envy for the penis" (38).
Refusing to explore the "dark continent" of female sexuality, Freud rests secure for
five full years in the conclusions he draws from the visible exterior of the female
body. Only in 1931, with the publication of "Female Sexuality," will he begin— and
then only tentatively— to revise his earlier claims.
Similarly, in his 1932 thesis on the psychotic Aimee, Lacan describes not
femininity but narcissism as an unexplored continent, arguing that "Le narcissisme en
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fait se presente dans l'economie de la doctrine psychanalytique comme ime terra
incognita, que les moyens d'investigation issus de l'etude des nevroses ont permis de
delimiter quant a ses frontieres, mais qui dans son interieur reste mythique et
inconnue" (3 2 2).27 Lacan repeats Freud's use of a cartological metaphor to indicate a
theoretical terrain that remains unknown to him: if for Freud this area is the female
body, for Lacan it is the psyche. While Lacan's description of narcissism as "une
terra incognita" does not reference gender, the appearance of the trope within a case
study of a woman whose narcissism culminated in psychosis codes pathological
narcissism as feminine. Indeed, his argument that his female psychotics' ailments
stem from their refusal of sexual difference suggests that it is a specifically female
narcissism whose purported perils are at stake. Lacan thus renders the female psyche
as invisible to psychoanalysis as Freud does the female body. Psychoanalysis' work
on both femininity and narcissism is stymied by a phallogocentric logic that permits no
exploration beyond the realms of the visible.
In construing woman as an unexplored terrain, both Freud and Lacan
participate in a rhetorical maneuver common in Western discourse in the early
twentieth century: the use of images of primitivism to equate women with the
inhabitants of nonwestem cultures. Whether contemplating the female body or
psyche, these physicians follow the same logic of diametric opposition used by
Western anthropologists to cast unknown cultures as "primitive." When narcissism
becomes the linchpin of Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, it will continue to carry
with it these early implications of lesbianism, psychosis, and primitivism. Thus even
27. Trans.: "In fact, in the economy of psychoanalytic doctrine, narcissism
presents itself as an unknown territory, of which the means of investigation developed
in the study of the neuroses have allowed us to delimit the frontiers, but whose interior
remains mythical and unknown."
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"civilized," "fully developed" subjectivity will continue to have "primitive" qualities at
its heart.
In marking female, especially lesbian, sexuality as primitive, Lacan aligns it
with psychosis, ostensibly the most primitive of psychical states. As the lesbian
psychoanalysts Maggie Magee and Diana C. Miller note, "[i]f female sexuality has
been a territory difficult for psychoanalysis to explore, the sexuality of two women
together has been an even darker continent, and one often imagined to be a primitive,
underdeveloped region of infantile desire, autoeroticism, narcissism, and preoedipal
object relations" (Magee and Miller 103). Psychoanalytic formulations about lesbian
sexuality "repeat the phallocentric assumption that something is lacking or
underdeveloped in female anatomy'' because, as Luce Irigaray notes, "leurs modalites
sont trop exclusivement tributaries de l'histoire, et de la historicisation, de la sexualite
(dite) masculine" (Magee and Miller 103; Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme.
6 3 ) .2 8 Psychoanalytic theory leaves the woman "depourvue, sans recours, d'image
valide, valable, de son sexe, de son corps. Condamnee a la 'psychose,' aux mieux
rhysterie,' par defaut-censure? foreclusion? refoulement?~de signifiant valeureux
de son desir 'premier' et de son sexe" (Irigaray 6 4 ) .2 9 As a result, explain Magee and
Miller,
The anatomy-based cognitive and psychological diffusivity supposedly
characteristic of women becomes intensified in descriptions of lesbian
patients, who in numerous clinical discussions are said to suffer from failed
separation, loose boundaries, and weak and undeveloped ego states. And,
finally, in the kind of splitting so common in thinking about homosexuality,
the emotional regression often espoused as a goal of heterosexual orgasmic
28. Trans.: "their ways are too narrowly derived from the history and the
historicization of (so-called) male sexuality" (55).
29. Trans.: "despoiled, without recourse, of all valid, valuable images of her
sex/organs, her body. She is condemned to 'psychosis,' or at best 'hysteria,' for
lack-censorship? foreclusion? repression?— of a valid signifier for her 'first' desire
and for her sex/organs" (55).
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29
experience in which boundaries between self and other can safely collapse,
leading to expanded sense of self and well-being, becomes, when it occurs
between two women, evidence of primitive, infantile, or pathological
arrangements. (103)
In other words, a double standard is at work that construes certain behaviors by
lesbians to be pathological even if they are considered normal, indeed desirable in a
heterosexual context. Although Lacanian psychoanalysis intimates that a degree of
psychical primitivism subtends all subjectivity, its claims about lesbians' supposed
psychosexual underdevelopment cast homosexual women's enactments of primitivism
as sinister signs of sickness.
While many critics have shown us the limits of psychoanalysis' construal of
individual lesbians' psyches, others have used it to illustrate the larger societal
dynamics through which lesbians are positioned at the limit of the social. Amongst the
latter accounts, one of the most compelling is Lynda Hart's argument that "in the
psychoanalytic symbolic lesbians are only possible in/as the 'Real,' since they are
foreclosed from the Symbolic order" (Between 91). Hart asserts that
homosociality between women would seem to be impossible in reality but
always threatening to erupt from the Real. It falls outside of symbolization,
drops out of discourse, but occasionally emerges as a destabilizing rupture in
the margins of a dominant order that cannot quite banish it. (Hart, Fatal
Women. 84)
In its implicit reversal of Lacan's proposition that the psychotic has foreclosed the
master signifier and thereby refused to enter into symbolization, Hart's formulation
suggests that society itself performs a foreclosure that renders lesbians
unsymbolizable. Yet precisely what signifier has been foreclosed by society? In a
later book, Hart cites the source of her reversal of Lacan's paradigm: Tim Dean's
argument, in a psychoanalytic interpretation of AIDS discourse, that "by refusing a
signifier for AIDS," society manifests a "social psychosis" (Dean 85-87). Hart's
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30
arguments in Fatal Women and in earlier work similarly imply that a "psychotic"
society has refused to admit a signifier for lesbianism.
Though Dean's and Hart's reversal of Lacan's formula for psychosis is quite
attractive for psychoanalytically informed queer theorists, their arguments nonetheless
require further examination in light of Lacan's work. Lacan asserts that psychosis
does not result from the foreclosure of just any signifier, but specifically from the
foreclosure of the phallic signifier-the "privileged" signifier upon which the social
order ostensibly is founded (Lacan, "La signification du phallus," Ecrits II. 111).
Dean's argument runs aground not because of his substitution of a "signifier for
AIDS" for the phallic signifier-after all, as I will discuss shortly, other progressive
Lacanians have made tenable arguments that the master signifier does not necessarily
have to be the phallus— but because of his implication that Lacan views "social
psychosis" as "a legitimate analogy" to’ psychoSis in every way (Lacan, "On a
question," 216).
Given Lacan's proposition that the psychotic forecloses a signifier "in" the
symbolic, can one conclude that the symbolic itself is capable of effecting
foreclosures-that a signifier can be foreclosed "by" the symbolic, to echo Elizabeth
Freeman's language in her review of Hart (64)? In the passage from "On a question
preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis" from which Dean derives his
discussion, Lacan does not necessarily imply that psychotic "foreclosure" occurs in
"social psychosis." Instead, much like his work in "Propos sur la causalite
psychique," Lacan's reference to "social psychosis" simply underscores the
phantasmatic-that is to say, the "delusional"-nature of "normal" subjectivity ("On a
Question," Ecrits: A Selection. 216). Lacan does not claim that all of the mechanisms
of psychosis and normalcy are the same; rather, by insisting on the phantasmatic
nature of the reality of the "normal" subject, he displaces the classical conception that
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31
psychosis is a "loss of reality," and asserts instead, as Dean acknowledges, that
"psychosis is a question of the real that is too proximate, a real from which sufficient
distance has not been obtained" (Dean 86). In the passages that follow his discussion
of "social psychosis," Lacan continues to point to the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-
Father as the fundamental mechanism that distinguishes the delusions of psychotics
from those of normal subjects.
However arbitrary the symbolic order upon which the "delusions" of the
"normal" subject are founded, though, further argumentation is required to justify
Dean's assumption that the "delusions" of the dominant social order, like those of
psychotics, are set into place through the "foreclosure" of a master signifier. If we
were to accept Dean's thesis provisionally, which "master signifier" would have to be
foreclosed by society in order to set into place that "delusion" called the symbolic
order? Dean's and Hart's arguments both suggest different ways of pursuing this
question, but here I will pursue only Hart's, for her focus on the representation of
lesbianism is closer to my own immediate concerns.
Unlike Dean, Hart performs an "imminent critique" of Lacan's privileging of
the phallus: she implicitly retains the "privileged" status of the phallic signifier while
reversing Lacan's interpretation of the role of foreclosure in psychosis. Instead of
focusing on the individual psychosis that is said to result from foreclosure of the
phallic signifier, she focuses on the "social psychosis" whose arbitrary privileging of
the phallus arguably relegates lesbianism to the realm of the "impossible-Real." Her
"imminent critique" performs not a derailment of Lacan's theory of the phallus as the
"master signifier" but instead an elaboration of its implications for the representability
of lesbianism in the social. She is correct to argue that the tautological violence of the
symbolic order produces lesbians as unrepresentable. However, in drawing a causal
relation between the "specular economy" of a phallogocentric, heterosexist regime and
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the production of the lesbian as "a hallucination— 'the return of the Real that has never
been signified,'" she conflates the constitutive violence of symbolic mandates with
psychotic foreclosure ("Identity and Seduction" 134-5).
In her argument that lesbians are hallucinated as the unsymbolizable Real,
then, Hart equivocates on the meaning of "foreclosure," suggesting that any sort of
violent exclusion can produce an unsymbolizable Real. She argues that
psychoanalytic heterosexism creates a system "based on an interdiction of physical
love between men and a foreclosure of desire between women" (Fatal Women 25).
Because desire between women is "not merely repressed but foreclosed," it becomes
"that which must never appear in the light of the Symbolic"~the unsymbolizable Real
(15). Judith Butler, the source of Hart's claim, similarly equates "foreclosure" with
any kind of mechanism of constitutive exclusion ("The Force of Fantasy" 106). In
"Arguing with the Real," her critique of Slavoj Zizek, Butler charges that "a specific
use of psychoanalysis works to foreclose certain social and sexual positions from the
domain of intelligibility" (Bodies 189). These arguments' conflation of the foreclosed
signifier with the effects of foreclosure is particularly evident in Butler's assertion that
the "'Law of the Father' induces trauma and foreclosure through the threat of
castration, thereby producing the 'lack' against which all symbolization occurs" (196).
Yet in Lacan's account of psychosis, it is not the Law of the Father that induces
foreclosure, but instead the psychotic who forecloses the Name of the Father and
thereby refuses paternal law. That the "forced choice" Lacan believes to be involved
in subjectification is fundamentally violent is not under dispute. As Butler asserts, the
Lacanian symbolic should be understood "as a series of normativizing injunctions that
secure the borders of sex through the threat of psychosis, abjection, psychic
unlivability" (Bodies 14-15). All of those injunctions should not be understood as
effecting "foreclosure," however: one forecloses signifiers, not social positions,
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sexual positions, or bodies. Yet Lacan's doctrine of foreclosure does dangerously
consign certain social and sexual positions to the realm of the abject by making them
available only within "psychosis." The crisis of symbolization at work in the
psychotic's refusal of symbolic mandates, though, does not amount to complete
illegibility: the psychotic appears, but only as the hallucinatory inversion of symbolic
mandates. She is not the impossible Real, but instead the limit of the social.
IV. Psychosis, Lesbianism, and Queer Theory
"It remains for the future to decide whether there
is more delusion in my theory than I should like
to admit, or whether there is more truth in . ..
delusion than other people are as yet prepared to
believe."30
— Sigmund Freud
Despite psychoanalysis' positioning of the psychotic lesbian at the limit of the
social, I argue for its limited usefulness for partially understanding the phantasmatic
construction of female same-sex desire. Because efforts to theorize female
homosexuality take place in a milieu saturated by psychoanalytic discourse, what
Michel Foucault calls the “productivity” of psychoanalysis should not be ignored,
even as its limitations should be closely examined. While there are quite obvious
dangers in psychoanalysis' linking of lesbianism to psychosis, one also should not
underestimate psychoanalysis’ role in producing a discourse on female homosexuality
30. Freud, "Psycho-analytic Notes," 79.
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that subsequently can be transformed. Despite its tautological presumption that law is
paternal, psychoanalysis still offers us a way of understanding the construction of
lesbianism under patriarchy. Through their tautological performativity, psychoanalytic
mythologies put into discourse claims that we can examine not as absolute truths but
as fictions with some purchase on how we understand and experience "reality." These
fictions certainly do not provide an exhaustive account of the way in which desire is
structured and experienced between women, and I make no attempt in this project to
elaborate a universal account of lesbian desire. Instead, by examining the putting into
discourse of psychoanalytic claims about desire between women, I aim better to
understand the way in which patriarchy sustains itself through certain fantasies about
"lesbians," and the way in which women have attempted to define their desire for each
other by appropriating and reworking psychoanalytic fictions of their experience.
To grant exclusive ownership of psychoanalytic ideas only to their originators
and most conservative adherents would be dangerously to reinscribe the privilege
traditionally granted to the disciplinary "fathers"— a privilege much recent feminist
theory sets out vigorously to contest. Yet in a provocative 1994 review of Teresa de
Lauretis' The Practice of Love. Elizabeth Grosz does just that in questioning the
complicity of feminist theorists— herself included— with Freudian and Lacanian
accounts of lesbianism. Setting up the theoretical "blind spot" to lesbian desire as
"constitutive of the psychoanalytic project," Grosz takes the most orthodox of
Freudian and Lacanian arguments as representative of psychoanalytically informed
theory in its entirety, implicitly privileging the conservative and devaluing the
contestatory (277, emphasis added). In her elision of the possibility that there might
be multiple and conflicting psychoanalytic projects, Grosz ignores the way in which
the "psychoanalytic projectjs]" of Freud and Lacan are quite different from those of
the revisionists whose efforts at progressive rethinking of psychoanalytic accounts of
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lesbianism are at stake in her evaluation. The projects of these feminist academics,
informed by (yet sometimes defiant of) the conventions of literature and philosophy
departments, are themselves quite distinct from those of the clinicians whose
consideration of the treatment of lesbian analysts and analysands in contemporary
practice recently has prompted a veritable publishing boom on the subject of
lesbianism and p s y c h o a n a l y s i s . 3 1 And those clinical studies, in turn, have a rhetorical
force very different from that of the literary texts by women such as H.D., whose
deliberate and sustained engagement with Freudian ideas constitutes a more explicitly
creative kind of "psychoanalytic project."
De Lauretis' The Practice of Love, then, should not be dismissed as "an
intriguing last-ditch effort to preserve" a dying male discourse for feminist and lesbian
theorizing, but instead should be cited as the first among many book-length attempts at
a psychoanalytic account of lesbianism (287). Indeed, to deny critical rewritings any
purchase on what we understand as "psychoanalysis" is to ignore the performative
potential of theory itself. Grosz' assumption— that Freud's and Lacan's blindness to
lesbianism is not simple "oversight or neglect" but instead is conceptually "constitutive
of' certain analytic projects— is, in fact, shared by scholars such as de Lauretis and
Butler. Where these theorists differ is in their understanding of the nature of the work
they perform on the classical psychoanalytic text. Construing it as an object with
limited flexibility, such as a rubber band, Grosz asks whether feminists run the risk of
"stretch[ing] psychoanalysis beyond its limits of transformation" (278). Yet her
analogy between a material object and a rhetorical process is not persuasive, for an
31. For recent clinically informed work on lesbianism and psychoanalysis,
see Burch, Magee and Miller, Glassgold, O'Connor, and Schwartz. See also Lesser
and Schoenberg for a collection of essays by both clinicians and academics on Freud's
"Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman," and Domenici and Lesser
for a collection of recent work by clinicians on psychoanalysis with both lesbian and
gay male analysands.
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36
object has the foreseeable limits that a text, available both for preservation and for
endless rewriting, does not. Feminist rewritings of psychoanalysis have the potential
to effect rhetorical transformations that substantially change the contours of the
concepts set in place in the preceding texts. Grosz' insistence on the intransigence of
"the psychoanalytic project" to successful feminist rewriting betrays a refusal to
consider the possibility that psychoanalytic theory might be "transferable"— a refusal
peculiar in its miming of the Lacanian text's own refusal decisively to divorce mastery
from maleness, the phallus from the penis.32
The particular "psychoanalytic project" that constitutes this dissertation thus
takes as its starting point not a foundational belief in the Oedipus complex as a
transhistorical law of desire, but instead a permanent skepticism— produced through an
early and formative encounter with the work of feminist scholars such as Butler,
Grosz, and de Lauretis-about the necessity of the symbolic concessions that classical
psychoanalytic frameworks claim inevitably to accompany "normal" subjeetification.
It undertakes not only what Hegel would call an "imminent critique" of Lacan's
thinking on female sexuality and the very thin line between normalcy and psychosis,
but also a critical rearticulation of Lacan's theory of the symbolic— one that opens up
the possibility for new conceptions of lesbian desire.
Psychoanalytic accounts of sexuality and desire have been frequent points of
departure not only for feminist theories of lesbianism but also for the larger field of
32. See Butler's essay on "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological
Imaginary" (in Bodies That Matter) for a reading of Lacan's refusal decisively to
distinguish the "phallus" from the "penis," and for an account— itself an excellent
example of feminist rearticulation of Lacanian paradigms-of the "transferable,"
"lesbian phallus."
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37
"queer th e o r y ." 3 3 Nonetheless, the relationship between queer revisions and the
psychoanalytic understanding of psychosis remains unresolved. Posing the question
of queer theory in tandem with that of psychoanalysis' construction of madness and
homosexuality is especially important because of the extent to which that theory
invokes Lacan's high structuralist phase, which casts refusals of (hetero)sexual
difference as pathological.
In "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," queer studies pioneer Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick draws on psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, and Foucauldian theory
to reflect on the links between queemess, theory, and paranoia; she questions the
political efficacy of a "paranoid" style of antihomophobic thought that she believes to
dominate queer theory. Re-evaluating pioneering studies such as Judith Butler's
Gender Trouble and D.A. Miller's The Novel and the Police. Sedgwick argues that the
authors' stances of "suspicion" towards formative ideological regimes brilliantly
illustrate the tautological trap through which queer subjects are both produced and
constrained, yet provide little leverage with which to break the disciplinary double
bind. She makes the important point that methodologically paranoid analyses, such as
Butler's "repeated and scouringly thorough" expose in Gender Trouble of the
tautological violence of psychoanalytic gender essentialism, ironically proceed with a
naive faith that to denaturalize falsely essentializing constructs is inevitably to effect
progressive change (10; 17-21); she rightfully insists that "for someone to have an
33. From Gender Trouble to Bodies That Matter to her most recent The
Psychic Life of Power. Judith Butler's work outlines queer, poststructuralist revisions
of Freud and Lacan; similarly, Lee Edelman's Homographesis substantially reworks
Lacan through a fusion with poststructuralism. In The Practice of Love. Teresa de
Lauretis provides a feminist critique of psychoanalysis and then attempts to rework it
better to account for lesbian sexuality. Elizabeth Grosz' Volatile Bodies and Space.
Time, and Perversion variably work through and reject psychoanalytic paradigms.
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unmystified view of systematic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin
on that person any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences" (7).
While I agree that paranoid reasoning is seriously limited as a political tactic, I
nonetheless argue that, given the prestige of psychoanalysis within queer theory's
genealogy, the entrenchment of a discourse of psychosis within queer theory
continues to demand investigation. Sedgwick herself does not sufficiently address
specifically psychoanalytic theories of psychosis. Instead, her summary of recent
debates equivocates on the nature of "paranoia" she believes to be operative between
Freudian, Foucauldian, and queer theory. Summarizing queer theory's "distinctive
history of intimacy with the paranoid imperative," Sedgwick begins by referring to the
way Freud locates paranoid delusion in "the repression of same-sex desire" and uses
paranoia as a key to the nature of homosexuality; she then moves on to those
"powerful, against-the-grain" rereadings of Freud that, through what Foucault would
call a 'reverse discourse,' illustrate the mechanisms of "homophobic and heterosexist
enforcements against" homosexuality (6). She cites what she sees as a major
difference between Foucauldian and Freudian accounts of paranoia: she distinguishes
between the appearance of paranoia as the "object" of queer-theoretical investigation-
as in anti-homophobic interpretations of the Schreber case— and the dominance of
paranoia as queer theory's "uniquely sanctioned methodology"— as in the Foucauldian
paranoia she believes to characterize the New Historicism (6). The paranoid
hermeneutic Sedgwick finds so stifling in queer theory thus is not that of the paranoid
psychotic, medically defined. Instead, her examples suggest that she is charging
queer theorists with the kind of paranoia Foucault both studies and practices in
Discipline and Punish-the fear instituted in subjects that are simultaneously produced
and constrained by hyper-efficient, controlling discursive regimes. While the all-
encompassing surveillance mechanisms described in Discipline and Punish share
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certain elements with the highly systematized delusions of clinical psychotics,
Foucault's model evacuates intentionality from the Panopticon, altogether removing
the necessity for an actively spying guard. Though not entirely, Foucault's account
differs from the paranoid psychotic's delusional conspiracy theories. The paranoid
self-surveillance instituted by the Panopticon is neither analogous to "repression" in
the psychoanalytic sense, nor to delusional disavowal of a formerly repressed
homosexuality.34
Sedgwick's discussion, then, proceeds through a rhetorical slight of hand that
dismisses Freudian psychoanalysis by placing the "paranoid" hermeneutics of
Foucauldian theory in its stead. Yet lost in the shuffle are important distinctions
between Foucault's account of the way in which institutional regimes produce
paranoid subjects, and the psychoanalytic understanding of paranoia as a psychosis
predetermined by the failure of a subject's psyche completely to accede to a socially
imperative heterosexuality. Foucault and psychoanalysis each provide a very different
understanding of the cause of the paranoiac's sense of being watched: Foucault
explains it as the production of an institutional mechanism; psychoanalysis, on the
other hand, explains it as an effect of a problem more properly located in the subject's
developmental history.
Sedgwick implies that the appearance of this second kind of paranoia as an
"object" rather than a "methodology" of queer studies also is no longer intellectually
productive. She argues that the psychoanalytic account of paranoia, dependent as it is
upon a heterosexist account of psychical development, has already been pushed to its
limit by the "against-the-grain" readings of queer theorists who use it not to
34. i draw my understanding of the psychoanalytic view of the interplay
between repressed homosexuality and paranoid disavowal from Freud's paper on
Schreber.
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4 0
pathologize homosexuality, but instead to call attention to the machinations of
homophobic denial. Indeed, she locates the origin of paranoid queer theory in
psychoanalytically informed work: Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire: Judith
Butler's Gender Trouble: her own Between Men and Epistemologv of the Closet.35
Like Grosz, Sedgwick presents psychoanalytic accounts informed by Freud and Lacan
as static, as inherently limited by the heterosexist presumptions of the "father"
analysts; she grants to queer theorists the opportunity to explore the limits of "master"
texts, but not the ability to transform them. Indeed, if Sedgwick is correct in charging
paranoid critics with hastily putting too much faith in exposure, she herself puts too
little faith in the possible— but difficult and lengthy— project of reworking oppressive
psychoanalytic paradigms, a project only tentatively begun through work such as
Butler's. While Sedgwick does not explicitly claim that Freudian and Lacanian
frameworks have definitively exhausted their use for queer theory, her argument
proceeds as if they did, and ultimately forecloses any possibility that they might be
rearticulated in ways that do not privilege heterosexuality.36
As a result, she suggests that the most productive use of psychoanalysis for
queer theorists might be to turn to the work of Melanie Klein, whose understanding of
paranoia she views as less Oedipal and "homophobia-centered" than Freudian and
Lacanian accounts (25). She hails Klein as as a way out of queer theory's "paranoid"
35. Butler has furthered this line of inquiry in her recent discussions of
paranoid circularity in the U.S. Military's prohibition of "I am homosexual" as a
speech act; see Excitable Speech and The Psychic Life of Power.
36. To give just one example, Sedgwick's discussion of the political
limitations of "paranoid" criticism ignores Butler's emphasis on the possibility of
displacement. While Butler's claims in Gender Trouble about displacement recently
have been subject to scrutiny, they nonetheless underscore an important aspect of
Butler's project that Sedgwick ignores: the effort not only to expose, but also to
transform psychoanalysis' tautological accounts of gender and sexuality. For Butler's
subsequent refinements of her theory of displacement, see Bodies That Matter.
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41
dilemma, arguing that it provides a springboard for powerful "reparative" readings in
which one abandons "paranoid" suspicion and remains open to understanding the
nature of queer "practices." As much as this seems to be a very useful direction for
future queer theory, I nonetheless argue that, at the same time, Sedgwick's swapping
of Freudian and Lacanian theory for a heretofore underexplored Kleinian model
forecloses as many productive questions as it opens up, covering over rather than
displacing the question of earlier queer theory's relation to Freudian and Lacanian
models of psychosis.
Sedgwick's premature dismissal of psychoanalytic accounts of paranoid
psychosis is rendered problematic by her own text's admitted implication in paranoid
reasoning. In accounting for what she sees, in queer work from the mid-1980's, as a
rapid shift from the study of paranoia as object to the practice of paranoia as
methodology, Sedgwick highlights paranoia's distinctively "contagious" quality-its
tendency "to construct symmetrical relations, and in particular symmetrical
epistemologies" (6). Yet curiously, her own reasoning proceeds by a similar logic of
contagion: referencing (presumably psychoanalytic) accounts of paranoia's
"peculiarly intimate relation to the phobic dynamics around homosexuality," she
suggests that homosexuality's "intimacy" with contagious paranoid epistemologies
makes a paranoid queer-theoretical practice itself "structurally inevitable" (7). By
assuming the slide from "object" to "methodology" to be "inevitable," she
inadvertantly ratifies the very structural linking of paranoia to homosexuality whose
presence in psychoanalytic work she decries. Moreover, in emphasizing in multiple
passages the "intimacy" of paranoia with either "queer studies" or "phobic dynamics
around homosexuality," Sedgwick deploys, at the rhetorical level, the same trope of
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42
homosexuality as perilous collapse of difference that is used by Freud and Lacan (6-
7) 37
Sedgwick ultimately fails in wresting her argument away from psychoanalytic
accounts of paranoia, despite her most rigorous efforts to defend against the
possibility that Freudian and Lacanian accounts of paranoid psychosis might have
more to offer queer theorists than a tired insistence on a homophobic, paternal law.
Indeed, her prefacing of a collection of queer close readings with a long diatribe
against paranoid critical methodology— a hermeneutic whose absence in the subsequent
essays strikes Sedgwick as refreshing— itself smacks of symptomatic negation, of an
insistent bringing of paranoia back into discussion only to claim to dismiss it.
Paranoid reasoning drives Sedgwick's essay, right down to her acknowledgment, in
the classically paranoid style of the pre-emptive strike, of her own complicity in
paranoid discursive structures: she not only retrospectively criticizes her earlier work
on Schreber, but also— and more importantly— parodically plays up paranoid moments
in the present piece to highlight her own residual paranoias and to elicit those of her
readers. Brilliantly taunting the reader with a title that asserts that "You're So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You," relaying anecdotes
about litigious colleagues and then admitting the stories to be fictitious, Sedgwick's
essay attempts throughout to incite and to reproduce the paranoias of its readers in
order to illustrate the ubiquity of paranoid thinking. Indeed, in 1996, as a graduate
student just beginning the conceptual work that led to this dissertation, my own
37. One might also observe that in setting up the conceptual "intimacy" of
homosexuality with psychoanalytic accounts of paranoia as a conduit for paranoia's
inherent and inevitable "contagion," Sedgwick oddly invokes— though does not
endorse— the contemporary, homophobic belief that homosexuality involves a
dangerous proximity to contagious disease.
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43
paranoias were incited upon hearing an early version of Sedgwick's essay in the form
of a talk: I could not help but perceive the talk— and later the essay— as being about me!
It is not, then, that Sedgwick is incorrect in identifying her own and her
readers' complicity in paranoid hermeneutics. Paranoia is endemic within, perhaps
even inherent to academic discourse: as Sedgwick notes, Freud famously declared
that there are striking similarities between "the delusions of paranoiacs . .. and the
systems of our philosophers" (qtd. in Sedgwick, "Paranoid," 5). Academic paranoia
is evident, too, in the vigilantly anticipatory gestures by which the scholar fends off
potential objections to her work; these gestures are no less implicated in paranoid
argumentative practices if, as in Sedgwick's work, they are cast in the most generous
of terms. The very precision of Sedgwick's argument, with its constant anticipation
and acknowledgment of opposing views, challenges readers to a sustained and
detailed engagement with both her paranoias and their own. However, this process
ironically furthers, rather than dispels, the very paranoid reasoning her text parodies,
as the reader finds her objections always already anticipated and recontained by
Sedgwick's argument.
The problem with Sedgwick's essay, I suggest, is its assumption that we can
so easily shake our paranoias: she does not go far enough in acknowledging the
extent of the complicity with paranoia still at work in its own attempt to move away
from it. Indeed, in an essay that so self-consciously plays with its own paranoias,
symptomatic moments of unself conscious pre-emptiveness stand out all the more
clearly. Without metacommentary on her own logic of disavowal, Sedgwick engages
in a paranoid pre-emptive strike in her " insistence] in advance" that the paranoia under
discussion has nothing to do with psychosis, or with any other medically classifiable
source of "delusion" such as dementia praecox or schizophrenia (9). She illustrates,
through Laplanche and Pontalis, that the latter two categories are distinct from
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44
paranoia, yet does not mention that Laplanche and Pontalis are quite clear about
paranoia's nosological status as a "psychosis"— an umbrella category that also includes
dementia praecox and schizophrenia (296). Shifting away from Freud, Sedgwick
only considers psychosis in referencing Klein's view of "psychotic-like mental events
. . . as universal" and her apparent prioritizing of the "mechanisms of paranoia" over
"diagnostic categories such as dementia" (9). It is not in her criticism of the paranoid
hermeneutic, but in her unselfconsciously paranoid circumscription of certain kinds of
paranoia as scholarly objects, that Sedgwick shuts down discussion. Sedgwick is not
afraid of being called paranoid, but she defends herself— and her colleagues in queer
studies-against being called psychotic.
In many ways, Sedgwick's move away from a necessary and wholly
pathologizing conceptual linking of queemess to psychosis is important in its
insistence that "the main reasons for questioning paranoid practices are other than the
possibility that their suspicions may be delusional"— that is to say, pathological (9).
Even though in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality-
understood as same-sex desire— from its official list of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-II). certain segments of the
queer community— transsexuals, transgenders, butch lesbians, and effeminate gay
men, to name only a few-still fall under the rubric of "Gender Identity Disorder" in
the current manual, DSM-IV. 3 8 DSM-IV fails in its attempt completely to separate
gender identity from sexual orientation: the diagnostic criteria for "Gender Identity
38. According to DSM-IV. in adults diagnosed with "Gender Identity
Disorder," "the following specifiers may be noted based on the individual's sexual
orientation: Sexually Attracted to Males, Sexually Attracted to Females, Sexually
Attracted to Both, and Sexually Attracted to Neither. Males with Gender Identity
Disorder include substantial proportions with all four specifiers. Virtually all females
with Gender Identity Disorder will receive the same specifier— Sexually Attracted to
Females" (534).
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45
Disorder" appear in a section entitled "Sexual and Gender Identity Disorder," and are
surrounded front and back by descriptions of specifically sexual ailments. It is not
surprising, then, that gender identity and sexuality often continue to be conflated in
clinical practice.39 Moreover, a minority of psychiatrists continue to consider
homosexuality a mental illness in and of itself. By placing advertisements in major
newspapers and on regional television, "ex-gay ministries" such as Exodus
International gained national attention as recently as 1998 with claims to a therapeutic
cure for homosexuality (Bull).
Both in the APA and in specifically psychoanalytic institutes, American
psychoanalysts have been especially opposed to attempts to depathologize
homosexuality— despite Freud's famous insistence that, though homosexuality is "a
variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest in sexual development," it
"cannot be classified as an illness" and "is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no
degradation" (Bayer 208-210; Freud, qtd. in Bayer, 27)40 Only recently have
attempts to question the primacy of the Oedipal narrative within Freudian theory begun
to be taken seriously within American psychoanalytic circles. Dogmatic adherence to
the Oedipal narrative can be even stronger outside the United States. Pathologizing
39, See Scholinski and Adams for an autobiographical account of an
adolescent girl's homophobically inflected treatment for "Gender Identity Disorder" in
a psychiatric facility. The broad scope of the term "Gender Identity Disorder" not only
encompasses transsexual and transgendered individuals, its most obvious targets, but
also anyone else— homosexual or heterosexual-whose gender presentation falls
outside the boundaries of traditional masculinity and femininity. The continued
pathologization of some of gays and lesbians for "Gender Identity Disorder" suggests
that progressive attempts to contest the diagnosis of marginalized sexual orientations
may unwittingly be complied with a conservative medical establishment if they are not
articulated through a simultaneous questioning of the politics through which gender,
too, is naturalized and policed through medical diagnosis and practice.
40. As Bayer notes, however, psychoanalysis' assumptions have only a
marginal status within the APA's official publications. Yet the opposition within the
APA to the removal of homosexuality from DSM-II has come from non-
psychoanalytically oriented physicians as well.
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46
accounts of homosexuality recently were given very serious consideration in France in
the heated debates preceding the November 15, 1999 adoption of the "pacte civil de
solidarite" (PACS), a form of civil union equally open to homosexual and
heterosexual couples.41 Invoking Levi-Strauss' account of a symbolic order founded
on the Law of the Father, the anthropologist Fran§oise Heritier cited the "fact" that
"anatomical, physiological, and functional differences between the sexes . . . form the
base of the fundamental opposition that allows us to think"; she insisted that societal
institutions, too, are and should continue to be founded exclusively "on the principal
observation of sexual difference" (Heritier). Specifically, opponents to the PACS
such as Heritier feared that children raised by gay or lesbian parents would be
especially prone to mental illnesses such as psychosis.42 Some of their rhetoric even
construed the PACS as threatening the French nation itself with psychotic dissolution:
they worried that the passage "into law [of] an unconscious and universal fantasm"
would "make possible the impossible" by suppressing sexual difference (Magoudi
1 5 ) 4 3 One of the most vocal opponents to the PACS, the priest and psychoanalyst
Tony Anatrella, asserted that "the homosexual relation . . . is hot a couple" but instead
a form of psychical infantilism— "psychic clonage." Because a homosexual union
"symbolizes nothing in the social scheme," its legal validation would threaten an
"inversion of reality" through which a world centered around "sex and the symbolism
41. Here I am grateful to Judith Butler, who, during her 1999 seminar on
Antigone, called our attention to the debates surrounding the PACS and later provided
me with crucial bibliographical information on the French intellectuals involved.
42 por a discussion of the use of accounts of the symbolic order in debates
surrounding the PACS, see Le Guilledoux; see Prokhoris and Tort for rebuttals of
psychoanalytic claims that homosexual parenting will result in mentally ill offspring,
and for psychoanalytic arguments in favor of the PACS.
43. Orig.: "faire passer dans la loi un fantasme inconscient et universel";
"[Rjendre possible l'impossible."
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47
of the sexes" would be "negated" and supplanted by the homosexual's "pre-oedipal
fantasy of a unique sex." France would become a "society of asexuals" founded not
on the "reality" of sexual difference but instead on the false principles of primitive
fantasy (Anatrella).44
Even if Sedgwick shows an appropriate degree of concern about the continued
pathologization of queers by some mental health professionals, what I find
problematic about her dismissal of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis is her
implicit dependence upon a distinction between pathologizing and nonpathologizing
references to paranoia in order to differentiate between paranoia as an "object" and
paranoia as a "methodology" of queer-theoretical inquiry. That certain psychoanalysts
define paranoia as a psychosis does not, of course, imply that the other kinds of
paranoia discussed in Sedgwick's article-such as the paranoid hermeneutics derived
not from psychoanalysis but from Foucault— could or should be so classified. Nor
does it imply that psychoanalytic accounts of homosexuality and the social always will
be used to pathologize. Yet Sedgwick attempts to differentiate paranoia from
psychosis and other "delusional" states in a paranoid attempt to fend off the contagion
of a pathologizing connotation that (due to paranoia's presumably "contagious"
structure) threatens to infect the queer critic. Indeed, Sedgwick's description of
paranoia as "contagious" reinstates the very connotation of pathology she tries to
eliminate in her unsuccessful circumscription of "psychosis" and "delusion" from the
field of paranoia.
Sedgwick's attempted distinction between pathologizing and non
pathologizing accounts of "paranoia" allows her prematurely to toss out Freudian and
44. Orig.: "la relation homosexuelle . . . n'est pas un couple"; "le clonage
psychique"; "ne symbolise rien dans le plan social"; "l'inversion des realites"; "le
sexe et la symbolique des sexes"; "fantasme du sexe unique de la periode
preoedipienne"; "societe des asexues."
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48
Lacanian psychoanalysis as providing hopelessly pathologizing accounts of the
discursive link between homosexuality and paranoia. Especially worrisome to
Sedgwick is what she presumes to be the pathologizing force of psychoanalysis'
implication that paranoid suspicions "can be delusional" (9). Yet we would do well to
recall that Lacan asserts not only that "normal" subjectivity itself is paranoiacally
structured, but also that the mechanism of psychosis is at work both in psychosis and
"normalcy." In “Propos sur la causalite psychique,” Lacan considers the differences-
and similarities-between psychotics’ and normal subjects’ apprehension of what he
calls “virtuality” and “actuality.” While Lacan argues that all subjectivity is constituted
through a fundamental meconnaissance, he insists that the madman’s
meconnaissance se revele dans la revolte, par ou le fou veut imposer la loi de
son coeur a ce qui lui apparait comme le desordre du monde, entreprise
“insensee” . . . le sujet ne reconnait pas dans ce desordre du monde la
manifestation mSme de son etre actuel, et que ce qu'il ressent comme loi de
son coeur, n'est que l'image inversee, autant que virtuelle, de ce meme etre.
II le meconnait done doublement, et precisement pour en dedoubler l'actualite
et la virtualite. Or il ne peut echapper a cette actualite que par cette virtualite.
45
Son Stre est done enferme dans un cercle. (171-172)
If one understands the so-called normal subject as misrecognizing himself in the world
of actuality by believing its apparent logic to be the true ground of reality, the
psychotic’s misrecognition is double because he misrecognizes the extent to which he
depends upon the world in which the “normal” subject more easily, perhaps more
naively, believes. For Lacan, double misrecognition is precisely how "the non-duped
err[s]": the psychotic misrecognizes the extent to which the law of his heart is
. Trans.: “misrecognition reveals itself in the revolt through which the
madman would impose the law of his heart upon that which appears to him as the
disorder of the world, senseless enterprise . . . the subject does not recognize in that
disorder of the world the very manifestation of his actual being, and that what he feels
to be the law of his heart is nothing but the inverted image, however virtual, of that
very being. He misrecognizes it doubly, and precisely en redoubling actuality and
virtuality. But he cannot escape from that actuality except through that virtuality. His
being is thus enclosed in a circle.”
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49
conditioned, in inverse, by the very world whose apparent disorder provokes his
revolt.46 Yet what Lacan's formulation shows is that even "normal" subjectivity is
predicated on delusion— delusion that is paranoiacally structured.47
If all subjectivity can be said to be delusional, then it makes little sense to
dismiss Freud and Lacan simply because their work links homosexuality to delusion.
However, these theories' presuppositions about sexual difference still need to be
interrogated if their work is to be of continued use for a queer criticism that, as
Sedgwick rightfully suggests, has pushed the reverse discourse against
psychoanalysis to its limit.
At this point, we should examine the way in which Lacan constructs the
"reality" that is taken for granted through the meconnaissance of the "normal" subject.
Though in "Propos" Lacan demonstrates the realities of the "normal" subject and the
psychotic to be mere inversions of each other, he does not account for the way in
which normative definitions of reality come to be. Instead, his formulation itself
appears naively to believe in the stability of the "normal" subject's world of
“actuality,” however founded in misrecognition it may be. Indeed, if one reads this
passage through his later work in Les Psychoses, in which that misrecognition
understood by the normal subject as reality is conditioned by the necessary acceptance
of paternal law, both the rigidity of the normal subject’s (however virtual) reality and
that reality’ s ideological thrust appear all the more clear.
Yet if Les Psychoses illustrates the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis
deploys the doctrine of the Law of the Father to circumscribe the boundaries of
"sanity" and "insanity," his reflections in "Propos" highlight the arbitrary nature of the
46. Les non-dupes errent is the title of Lacan's twenty-first seminar.
47 On the ^paranoiac nature of subjectivity, see also Lacan's "L'aggressivite en
psychanalyse" in Ecrits.
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50
doctrine of sexual difference: in showing the virtual realities of normal subjects and
psychotics to be the inverse of one another, "Propos" suggests the phallogocentric
symbolic order's claim on actuality to be ideologically contingent. The redoubling of
the worlds of the normal subject and the psychotic produces not so much a redoubling
of actuality and virtuality but instead a vertiginous mise-en-abime of projections in
which an original image cannot be found. Because it operates not so much as an a
priori as a retroactively inscribed origin, the symbolic order’s claim to precipitate the
“grounding” of subjectivity must be understood as a tautological pretense, one whose
claim to actuality is as arbitrary as that of the apparently inverted law of the psychotic’s
heart.
Through this study I also hope to suggest that a critical understanding of
Lacan's deployment of a distinction between "sanity" and "insanity" that hinges on the
arbitrary doctrine of "sexual difference" is of continued importance for queer theory
not only because it allows us to question pathologizing circumscriptions of alternative
sexual practices, but also because it allows us to imagine a symbolic order that could
be organized otherwise. If the symbolic order sets the terms through which sexuality
is legible, then to revise the account of the symbolic so as not to privilege paternal law
would be to open up new frames of representation within which "queer" sexualities
might not be cast as pathological— perhaps, even, within which new modes of sexual
being would be possible. Contra Sedgwick, then, I will retain the question of queer
theory's deployment of psychoanalytic paradigms, and explore the ways in it might
actively seek to rearticulate the terms through which psychoanalysis defines "reality."
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51
Chapter 1
"To understand is to condemn," or, "the human enigma of sex"
I. "The maid is the repressed of the mistress of the house."
- Helene Cixous
February, 1933. In the course of a dispute over housework in a small town in
France, the maids Christine and Lea Papin brutally murdered Madame and
Mademoiselle Lancelin, their employer and her daughter. The sisters tore out their
victims' eyes with their own bare hands, methodically sliced the Lancelins' thighs
with kitchen knives, and then returned to their attic bedroom to undress and await the
police. Although Christine and Lea immediately confessed to the murders, an air of
mystery hung over the scene of the crime in what came to be called "the Papin
affair:" with the victims its only witnesses and the sisters reticent at their trial, the
court officials and medical experts whose testimony convicted them were hard-
pressed to construct a plausible account of the murders. An initial examination by
three psychiatric experts deemed the sisters sane, and therefore responsible for the
crimes; as a result, Christine was sentenced to death and Lea to life in prison. After
Christine began to exhibit symptoms of self-punishment while separated from Lea,
both sisters were retried, with testimony from an additional psychiatric expert whose
unsuccessful insanity defense nonetheless cast permanent doubt on their mental
states (Lane 27-8).
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The trials of the "maids of Le Mans" established little about the reasons for
the Papin sisters' wrath or about the nature of their presumed psychosis; instead, as
Christopher Lane argues, the trial and the resulting flurry of literary, journalistic, and
psychoanalytic discussion signaled a "crisis of meaning" that "stymied accepted
definitions of sanity, femininity, rebellion, and delirium" (25). The Papin affair thus
becomes important as an event that can be interrogated in the service of
understanding the impasses faced by the social, juridical, and intellectual institutions
through which it is represented.
The "crisis of meaning" brought about by the Papin sisters' trial more often
than not articulated itself through a frantic discourse speculating on the sisters'
sexuality and positions as maids in the Lancelin household: two of the most
sensational journalistic themes concerned the possibility of a lesbian relationship
between them and of class rebellion as a motive for their crime. Dismissed during
the trial, the implications of the Papin sisters' status as maids haunted wider
discourse surrounding the murders both in journalistic speculations and in the
margins of official accounts. The chambre de bonne to which the sisters calmly
returned after their frenzy became center stage in a panicked attempt to understand
the murders, its very mysteriousness shrouding the reasons for the sisters' rage.
Discourse surrounding the Papin affair was haunted with the possibility that the
chambre de bonne might be not only a homosexual closet but also the site of revolt
against the bourgeoisie (Dupre; Guillant).^ Further haunting the seemingly separate
1. Reports that the sisters had spent a significant portion of their free time in
each other's company in their bedroom appear especially frequently in speculations
about the sisters' relationship and their murderous motivations. Summaries of
newspaper articles surrounding the murders can be found in Guillant and Dupre;
Dupre also reproduces excerpts from much of this coverage.
French material will be quoted in the original language throughout the body
of this text, with translations provided in footnotes. Translations are mine, except
where I indicate another source in parentheses.
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53
issues of sexuality and class was an unstated element of the family itself: the
structural possibility of lesbian incest. The example of Christine and Lea Papin
brought that possibility into discourse as an attempt to fathom the seemingly unruly
psyche of an abjected, working-class other.
If Jacques Lacan is correct in observing that in the Papins' attack on the
Lancelins, "les metaphores les plus usees de la haine . . . regoivent leur execution
litterale," then one might say as well that the "Papin affair" brought French bourgeois
fears of the metaphorical other into the realm of the literal, providing apparent
confirmation for its institutionalized biases ("Motifs” 26).2 Both inside and outside
the courtroom, the Papin sisters were constructed as French society's primitive
others, as brutes whose horrific actions threatened the institutions that held together
the civilized world. Their mysterious chambre de bonne served as a metaphor for
hazily perceived threats to the "home" of bourgeois civilization, and their
frighteningly literal attack on their employers as a promise in advance of the collapse
of the social and sexual order into its ostensibly primitive foundation.
II. "[U]n raffinement de torture qu'on ne rencontre que chez les peuples non
civilises"
- M. Le Batonnier Houliere
The conflicting testimonies of those medical experts called into the service of
the prosecution and the defense turned the second trial of Christine and Lea Papin
into a forum for the debate of psychological theories of sanity and criminality,
staging a dispute between different medical camps that not even the sisters'
2. Trans.: "the most trite metaphors of hatred . . . received their literal
execution."
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54
conviction could resolve. The retrial rehashed the psychiatric arguments with which
the state had originally convicted the sisters and presented the counter-argument of
an additional expert to address renewed misgivings about the defendants' sanity. As
Elisabeth Roudinesco notes, the retrial, much like others at the time, pitted "the
advocates of dynamic psychiatry" against "the partisans of the older doctrines of
heredity, constitution, and malingering" in its attempt to account for and to judge the
murderers' motives (Jacques Lacan & Co. 125-71.3
During the retrial, the prosecution invoked the testimony of Drs.
Schutzenberger, Barak, and Traelle, the three psychiatrists who had initially
examined the Papin sisters on the court's request, and declared the defendants fit to
stand trial (Dupre 94-122). Having physically, physiologically, and psychologically
examined the sisters and looked into their "hereditary antecedents" to find out "si une
tare quelconque pouvait etre de nature a avoir eu sur elles une repercussion
susceptible de pouvoir expliquer ou attenuer leur forfait," all three physicians
declared that the defendants showed neither predispositions to or signs of insanity
(qtd. in Dupre 104).4 Summarizing the doctors' conclusions, the prosecuting
attorney, M. Le Batonnier Houliere, affirmed that
3. For overviews of the psychiatric theories at stake in this trial, see:
Roudinesco. La bataille de cent ans. Vol. 1; Carlson; and Gilman, "Sexology,
Psychoanalysis, and Degeneration." For an overview of the trial and of the
journalistic coverage of the affair see Dr. le Guillant. For extensive excerpts of the
trial transcripts and early articles on the Papin affair see Dupre. See also Coddens,
Beauvoir, Bonnot, Burgin, Flanner, Hart (Fatal Women and "They Don't Even Look
Like Maids Anymore"), Jouve, and Pottecher. The affair has also inspired several
fictionalizations I do not discuss here: Paulette Houdyer, L'Affaire des soeurs Papin
(Le Diable dans la peau) (Paris: Julliard, 1966); Jean Genet’ s stage play Les Bonnes
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947); and Nico Papatakis's film Les Abysses (1962).
4. Trans.: "if their horrific crime could be explained or attenuated as the
natural repercussion of some kind of defect."
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[a]u point de vue hereditaire, au point de vue physique, au point de vue
pathologique, nous n'avons trouve chez les deux femmes,. . . aucune tare
susceptible de diminuer dans une proportion quelconque leur responsabilite
penale. Elies ne sont ni folles, ni hysteriques, ni epileptiques, ce sont des
normales, medicalement parlant, et nous les considerons comme pleinement
et entierement responsables du crime qu'elles ont commis.^ (qtd. in Dupre
105)
Maintaining that Christine's crises of self-punishment while in prison were not signs
of madness, but instead manipulative!y intended "simulations," the trio of state
psychiatrists represented the Papin sisters as malingerers (Guillant 890). Using this
psychiatric testimony of the sisters' sanity, the Procureur de la Republique, M.
Riegert, insisted to the jury that the murders instead were crimes of anger. Riegert
insisted that "[p]as de crise de folie, mais une crise de colere" left "ses auteurs
entierement responsables de leurs actes" (Dupre 113).6 Because "[l]a colere n'est
pas la folie,. . . n'a rien de pathologique," and is indeed a universal human
experience, Riegert argued that the Papin sisters' crime was especially abhorrent
because it resulted from their failure appropriately to check their a g g r e s s i o n . 7 His
insistent juxtaposition of the Papins' raging anger with the controlled propriety of
their victims suggests that the sisters' offense was not only murder, but also the
violation of bourgeois social norms. On the basis of this moral claim, Riegert
insisted that they should be condemned with "the maximum penalty" (112-14).
5. Trans.: "From the hereditary point of view, from the physical point of
view, from the pathological point of view, we did not find in the two girls . . . any
defect that could diminish the measure of their penal responsibility. They are neither
insane, nor hysterical, nor epileptics; they are normal, medically speaking, and we
consider them fully and entirely responsible for the crime they have committed."
6. Trans.: "Not a fit of madness, but instead a fit of anger left its authors
entirely responsible for their acts."
7. Trans.: "anger is not madness,. . . is not pathological."
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In an effort to present the state psychiatrists' condemning testimony as
infallible, the prosecution placed rhetorical emphasis upon the institutional privilege,
expertise, and professional eminence of the trio, whom he described as professional
"authorities" and reliably bourgeois "honnete[s] hommefs]" (Dupre 103-4). In fact,
Baruk and Truelle were well-accustomed to appearing in the service of the judiciary
as witnesses for the prosecution: at the time of the Papin trial, Truelle also was about
to be commissioned to examine Violette Nozieres, the defendant in a famous
parricide trial whose cause had been championed by the surrealists (Dupre 104).
Houliere's prosecutorial rhetoric involved a self-validating cycle whereby these
psychiatrists' repeat court appearances had solidified the impeccable reputations to
which he then laid claim in the service of another conviction. Moreover, he set up a
false binary between the supposed objectivity of the psychiatric trio and the
purported biases of the defense's psychiatric expert, Dr. Logre. Using the same
rhetoric to discredit the defense's witness as he did to validate the other psychiatrists'
testimony, he cast suspicion on Logre by pointing out that he is a doctor "qu'on a
coutume au surplus de rencontrer habituellement dans les grandes circonstances, du
cote de la defense" (105).& In this passage, the conjunction "au surplus" does not
merely indicate an additional point of information about Logre; it also situates the
doctor's behavior within a frame of excess, of "surplus." Whereas Baruk and
Truelle's equally frequent appearances in the courtroom served to bolster the
prosecution's claim to their competence, Logre's appearances constituted an excess
that allegedly invalidated his testimony and betrayed his bias towards the defense
(105). Indeed, Houliere cited a case in which Dr. Logre had appeared in court to
contradict the prevailing testimony of Dr. Truelle, yet deploys this fact solely to
8. Trans.: "whom one has custom, moreover, of encountering habitually at
great trials, on the side of the defense."
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Logre's demerit (106). Houliere even claimed that because Schutzenberger, Baruk,
and Truelle were "commis par la justice," they "ne connaissent ni defense, ni
accusation" and "n'ont aucun interet a se prononcer dans un sens plutot que dans une
autre"; he thereby obscured the interests and biases of the state (105).9 Houliere
distracted the jury from Dr. Logre's credentials, and the possibility that his testimony
could evidence a legitimate clash in professional opinion, by portraying the defense's
witness as "un homme au coeur genereux . . . le medecin des causes desperees, le
medecin des accuses en danger de mort" (Dupre 106).10 Building on the valid
charge that Logre had not personally examined the defendants, Houliere portrayed
him as the puppet of a defense attorney "qui ne lui a dit que ce qu'elle pensait etre
favorable a la cause de ses clientes" (106). 11 At the same time as he presented the
findings of the court's psychiatric trio as if they were transparent facts, Houliere
described Logre's medical stance as "his doctrines"; he implied that Logre's frequent
court appearances were self-interested pushes for doctrinal legitimacy, calculated to
debunk the theories of his more accepted rivals and to inflate his own professional
stature (106).
Claiming a distinct separation between the judicial system and medical
expertise, both M. Houliere, and then M. Riegert, Procureur de la Republique,
insisted that they were not medical specialists and that therefore they must defer to
the opinions of psychiatric experts (Riegert qtd. in Dupre, 111). However, by
9. Trans.: "commissioned by the court"; "know neither defense, nor
accusation"; "have no interest whatsoever in finding one way rather than another."
10. Trans.: "a man with a generous heart... the doctor of desperate causes,
the doctor of the accused in danger of death."
11. Trans.: "who told him nothing except what she thought would be
favorable for her clients' cause."
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conflating the question of the validity of a medical diagnosis with its successful use
in criminal prosecution, they subsumed a legitimate conflict in medical opinion to
the interests of the state, making past prosecutorial success the index of scientific
truth. Houliere's use of supposedly objective psychiatric expertise followed a
circular logic whereby credibility as a forensic psychiatrist depends upon the
physician's ability to repeatedly find evidence in favor of conviction. His rhetoric
thus ultimately blurred the line between psychiatric objectivity and politically
invested bias.
Houliere extended this rhetoric of societal privilege and reputability as he
shifted focus from the question of the stature of the witnesses to that of the parties in
the case. He portrayed the Lancelins as an upright, bourgeois family whose generous
treatment of their ungrateful servants was beyond reproach; he repeatedly contrasted
their social image to that of the Papin sisters, whose brutal and "monstrous" crime
appeared to have no provocation (Houliere qtd. in Dupre, 94-114). His speech to the
jury was filled with references to the Papin sisters as primitive murderers whose
crime seemed so unreal because of its "savagery" (95). In drawing such a stark
contrast between refined masters and barbaric servants, Houliere's discourse
symptomatized an early twentieth-century French bourgeois tendency to associate
primitivism with femininity and the provincial underclass. As Maria Torgovnick
notes, "gender issues always inhabit Western versions of the primitive": "[sjooner or
later . . . familiar tropes for primitives become the tropes conventionally used for
women." Similarly, "the working class or other subordinated segments of a
population become associated or identified with primitives" on a regular basis
(IB ).1 2
12. For more on this point, see: Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, esp. Ch. 1 and
Ch. 10; Hurley. The Gothic Body; Perry, "Primitivism and the Modem"; Rhodes,
Primitivism and Modem Art.
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While Houliere's invective taps into wider associations of women and the
peasantry with primitives, one might also ask to what extent the "civilized" and the
"barbaric" were distinct in his charge. He emphasized the cruelly detailed nature of
the massacre, which he calls "un crime commis avec un raffinement de torture qu'on
ne rencontre que chez les peuples non civilises" (95). *3 This paradoxical image
represents savage acts as involving both unmitigated rage and carefully controlled
refinement. Others have noted similar parallels between the sisters' incisions into
their victims and the gourmet meals and delicate clothing they were employed to
prepare for their bourgeois employers. In a popular account of the trial, Frederic
Pottecher notes that Lea testified to having made "encisures" (sic) into Mile.
Lancelin, commenting that "[o]n croirait l'entendre parler d'un travail de couture!"
(73). 14 Similarly, the newspaper La Sarthe provides a parallel report that Lea
described herself as making "enciselures" (sic) into the Lancelins' bodies,
emphasizing her professional role as slicer and sculptor of flesh (qtd. in Dupre, 85).
Noting that home utensils were the Papins' weapons, and that "[t]he sisters testified
to cutting little marks in the women's thighs like the ones French bakers make in
their loaves," Lynda Hart reads their crime as a reversal of the dynamic of
subordination and objectification that ordinarily obtains between bourgeois
employers and their servants ("'They Don't Even'" 134). The prosecuting attorney,
however, insisted that the sisters' was a cruelty "qu'on ne rencontre que chez les
13. Trans.: "a crime committed with a refinement of torture that one does
not encounter except amongst the uncivilized peoples."
14. "Encisures" is a neologism. The rest of the passage can be translated as
"one would think one was hearing her speak about a sewing job!"
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peuples sauvages," and that was unrelated to European c i v i l i z a t i o n . 1 5 He avoided
the possibility that the sisters' murderous twist on the requirements of the bourgeois
household could be a manifestation of the consequences of "civilization" turned
against itself— that the maids' supposed "savagery" was the underside of the
bourgeois order rather than the return of primitive morals (Dupre 108).16
Twice advocated and obtained by both Houliere and Riegert, the conviction
of the murderous Papin sisters took the form of a demand for vengeance similar to
the very murderous impulse for which the maids were being tried. Emphasizing the
purported difference between the Papin "beasts" and ordinary, upstanding French
citizens, Houliere insisted that "puisqu'elles [les soeurs Papin] se sont conduites en
betes fauves, il faut les traiter en sauvages et en betes fauves" (108). 17 The extreme
rhetoric through which the prosecution advocated punishment was perhaps
conditioned by what Lynda Hart has identified as an eagerness on the part of the
court to "suppress any analysis of the Papin murders as a class insurrection" during a
historical period in which the political left was gaining power and threatening
bourgeois hegemony ("'They Don't Even'" 133-4). The members of the jury wreaked
such vengeance with their verdict: Christine, deemed the stronger and more
culpable, was sentenced to the guillotine. Yet their drive for vengeance was finally
blocked by its own contradictory logic. Although the sisters' status as women fed the
fear of the "primitive" that supported their condemnation, it paradoxically also
15. Trans.: "that one does not encounter except amongst the uncivilized
peoples."
16. Recent scholarly work similarly has emphasized the extent to which "the
primitive" is more often than not constructed in the service of claims about the nature
of contemporary "civilization." See Torgovnick for one such argument.
17. Trans.: "because they [the Papin sisters] conducted themselves as wild
beasts, it is necessary to treat them as savages and as wild beasts."
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61
became the technicality by which Christine's death sentence later was commuted: at
the time of the trial, the guillotine already had been abolished as a means of
executing women (Lane 38). The fact that the jury's initial verdict contradicted the
state's own mandates testifies to a vengefulness so excessive, so apparently psychotic
that it overrode the reality imposed by the court's punitive limits. Out of such
rhetorical and punitive excess, the figure of Christine Papin emerges less through a
simple logic of vengeance than through a complex movement of abjection. Her
female sex appears both as a mitigating factor linked to primitive cruelty and
criminal culpability, and as an extenuating factor that finally thwarted the court's
capital impulse.
III. "There was nothing else between us."
- Christine Papin
Though the prosecution ultimately succeeded in obtaining a conviction,
Logre's testimony provides a counter-discourse— and a starting point for subsequent
assessments of the sisters. Never having examined the sisters, Logre, a dynamic
psychiatrist, chipped away at his rivals' testimony on theoretical grounds,
emphasizing the uncanny contrast between their extremely brutal crimes and their
otherwise quiet composure. While the prosecution made its case for the sisters'
competence and culpability by portraying them as willfully malingering and defiant
of bourgeois morality, Dr. Logre argued instead that they were insane. Speculating
about facts the other doctors ignored— the sisters' presumed virginity and their
homosexual attachment to one another— Dr. Logre drew on early twentieth-century
medical theories that linked sexual "perversion" to insanity, and argued that they
should not be held criminally liable for their actions.
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A journalistic reconstruction of Logre's testimony indicates that he not only
raised the possibility that the sisters suffered from delusions of persecution but also
suggested that the brutality of their crime— particularly the sisters' incisions into their
victims' thighs— was evidence of a "sexual impulse, almost of sadism" that might
signify "hystero-epilepsy" (qtd. in Dupre, 90-1). He remarked upon "l'extraordinaire
duo moral que forment les deux soeurs," calling them a "couple psychologique"
(Dupre 90; Guillant 896). 18 This account is echoed in another report by the
Tharaud brothers, who note that the doctor criticized the court psychiatrists' refusal
to consider the "homosexual preoccupations" suggested by the sisters' total lack of
male companionship during their tenure at the Lancelins' and by the imprisoned
Christine's sexual displays and cries to Lea: Christine insisted that '"[a]u cours d'une
vie anterieure, ma soeur etait ma mari'" (Tharaud and Tharaud, qtd. in Dupre, 91;
interview with Dr. Logre in Alio Police, qtd. in Dupre, 92). 19
Following Logre, the attorney for the defense, Germaine Briere, suggested
that the sisters' sexual nonconformity could indicate corresponding mental
abnormalities. Indeed, in summing up the evidence, Briere advanced an additional,
and possibly apocryphal, psychiatric theory apparently unremarked by any of the
medical experts appearing at the trial, including Logre. 20 Briere reminded the jury
of the evidence of virginity found in the sisters' physical examination, insisting that it
18, Trans.: "the extraordinary moral duo that the two sisters formed;"
"psychological couple."
19, Trans.: "in an earlier life, my sister was my husband."
20 As Michel Coddens notes, M. Briere "n'agit pas autrement qu'un
psychiatre" by presenting to the jury arguments of a psychiatric nature despite his
lack of training in the field; according to Coddens, Briere presented the sisters'
madness as "transparente" by describing the sisters' behavior as if through a "regard
clinique" (147).
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was crucial to know whether or not the sisters were virgins because "[i]l est des
psychoses qui se developpent plus particulierement chez les femmes encore vierges,
ou qui n'ont pas une vie genitale normale" (qtd. in Dupre 117).21 By conflating
sexual and mental abnormality, Briere presented the maids as sexually deviant
psychotics— as radically other to normative constructions of sexed subjectivity, and
therefore as unfit to be convicted as competent adults.
Because of the arguments put forth by the defense, the trial's president
interrogated the sisters about the nature of their relationship with one another.
Presumably, a confession of lesbianism would have been the equivalent of testimony
to the sisters' insanity and consequently to their lack of responsibility for the crime:
the president prefaced his questions on the subject with the explanation that his task
was to find not only evidence of their culpability but also information "that could
work in [their] favor" (Guillant 889). Characterizing lesbianism as a factor that
could only exonerate the sisters, he encouraged Christine and Lea to give the
response that they judged "useful"— and thus presented them with the opportunity to
lie with impunity (889).
This bizarre suspension of the necessity of telling the truth— by an agent of
the court whose professed duty was to elicit "the entire truth" concerning the crime—
signals the massive anxiety about sister-sister incest that structured discourse about
the "Murderers of Le Mans" (899). The miscarriage of justice that would have
resulted if the sisters had falsely avowed an incestuous relationship, either to gain
their freedom or to win clemency by way of an insanity defense, does not seem to
have bothered the President here. His presentation of the question of truth as a
matter of "utility" further signaled unspoken laws about confessing to both
21. Trans.: "There are psychoses that develop particularly in women who
are still virgins, who do not have a normal genital life."
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lesbianism and incest. Each sister was forced to choose between two competing
versions of her subjectivity: that of the criminal murderess, or the insane lesbian.
Had the sisters avowed a sexual relationship, they might have received a different
punishment— another kind of abjection from the community. The accused were at an
impasse, forced to decide which punishment would be the worse: the imprisonment
that would result from an admission of responsibility for the murders, or the social
and juridical condemnation-and most likely the psychiatric interment-that would
follow the disclosure of "abnormal" sexual relations.
Because Christine and Lea were given carte blanche to lie to the court, the
very format of the interrogation provided them with a discursive context in which to
avoid the question of their sexuality. They were presented with a lengthy description
of the court's suspicions of their lesbianism but then were asked whether their ties to
one another were solely those proper to sisters. The president began his questioning
of Christine as to her relationship with Lea by citing evidence of their closeness and
then asserting that "c'est mon devoir .. . de vous demander si cette affection est
basee uniquement sur un sentiment familial ou s'il reposait par hasard sur des raisons
d'ordre sexuel" (889).22 Yet he quickly changed the terms of the question, asking
whether Christine was fond of Lea "simplement parce que c'etait votre soeur"
(889)23 The president's statement can be taken as negation, in the psychoanalytic
sense: it raises and then denies the possibility of lesbianism. Christine echoed this
negation by replying that "II n'y avait rien d'autre entre nous" (889)24 Likewise,
22. Trans.: "it is my obligation . . . to ask you if this affection is based
uniquely on family sentiment or, perchance, on reasons of a sexual nature."
23. Trans.: "[i]s it simply because she was your sister?"
24. Trans.: "there was nothing else between us."
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65
when Lea affirmed that her attachment to Christine was based "uniquement sur un
sentiment familial," the president nonetheless asked her if there had been ties
between them "d'ordre sexuel, de rapports anormaux"; his question, however, was
met with silence, which proved nothing (889)25
Equivocated through this discursive structure is the possibility that the sexual
and the sisterly may not always be separate: despite the pains the court took to
present the question as one concerning lesbian ties between Christine and Lea, the
sisters' insistence that their affection was "familial" says nothing about whether the
sisterly might have incorporated the sexual. One might conclude from the
interrogation that the incest taboo, while playing a structuring role by rendering the
sisters' intimacy and shared bed suspicious, paradoxically prevented the court from
reading their replies as anything but denials of lesbianism.
One must not see this opportunity for equivocation as conclusive evidence
that the sisters had a sexual relationship and covered it over with a sanctioned lie, for
their equivocation resulted in their conviction. What should be noted, however, is
that the interrogation left the question of their sexuality indeterminate-and therefore
could not link lesbianism to insanity. Arguing that the sisters may have been prey to
an illness unnamable within the court psychiatrists' vocabulary, the defense called for
the sisters to be examined by additional specialists— doctors whose careers were not
tied to the court (Dupre 114- 122). 26 Despite the pleas of a jury confused by the
clash in medical opinions, the court refused to retain additional experts (Dupre 90-1,
25. Trans.: "uniquely on family sentiment"; "of a sexual order, abnormal
relations."
26. According to a report in La Sarthe. Logre justified the need for additional
experts by arguing that "[i]t is always possible . .. to tell if a creature is sick, even if
one cannot immediately say what is the nature of the illness" (qtd. in Dupre, 91).
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66
123). Without support for Logre's claim that the sisters were sexually and
psychologically "abnormal," the defense failed to prove that the sisters were unfit to
stand trial (Briere, qtd. in Dupre, 115). With the sisters' eventual conviction, the
prosecution's representation of the "murders of Le Mans" as a willful threat to the
bourgeois social order prevailed. Instead of being abjected as French society's
irrational and perverse other by an insanity diagnosis and institutionalization,
Christine and Lea were expelled into prison as its criminal and primitive underside.
IV. "What significance cannot be found?"
- Lacan
In raising— and ultimately leaving unanswered— the question of the Papin
sisters' psychological and sexual normalcy, the Defense presented them as a
diagnostic conundrum for psychiatric medicine. Because of Christine's persistent
signs of insanity after her conviction— her transfer to an insane asylum within a year
of her conviction, and her death several years later from continued self-punishment-
physicians continued to speculate about the sisters' motives (Dupre 38). Logre's
testimony took on a discursive life after the trial in articles such as Lacan's "Motifs
du Crime Paranoiaque," the most famous attempt to formalize the line of inquiry the
court had f o r e c l o s e d . 2 7 Challenging orthodoxies of which he had become skeptical
27. For discussion of the relevance of "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque" to
Lacan's later writings see Clement, Carolyn J. Dean, and Marini. Many accounts of
Lacanian psychoanalysis reference "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque" as an important
anticipation of the theory of specularity Lacan later would delineate in his famous
article "Le Stade du miroir" (in Ecrits). While "Le Stade du miroir" announces
Lacan's move away from Freud's diachronous Oedipal narrative, I assume that the
interest of his early work on the Papin sisters is not reducible to its relevance to his
later, arguably more mature work. That said, it is important to note that my critique
of the theory Lacan puts forth in "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque" may or may not
apply as well to his later texts, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this
chapter.
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during his psychiatric training, Lacan contested both the arguments of the experts
who found the Papin sisters to be of sound mind and the pleas of Dr. Logre that the
sisters should be exonerated by virtue of their insanity.
Lacan builds his argument on a single premise, selected from Logre's
speculations: the sisters had a homosexual bond. While the trial of Christine and
Lea figured lesbian desire as unspeakable, leaving the nature of their relationship an
unanswerable question, Lacan builds his argument around its very possibility.
Taking up certain facts released in early journalistic reports— the silence between
masters and servants that characterized everyday life at the Lancelins1 , the mutilation
of Madame and her daughter, and the detectives' discovery of the maids clinging to
each other in bed-Lacan speculates on the sisters' motives in a 1933 issue of the
surrealist journal Minotaure. He uses Freud's work on paranoia and disavowed
homosexuality, along with his own doctoral thesis on a female paranoiac named
Aimee, both to form a hypothesis about the sisters' sexuality and to articulate a
theory of the links between paranoid homophobic projection and violent aggression,
links tacitly presupposed during the sisters' interrogation. In contrast to the insistent
divorcing of the sisterly from the sexual that marked the sisters' interrogation, Lacan
asserts not only that mutual desire was present between the sisters but also that it
served as the engine of their crime.
It is important to note the vagueness of Lacan's first reference, late in his
article, to the speculations that had been circulating concerning the sisters' possible
lesbianism. Having outlined a theory that links paranoid aggression to disavowed
homosexuality, Lacan asks, "quelle signification ne prennent pas, a la lumiere de ces
donnees, l'affection exclusive des deux soeurs, le mystere de leur vie, les etrangetes
de leur cohabitation, leur rapprochement peureux dans un meme lit apres le crime?"
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( 2 7 ) 2 8 Indeed, what significance could the "mystery" of the sisters' relationship not
take within the sphere of public opinion, or in that of psychoanalytic speculation?
Lacan's question recalls for us the literary theorist Paul de Man's argument that in
rhetorical questions, "the literal meaning asks for the concept. , . whose existence is
denied by the figurative meaning," resulting in "indetermination . . . a suspended
uncertainty that [is] unable to choose between two modes of reading" (9, 16).
Likewise, Lacan's question asks to be read doubly. Literally, it demands that the
reader provide evidence for his account of the Papins' paranoia by deciphering the
mysterious details of their lives as signs of their lesbianism. But figuratively, it
demands that one interrogate the very tenability of their behavior as a transparent
sign: the question holds out the possibility of an infinite number of interpretations
that would render the sisters' "mystery" all the more enigmatic. Lacan's rhetorical
strategy therefore figures the sisters' sexuality as just as diffuse and hence
undecidable as did the trial-as a question that no one, perhaps not even the sisters
themselves, could answer.
"Because [s]he persecutes me!"
- Freud
The bulk of Lacan's article is devoted to an attempt to provide one such
"significance," although he hesitates to confirm journalistic speculation of "sexual
relations" between the sisters. Drawing on Freud's work and his own dissertation to
qualify Logre's testimony, he suggests that the Papins' is an "unconscious, 'larval'
28. Trans.: "what significance cannot be found in the exclusive affection of
the two sisters, the mystery of their life, the eccentricities of their cohabitation, and
their fearful reconciliation in the same bed after the crime" ("Motives" 10).
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69
homosexuality," disavowed and disguised in their paranoid delusions (10). He writes
that their "tendance homosexuelle ne s'exprimerait que par une negation eperdue
d'elle-meme, qui fonderait la conviction d'etre persecute et designerait l'etre aime
dans le persecuteur" (28).29 Lacan's thesis of the Papins' "larval" homosexuality is
presumably derived from a formula Freud uses to account for Schreber's psychosis:
"I do not love him - 1 hate him, because HE PERSECUTES ME" ("Notes" 63).
Freud presents this formula as a permutation of a more general statement to which,
arguably, all paranoid psychoses can be reduced: "I (a man) love him (a man)" (63).
Freud thus understands paranoid delusions as displacements of an originary
"homosexual wishful phantasy of loving a man" (62).
How does Freud justify the apparent privileging of homosexual desire over
the other contents of paranoid delusions? Presuming that human psychosexual
development proceeds from autoeroticism through narcissism to object-love, Freud
contends that homosexuals stay "unusually long" in the narcissistic phase and
therefore transition into object-love only when the object possesses genitals similar
to their own (61). Thus homosexual object-choice represents a transition from
primary narcissism, in which the subject takes himself as love-object, to the
narcissistic choice of a same-sex object. A small step away from primary narcissism,
homosexuals' "narcissistic object-choice" is marked by "a predominance of archaic
constitutions and primitive psychical mechanisms" (Three Essavs 12). Those who
eventually take persons of the opposite sex as sexual objects, freeing themselves of
narcissism altogether, do so only by sublimating their primitive "homosexual
tendencies" into "social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and
29. Trans.: "homosexual tendency is expressed only through a desperate
negation of itself, which would ground the conviction of being persecuted and
designate the loved one in the persecutor" ("Motives" 10).
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70
comradeship, to esprit de corps and to love of mankind in general" ("Notes" 61).
Freud then claims that amongst apparent heterosexuals (including the married
Senatsprdsident), there are some who retain a "fixation" at the stage of narcissism,
which threatens to erupt under the stress of "some unusually intense wave of libido"
that finds "no other outlet" (62). In such individuals, any sociosexual frustration can
provoke "regression" to the primitive stage of narcissism, characterized by the
"sexualization of their social instincts" (62). Because Freud finds that paranoiacs
frantically defend themselves against such a (homosexual) resexualization of the
"social instincts," he locates "the weak spot in their development" somewhere
"between the stages of auto-eroticism, narcissism, and homosexuality"— a relatively
long stretch of time in the subject's psychosexual narrative (61-2).
Throughout the remainder of the Schreber study, Freud remains equally
unclear as to the exact point of the paranoiac's fixation. This problem becomes
particularly vexed when he discusses the paranoiac's megalomania. After he has
elaborated the three formulae through which the paranoiac can negate one
grammatical element of the proposition "I (a man) love him (a man)," Freud proposes
a formula for another kind of contradiction that "rejects the proposition as a whole":
"I do not love at all— I do not love anyone," which serves as a screen for "I love only
m yself (65). This formula for self-love epitomizes the paranoiac's regression into
primary narcissism, in which he takes himself as sexual object; on this trajectory,
"the length of the step back from sublimated homosexuality to narcissism is a
measure of the amount of regression characteristic of paranoia" ("Notes" 72). The
paranoiac, then, regresses to primary narcissism from the state of sublimated
homosexuality that characterizes heterosexual "normalcy." Despite the appearance
of having completed the Oedipal trajectory and entered into "civilized" society, the
paranoid psychotic is thrown back to the "primitive" point at which he was fixated.
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71
Interestingly enough, Freud asserts in his concluding remarks that "the
majority of cases of paranoia" are marked by megalomania (72). He thus creates a
contradiction by positing two mutually exclusive origins of paranoia: "I love him”
and "I love only myself' (via "I do not love at all - 1 do not love any one” ) (63, 65).
The example of Schreber illustrates the complexity of the problem: while his
megalomania suggests a regression to primary narcissism (the recathexis of the self
as sexual object), his delusions suggest a regression to homosexual object-choice
(the return to a selfsame sexual object). Thus paranoia simultaneously signals both
the subject's defense against the libidinal recathexis of his (homo)social bonds (i.e.,
his fundamental refusal of the proposition "I love him"), and his regression into
primary narcissism. By arguing that paranoid delusions constitute a defense against
homosexuality, Freud suggests a fixation at the point of narcissistic (qua
homosexual) object-choice; by emphasizing the paranoiac's megalomania, however,
he suggests a fixation at the point of primary narcissism.
"Always a mere prisoner of her narcissism"
- Lacan
The unresolved contradiction in Freud's account of paranoia is glossed over
by Lacan, whose early work further muddles the role of narcissism in object-
relations. In his discussion of the Aimee study, Lacan conflates narcissistic
(homosexual) object-choice and primary narcissism. His summary of Freud's work
on Schreber equivocates on the kind of homosexuality in question: "La distance
evolutive, dit Freud, qui separe la pulsion homosexuelle, cause du refoulement
traumatique, du point de fixation narcissique, que revele la regression accomplie,
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72
donne la mesure de la gravite de la psychose dans un cas donne" (De la psvchose
262).30
While Freud understands the paranoiac to have regressed from heterosexual
object-choice to a resexualization of homosocial bonds, Lacan's vague reference to
"pulsion homosexuelle" ("homosexual drive") threatens to efface the distinctions
between manifest homosexuals and those who disavow their regression to
homosexuality.31 Lacan's use of the term "fixation" equivocates on Freud's
distinction between the arrest of development at homosexual object-choice and
psychotic regression to homosexual object-choice. According to Freud, a subject
might be unconsciously fixated at a certain point yet still progress to the later stages
of development; paranoia would result when a seemingly normal subject regressed
to the point of fixation, returning to a stage he appeared to have overcome. In his
discussion of Aimee, however, Lacan uses fixation to denote an arrest in
development, a complete halt in the subject's progress toward heterosexuality.32
Such an argument plays out in exemplary fashion in Lacan's account of the
Papin sisters' psychosexual development. He argues that an "anormale inversion"
can occur during social integration, producing "un type special d'homosexuels chez
qui predominent les instincts et activites sociales" ("Motifs" 28).33 However, "Cette
30. Trans.: "[t]he evolutional distance, says Freud, that separates the
homosexual drive, cause of traumatic repression, from the point o f narcissistic
fixation, which reveals the accomplished regression, shows the measure of the
gravity of the psychosis in any given case."
31. Trans.: "homosexual drive."
32. Interestingly enough, his use of "fixation" in the analysis of Aimee
parallels Freud's; he only conflates it with arrested development in his discussion of
the Papin sisters (De la psychose 259-262).
33. Trans.: "abnormal inversion"; "a special type of homosexual in whom
social instincts and activities predominate" (10).
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integration se fait cependant selon la loi de moindre resistance par une fixation
affective tres proche encore du moi solipsiste, fixation qui merite d'etre dite
narcissique et ou l'objet choisi est le plus semblable au sujet: telle est la raison de
son caractere homosexuel" (28). 34 One can see here that fixation designates an
arrest at the homosexual stage of development, an inability to pass into
heterosexuality. Lacan falls into the trap of claiming that paranoia results not from
regression but from the arrest of development at homosexual object-choice. While
his deployment of fixation is in line with common psychoanalytic usage— Laplanche
and Pontalis note that "fixation" can "be manifest and immediate or else it can be
latent"-it is not consonant with Freud's discussion of the role of specifically "latent"
fixation in the paranoiac's delusions (162). Lacan's argument thus conflates Freud's
two types of homosexuality by subsuming them to the fixation's supposedly
narcissistic nature, even though the interplay between narcissism and homosexuality
is much more vexed for Freud.
Lacan's explanation for the murderous drive of "paranoid criminals" depends
in part on this conflation of manifest homosexuality, latent homosexuality, and
narcissism into one "primitive" state (28). Fie argues that the forced renunciation of
aggression demanded by psychosocial development leaves a residue, which emerges
as a sadistic component of the narcissistic dialectic between the self and the self
identical love object. However, for Lacan, residual sadism is not specific to the
homosexual; it is merely an exaggeration of a universal process of socialization. He
holds that under certain conditions sadism engenders paranoid aggression as the
subject projects onto a persecutor his or her aggression towards a sibling with whom
34. Trans.: " [tjhis integration occurs . . . according to the law of least
resistance through an emotional fixation quite close to the solipsistic self, a fixation
meriting the term narcissistic, wherein the object-choice is most similar to the
subject: such is the reason for its homosexual character ("Motives" 11).
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74
he or she shares an uncomfortably narcissistic closeness. He claims that Aimee
exhibited fraternal (sic) rivalry toward her sister when the latter became the principal
caregiver of the former's child, and that this jealousy provoked Aimee's
homosexualized regression and the resultant psychosis:
Pour la genese historique de la psychose, notre analyse . . . nous en a livre
le noyau dans le conflit moral d'Aimee avec sa sour. Ce fait ne prend-il pas
tout sa valeur a la lumiere de la theorie qui determine la fixation affective
de tels sujets au complexe fratemel?
Enfin, nous croyons pouvoir retrouver la regression libidinale typique
dans la structure meme du delire d ' A i m e e . 3 5 ("Motifs" 28; De la psychose
261)
Displacing her closeness to the desired sister onto an actress whose success and
independence she took as her ideal, Aimee both narcissistically desired to be the ego-
ideal and wished to destroy her: "Aimee frappe l'etre brillant qu'elle hait justement
parce qu'elle represente l'ideal qu'elle a de soi" (28).36 The homosexual component
is subsumed to the narcissistic aggression of the psychotic through the dialectic of
her "self-punishment" ("Motives" 11). In this account, paranoid projection,
homosexuality and the narcissistic dialectic are regulated by a single engine. While
these phantasies constituted the subject's attempt to break away from her narcissistic
fixation, Lacan insists that she was bound to fail: "chacune des persecutrices n'est
vraiment rien d'autre qu'une nouvelle image, toujours toute prisonniere du
narcissisme, de cette soeur dont notre malade a fait son ideal" (28).37 Basing his
35. Trans.: "ja]s for the historical genesis of the psychosis, our analysis . . .
betrayed the core in the moral conflict of Aimee with her sister. Does not this fact
take all its value in the light of the theory that determines the affective fixation of
such subjects on the fraternal complex? Thus, we are able to find typical libidinal
regression in the structure itself of Aimee's delirium."
36. Trans.: "Aimee struck the bright creature whom she hated just because
that being represented the ideal she had of herself' ("Motives" 11).
37. Trans.: "each of the persecutors was really nothing other than a new
image, always a mere prisoner of Aimee's narcissism, of this sister whom the patient
had made her ideal" ("Motives" 11).
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75
discussion of the Papin sisters on his conclusions about Aimee, Lacan argues that
their attack on the Lancelins proceeded from the disavowal of their desire for each
other. Projecting this intolerable desire onto their employers, the Papins attempted to
annihilate an unwanted representation of themselves by murdering its screen, the
Lancelin "couple."
To Lacan, the Papin sisters' homosexuality is a primitive force linked to the
danger of psychotic, criminal aggression. He shares with Freud a teleological view
of human psychosexual development, in which the child progresses from narcissism
to homosexuality to heterosexual normalcy. But if Freud attributes homosexuality to
arrested development, he does not view it as inherently sociopathic. Latent
homosexuality, disavowed a la Schreber, is a sign of psychical "primitivism" for
Freud; however, it becomes pathological not because of its homosexual component
but because of the misrecognition it entails.3 8 For Lacan, on the other hand, the
refusal to submit to heterosexuality always carries the risk of criminal psychosis,
which threatens the subject and his or her social environment. Applying Freud's
account of homosexual "brotherly love" to Schreber's illness, he declares that
"homosexuality, sado-masochistic perversion and such" are not only symptoms of
arrested development but also "contemporaneous in their genesis" in the perniciously
sadonarcissistic, paranoid personality (10).
Attempting to differentiate paranoiacs from average subjects, Lacan claims
that the Papins "did not evolve beyond the first stage [the homosexual]" ("Motives"
38 Freud notes that the openly homosexual man differs from the
heterosexual only because for the former "the detachment of social feeling from
object-choice has not been fully carried through." He thus suggests a teleology of
heterosexual without presenting so-called homosexual underdevelopment as
inherently harmful. By mentioning homosexuals' "devotion to the interests of the
community," Freud suggests that their orientation is evidence of psychosexual
underdevelopment, but not necessarily of social pathology ("Neurotic Mechanisms"
169-70).
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76
10). This seems to explain why certain subjects remain homosexual but not how
others are able to leave the homosexual stage without becoming paranoid: if
sadonarcissistic homosexuality and paranoid projection are "contemporaneous in
their genesis," then any such homosexuality should be inherently pathological (10).
Inasmuch as Lacan suggests not only that most subjects pass through a homosexual
phase but also that they are able to overcome it, however, that phase cannot be
contemporaneous with paranoia. Otherwise the average subject, like Aimee, would
be unable to cross the threshold to heterosexual normalcy, trapped in an ultimately
murderous series of narcissistic projections (10). Lacan cannot clarify this point
because the claim of contemporaneity places the subject in a Kafkaesque dilemma:
if the adult is paranoid, it is because he or she has been unable to cross the threshold
to heterosexuality and thus is the prisoner of narcissistic homosexuality; crossing
this threshold ensures that the subject will not be paranoid, but the threshold exists
only after it has been crossed. That is, if the Papin sisters had not been paranoid,
they would not have been "larval" homosexuals— but if they had not remained
homosexuals, they would never have been paranoid.39 The argument of "Motifs"
thus is caught between two theoretically incompatible impulses: Freud's
developmental model and Lacan's theory of contemporaneity .40
39 Similarly criticizing the "circularity" of Freud's account of paranoia,
Judith Butler argues that by theorizing social integration and the formation of
conscience as marked by the outward renunciation of a homosexuality on which the
social bond nevertheless depends, Freud offers an etiology that "is already within the
normative and regulatory domain of the social for which he seeks to give an account"
tExcitable Speech 120).
40, The important question of whether or not these two theoretical impulses
are mutually exclusive, and whether or not Lacan more successfully integrated them
in his later writings, is beyond the scope of this study. Whatever changes Lacan
subsequently made to his theorization of subjectivity and psychosis, the importance
of "Motifs" for my study lies in the way in which it symptomatizes definitional
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77
In failing to explain how some subjects evolve past the point of fixation,
Lacan suggests that all subjectivity is paranoid: he insists that sadism is not specific
to homosexuals and paranoiacs, but instead is an exaggeration of a universal
socialization process (11). He thus foreshadows his later claim that all subjectivity
has a "psychotic kernel" (Zizek, Looking Awry. 43). Indeed, as Elisabeth
Roudinesco notes, "Motifs" is Lacan's first attempt at contesting the "grand division
between normalcy and pathology" that French psychiatrists had assumed since 1838.
Far from relying on a diametrical opposition in which "the mad were completely mad
and the normal completely normal," "Motifs" instead blurs the line between
psychosis and normalcy, setting the stage for Lacan's later work (Roudinesco,
Bataille. 204-5).
Even if Lacan is correct in asserting that paranoia structures all subjectivity,
he fails to explain the Papin sisters' criminal violence. He distinguishes their
paranoia from that of "normal" subjects only by recourse to the very theories of
hereditary insanity he sets out to contest: he claims that the Papin sisters' "Evolution
[towards heterosexuality] ne depasse pas son premier stade [the homosexual]" and
that "les causes d'un tel arret peuvent Stre d'origines tres differentes, les unes
organiques (tares hereditaires), les autres psychologiques" (28).41 "Motifs" thus
does not reject "the entire range of doctrines stemming from race and degeneration,"
as Roudinesco would have it; instead, it is a symptom of psychoanalysis' continued
anxieties and incoherences surrounding female sexuality and criminality in the first
half of the century.
41. Trans.: "did not evolve beyond the first stage"; "the causes of such an
arrest can be of very different origins, some organic (hereditary traits), others
psychological" ("Motives" 11).
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78
straggle with psychiatry's assumptions about heredity (Jacques Lacan & Co. 127)42
The hereditary explanation sutures Lacan's theory of contemporaneity, making it
seem coherent at the very point at which it cracks.43 He calls in theories of heredity
in a last-ditch attempt to account for the anomaly of the sisters' crime, to tie up the
threads of causality in a theory that can only differentiate with great difficulty
between "normal" subjects and the murderous Papin sisters44
Lacan's argument for the hereditary predisposition to psychosis not only fails
to bypass his tautological discussion of narcissism but also brings into play a set of
earlier medical discourses on insanity that informs early psychoanalysis' construction
of homosexuality. Historians George Chauncey and Lillian Faderman both
document the ways in which the theories of hereditary "degeneration" that arose in
42. A large body of scholarly work describes the place of theories of heredity
within often elusive late nineteenth-century medical and quasi-medical discourses of
degeneration. Some key texts are Gilman. Difference and Pathology: Chamberlin
and Gilman, Eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress: Greenslade,
Degeneration. Culture, and the Novel: Pick. Faces of Degeneration.
43. This is not necessarily to invalidate Lacan's later discussions of the
similarities between psychosis and so-called normal subjectivity. Though in texts
such as "Propos sur la causalite psychique" Lacan fleshes out the distinction between
the structure of psychosis and normalcy in philosophical terms while also
emphasizing their similarities to one another, "Motifs" leaves this distinction
undeveloped by calling in "heredity" as an easy explanation (Ecrits 151-193).
44. "Motifs" and the other medical claims at stake in the Papin affair force
one to challenge Michel Foucault's sweeping and unabashedly optimistic claim, in
the first volume of The History of Sexuality, that the appearance of psychoanalysis
on the medical scene created a "rapture" in the "great system of degenerescence" by
having "resumed the project of a medical technology appropriate for dealing with the
sexual instinct" while also having "sought to free it from its ties with heredity, and
hence from eugenics and the various racisms." Foucault's account flattens the
complex history of interpenetrations between psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and
theories of degeneration, theoretical negotiations of which Lacan's early career is a
prime example. If psychoanalysis "rigorously opposed the political and institutional
effects of the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system," it nonetheless indirectly
perpetuated some of those older theories' assumptions in the new institutional context
of the psychoanalytic model of psychosexual development (119).
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79
the second half of the nineteenth century linked homosexuality to psychological
underdevelopment, especially in the work of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-
Ebing and Havelock E ll is .4 5 Similarly, Ronald Bayer notes that
The tendency to view homosexuality as inherited was linked by many
investigators to a more general interest in the extent to which various forms
of degeneracy represented an atavistic reappearance of primitive
tendencies. Some believed that not only did homosexuals deviate from
civilized sexual standards, but they were likely to engage in uncontrolled
primitive and animal-like behavior as well. (20)
Moreover, through an analogy between psychical development and cultural
development, these theories frequently presented homosexuality as a "primitive"
phenomenon whose presence in "civilized," European society was regressive. As
literary critic Kelly Hurley explains,
Deviant sexuality could be classified as "degenerate" in four senses: its
recapitulation of the less evolved sexuality of so-called primitives, its
hereditability, its deteriorative effect on mind and body, and its general
corrupting influence on public morals . . . Deviant sexual behaviors . . .
constituted a sort of behavioral recapitulation of some ancestral state, and a
betrayal of the socioevolutionary process that distinguished the modem
Caucasian from the present-day non-European "primitive." (71-2)
Psychoanalysts would take up these theories and link "primitive" regression both to
homosexuality and psychosis.
Freud bases his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality on sexological
theories of "degeneration," whose conflation of homosexuality with the primitive
appears again in the psychoanalyst's claim that "archaic constitutions and primitive
45. For a discussion of homosexuality and insanity in these theories, see
Chauncey, 133-138, and Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men. 239-253, 314-331.
Especially important primary texts on the topic of homosexuality and psychosis are
Krafft-Ebing's Psvchopathia Sexualis. which includes an extensive discussion of the
supposedly delusional gender transformations of psychotics of "contrary sexual
instinct," and Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion, which critiques the vagueness of the
term "degeneration" at the same time as it argues that homosexuality as "congenital
inversion" is the result of a hereditary deficiency (188-9).
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80
psychical mechanisms" predominate in "inverted types" (11-12)46 Sander Gilman
argues that Freud recast "the moment of degeneracy from prenatal influence to early
childhood experience" in a way that reflected his lifelong concern with the
psychological primitivism of childhood and that paved the way for his Oedipal
theory (Gilman, "Sexology," 82). Yet Gilman also notes that, at the same time,
Freud's general rejection of heredity as an explanation for psychopathology, most
strongly stated in his famous essay on female homosexuality, conceals a continued
fascination with the links made in nineteenth-century medicine between heredity and
"sexual pathology" (83-84). This fascination plays out in the "primitive" status
Freud assigns to homosexuality within the Oedipal model.
Departing from fin-de-siecle theories of "degeneration," Freud considers not
only homosexuals but also women to be psychically "primitive." His early writings
presume the two sexes to parallel one another in their efforts to overcome the
Oedipus complex, the boy selecting a sexual object that substitutes for his mother
and the girl choosing a substitute for her father. As Marianna Torgovnick explains,
Freudian theory implies that "when societies evolved from the primitive to the
civilized after the primal murder of the father, individual men did too"; as a result,
"[ojften (though not exclusively) for Freud, residual 'primitive' feelings were
associated with the mother and, hence, with femininity" (204). As Torgovnick's
reading suggests, Freud's continued association of femininity with "primitivism"
marks the myth of the "primal horde" upon which he founds his account of the
social. Elizabeth Grosz argues that the myth of the sons' murder of the primitive
father-the act that both mitigated primitive hostility between brothers and
46, Here I refer to sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Ellis, whose case
studies bear on Three Essays.
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81
inaugurated the tyrannical regime of the absent father— "does not in fact explain
patriarchy, for it already presupposes it" (69). From this tautological myth, Freud
develops a teleological perspective on psychosexual development that presents both
patriarchy and heterosexuality as crucial supports of "civilized" society.
As a homosexual woman, the lesbian is doubly associated with the
"primitive" in psychoanalysis' conceptual framework. Even in "Female Sexuality"
(1931) and "Femininity" (1932), Freud's notoriously contorted attempts to account
for developmental differences between the sexes, lesbianism is understood as a
woman's failure to progress from desiring mother-figures to desiring father-figures.
Lacan's 1932 thesis compounds the problem: citing neither of Freud's articles on
women's sexuality, he continues to cast female sexuality as comparable to male and
to presume female and male homosexuality to be similar in genesis. He thus uses
Freud's Schreber case and "Some Neurotic Concepts" to argue that disavowed
homosexuality led Aimee and the Papin sisters to criminal p s y c h o s i s .47 Moreover,
"Motifs" flattens Freud's ambivalence towards hereditary explanations of both
homosexuality and psychopathology into an unambiguous image of the Papin sisters
47, From a feminist perspective similar to my own, Lynda Hart discusses the
way in which "Motifs" serves as foundational text for Lacan's subsequent work,
which perpetuates "a heterosexual imperative" by developing such key concepts as
the mirror stage through theoretical "reconstruction based on the observation of
female criminals" (Fatal Women 147). While I thoroughly agree that "Motifs" is
held prisoner by its own phallogocentric assumptions, I suspect that the translation of
concepts such as female homosexuality and femininity from "Motifs" into Lacan's
later work may be more complicated than Hart's analogy between "Le stade du
miroir" and the Papin article would imply (ibid.). The figuration of gender and
sexuality in key texts such as "Le stade du miroir" and "Propos sur la causalite
psychique," for example, is by no means consistent, and forces one to question Hart's
narrative of Lacanian psychoanalysis as uniformly phallogocentric (Lacan. Ecrits.
93-100, 151-193). In a sense, Hart stacks the deck by framing her generalizations
with a comparison between "Motifs" and Lacan's notorious Seminar 20. presenting
the figure of the aggressive lesbian as raising the "question of the production of The
Woman as symptom" (Hart, Fatal Women. 147).
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as arrested at a primitive stage of psychosexual d e v e lo p m e n t ^ ^ Lacan's analysis of
the Papin sisters' "primitive" psyches perpetuates the fear, present since the fin-de-
siecle, that the increased visibility of "deviant" sexuality heralds the psychotic return
of "civilization" to its "primitive" r o o t s . 4 9
"Unconscious sense o f guilt."
- Freud
Just as Lacan's account of the genesis of paranoid delusions is articulated
within a tradition limited by phallogocentric assumptions, so too is his construing of
those delusions' violent end. Noting the apparent dissipation of paranoid criminals'
delusions at their arrest, Lacan uses Freud's 1924 article, "The Economic Problem of
48, Both Torgovnick and Rhodes discuss the status of the "primitive" in
Freud's writings, pointing to the way in which the texts vacillate between a
condemnatory and a praiseful evaluation of purportedly "primitive" psychical traits
that obtain in "civilized" persons. While in Three Essays. Freud gives a positive or
at least neutral valuation to those "primitive" traits he links to "inversion" and
"homosexual object-choice," Lacan's focus on "primitive hostility" in his use of those
theories is my principal concern here (11-12).
49 xhe editors of Degeneration: the Dark Side of Progress note that
degeneration "could certainly be said to be a word that nobody in the nineteenth
century rightly understood. As is often the case, it was also a word of which many
people were certain that they alone knew the true meaning," and whose conflicting
interpretations of it "did not always, indeed on the surface did not usually, agree"
(xiv). Daniel Pick likewise explains that "degenerescence" was "the condition of
conditions" and "the ultimate signifier of pathology" (8). However, he notes that this
term "served to anchor meaning" at the same time as "its own could never be fully
stabilized" and "indeed was in doubt more than all the others" (8). In referencing
degeneration theory as a source of medical conflations of homosexuality with
insanity, I am invoking only a limited subset of texts on degeneration.
Moreover, while some writers at the turn of the century claimed a diagnostic
distinction between "atavism" (primitivism) and "degeneration," the two terms often
were conflated not only within competing medical and sociomedical treatises, but
also within the wider discursive field. See Legrain, Du Delire chez les Degeneres.
and Magnan and Legrain, Les Degeneres. for examples of attempts to distinguish
theories of "degeneration" from those of "atavism."
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83
Masochism," to understand the female paranoiac's seeming satisfaction after being
arrested for her murderous passage a Vacte. Positing an "unconscious sense of guilt"
as the source of the need of moral masochists (such as Aimde and the Papins) to
receive "punishment at the hands of a parental power," Freud insists that their illness
involves a "regression from morality to the Oedipus complex" and a consequent
resexualization of morality (169). Freud understands this regression to originate in
the child's wish for a "passive (feminine) sexual relation" to the father, disguised
through the phantasy of being beaten by him. Thus Freud's argument slides from the
general assertion that the moral masochist wishes to be punished to the specific
assertion of the wish to be beaten by his or her father.
Freud's discussion of the masochist's wish for a feminized sexual relation to
the father recalls the concept of "feminine masochism," introduced earlier in "The
Economic Problem of Masochism" (165). Supposedly distinct from each other,
moral masochism and feminine masochism are nonetheless both drawn through a
rhetoric dependent on "femininity." Ironically, in this text Freud explicitly limits his
discussion of "feminine masochism" to its manifestation in biological men: he
asserts that
If one has an opportunity of studying cases in which the masochistic
phantasies have been especially richly elaborated, one quickly discovers
that they place the subject in a characteristically female situation; they
signify, that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.
For this reason I have called this form of masochism . . . the feminine form.
("Economic Problem" 162)
However, Freud's concept of feminine masochism is puzzling if one attempts to
imagine it in a biologically female subject. The same phantasies that serve as
evidence of masochism in a man would be privileged signs of normalcy in a woman;
their presence in her consciousness would prove her feminine, though not necessarily
masochistic, whereas their presence in a man would prove him both. The
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distinguishing mark of feminine masochism is not so much femininity as a
displacement of masculinity.
Similarly, guilt-producing "moral masochism" involves for Freud "a
regressive distortion" of the originary wish for a "passive (feminine) sexual relation"
to the father (169, emphasis mine). His discussion of beating phantasies invokes the
conclusions of a 1919 article, '"A Child is Being Beaten,'" according to which such
phantasies are always distortions of the wish for a (passive) sexual relation with the
father, regardless of the sex of the phantasizing child and of the characters in the
phantasy. Phantasies that figure the mother as the beater, for example, are
understood as displacements of a more originary wish for paternal love. The mother,
always representative of the father in her articulations of authority, has no role of her
own; parental authority is effectively paternal authority, and masochism is a relation
between men. Thus the phallogocentric ideology Freud betrays in his elaboration of
feminine masochism holds for his understanding of sexual and familial relations
more generally.
That neither Aimee nor the Papins seem to have been concerned with fathers
or their representatives, either in real life or in their phantasies, underlines the
problems that arise when Lacan uses "The Economic Problem of Masochism" to
theorize their crimes. Indeed, the known facts of both cases show a predominant
concern with maternal representatives, with little or no paternal influence. "The
Economic Problem of Masochism," however, would have us see these female figures
as filters through which passes a fundamental preoccupation with the phallus. In
Lacan's account, female homosexuality is representable only through a logic of
"hom(m)osexuality": the phallogocentric specularization of desire between men
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85
(Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman. 98).50 Nonetheless, it remains a principal
concern of his analysis of Aimee and the Papins, the nodal point of his fusion of the
paranoid criminal's sense of guilt with her delusional projections.
"The human enigma of sex”
- Lacan
Foreshadowing his later theory that psychosis is effected through the
psychotic's foreclosure of the Name of the Father and refusal to accede to the
signification of the phallus, Lacan represents the Papin sisters as sexually ignorant
and therefore prone to psychotic delusion. In a pathos-laden passage at the end of
the article, he attempts to evoke pity for the sisters' supposed ignorance of phallic
sexuality by declaring that "II faut avoir prete une oreille attentive aux etranges
declarations de tels malades pour savoir les folies que leur conscience enchamee peut
echafauder sur l'enigme du phallus et de la castration feminine" (28).51 Lacan
portrays Christine and Lea as two savages whose insufficient mastery of the doctor's
language symptomatizes their primitive ignorance and irrationality. Yet Lacan's
metaphor— his image of the sisters imprisoning themselves in a delusional attempt to
50 One might recall the rhetoric Freud uses to account for Schreber's
paranoia. As their nodal point, the mad Senatsprdsident's delusions featured his
bodily transformation into a woman: he sensed his chest developing the feeling he
imagined to characterize women's breasts; he looked forward with pleasure to
assuming the place of the woman in coitus. This evidence led Freud to assert that
"the exciting cause of the illness was the appearance in him of a feminine (that is,
passive homosexual) wishful phantasy" (47). As in Freud's text on masochism,
"femininity" is here understood only in the context of a relation between men.
51. Trans.: "one must have lent an attentive ear to the strange declarations of
such patients to know the follies that their shackled conscience can build upon the
enigma of the phallus and of female castration" (11).
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86
decipher the social order and to position themselves within it— is only meaningful to
those who accept psychoanalysis' premise of the primacy of the phallus and of
women's necessary recognition of their "feminine castration." A retroactive
projection, Lacan's image presents the sisters as civilization's primitive others, as the
constitutive outside of the social order, yet their very "primitive" qualities are
produced by civilization itself.
Indeed, Lacan's representation of the sisters' "shackled conscience" is
evidence not so much of the sisters' sexual ignorance as of his own equivocation on
the subject of sexuality. His outline of the sisters' personal history places their
behavior within a frame of paternal authority. For example, he notes the
governmental authority figures— a mayor, a "general secretary," a "central
commissioner"— who, well before the murders, had judged the sisters "cracked" and
"persecuted" ("Motives" 7, 11). He then notes that "[o]n omet encore un pere
alcoolique, brutal, qui, dit-on, a viole une de ses filles" ("Motifs" 26). But he draws
the father into the picture only by effacing him, by figuring him as something that
"we omit still" [on omet encore].^ Lacan does not name the sister raped by the
father; however, the record indicates that it was the eldest sister, Emilia, not
Christine or Lea (Dupre 116, 127). Later bringing up the Papins' abusive father as
evidence of their "fixation" at the homosexual stage, Lacan claims that "l'inceste
infantile," often a cause of arrested development, "semble n'avoir pas ete absent de la
vie des soeurs" ("Motifs" 28).53 Here again, the possibility that the Papins were
52 Trans.: "we omit still an alcoholic father, brutal, who, they say, raped
one of his daughters." In "Motives of Paranoid Crime," Anderson's translation reads
"Yet we omit," which clarifies the sentence structure but elides the "still" [encore]
that suggests the negation through which Lacan figures the rapes (7).
53. Trans.: "infantile incest;" "seems not to have been absent from the
sisters' life" ("Motives" 11).
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87
raped by their father is rendered not in positive but in negative form: incest was "not
absent" from their lives. Lacan's suggestion that the sisters' rape engendered their
homosexuality, and therefore their paranoia, is further contradicted by the language
he uses to assert their ignorance of sexual difference (of "l'enigme du phallus et de la
castration feminine") (28).54 if Christine and Lea had been molested, how could
ignorance of sexual difference have determined their lack of "attachments to men" or
"hope for marriage" (Guillant 887)?55 Indeed, if the sisters were already aware of
the "enigma" of heterosexuality, then Lacan's claim that they were stuck in an
infantile phase of sexual development makes little sense ("Motives" 11). More
significantly, his invocation of the (false) possibility that the sisters had been raped
performs a characteristic sleight of hand: the simultaneous conjuring and effacing of
the phallus.
It is not surprising that Lacan invokes the phallus as a site of undecidability
in his drive to understand the "mysterious" events in Le Mans (7). But what does the
sisters' supposed ignorance of the "enigma" of heterosexuality signify as a
conclusion to Lacan's analysis? I have already noted that his text reproduces the
aporias evident in Freud's arguments about female sexuality. The insufficiency of
this strain of early psychoanalysis' theorization of sexual difference is evident at the
end of "Motifs du Crime Paranolaque" when, as a phantasmatic passage a Vacte,
54. Trans.: "the enigma of the phallus and of female castration" ("Motives"
11).
55. I do not wish to suggest that antipathy toward or fear of men caused the
sisters to become lesbian; I would like to maintain the indeterminacy evidenced
(sometimes unwittingly) in earlier representations of their enigmatic sexuality. I
make no attempt to further epistemological arguments in which proof of their
sexuality is at stake; what interests me is the way in which constructions of their
lesbianism testify to phantasies and anxieties about gender, sexuality, and the
bourgeois family.
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Lacan stages a lesbian "primal scene" by describing the Papin sisters' attack on the
L a n c e l i n s . 5 6 Using Christine's post-crime theatrics as evidence, Lacan suggests that
through the paranoid projection entailed in the passage a I'acte of murder, the sisters
also effected a phantasmatic sexual passage a I’ acte through which the repressed
possibility of incestuous, lesbian sex surfaced in their consciousness and the
"primitive" erupted into "civilization" with its characteristic "mark of a g g r e s s i o n ."57
Accordingly, the hallucinations that accompanied the act of murder allowed
Christine to pass from her primitive ignorance of "l'enigme du phallus et de la
castration feminine" to the phantasy of being her sister's husband, with her ostensible
savagery becoming all the more legible in her violently sexual approaches to Lea
(28).58
While a prisoner, Christine began not only to engage in various erotic
displays but also to articulate her first openly passionate cry for her sister, in the form
of a demand for sexual consent: "Yes, say yes" (11). Upon their reunion, Christine
flung herself at Lea (Dupre 179-180). Lacan artfully arranges Christine's multiple
delusions into one phantasy-narrative, presenting her courtroom cry of "'Yes, say
yes" as the culmination of a morbid phantasy that had begun with her vision, at the
beginning of her imprisonment, of Lea's death— "dead doubtless from that blow [of
Christine's breaking off of the narcissistic ideal into which she had fashioned her
56. My thanks to Christopher Peterson for suggesting that Lacan creates a
lesbian version of the "primal scene" in his article.
57. Though it does not discuss the matter of the primitive, I cannot help but
echo the title of Lynda Hart's study of aggressive lesbians in contemporary film—
Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression.
58. Trans.: "the enigma of the phallus and of female castration" (11).
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89
sister]” (11)59 Similarly, Elisabeth Roudinesco underlines Lacan's claim that the
sisters "bared Genevieve Lancelin's sex in order, as Christine put it, to 'possess'
something that did not exist but that would bear the trace of a phallic omnipotence"
fJacques Lacan & Co. 126). Thus Lacan inscribes lesbian desire and paranoid
delirium in one and the same phallic narrative, ending with a passage a I'acte that is
both sexual consummation and murder. Working within an interpretive framework
that can only render Christine's words as "strange declarations" and her masculine
identification as psychotic hallucination, Lacan manipulates her disparate delusions
into a narrative that constructs lesbian desire as an inherently morbid pretense to
having the phallus (11).60
Yet the question of the sisters' sexuality— and the nature of their delirium—
remains undecided, even at the article's end. The conclusion of "Motifs du Crime
Paranoiaque" recalls once again the indeterminacy of the rhetorical questions with
which Lacan has invited his readers to consider the "significance" of the sisters'
"exclusive affection"— for it is the undecidable meaning of their close attachment to
one another that has puzzled Lacan into writing the article (10). His investment in
the Freudian tradition finally leads to his own arguments' undoing: his quest for the
primal cause of the sisters' psychosis can be undertaken only in a labyrinth of
overlapping etiologies whose multiple valences point up the arbitrariness of his
59. As Dupre shows, Lacan's claims have some basis in accounts of
Christine's behavior in prison (166-180).
60. in "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (in Bodies
That Matter). Judith Butler reads Lacan's essays on "The Mirror Stage" and "The
Signification of the Phallus" as both opening up and warding off the possibility of
understanding the phallic signifier as transferable, open to appropriation and
resignification in non-heterosexual contexts (such as in gender play between lesbian
partners). "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque," on the other hand, pathologizes women's
appropriation of a "transferable phallus" by casting it as delusional.
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9 0
conclusions. In the end, Lacan can make his case only through a set of negations
that invoke and pathologize the sisters' "larval" lesbianism as primitive through a
specularization of the phallus, finally presenting not so much a solution to the Papin
enigma as a vertiginous mise-en-abime of psychoanalytic phallogocentrism.
Because the phallus and the murderous hallucinations it is said to have engendered in
Christine Papin are the phantasmatic productions of Lacan's own narrative, his
article, like the interrogation of the sisters at the trial, provides little clarification of
the Papins' supposed sexual motives for murdering the Lancelins. However, it is
stymied not by the refusal to consider incestuous desire but by its insistence on
reading it through a theory that renders femininity itself enigmatic.
Though unconvincing as an assessment of Christine and Lea, "Motifs du
Crime Paranoiaque" is interesting because it enables one to untangle several
important threads of early twentieth-century discourse about psychosis, female
sexuality, and the family. Lacan's analysis of the Papins' "paranoia" is not so much a
conclusive diagnosis as evidence of psychoanalysis' obsession with the phallus,
which drives his solution to the enigma of two women's murderous motives. One
can discern in "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque" a movement from the figuring of an
analyst's inability to read the sisters' sexuality to the claim that the "primitive" sisters
themselves cannot comprehend "the human enigma of sex" in terms of the phallus
(11). Presenting the Papin sisters as the psychotic others of "the human community,"
Lacan's text projects onto them the inability to understand that more accurately
characterizes his own theorizing ("Motives" 9). Thus its representation of the Papin
affair takes the form of a paranoid event, an attempt at suture after the devastating
"crisis of meaning" brought about by the affair (Lane 25).61
61. I agree with Lane that the Papin affair presented a "crisis of meaning" in
several discursive arenas in the early 1930s; however, given his indictment of the
way in which male phantasy colors an account of the Papin sisters by Paul Eluard
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91
"To understand. . . is to condemn”
- Lacan
The politically charged concept of "human community" is crucial to Lacan's
wider intervention into matters of criminal psychiatry . As Roudinesco argues,
Lacan's discussion of the sisters' criminal responsibility follows from his effort to
blur the line between psychosis and normalcy: "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque"
attempts to reorient criminal psychiatry away from the role of adjudicating
"responsibility and irresponsibility . . . by showing that the madman was not without
responsibility for his acts, since madness was the alienated reality of man and not the
reverse side of an illusory reason" tJacques Lacan & Co. 127). For Lacan, the
psychiatrist can provide no easy answer to the question of the psychotic criminal's
responsibility, which is more properly addressed by the jury.
However, he does not succeed in extricating psychiatric diagnosis from the
juridical determination of criminal responsibility. He asserts that the ethical limits of
his forensic application of psychoanalysis are circumscribed by social values,
insisting that "l'adage 'comprendre, c'est pardonner' est soumis aux limites de chaque
communaute humaine et que, hors de ces limites, comprendre (ou croire
comprendre), c'est condamner" (27)62 His rhetoric begs the question of the Papins'
criminality, neither spelling out his understanding of the limits of the "human
community" nor explaining which elements of the sisters' behavior constituted their
and Benjamin Peret, I find it odd that his discussion and revision of Lacan's "Motifs
du Crime Paranoiaque" do not include an examination of that article's sexual politics.
62. Trans.: "the adage, 'to understand is to forgive,' is subject to the limits of
each human community and that outside of these limits, to understand (or to think
one understands) is to condemn" (9).
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92
transgression. His stance of neutrality is further belied by his essay's title, in which
paranoia appears as an adjective describing "crime" and the Papin sisters appear as
having committed the said transgression; they enter the scene of analysis as always
already criminal. Because Lacan proceeds by sidestepping the question of the sisters'
criminality, his only task is to persuade his readers that their crime was "paranoid" in
nature, and so he proceeds as if the nature of psychosis were his article's sole
concern. 63
Though one might defend Lacan's presumption of the Papins' criminality with
the argument that his article simply reiterated the jury's verdict and set out only to
explain the sisters' motives, he avoids the question of the psychiatrist's complicity in
juridical condemnation. Far from taking a neutral stance, his analysis, as much as
the jury's verdict, sets the boundaries of "human community": the terms through
which he theorizes paranoiac aggression figure Christine and Lea as always already
criminal. Yet he acknowledges a link between paranoia and the social in theorizing
the paranoiac's "pulsion aggressive": he writes that the aggressive "pulsion est
empreinte en elle-meme de relativite sociale" (26)64 The paranoiac's crime is a
double vengeance, directed against both her own guilty conscience and a
63. This is likewise my criticism of a 1950 text in which Lacan again
addresses the question of the psychiatrist's or psychoanalyst's role in adjudicating
criminal responsibility, "Introduction theorique aux fonctions de la psychanalyse en
criminologie" (Ecrits 125-149). The later article does not go beyond the tautologies
that hamper "Motifs": though he expunges theories of heredity from his argument,
he fails to resolve the problem of the cause of the structural difference between
normal and criminally psychotic subjectivity. While Lacan makes explicit reference
to the Papin sisters in his attempt to flesh out the dialectic of alienation (or double
alienation, as he argues in the 1946 "Propos sur la causalite psychique") that he
believes to characterize psychosis, he still fails to elucidate the cause of the
"suspension of the dialectic of the ego" crucial to the criminally insane passage a
I'acte ("Theoretical Introduction" 21).
64. Trans.: "the aggressive drive"; "drive is itself stamped with social
relativity" ("Motives" 8).
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representative of a social order wherein her desire is always already criminal: her
aggressive drive "a toujours l'intentionnalite d'un crime, presque constamment celle
d'une vengeance, souvent le sens d'une punition, c'est-a-dire d'une sanction issue des
ideaux sociaux, parfois enfin elle s'identifie a Facte acheve de la moralite, elle a la
portee d'une expiation" (26).65 While for scholars such as Roudinesco, Lacan's
attempt to isolate the structure of psychosis from the question of criminal
responsibility is his principal innovation in the Papin article, he never quite succeeds
in extricating the question of criminality from his model of psychosis.
The focus on individual psychopathology evident in Lacan's assertion that "to
understand . . . is to condemn" elides the question of the sociosexual context of the
crime ("Motives" 9). However, an "against the grain" reading of "Motifs du Crime
Paranoiaque" suggests that "social tensions" surrounding homosexuality formed the
larger context of the sisters’ revolt (8). Lacan emphasizes Freud's argument that an
individual's "larval" homosexuality is unacknowledged, and all the more potentially
dangerous, because it is forced into repression by the demands of integration into a
social order itself constituted through the repression of homosexuality. However, he
fails to speculate on the role that the social order's constitutive homophobic
repression might play in his definition of "the human community" (9). Though
Lacan does not explicitly indicate the violation that rendered the sisters' psychosis
criminal, his account of their "motives" suggests it to be their refusal of the mandate
that the "civilized" subject cede his or her homosexual desire: he implies that their
murderous paranoia may have been fueled by social sanctions against
homosexuality, which rendered the appearance of the Lancelin "couple" intolerable
65. Trans.: "it always has a criminal intentionality, almost always that of
vengeance; often the sense of a punishment, that is to say, of a sanction sprung from
social ideas; and sometimes at last it identifies itself in the finished act of morality,
having the import of an expiation (self-punishment)" ("Motives" 8).
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9 4
("Motifs" 28). Lacan both presumes and reinforces the idea that the limits of the
"human community" are marked by the criminal psychosis through which the Papin
sisters perform female homosexuality.
V. "One doesn't speak to the other."
- Lacan
Discourse surrounding the Papin affair figures the sisters' transgressions as
not only a sexual but also a class enigma: journalistic speculation about whether or
not Christine and Lea were satisfied with their tasks in the Lancelin home raises the
possibility that the murders were retribution for harsh treatment under their
employers.66 Yet Lacan forecloses the questions about class rebellion that are
suggested by the social context of the crime. Indeed, even if early respondents such
as Rene Crevel are correct to praise Lacan's thesis on Aimee as the first
psychoanalytic study to implicitly analyze class oppression, I contend that his article
on the Papins fails to go far enough in critiquing the bourgeois hegemony of the
oedipal narrative.67
66. prior studies that have questioned inconsistencies in the sisters' testimony
are undecided both about whether they had any complaints against the Lancelins and
about whether their rage was an expression of class rebellion. See Guillant, Dupre,
and Coddens. I do not intend to affirm that the murders were acts of revenge;
instead, I would like to demonstrate that Lacan dismisses these possibilities without a
solid rationale.
67 Along with Paul Nizan and Jean Bernier, Crevel gives Lacan's De la
Psychose paranoiaque a largely positive appraisal by underscoring its incipient
analysis of class oppression. Elisabeth Roudinesco, who cites Crevel, points out that
"Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque" deploys an even more explicitly Marxist vocabulary
than Lacan's thesis, supposedly demonstrating that Lacan had "listened to the
message transmitted" by his communist fans (Jacques Lacan 62).
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95
Roudinesco defends "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque" against dissections of its
class politics by arguing that it inflects the question of sociality through what Lacan
later would call the "symbolic order." She argues that the essay marks the beginning
not only of Lacan's theory of the mirror stage but also of a theory that "derealized"
paranoid crime by "restor[ing] to it its imaginary, then symbolic dimension" through
an analysis of delirium (Jacques Lacan & Co. 127). "If madness is to man what
language is to humanity," she writes, then "there is no 'nature' or 'instinct,' nothing
'sub-human' or 'super-human' which is not already in man himself." That is to say,
the psychotic is positioned neither as prior to the symbolic order, innocent of its
laws, nor as extrahuman, beastly and contemptible; instead, having refused to enter
into the symbolic order, and therefore social law, he or she is still under its sway to
the extent to which its foreclosed elements return in psychotic delusion.
If the Papins were driven to murder by a delirious interpretation of reality in
which they "melent a l'image de leurs mattresses le mirage de leur mal," the motive
of their attack was more than a simple act of revenge; it was a mad expression of
"the alienated reality of man," governed by "the psychotic structure through which
the murderer strikes the ideal of the master he bears within him self (Lacan,
"Motifs," 28; Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.. 127).68 The Papins, then, revolted
against the phantasm produced through their internalization of the Lancelins'
mastery. But it is difficult to understand how this theoretical complication allows
one to dispense with the question of the sisters' status as maids: within the terms of
Lacan's (and Roudinesco's) argument, one could argue that the sisters' violent
idealization of their mistresses may have been conditioned by their subordination
within the Lancelin household. Yet even if Lacan presents psychosis as a question of
68, Trans.: "mingled the mirage of their illness with the image of their
mistresses" (11).
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96
"social tensions" and understands "the aggressive drive" as "itself stamped with
social relativity," he never explicitly considers the implications of the maids'
domestic servitude ("Motives" 8). Instead, by the end of "Motifs du Crime
Paranoiaque," he has entirely passed over the question of the sisters' imprisonment
by external circumstance, displacing it into the interior realm of their "shackled
conscience" in his reconstruction of their murderous motives (11). In considering the
"social relativity" of "the aggressive drive" as a matter of "criminal intentionality,"
he ignores the way in which paranoid crime is what Kristin Ross calls "a disease of
social position," a malady often suffered by socially marginalized women such as
maids (Lacan, "Motives," 11, 8; Ross 2 4 ).69 in Lacan's final analysis, Christine and
Lea are imprisoned not in the sparse attic of the Lancelins' bourgeois home but in the
virtual world of narcissistic projections generated solely through their own
developmental difficulties.
Despite his elision of the sisters' social circumstances, Lacan stages the Papin
affair as a matter of specular doubling between employers and employees. He notes
the two parties' silent but mutual animosity: "si l'on a remarque que les maitres
semblent avoir etrangement manque de sympathie humaine, rien ne nous permet de
dire que l'indifference hautaine des domestiques n'ait fait que repondre a cette
69. Ross situates Lacan's article on the Papins within the larger context of
twentieth-century French literature and cinema, underlining the way in which the
marginalization of both maids and schoolmistresses often leads to paranoia. In her
discussion of Lacan's early work on "social tensions" in paranoid crime, Ross
helpfully underlines the way in which Lacan opens up questions of gender and class
in his other early writings. Oddly, though, she begins by citing "Motifs du Crime
Paranoiaque" as an example of unqualified success in theorizing paranoia's relation
to social position and then shifts to an acknowledgment of the way in which "the
specific class dimension of.. . rage . . . is kept at bay in Lacan's rhetorical
interpretation" of the Papin affair (22).
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97
attitude; d'un groupe a l'autre 'on ne se parlait pas'" (25).70 Interestingly, while
Lacan concludes with an analysis of the projective mechanisms through which the
Papins' disavowal of their own homosexual desire figured the Lancelins as
threatening doubles, he does not follow up on his characterization of the situation as
silently but mutually antagonistic from the start. Yet he is finally unable to
distinguish the sisters' psychology from that of their employers, whose relationship
he sexualizes in his conclusion. He writes that on the night of the murders, "dans
l'anxiete d'une punition imminente, les soeurs melent a l'image de leurs mattresses le
mirage de leur mal. C'est leur detresse qu'elles detestent dans le couple qu'elles
entrainent dans un atroce quadrille" (28).71 In this passage, Lacan exploits double
entendre by playing on the sexual connotations of both couple and mistresses. He
both refers to the Lancelins' superior social status and figures them as a pair with
whom the Papins engage in a dance seemingly as atrocious for its homosexual
undertones as for its murderous results.72 However, in suggesting that the Lancelins
were the arbitrary victims of the Papins' paranoid projection, Lacan elides the
possibility that their "imminent" ability to punish their maids provoked a panicked
rage ("Motives" 11).
70. Trans.: "if one observes that the masters seem strangely to have lacked
human sympathy, we can only reply that the haughty indifference of the domestics
was but a response to this attitude; 'one doesn't speak to the other'" ("Motives" 7).
71. Trans.: "under anxiety of an imminent punishment, the sisters mingled
the mirage of their [homosexual] illness with the image of their mistresses. They
detested the distress of the couple whom they carried away in an atrocious quadrille"
("Motives" 11).
72. This double entendre obtains both in the English translation and in the
French original, which refers to the Lancelins as "le couple" and "leurs mattresses"
(28).
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98
That the Lancelin "couple" might be subject to the same murderously
narcissistic dialectic is ignored, however, as Lacan displaces the question of
lesbianism and incest onto the Papins. He thus constructs the relationship between
the Papins and the Lancelins as mutual in its specular doubling and then projectively
diagnoses this structure as illness only in the maids. "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque"
traces out what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White call "a one-directional process of
double displacement," whereby working-class women embody bourgeois anxieties
about sexuality and the family structure, but not vice versa: it shifts the scandalous
implications of the bourgeois family romance onto the Papins in a failed attempt to
decipher their enigmatic actions (164).
Lacan’ s intimation of a dialectical relationship between the Papin sisters and
their employers suggests that a similar dynamic may have driven the larger public's
terrified and punitive reaction to the "murders of Le Mans." If paranoid aggressivity
is a universal experience constituted within the social field, violently "paranoid
crime" is likely to be matched, in a logic of specular doubling, by the community's
demand that the criminal be severely punished. Lacan writes that "[c]e sont les
memes degres qui commandent la reaction de la societe a l'egard du crime
paranoiaque, reaction ambivalente, a double forme, qui fait la contagion
emotionnelle de ce crime et les exigences punitives de l'opinion" (26)73 This
reading of paranoia's contagion finds confirmation in accounts of the sisters' trial,
which portray both the prosecution and the general public as demanding the sisters'
expulsion from the community. In 1933, angry demonstrations outside of Le Mans'
Palace of Justice in favor of the sisters' conviction provided a backdrop for the
73, Trans.: "These same degrees command the reaction of society in regard
to paranoiac crime, an ambivalent reaction in dual form, which produces the
emotional contagion of the crime and the punitive demands of public opinion" (8-9).
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99
prosecution's insistence, inside the courtroom, that the sisters' brutal crime be met
with equally severe punishment (Dupre 84). Thus, read against itself, "Motifs"
implies that social sanctions against homosexuality not only produced Christine and
Lea's paranoid delirium through the workings of internalized homophobia, but also
stoked the fires of the community's cries for their punishment. As criminal "others"
who represent "primitive" aspects of the "civilized" psyche, the sisters are screens
onto which the bourgeoisie projects its worst fears about itself. So it is that in its
cries for vengeance the "civilized" French bourgeoisie sought to fend off the horrific
return of what it perceived to be its primitively provincial, voluptuous, and violent
self.
This treatment of social class exemplifies the tendency within late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century European medicine to view the psychical maladies of the
social classes asymmetrically. As George Chauncey notes,
[T]he medical profession grew out of the white middle class and reflected
its values and concerns in an extremely class-conscious manner; it
perceived not only non-Europeans but also America's own lower classes as
immoral. Doctors assumed that sexual license and sensuality characterized
the poor and working classes, that only the middle and upper classes had
'achieved' a sense of sexual propriety. Degeneration theory explained the
immorality of the poor-as well as their poverty— by asserting the
degeneration of the class as a whole. (135)
While these class asymmetries took on diverse forms in theories of "degeneration,"
the association of the lower classes with flawed heredity was a constant. Moreover,
noting that "[a] number of doctors saw hysteria among lower-class women as
originating in the sensuality believed to characterize their class," Caroll Smith-
Rosenberg points out that class prejudice extended to the work on hysteria that was
psychoanalysis' starting point (670). Freud's texts not only eroticize female domestic
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100
servants but also figure them as the site of a primitive, polymorphously perverse
sexuality suppressed in "civilized" society7 ^
The displacement at work in Lacan's analysis of the Papin affair recalls
Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement's work on the position of the household
servant in Freud's case studies. Using as their example the infidelities that take place
between Dora's father and the family maid in the "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case
of Hysteria," Cixous and Clement argue that the figure of the domestic servant in
Freud's case studies "is the repressed of the mistress of the house"; she "is always on
the side of eroticism," "the hole in the social cell," the disavowed working-class body
through which the exchanges of the bourgeois family romance inevitably pass.
Furthermore, she is always "eliminated" from the narrative for having transgressed
class boundaries in her sexual role (150)75 Similarly, the Papin sisters' murderous
rage was precipitated by the imminent possibility of their elimination from the
narrative: their dismissal from the Lancelin home. While Lacan leaves the psyches
of the Lancelin women unexplored, he implies that their maids may have been
predisposed to murder because they were the flawed spawn of the rural poor. He
thus figures the Papin sisters' actions as evidence of an essential difference between
the primitive, rural poor and Le Mans' civilized, bourgeois c o m m u n i t y . ^
74 xhe former point is made most famously by Helene Cixous and
Catherine Clement in La jeune nee and extended by Camhi in Prisoners of Gender:
the latter point, usually made apropos of Freud's Three Essays (57), is developed first
by Steven Marcus in his introduction to Three Essays (xxxix), and then by Sander
Gilman in Difference and Pathology (42-3).
75 Stallybrass and White similarly argue that in Freud's case studies "the
topography of desire . . . is traced out on the body of a paid servant" (163).
76. For related insight into the interrelationships between gender, psychiatry,
psychoanalysis, and social class at the fin-de-siecle and beginning of the twentieth
century, see Camhi, Prisoners of Gender, and Dean, The Self and its Pleasures.
Though Dean's book begins by invoking theories of degeneration and atavism, the
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101
The fact that psychoanalysis first gained widespread currency in the
European bourgeoisie of the fin de siecle and early twentieth century is especially
pertinent to the class displacement at work in Lacan's discussion of the sisters'
"larval" homosexuality. Michel Foucault's work on psychoanalytic discourse as a fin
de siecle "technology of sex" helps contextualize the work of Freud and Lacan
within the history of sexuality. According to Foucault, a "heterogeneous" set of
discourses, both medical and juridical, crystallized in the late-nineteenth-century
Western family and eroticized the human body in the service of capitalist social
imperatives. Yet eroticizing discourses were not "homogeneous at all levels of
society and in all social classes." Instead, the medical surveillance of sexuality first
arose in bourgeois and aristocratic milieus to preserve their health and purity (47, 92-
114, 120).
The surveillance of sexuality extended to the lower classes only later, yet
even then a different "strategy" was devised to control the working-class body.
While many bourgeois were urged to "alleviate the effects of repression" of their
oedipal conflicts by expressing "their incestuous desire in discourse" on their
psychoanalyst's couch, the working class was subjected to juridical surveillance
because their smaller quarters were said to encourage a dangerously incestuous
proximity between family members (129). Thus the proliferation of anxieties about
incest, rooted in the eugenic impulse to preserve the qualities of the bourgeois body,
branched out to the working class not through a medical discourse but through
juridical condemnation. The difference in strategy was important to maintain: while
the incestuous desires of bourgeois subjects were produced and constrained in the
privacy of the analyst's office, those of the working class were ferreted out— precisely
question of the primitive does not remain in focus. Camhi's dissertation, focused on
hysteria, mainly provides a detailed discussion of hysteria in domestic servants.
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because o/the hyperawareness cultivated by psychoanalysis— and placed on trial for
all to see and condemn. In the public realm of jurisprudence, the incestuous desire
with which bourgeois analysands were privately preoccupied was made to seem a
specifically working-class vice (121, 129-30).
The asymmetry of this configuration recalls the trial of the "maids of Le
Mans," specifically the anxieties attached to the possibility of their incestuous
relationship. Yet Lacan's reading of their crime confounds Foucault's distinction
between the psychoanalytic regulation of the bourgeoisie and the juridical regulation
of the working class: "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque" calls on psychoanalysis to
account for the sisters' motives, yet it insists that "to understand . . . is to condemn"
(9). With their psyches on trial in the pages of Minotaure and their murderous blows
illustrating the perils of incest, the Papin sisters become the working-class
embodiment of bourgeois anxieties surrounding sexuality in the family. Thus it is
significant that their chambre de bonne was located literally under their bourgeois
victims' roof, where the Freudian family romance was uncomfortably at home. For
bourgeois spectators, the sisters' mysterious chamber serves as the site of otherness
that provokes both fascination and anxiety— as the place, both comfortably distant
and disturbingly close, at which to pose and evade the unsettling question of their
own desires.
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Chapter 2
Repudiating the Lesbian Double of "Mad Love:" Andre Breton’s Nadja
Lacan's "Motifs du Crime Paranoiaque" first appeared in the avant-garde
journal Minotaure. a forum for art, literature, and criticism to which the surrealists
often contributed.^ "Motifs" was not Lacan's first contribution to Minotaure: his
thoughts on "Le Probleme du Style et la conception psychiatrique des formes
paranoiaques de l'experience" appeared in its debut issue and influenced Salvador
Dali's "paranoid-critical" method of painting.2 Thus, though Lacan himself was not a
surrealist, his study of the Papin sisters should be situated within the wider context of
their work: he shared with them an interest in psychoanalytic theories of the
unconscious that played out both in their friendships and in their collaboration on
Minotaure. Albert Skira, the journal's publisher, indicates that the collaborators' "aim
[in creating Minotaurel was to show the interrelationship between the conscious and
the unconscious, as well as to explore all areas of human sensibility." Skira's
description of Minotaure in psychoanalytic terms suggests that the review condenses
certain preoccupations of the early thirties, and that its varied contributions, each in its
own way, articulate a piece of the "latent" contents of their time.3 Lacan's 1933 article
1. Lacan's article is translated by Jon Anderson as "Motives of Paranoid
Crime."
2. Trans.: "The Problem of Style and the psychiatric conception of paranoid
forms of experience."
3. The same might be said of those journals, explicitly allied with surrealism,
that preceded it. While Minotaure did not officially begin as a surrealist publication
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104
is important in this context not only for its exploration of the way in which the
murderous Papin sisters may have been driven by unconscious motives, but also for
the way in which its argument symptomatizes larger cultural anxieties of the 193Q's.
In situating "Motifs" within the context of surrealism, it is important to
understand the differences between Lacan's more strictly Freudian take on
psychoanalysis and the surrealists' looser deployment of it. Jean Laplanche notes that
while surrealism appropriated Freud's theory of the dreamwork— the model in which
the dream is said to deploy visual images through the work of condensation and
displacement in order to accomplish an unconscious wish— it diverges from classical
psychoanalysis "[i]n its relation to the dream-object" (Laplanche 1974, iii). For
Freud, the dream is a prototype of the unconscious, a form of compromise through
which suppressed wishes can be expressed. For the surrealists, however, the dream
takes on the value of a "paradigm" for the synthesis of everything that is disconnected-
-even diametrically opposed— in conscious life (iv).4 Furthermore, as Elisabeth
Roudinesco notes, because Andre Breton came to psychoanalysis only after having
been trained as a classical psychiatrist, he brought to his reading of Freud an idea of
the unconscious not as "a structure organized topographically into agencies or
instances, but a psychical site conforming to those automatisms described by
psychologists, magnetizers, spiritualists, and occultists" tJacques Lacan & Co. 22). If
the young Lacan, as a follower of Freud, and the surrealists, as artists inspired in a
and only later evolved into one, earlier journals such as La Revolution Surrealiste and
Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution were created explicitly as surrealist organs.
See Nadeau for a history of these publications.
4. Thus the "passion" with which the surrealists valorize the dream-state, and
the way in which it allows for the repeated "simultaneous realization of contrary
desires" in which "the words are liberated from the thing, the things outside the grasp
of the words" (Laplanche 1974, iv-v).
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more general sense by the psychoanalysis of dreams, differ in the way they theorize
the unconscious, they nonetheless both use Freud to explore the conundrums posed by
psychosis and violently criminal women.
Yet if, as Hal Foster puts it, "the Oedipal conundrum might be taken to
structure the surrealist imaginary" much as it does the terms of psychoanalytic theory,
one must also bear in mind his warning that, as "representations" and not mere
"expressions" of male fantasies and Oedipal dramas, surrealist texts cannot simply be
seen as unmediated evidence of their authors' mental states— despite their frequent
claims to the contrary (25). Indeed, to the extent to which Lacan's account of the
Papin affair is itself a "representation" of "the Oedipal conundrum," it, too, should be
read as evidence neither of the "motives" of Christine and Lea Papin nor of the actual
phantasies of a psychoanalyst named "Lacan." What Lacan’ s essay and its
contemporary surrealist texts do demonstrate, however, is the constellation of
discourses about gender, sexuality, and madness that circulated between the wars, and
that, as a result of events such as the murders in Le Mans, condensed into claims that
had real political effects.
Furthermore, if one is to believe Sarane Alexandrian's claim that "[t]oute la
collection de Minotaure. par un accord saisissant entre le texte et l'image, exalte le reve
en mettant l'accent sur son materiau objectif, le desirable,” one must nonetheless be
suspicious of his omission of Lacan's "Motifs," for this elision leads him to leave the
vexed question of the relationship between normal subjectivity and insanity
unaddressed (203).5 While he tracks surrealism's early engagement with
5. Trans.: "the entire collection of Minotaure. by a striking accord between
text and image, exalts the dream by placing an accent in its objective material, the
desirable.”
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psychoanalytic and psychiatric categories of madness, he fails to distinguish between
the surrealist dream-state and psychotic delusion.6 Moreover, leaving unremarked
Freud's gendering of both the unconscious and madness, he does not clarify the way
in which sexual phantasies about Vamourfou and the "perversions" may appear in
surrealist texts as both desirable and frightening (Gauthier; Alexandrian 203).
Thinking through Alexandrian's logic but against his elisions, I contend that Lacan's
discussion of the Papin sisters raises to the surface the figure of the psychotic lesbian
as both "desirable" and threatening within the surrealist milieu of Minotaure
(Alexandrian 203).
I. L'Amour fou
Lacan was not the only writer to bring the "murderers of Le Mans" into focus
in surrealist forums. The May 15,1933 double issue of Surrealisme au service de la
revolution contains not only Rene Crevel's rave review of Lacan's thesis on Aimee,
but also a report by Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret on the murders in Le Mans7 The
final items in a series of reproductions of surrealist art and photography, a studio
photograph of Christine and Lea from before and a police photograph from after the
murders appear on the journal's back cover. The surrealists famously championed the
causes of two other female criminals, the left-wing assassin Germaine Berton and the
patricide Violette Nozieres, as avant-garde rebels against the stifling bourgeois order.
6. Trans.: "Surrealism and depth psychology."
7. Trans.: Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution.
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107
If, in the wider political sense to which I refer in my first chapter, the trial of
the "murderers of Le Mans" rendered them the social and sexual "others" of "civilized"
French society, surrealist discussion of their revolt was far more ambivalent. While
the surrealists were unified in championing the causes of women such as Nozieres and
Berton, whose criminality lay in their violent revolt against social structures, their
reaction to the Papin sisters and other presumed lesbians is less straightforward. If the
Papin sisters' crime was indeed "desirable" to a certain degree within the surrealist
milieu, one must ask at the same time what cultural anxieties about female sexuality in
general, and lesbianism in particular, are symptomatized by these texts' contrasting
fantasies about madness and women's revolt.
Because the surrealist movement focused on the realm of sexuality as the site
of revolution par excellence, Lacan and his surrealist friends approach the problem of
female criminality by examining the family as a potential site of social resistance. As
both an example of and a means of critiquing bourgeois ideologies of sexuality and
family, psychoanalytic theory was the perfect tool for surrealist intellectuals'
revolutionary aims. Xaviere Gauthier has discussed the way in which the surrealists'
emphasis on eroticism is designed as a revolution from within society— a
demonstration of an erotic potential repressed by, yet at the same time generated
through, the mandates of bourgeois morality. She writes that "[l]es surrealistes
alertent le bourgeois: c'est de sa vie, de son milieu, de l'interieur meme de sa morale
que sourd le venin d'une 'inquietante etrangete' et d'une mouvante perversion, car ils
affirment, apres Freud, le caractere sexuel des actes et des situations, des objets
meme" (26).^
8. Trans.: "the surrealists alert the bourgeois: it's from within his life, within
his milieu, even from within the interior of his morality that the poison of an
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108
Yet if Gauthier's pronouncement suggests that the surrealists succeed where
Lacan fails in explicitly theorizing the relationship between sexual and social
transgression-a claim which itself credits the movement with a more sweeping
success than actually is the case— their texts nonetheless are marked by the same
phallogocentric biases as "Motifs." Feminist literary critics and art historians have
long argued that the ''ecriture automatique"^ through which surrealist texts claim to tap
the unconscious frequently results in the valorizing display of misogynist phantasies.
Furthermore, many surrealist texts articulate an ambivalent fascination with madness
and female revolt through the relationship between a passionate male narrator and an
enigmatic female figure. As Rudolf Kuenzli states, many texts by male surrealists
represent "woman . . . as a projection" of men's "own dreams of femininity"; she
serves as the site upon which to "encode male dreams," rather than as a subject with
dreams and phantasies of her own (18-19). According to Kuenzli, male phantasies are
writ large in surrealist texts that claim to be ecriture automatique, the uninhibited
articulation of dreams or the unconscious (18).10
uncanniness and of a shifting perversion wells up, because they affirm, following
Freud, the sexual character of acts and situations, even of objects."
9. Trans.: "automatic writing." Widely used within the surrealist movement,
"ecriture automatique" is formally theorized by Andre Breton in Les manifestes du
surrealisme.
10. Xaviere Gauthier's Surrealisme et Sexualite is a classic feminist survey of
sexuality in the movement. A 1977 Oblique, entitled La Femme Surrealiste. includes
articles on the mainstream surrealists' misogyny along with reassessments of the work
of undervalued women surrealists. Vol. 18 of die journal Dada/Surrealism includes
more recent essays on women surrealists in addition to critical surveys by Gwen
Raaberg, Mary Ann Caws, and Rudolf Kuenzli. While the issue of whether or not the
writings of women surrealists (both those in the movement's French beginnings and in
its later stages) resist the larger movement's misogynist tendencies has been an
important debate amongst many scholars, addressing it is beyond the scope of this
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"Woman" is figured in a similar manner in many texts on Vamourfou ("mad
love"), the characteristic surrealist quest for a quasi-insane obliteration of the self in an
idealistic merger with the beloved. Exploring the unconscious through identification
with madness and "the feminine," narratives of Vamourfou turn on the desire of a man
who reduces his beloved women to "un objet de contemplation et de consommation"
while denying her own desire (Laplanche 1971, 13).H This narrative movement is
expressed in the very theory of Vamourfou. As Xaviere Gauthier points out, Breton's
formulation of Vamourfou derives from the Platonic myth of primal androgyny,
which claims that each person has a unique counterpart, an other half from whom he
was split by an angry god. As the myth goes, these two halves are driven by a sense
of nostalgia to find one another again and unite in love. 12 As Gauthier notes, the
surrealists claim that this ideal couple unites in Vamourfou:
Le delire de fusion gagne ainsi de toutes parts: la nature disparait pour
devenir la femme; la femme perd son individualite pour se faire nature;
l'homme est lui-meme depossede de sa personnalite: il se perd dans la nature
pour atteindre la femme, il s'unit avec la femme pour aller vers la nature. 13
(139)
L'amour fou thus culminates in a merger that reproduces many continental surrealists'
refusal to recognize women's agency as a sexual subject. Its revolutionary
chapter. At stake here instead is the way in which male surrealists' representations of
lesbianism may or may not perpetuate male phantasies of female sexuality.
11. Trans.: "an object of contemplation and consumption."
12. Breton is not unique among the surrealists in his heterosexist take on the
myth of primordial androgyny; Albert Beguin fleshes out the same argument from a
mythological perspective in Minotaure 11.
13. Trans.: "The delirium of fusion is a victory for all sides: nature
disappears to become woman; woman loses her individuality to make herself into
nature; man himself is dispossessed of his personality: he loses himself in nature to
come to the level of woman, he unites with woman to go towards nature."
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transformation— the idealized loss of subjectivity in the other— is, by definition,
available only to men. Moreover, Robert Benayoun makes it clear that Vamourfou
effects first and foremost the abolition of the subjectivity of a heterosexual male, for
whom "l'amour permet. . . un achevement du monde au travers de la femme, seul etre
capable de transformer l'acte d'amour en une creation" (90). 14 As Kuenzli points out,
the surrealist quest for Vamourfou reflects psychoanalysis' problematic assumption
that woman is located closer than man to the unconscious (19). On one hand, male
surrealists place woman on a pedestal by equating her with a potentially liberatory
unconscious; on the other, they give her no voice in articulating the terms of her own
"liberation," and leave her confined to the space of the "primitive."
Precisely because it involves identification with traditional notions of "the
feminine" and "the primitive," Vamourfou is fraught with anxiety for the male lover.
According to Benayoun, the two halves of the severed couple of Plato's myth reunite
during Vamourfou, reliving a primal androgyny in which each sex takes on the
characteristics of the other:
chacun des deux predestines prend conscience dans 1'autre de son double
cache, l'homme realisant son double feminin, la femme assumant son double
masculin; comment chacun, reconstituant dans l’ amour l’ Androgyne
primordial, retrouve dans 1 ’ autre cette moitie d'etre dont il a ete separe au
commencement des temps, et qui lui rendra la perception de la totalite.15 (91)
14. Trans.: The Erotics of Surrealism. "[Ljove permits . . . an achievement
of the world through woman, the only being capable for transforming the act of love
into a creation."
15. Trans.: "each of the two predestined ones becomes conscious in the other
of his hidden double, man realizing his female double, woman assuming her
masculine double; how each, reconstituting primordial Androgyny in love, refinds in
the other that half of being from which he had been separated at the beginning of time,
and who will give him the perception of totality."
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I ll
"Realizing his female double" in Vamourfou, the male subject comes to identify with
her, seeing in her a reflection of himself. However, this identification involves the
radical obliteration of his personality, a shattering of subjectivity. Xaviere Gauthier
implies that this shattering feminine identification produces, in the man, an unbounded
narcissism often imputed to women:
Le melange heureux, qui, s'il a meme odeur et meme saveur, risque fort
d'etre inodore et insipide, forme dans la fusion une masse assez informe:
l'Autre semble bien devenu le Meme. Le couple est tellement uni qu'on voit
mal comment pourrait s'y glisser quelque mouvement d'echange, don ou
conquete. Le narcissisme trouve ici sa place. Mais le rapport a autrui est
annihile et le desir s'abolit dans son objet.16 (76-77)
Gauthier further argues that the undifferentiated quality of Vamourfou is the result of
"a regressive relationship" (77). While she notes that this regression takes the lover
back to the fuzzy boundaries present in the "relationship of the child to its mother," her
description also is strikingly similar to another case of purported infantilism we already
have encountered: that of the Papin sisters (77). In dissolving the boundary between
subject and object, Vamourfou places the surrealist and his beloved in a relationship
whose narcissistic structure is similar to the one Lacan claims to have imprisoned
Christine and Lea. With all possibilities of intersubjective exchange obliterated, the
lover's relationship to the other is transformed into an identical reflection of "the
same," as in a hall of mirrors (77). Derived from psychoanalytic accounts of feminine
narcissism, this boundless, reflective world is characteristically feminine— and
implicitly lesbian.
16. Trans.: "The happy mixture, which, if it has the same odor and flavor, is
at serious risk of being odorless and insipid, forms through fusion a formless enough
mass: the Other very well seems to have become the Same. The couple is so united
that one could hardly imagine any movement of exchange, gift, or conquest to pass
within it. Narcissism finds its place here. But the relationship to otherness is
annihilated and desire abolishes itself in its object."
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While surrealist texts consistently explore male protagonists' identification with
"the feminine," they only rarely consider the opposite possibility inherent in the
structure of Vamourfou— women's appropriation of the phallus. Foreclosing
discussion of "female masculinity" from the outset, most surrealist texts show a
willingness briefly to consider divesting man of phallic privilege but an unwillingness
to allow for what Judith Butler calls the "transfer" of the phallus between partners
(Butler, "Lesbian Phallus," Bodies That Matter) J 2 In the same manner that Butler
proves Lacan's writings to both open up and foreclose the possibility of the
transferable phallus, the surrealists both open up, in theory, and deny, in practice, that
same subversive possibility. Never fulfilling the promise of mutual gender crossing
suggested by Benayoun, Vamourfou never quite reaches its goal of androgyny.
Instead, it entails a relationship between a feminized man and an ideal of
"woman" he has built on the edifice of his own narcissism (91). Within the virtual
reality of his amour fou, the surrealist lover implicitly is equated with the female
psychotic— she whose "larval" homosexuality Lacan claims to be the key to her
narcissistic illness (28). However, the surrealist subject of Vamourfou seeks a
madness different from that of Christine Papin, whose cross over to masculinity was,
for Lacan, as symptomatic of psychosis as was her "feminine" narcissism. The
surrealist's amour fou involves instead a doubling of femininity-a double idealization
of "Woman," dressed in the robes of female same-sex desire.
The surrealist notion of Vamourfou thus figures desire between women as a
trope available to, yet incapable of challenging, heterosexual desire. While Vamour
fou involves a merger that abolishes difference through the simultaneous reversal of
12. For general discussion of possible modes of "female masculinity," see
Judith Halberstam's "F2M" and Female Masculinity.
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113
both partners' gender, identifies the male lover with "the feminine," and places him in
a relationship to his beloved that shows marked similarities with psychoanalytic
constructions of lesbianism, the passionate narrative of Vamourfou is, through its
very phallogocentric and heterosexist premises, foreclosed to same-sex couples. As
Gauthier notes, Breton's inflection of Plato's myth ignores two variants in which the
priginary couples were of the same sex (71-73). Furthermore, his exalted amour fou
is specifically coded as heterosexual, as the abolition of sexual difference through the
union of two opposites. Benayoun's account reproduces this bias in explicitly phallic
terms by portraying the sexual unity found in Vamourfou as a result of surmounting
"the feeling of possession" (90). He thereby stages a phallogocentric form of
heterosexuality as essential to the couple's successful union in Vamourfou— as an
arrangement that initially must be present in order for one to achieve its desired
sublation. To deny traditional notions of heterosexuality and femininity as premises
would be to refuse to set up the dialectical system through which Vamourfou operates
and, indeed, would be to abolish it altogether.
If, as Susan Rubin Suleiman aptly points out, the surrealists often portray
femininity as both exalted and threatening, I argue that it is because of the dual nature
of the sexual identifications involved in Vamour fou.. The male lover initially is
positioned as the opposite of his female partner, yet, through the identification
involved in submitting to his passion, experiences a shattering of subjectivity that is
frighteningly similar to the femininity attributed to his partner— a status associated with
being an object, with being deprived of the ability to construct one's own desires. One
might read the doubling between genders involved in Vamour fou as an example of
what Freud famously calls "The Uncanny"— an effect Hal Foster finds in many
surrealist texts. Freud argues that repression transforms the mind's archaic contents
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114
into "morbid anxiety" attached to the figure of a double. The subject then perceives,
vis-a-vis the double, something which he himself had repressed and which,
consequently, he can perceive only 'uncannily' from without (Foster 40-47). Such an
anxiety characterizes Vamourfou: the male subject recognizes and identifies with his
female double, perceiving in her both his own castration and those arguably universal
qualities of his early years that, by adulthood, have come to be identified with "the
feminine." The return of those familiar childhood perceptions~not only the famously
"uncanny" appearance of the mother’ s genitals to her son (an appearance he only can
cast in terms of his own castration, as "lack"), but also the son’ s own narcissistic lack
of differentiation from the mother— appears to the male subject as a state threateningly
akin to his own unmanning, as threateningly akin to that psychosis to which woman,
in psychoanalytic theory, herself is "condemned" (Irigaray, Speculum of the Other
Woman. 55). ^ Indeed, Foster asserts that "surrealism oscillates between these two
uncanny fantasies of maternal plenitude and paternal punishment, between the dream
of a space-time before bodily separation and psychical loss and the trauma of such
events" (25). As a result, anxieties attending identification with "the feminine" are
inherent in the structure of Vamourfou, and become overwhelming precisely at that
castrative moment at which the phallic model of male heterosexuality disappears. The
male subject of Vamourfou retreats back to a stance of phallic mastery upon reaching
that point— identified with "femininity," associated with the unconscious, and linked to
lesbianism— that stymies his sexual vocabulary and threatens psychosis.
18. With special regards to castration, Irigaray provides an extended critique
of the phallogocentric positing of the female sex organs as "lack" in "Une 'cause'
encore: la castration" in Speculum de l'autre femme. 51-64.
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115
II. "Une emotion violente et indefinissible"
Lesbianism exemplifies a notion of "the feminine" that surrealist texts at times
exalt and at other times figure as threatening. Benayoun's L'Erotique du Surrealisme
presents one symptom of this ambivalence by placing a post-crime photograph of the
disheveled Papin sisters in the margins of its chapter on Vamourfou. The photo,
which serves as an index of the delirium to which the surrealists aspire, should be
interpreted in the context of the sexual politics of Vamourfou. The title for this
chapter, "The delirium of absolute presence," sexualizes delirium and refers back to
the way in which male surrealists pursued "absolute presence" through the
heterosexual union of two opposites into an androgynous whole. Strikingly,
however, there is no commentary on the Papin sisters in the body of Benayoun's text;
there is only a caption underneath the photo, reproduced fromEluard and Peret's
account of the Papin affair. Romanticizing the sisters as "[sjprung up armed with a
song of Maldoror," the caption indexes their criminal transgressiveness, yet does not
specify the social norms they have violated. Using a combination of text and image to
parallel the rhetoric of Lacan's "Motifs," Benayoun figures the Papins as possessed by
a mysterious delirium. Yet in contrast to Lacan, Benayoun implicitly praises, rather
than condemns, the criminal resolution of their delirium by positioning it as the
epitome of the surrealist quest for Vamourfou. In a gesture that is odd in the context
of a study of surrealist erotics, he substitutes the criminal passion of the Papin sisters
for sexual passion, and thereby momentarily effaces the link between sexuality and
delirium whose crucial role in the surrealist quest for Vamour fou is his subject
elsewhere. In suppressing consideration of the role of sexual passion in the "Papin
Affair," Benayoun finally refuses to consider the way in which I 'amour fou, through
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116
its desire to sublate the male sexual position, leads to a state of undifferentiation that
parallels psychoanalysis'account of lesbianism.
Without naming lesbianism, many surrealist texts articulate a vision, common
to phallogocentric accounts of female same-sex desire, of feminine sexuality as a
transgressive yet disturbing "manque." For example, in his classic L'Histoire du
surrealisme. Maurice Nadeau claims that many people felt "une emotion violente et
indefinissible, en rapport sans doute avec des desirs sexuels inconscients," upon
seeing a sculpture by Giacometti (151).*9 Nadeau states that the sculpture can be
described as
formee de deux solides: l'un en forme de qu artier d'orange, avec deux plans
superieurs se coupant en une arete prononcee, l'autre comme une boule
fendue a sa base, et suspendue au-dessus du premier par un fil. Celle boule
est done mobile, et se deplace au-dessus du solide inferieur de faqon que
l'arete de celui-ci soit en contact avec la base fendue de l'autre. Ce contact
n'est pas une penetration. Tous ceux qui ont vu fonctionner cet objet ont
eprouve une emotion violente et indefinissible, en rapport sans doute avec
des desirs sexuels inconscients. Cette emotion ne ressemblait en rien d une
satisfaction, mais bien plutot a un agacement, comme celui que donne
l'irritanteperceptiond'unmanque™ (150-151)
19. Trans.: The History of Surrealism: "a violent and indefinable emotion,
doubtless having some relation with unconscious sexual desires" (188). Created in
1930-31, La boule suspendue was exhibited in May of 1936 in Paris as part of the
Exposition Surrealiste d'Ob jets at Galerie Charles Ratton; a photograph of its display
in this exhibition can be found in William Rubin, 142. While more widely known for
the later stages of his work, Giacometti was part of the surrealist movement-aligned in
particular with Georges Bataille's dissident Documents group— from the winter of
1929/1930 until 1935, at which point he was officially expelled. While the impact of
surrealism on Giacometti's work dates from 1928, he later disowned the sculptures
from his surrealist phase (Rubin 115, 210).
20. Trans.: "consisting of two solids: one in the shape of a quarter of an
orange resting on its rind, the two upper planes forming a sharp ridge, the other solid a
sphere split at its base and suspended by a thread over the first. This sphere was
therefore mobile and swung over the lower solid so that the latter's ridge was in
contact with the split base of the sphere. This contact was not a penetration. Now,
everyone who has seen this object function has felt a violent and indefinable emotion,
doubtless having some relation with unconscious sexual desires. This emotion has
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117
While one certainly cannot claim to know the desires of any of the concerned parties—
all the more so because they presumably are "unconscious"-one nonetheless can read
in Nadeau's rhetoric the traces of those sociosexual anxieties that animate surrealist
discourse. Sarane Alexandrian has emphasized the way in which La Boule suspendue
serves as a prototype for "un type d'objet se rapportant a un fantasme, et exterioiisant
un conflit instinctuel latent" (192).21 Nadeau's account of reactions to the sculpture
provides some clue as to the nature of those conflicts, as well as perpetuates them: he
both constructs a picture of surrealism as governed by specific male phantasies, and
uncritically affirms it by universalizing his own response into a claim about the
reaction of "everyone" to the sculpture (History 188). In another context, one might
well ask whether or not all spectators would share this irritation, and, if not, what
other effects it might elicit. But more to the point here is the way in which La boule
suspendue. and Nadeau's version of the way in which it violently disturbs yet also
reinstates certain male phantasies, figures recurring surrealist phantasies of feminine
sexuality as a disturbing "lack."
Without any apparent reference to lesbianism, or indeed to any other literal
object, Nadeau's description of Giacometti's La boule suspendue strikingly parallels
the stock heterosexual male construction of what is most titillating— but also most
threatening— about women's, especially lesbians' sexuality: the possibility of sexual
pleasure without the p h a llu s .2 2 Nadeau identifies that possibility with Giacometti's
nothing to do with satisfaction, rather with irritation, the kind produced by the
disturbing perception of a lack” (188).
21. Trans.: "a type of object relating to fantasy, and exteriorizing a latent
instinctual conflict."
22. While L'Histoire du surrealisme cites L'heure des traces as the name of
the sculpture in question, Nadeau's description clearly invokes Giacometti's La boule
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118
sculpture, which he claims to have produced "a lack" as its effect (188). Furthermore,
by presenting the presumably male spectators' reactions to the sculpture in the course
of his description, he likewise identifies them with its figuration of non-phallic
sexuality. Indeed, in that Giacometti's sculpture paradoxically makes "lack" visible
for these surrealist spectators, it provokes the enactment of those identifications with
"the feminine" involved in the radical and symbolically castrating obliteration of male
subjectivity they both desire and fear as male subjects of Vamourfou. Moreover, by
noting that the sculpture's effect on the emotions is duplicated in similar objects by
Breton, Man Ray, and Oscar Dominguez, Nadeau also associates the wider field of
surrealist objects with the disturbing possibility of non-phallic pleasure.
Yet if Nadeau's description of these surrealist objects claims a certain artistic
and spectatorial identification with "lack" as apparently non-phallic sexuality, the
anxious, fractured quality of that identification emerges most strongly in his
description of the spectator's identification as entailing a "violent" emotion, an
"irritation" stemming from "unconscious sexual desires" (188). By figuring the
"violent and indefinable emotion," the "irritation" produced by the sculpture's contact
that was "not a penetration" but instead the invocation of "a lack," Nadeau's
discussion of Giacometti suggests surrealism to be characterized by an anxious and
repeatedly unsuccessful attempt to move beyond the impasse produced through its
own phallogocentric structuring of desire— indeed, by a man's initial symbolic
castration, or relinquishment of phallic privilege, followed by his repossession of the
phallus in order to ward of its appropriation by women (188). Throughout Nadeau's
suspendue instead of the former sculpture. In her essay on Giacometti, Rosalind
Krauss discusses Nadeau's text as an analysis of La boule suspendue and, presenting
pictures of both sculptures, argues that they both are machines that operate in a
Bataillian vein.
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description, the construction of female sexuality as "lack" remains fixed, serving as the
site of identification and repudiation for male spectators who appear as both desiring
and fearing female sexuality as the castrative opposite of their own.
The rhetoric of Nadeau's passage suggests that the idea of "lack" works to
contain the very same revolution the surrealists claim to desire. One wonders whether
the vision of the sculpture as "lack," or castration, is a function of those very
spectators La boule suspendue is said to taunt— if the vicious cycle of male "irritation"
might be determined not by some essential representation of "lack" provided by the
sculpture, but instead by its surrealist spectators' investment in gender binaries, by
their overdetermined fear of and desire for identification with "the feminine," by those
associations triggered, though not simply represented, by Giacometti's sculpture.
Along these lines, Jacqueline Rose asserts that psychoanalytic metaphors of visual
representation suggest that "sexuality lies less in the content of what is seen than in the
subjectivity of the viewer," yet she also notes that "[t]he relationship between viewer
and scene is always one of fracture, partial identification, pleasure and distrust" (227).
So it is in Nadeau's account of surrealist spectatorship of La boule suspendue: in the
space of one sentence, the critic displaces the origin of "irritation" from the spectator
onto the sculpture. First, he identifies the irritation that obtains in the movement of
proximate surfaces with the irritation of the male spectator, suggesting that the sense of
"lack" might be a function of the spectator's own perceptual lens, his own fear of
castration; then, he collapses both of them into the claim that La boule suspendue itself
suggests "a lack," thereby casting the sculpture as provocateur and the spectators as its
victims. Vacillating between a stance of phallic mastery and a falsely liberatory
identification with "the feminine" qua "lack," the surrealist spectator perceives La
boule suspendue through an ongoing, projective cycle of visual and sexual "irritation."
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Indeed, as feminist critics long have pointed out, to figure female sexuality as
"lack" is to uphold the poles of phallogocentrism by presenting it only in
contradistinction to male presence, an unacknowledged position of mastery.23 This is
so even when male identification with "the feminine" is positioned as the site of
transgression, of subversion of phallogocentrism.24 Out of the sculpture's recursive
assault on and reinstatement of the phallogocentric structure of desire comes the
"violent and indefinable emotion" that Nadeau attaches to surrealist objects (188).
Nadeau suggests that for the male spectator, surrealist objects serve as sites both of
identification and repudiation, as a means both to articulate a desire for sexual
revolution and to contain the threat of castration that desire entails— as objects that
allow him to phantasmatically undermine his stance of mastery without allowing his
podium to crumble.
In her reading of the same passage from L'Histoire du Surrealisme in an essay
on Giacometti, Rosalind Krauss similarly argues that the sculpture provokes anxiety
by multiply invoking the phallus through a cutting motion. Krauss attributes the
"violent emotion" felt by Nadeau and his surrealist friends at the sight of La boule
suspendue to the sculpture's "explicitly sadistic" implications (Nadeau 188; Krauss,
"Giacometti," 512). Emphasizing the castrative effect of the sculpture, she points out
that "the sliding action that visibly relates the sculpture’ s grooved sphere to its wedge-
shaped partner not only suggests the act of caressing but that of cutting" (512). Yet
this account reproduces the phallogocentrism of the surrealist texts themselves,
23. See Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme.
24. Tania Modleski makes this point forcefully throughout Feminism Without
Women, as does Alice Jardine in Gvnesis.
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presenting the frustration of heterosexuality— specifically, male-oriented phallic
sexuality— as the sculpture's referent. She privileges the phallus in her account of the
sculpture as "an apparatus for the disconnection of the sexes, the nonfulfillment of
desire": she argues that "[t]he wedge, acted upon by the ball, is in one reading its
feminine partner; in another, distended and sharp, it is the phallic instrument of
aggression against the ball's vulnerable roundness" (512). Krauss' reading also
presents a striking instance of what Luce Irigaray calls "hom(m)osexuality:" it stages a
mise-en-abime of the phallus by following up her discussion of heterosexuality with a
nod towards male homosexuality (Speculum of the Other Woman 98). Krauss argues
that to reference a "third substitute for the phallus," La boule suspendue invokes a
violent Mexican ball game whose use of the buttocks "as the principal instrument of
play" has a (decidedly male) "homoerotic overtone" (512). However, in raising the
possibility that it might produce homoerotic effects, she nonetheless neglects the way
in which the sculpture also figures the violent irritation of "a lack" by invoking a form
of sexual pleasure most often associated with lesbianism in the phallogocentric
imagination (Krauss 512; Nadeau 188). While Nadeau's discussion of Giacometti's
sculpture suggests the typical male phantasy of impotent lesbian caresses, Krauss'
essay, on the other hand, presents Giacometti's sculpture as charging those caresses
with a dangerously phallic potency— as representing lesbianism as violently articulated
male homosexuality. If Krauss' reading of La boule suspendue itself mimes an
imagined viewer's response to the sculpture by circulating "through a constantly
shifting theater of relationships, cycling through a metaphoric statement of
heterosexual connection into the domains of transgressive sexuality— masturbatory,
homosexual, sadistic-and back again" in order to break down the "distinction between
what is properly masculine and what is properly feminine," the described reaction
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focuses only on displacements of male sexuality (513). Even though "the feminine"
appears in Krauss' analysis (as the partner of a phallic "masculinity"), she discusses
only the displacement of phallic heterosexuality. Male homosexuality is significant
only as a vehicle for transgressing the demands of phallic heterosexuality, and lesbian
sexuality either does not appear at all (not even in the guise of lesbian 'pretenders' to
the phallus), or can be said to do so only in the guise of male homosexuality. Indeed,
she suppresses any consideration of the "perception of a lack" to which Nadeau has
pointed as the source of spectatorial anxiety (188).
Krauss' revised discussion of La boule suspendue in The Optical Unconscious
would seem to be an improvement because it corrects her earlier account's foreclosure
of lesbianism. She acknowledges the way in which the wedge, apparently phallic
through its cutting motion, flips "into an unmistakable image of the genitality of the
woman" through its contact "as a labial surface" stroked by the ball. The ball itself is
both coded as a feminine wound and described as the wedge's "active, possessing
partner"; the sculpture's overall effect is to stage a performance of repeated alterations
in which "identities multiply" (166). Her refusal to call the sphere's activity
"masculine," a move which would have followed well-established modes of feminist
analysis, helpfully dislodges the phallogocentric logic through which the earlier essay
links the sculpture only to male homosexuality. Her formation even goes beyond
Butler's, which leaves open the question of whether or not displacements and
reappropriations of the phallic signifier might eventually lead to its abandonment.
Thus the new essay, at least in theory, suggests that La boule suspendue is a sculpture
through which the traditional terms of sexual identity, to borrow the words of Hal
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123
Foster, "become unfixed," and thereby open up a space from which one can begin to
consider sexuality without centering on the phallus (92).25
Krauss' dramatic reversal of her earlier reading of La boule suspendue is
instructive for our attempt to trace surrealism's deployment of lesbianism, in that her
two quite different critical responses parallel the very contradiction through which
surrealist texts draw female same-sex desire as both desirable and threatening. In
moving from the "Giacometti" essay's conservative retrenchment of phallogocentrism
to the later reading's more progressive, self-consciously avant-garde celebration of
subversions of gender identity, Krauss' readings move from an initial, uncritical mime
of surrealist phallogocentrism to an embrace of that stance's arguably more radical
(though by now somewhat overtheorized) opposite, the attempt to think feminine and
"queer" sexuality through a logic not centered on, but also not simply in opposition to,
the phallus. And if the surrealists' desire for a new sexual positioning requires
lesbianism as a trope devoid of the signification of the phallus, a construction that
limits lesbian sexuality to those modalities that can be defined only over and against
male phallicism, then that surrealist desire symptomatically elides the way in which
certain lesbian sexualities might be constructed through the appropriation of what
Butler calls a "transferable" phallus ("Lesbian Phallus"). This "transferability" of the
25. Krauss' slide from her explicit description, in the earlier essay, of the
ball's movement as phallic to her claim, in The Optical Unconscious, that it is "active"
and "possessing," also signals the exhaustion of contemporary feminist debates about
gendered binarisms. On one hand, her choice of "active" and "possessing," instead of
"masculine," hints that the sculpture undermines the binary oppositions that would
associate masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity— indeed, her reading
suggests that those oppositions may have been impostors all along. At the same time,
however, a juxtaposition of Krauss' earlier and later readings of the sculpture suggests
that to make such a claim sometimes can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: in reading such
an antirepresentational object as La boule suspendue as an allegory for the forming and
unraveling of gender and of sexual identity, one imposes on it the same set of symbols
that one then offers up as evidence for critique.
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phallus is precisely the threat that the ostensibly subversive surrealist male effectively
contains in his eventual retreat to a stance of phallic mastery: the possibility that,
beyond his control, the idea of lesbianism might take on a discursive life of its own,
becoming a means of rearticulating and restructuring the terms of women's desire
rather than a fixed trope for facilitating the displacement of bourgeois masculinity.
Taken together, Nadeau and Krauss suggest the contours of the anxiety about
gender and sexuality performed by surrealist texts and sculptures. While Krauss'
accounts point to, and implicitly celebrate, the way in which the sculpture invokes and
at the same time displaces the phallus as the privileged means of structuring sexual
relationships, Nadeau's reading insists upon the terrors of the sculpture's assault upon
the phallus by figuring its radical, implicitly castrative absence, "lack." Yet if the
suggestion of lesbianism within surrealist texts raises the simultaneously desirable and
threatening possibility of the displacement of masculinist models of sexuality, it does
so in two ways that, because of the demands of the circular logic which the sculpture
unravels, are each other's opposites. On one hand, the sculpture points to the way in
which sexuality might come to be conceived without reference to the phallus-to the
way in which the oscillating ball and fixed wedge suggest the caressing of surfaces
instead of their penetration. On the other hand, it inscribes the seemingly gentle
motion of the caress with a unexpected charge, with a violent potential that is both an
act of castration and of reappropriation of the phallus. Indeed, it suggests that,
regardless of the sex of the person doing the constructing, the apparently utopian,
gynocentric world of caresses is a construction more marked by the logic of the
phallus than some might think. If one lays these readings of La boule suspendue atop
one another while keeping in mind Nadeau's description of the (implicitly male)
spectator's "irritating perception of a lack," what results is a picture of the convulsive
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125
pain of phallogocentric models of sexual identity not only, as Foster would have it,
being "unfixed," but also, as the phallic charge of the caress would suggest, being
brought back into a certain order nonetheless (188; 92).
If Giacometti's sculpture points to a possibility within surrealism for the
displacement of phallic models of gender and sexuality, it only rarely is fulfilled
(Foster 92). Moreover, the "lesbianism" suggested in surrealist texts is constructed
along the lines of male phantasy: it is presented only through those cliches that draw it
in contradistinction to phallogocentric male sexuality, and is deployed in the service of
either affirming or refiguring the terms of men's experience. Even Investigating Sex,
a compilation of texts from surrealist journals in which various intellectuals respond
frankly to a series of questions about sexuality, does not break the movement's phallic
mold-despite critics' claims to its subversiveness. In the "Ninth Session" of these
discussions, several respondents indicate that sex between women could be very
appealing if a male partner could participate as well (131-2). And when participants
are asked to characterize sexual relations between women, descriptions of "circular
erotic relations" (Bauer) and such activities as "mutual masturbation," "kissing"
(Eluard), "cunnilingus," and "caressing the breasts" (Thirion) predominate (132).
These characterizations draw lesbian sexuality in contradistinction to phallic sexuality,
thereby insisting on traditional arrangements of sexual difference.
Paul Eluard and Victor Mayer provide a different kind of response, one that
references the prototypical phallic lesbian of Freud's "Psychogenesis of a Case of
Homosexuality in a Woman." Eluard confesses to a "hatred" of so-called "'male'
lesbians," and a contrasting titillation by, or "weakness for lesbians who remain
women"; likewise, Mayer claims to "loathe lesbians who want to play a male role" but
to be excited by the others (131). While similar to the concept of I'amourfou in their
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phallogocentrism, these attitudes differ from it in representing lesbianism as phallic-
and it is this phallicized woman, not the feminine lesbian, whom these two statements
mark as a threat, indeed as a non-woman. The lack of any descriptions of penetrative
lesbian behavior in the surrealists' "researches" is conditioned by the threat that the so-
called phallic lesbian, that herald of phallic "transferability," would pose to the position
of the male spectator vis-a-vis the encounter— whether that position be as an active and
physical participant, spectator, or phantasizer (Butler, "Lesbian Phallus"). Though
Dawn Ades claims that these collected researches demonstrate the complexity of the
surrealist group’ s responses to early twentieth-century medical debates, they only
position lesbianism differently than do texts on Vamour fou by making their
phallogocentric logic explicit, rather than implicit: lesbians only are acceptable to the
extent to which they do not usurp men's privileged possession of the phallus (186).
Investigating Sex presents a very limited range of opinions about lesbianism,
providing evidence of some surrealists' tolerance only of those women who do not
threaten the claims of the phallogocentric male.
III. "Sorties tout armees d'un chant de Maldoror"
Strikingly different, however, is a brief text in which Paul Eluard and
Benjamin Peret champion the cause of the Papin sisters. Their untitled report on the
'murderers of Le Mans' appears in a 1933 issue of Surrealisme au service de la
revolution, which, on its final page, reproduces photographs of the Papin sisters
before and after the crime. Importantly, Eluard and Peret's report hints at the possible
lesbianism Benayoun's critical text occludes in its reproduction of the same photos.
The two surrealists' discussion of the trial is printed directly above a drawing by Rene
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Magritte of a sexually transgressive nun, entitled the Vierge retroussee. Winking
beneath a halo, the robes of this "virgin" are pushed back to expose a pair of gartered
black stockings and a provocative pair of pumps, indexing both her sexual
transgressiveness in general, and her residence within a homoerotically charged
convent environment more specifically. In a less ambiguously approving manner than
most surrealist texts, the mutual appearance of the writers' report and Magritte's
drawing in SSR constructs lesbianism as promising revolt against the
heteropatriarchal, bourgeois order. Sliding between social and sexual transgression,
the combination of Magritte's drawing of the sexy nun with Eluard and Peret's report
on the Papin sisters-themselves raised in a Catholic school— signals the way in which
lesbianism serves as an ideal sign of the revolt that the larger surrealist movement
claims to champion-indeed, claims to desire. Moreover, the brief report in SSR
suggests the extent to which the kind of lesbianism attributed to the Papin sisters-
stereotypically phallic and violent, usually portrayed as threatening— at times takes on a
positive value when conjured up in the service of surrealism's primary social and
erotic goal: the obliteration of the bourgeoisie.
Eluard and Peret's text slides from the social to the sexual: it begins with a
sympathetic characterization of the maids' austere convent upbringing and exacting
employment in the Lancelin home, and finishes with a sexually charged account of
their eventual murderous reaction to oppression. The text implies that the Lancelins'
cruelty provided those grapes of "wrath" whose fermentation would concentrate its
flavor into the wine of "hatred," that very bourgeois beverage which the Papin sisters
gifted back to their employers on the evening of the murders (Eluard and Peret 28).
Christopher Lane notes that in combination with Magritte's drawing of the winking
nun, Eluard and Peret's article makes it clear, without explicitly saying so, that "the
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sisters . . . slept together:" with the phase "[l]a foudre etait tombee," the surrealists'
text deploys a thunderbolt as metaphor, resonating with the colloquial expression for
violently gripping love at first sight, "coup de foudre" (Lane 44; Eluard and Peret 28;
Lane 44). Yet more importantly, the passage presents the sisters' lesbianism as the
unifying result of their crime by slyly hinting, with "la foudre etait tombee," that the
murders were the culmination at once of the sisters' paired delirium (its final act being
the metaphorical clap of thunder) and their sexual bonds to one another. This suggests
that Vamour fou, understood as the absolute and binding submission of lover to
beloved, shares many qualities with "coup de foudre"— and is perhaps closer to delire a
deux than one would like to believe.
The more literal sense of "foudre" likens the maids' sexuality to a thunderstorm
that rattles the universe by burning down trees and extinguishing the sun. If one reads
the burnt trees as destroyed phallic symbols, the sun can be understood within a well-
established Judeo-Christian iconography that links sunlight to goodness, and its
extinguishing to the demise of the Christian universe and the triumph of evil-to the
onset of a dark realm revalued here as desirable through praiseful reference to the
satanically iconoclastic Maldoror. As Lane notes, the reproduction of Magritte's
Vierge retroussee directly underneath Eluard and Peret's report "depicts a surrealist
fantasy that the Papin sisters were engaged in a rebellion against bourgeois piety"
similar to that of Lautreamont's famous protagonist (44). While the text's
sexualization of the sisters certainly combines stock male phantasies of impiously
sexual nuns, its revolutionary significance extends well beyond those phantasies. On
one hand, the revolutionary potential accorded in this text to the Papin sisters and their
lesbianism is a logical extension, perhaps even a condition of the bourgeois
heteropatriarchy: it exemplifies Judith Butler's claim that the homosexual is the
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necessary, constitutive outside of a social order regulatedby a "heterosexual
matrix. "26 Yet on the other hand, Eluard's and Peret's positive evaluation of the
sisters' revolt is striking. While the paragraph on the Papins and its sexualization
through association with Magritte's drawing both tap into the most banal of male
phantasies, the assemblage shows surprisingly little of the sense of threat with which
the representatives of the "heterosexual matrix" are supposed (according to Butler's
theory) to meet its gay and lesbian "others." And even more surprisingly, the
assemblage on the Papins in SSR praises women's appropriation of the "transferable"
phallus, an act that often is suppressed severely.27 Indeed, in that the Eluard and
Peret text relates only the acts preceding the Papin sisters' discovery by the police, it
shows little interest in their criminal conviction. The series of metaphors with which
the text signals the effect of the Le Mans murders-"La foudre etait tombee, le bois
brule, le soleil definitivement eteint"--instead suggests the sisters to have completely
destroyed the world, indeed the entire universe around them— thus effectively
precluding any retribution.28 in sum, the report on the sisters' trial surprises in its
26. For an explanation of Butler's theory of the "heterosexual matrix" and of
the position of the homosexual as its necessary and constitutive "other," see Chapter 2
of Gender Trouble.
27. Butler discusses the way in which psychoanalytic writers such as Freud
and Lacan symptomatically have invoked only to shut down attempts to question the
originality of the phallus as privileged body part (Freud) and privileged signifier
(Lacan), using a rhetoric whose consequence is to further pathologize what Judith
Halberstam calls "female masculinity." This pathologization of women's phallic
appropriation has real effects: historians have documented the way in which the
majority of women prosecuted for lesbianism in the West before the twentieth century
were singled out for both literal and symbolic appropriations of the phallus. See
Faderman, 31-61.
28. The sisters' metaphorical destruction of the universe precludes what Lane
claims to be the surrealists' consistent use of punishment to "support a cultural fantasy
that is performed, celebrated, and putatively 'mastered' by repeated acts of feminine
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130
refusal to be threatened by violent women, whose acts so often are proscribed as
inappropriately manly and presented as evidence of mental illness or " d e g e n e r a c y ."29
Eluard and Peret's text seems thoroughly to approve of the toppling of those social
structures and romanticized ideas of feminine docility that constitute and sustain
bourgeois culture. While this text clearly is concerned less with female autonomy than
with the toppling of bourgeois institutions more generally, its lack of ambivalence
around the figure of the female sexual outlaw goes unduplicated in other surrealist
representations of lesbianism. Yet one wonders nonetheless whether a blind spot may
be at work that prevents Eluard and Peret from seeing the sexual subordination of
women as itself a function of bourgeois ideology, as something whose tenability, so
crucial to the surrealists' aspirations, would be called into question by the
bourgeoisie's demise.
abjection" (Eluard and Peret 28; Lane 47). While Lane makes the interesting
argument that Eluard and Peret's text, like many others of its kind, domesticates
female revolt by staging psychosis as a scene of hysterical outburst that is met with
punishment, his view is contradicted by the lack of any mention of the sisters'
punishment in the text from SSR (46-7). Lane's argument rests on a questionable
reading of "'la foudre etait tombee'" as referring to the sisters' juridical condemnation
(44). His argument for the necessity of punishment in surrealist representations of
women conflates Eluard and Peret's report, along with the surrealists' advocacy on
behalf of female murderers, with the more infamous examples of surrealist misogyny
with which he frames his discussion: he begins with a citation from Eluard describing
women as enchanting but "'[ujseless objects,"' and a critical passage from Sarane
Alexandrian and Patrick Walberg explaining the appeal of rape scenes in surrealist
painting (43).
29. On the links between early twentieth-century theories of "degeneracy" and
theories of mental illness, see Chapter 1.
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131
IV. "Descendre vraiment dans les bas-fonds de l'esprit"
Commenting on the montage of "before" and "after" shots of Christine and Lea
Papin in Surrealisme au service de la revolution. Nicole Ward Jouve points out that
"[i]n the context of the Surrealists' [Eluard's and Peret's] article, Christine in particular
does rather look like . . . Andre Breton" (13). Jouve picks up on the way in which
Eluard's and Peret's representation of the Papins as heroines engaged in a
Maldororean rebellion against the bourgeoisie constructs them through Breton's
surrealist ideal. Her comment also signals the way in which, in surrealist texts, the
violent, criminal woman often appears as a stand-in for the male cultural revolutionary,
serving as the point of cross-gender identification through which he articulates his
desire to escape social constraints. Expressed through identification with "the
feminine," however, the male aspiration to shatter the strictures imposed on desire
within bourgeois society also entails a certain anxiety, a trembling at the possibility of
finally assuming the position of the insane "other." These terrors are articulated no
more clearly than in Breton's own writing.
Like Lacan's "Motifs," Breton's famous anti-novel Nadja tracks the way in
which a man's fascinated contemplation of a madwoman drives his exploration of the
unconscious. At first glance, Breton's fascination seems to have nothing to do with
the conundrum lesbianism poses to early twentieth-century medicine. However, his
experience with Nadja prompts him to recall P.L. Palau's Les Detraquees. a drama
about two sexually "perverse" employees of a girls' boarding school, a dance teacher
and a headmistress, who murder a pupil.30 This story of the violent rebellion of two
30. Trans.: The Deranged. I am indebted to Suleiman's Subversive Intent for
first bringing the lesbian contents of Palau's play to my attention.
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female "degenerates" occupies a key position in Nadja: allowing the narrator to
"descendre vraiment dans les bas-fonds de l'esprit," it facilitates "son projet de
questionnement de l'esprit modeme" (Breton, Nadja. 45; Behar 81).31 Nadja thus
intervenes into medical debates about the status of the violent female criminal in the
social by figuring lesbianism through a man's interrogation of the unconscious and
madness, indeed of modernity itself.
Much like fictional representations of the Papin affair, Les Detraquees
describes itself as a dramatization of a historical event, "des incidents assez equivoques
qui avaient eu pour cadre une institution pour jeunes filles de la banlieue parisienne"
(Palau 117).32 Yet while Lacan's "Motifs" surreptitiously uses narrative techniques to
bolster its medical explanation of the Papin sisters' motives, Palau's play explicitly
dramatizes the events leading up to the murder of a schoolgirl by a dance teacher,
Solange, and the school's headmistress, Mme. de Challens; he invokes early
twentieth-century medical theories to explain their actions. While Palau himself was a
playwright and actor who lacked the medical credentials held by Lacan, he claims that
an eminent doctor, Joseph Babinsky (sic), assisted in the play's preparation by
illuminating those theories which permitted him to treat "sans erreur la partie pour ainsi
dire scientifique du drame" (117).33
31. Trans.: "descend into what is truly the mind's lower depths" (Breton 39-
40); "his project of questioning the modem spirit."
32. Trans.: "some ambiguous incidents that took place at an institution for
young girls in the Parisian suburbs."
33. Trans.: "Treat without error the so-called scientific aspect of the drama."
There is some difference of opinion as to the role Babinski played in the preparation of
Les Detraquees. Suleiman and Roudinesco echo Palau's claim that Babinski's advice
was obtained via Thiery; Behar goes so far as to suggest that Babinski co-authored the
play under the pseudonym of "Olaf" (Suleiman 103; Roudinesco, Lacan & Co.. 21;
Behar 84). Standing only on the uncritical reiteration of Palau's claim to have been
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Within the dialogue of Les Detraquees. the medical theories attributed to
Babinski are mouthed by Dr. Bernier, a local physician. Arriving at the school late at
night, the doctor is informed that, accompanied by the Commissioner of Police, the
headmistress is searching the premises for a missing pupil. Having examined the
headmistress' office, Dr. Bernier offers the commissioner an explanation for the girl's
disappearance. The doctor's attempt to persuade the empiricist Commissioner that the
two women are insane makes up the bulk of the play's second act. As the doctor's
theoretical claims are pitted against the Commissioner's repeated, mocking demands
for hard facts, the Theatre des Deux Masques is transformed into an arena for debating
the role of medical epistemologies in police investigation .
Recalling the case of another pupil who died mysteriously during Solange's
appearance at the boarding school the previous year, Bernier observes that a schoolgirl
has again disappeared upon the dance teacher's arrival. Realizing that Solange was
once his patient in an insane asylum— that she is a dangerous "detraquee, erotomane,
morphinomane . . . avec perversion des instincts sexuelles"— Bernier suspects that she
is responsible for the girls' disappearances (1 09).34 in a veritable incantation of
assisted by Babinski, the above accounts might themselves be seen as suspect in light
of the facts of that physician's career. Most famous as the pupil of Charcot "who
dismembered the theory of hysteria," eliminating the possibility of a sexual etiology by
redescribing the ailment as "pithiatism" and suggesting that it is impossible to discern
its true manifestations from simulations, Babinski's work provides little validation for
the already dated theories of hereditary degeneration mouthed by Palau's Dr. Bernier
(Roudinesco, La bataille. 225,68). It nonetheless is possible that Babinski could have
provided a regurgitation of other doctors' research on "perverse" sexuality for the
playwright. To assess the position of theories of degeneration and sexual perversion
in Babinski's work is, however, beyond the scope of this study; the question of the
validity both of these ideas and of Palau's claim to their authorship is irrelevant to the
manner in which Breton elides them in recounting his spectatorsfup of the play.
34. Trans.: "deranged person, erotomaniac, morphine addict, with perversion
of the sexual instincts."
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134
vices, he claims that patients such as Solange are so numbed by hereditary defects,
syphilis, drugs, and powerful perfumes that they only can become excited by extreme
sensations, at which point "le detraquement est produit" and "la fissure apparait"
( 1 0 9 ) .3 5 In the broken-down state of "detraquement," asserts the doctor, "[1]'amour,
les sensations meme aigues ne suffisent plus. L'on voit des femmes quitter leur mari,
leurs enfants, pour suivre une amie et, dans leur folie, introduire des tiers dans leur
intimite, la plupart du temps les enfants" ( 1 0 9 ) .3 6 The doctor thus presents lesbianism
as by definition a symptom of sensory oversaturation and a woman's increasingly
serious entanglement in "sexual perversion," which subsists through the predatory,
vampiric corruption of children and destroys the fabric of society by provoking the
collapse of the heterosexual family. 37 What is noteworthy in this otherwise
unremarkable set of early twentieth-century medical cliches is the feminine specificity
of sexual "perversion," the way in which its dangers are described through its
disastrous impact on a family deprived of a female caretaker.38 While, as Elaine
Showalter has suggested, fin-de-siecle discourse often focused on threats the
educated, professional "New Woman" and the "perverted" male homosexual posed to
35. Trans.: "the breakdown is produced;" "the fissure appears."
36. Trans.: "derangement;" "love, even piercing sensations no longer
suffice. One sees women leaving their husbands, their children, to follow a woman-
friend and, in their madness, introduce animals into their intimacy, most of the time
children."
37. Trans.: "sexual perversion."
38 por more on early twentieth-century medical theories that link sexuality to
"degeneration," see Chapter 1 and the material referenced therein, especially Gilman,
"Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and Degeneration;" Carlson; and Hurley. For
discussion pertaining specifically to the conceptualization of sexual "deviance," see
Hurley, p. 71-77.
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135
patriarchal, Western culture, Bernier's rhetoric shows that similar fears arose around
the figure of the educated lesbian, dangerous for her transgression of gendered and
sexual b in a r is m s .3 9 Emphasizing Solange's "grands yeux sombres, sourcils arques,
naturels," and her "cheveux en bandeaux," the doctor constructs her as an example of
a common fm-de-siecle female demon, the "ferhme fatale" (Palau 107) .40 However,
in so doing, he provokes the ire of the Commissioner, who chides him for believing
such fictional creatures to be real. The reactionary political thrust of Les Detraquees
thus consists in its return to tum-of-the-century anxieties about female independence
and sexuality, embodied in Bernier's theories of hereditary degeneration.
In constructing Solange as a "femme fatale," Bernier deploys a rhetorical link
between female "perversion," "morphinomania," and vampirism that was common at
the fm-de-siecle (Dijkstra 358-9). Yet his representation is atypical: instead of
figuring her as a threat to the phallogocentric universe by emphasizing the way in
which she ruins her male lovers, the doctor instead presents her as undermining
Western culture by refusing male desire through a "perverse" lesbianism whose
sadistic strikes against the family and the human reproductive cycle are dangerously
contagious. Yet Solange's threat cannot be attributed so simply to lesbianism: the
doctor insists that the women's problem lies in their being sexual "perverts" rather than
"inverts," the latter being "still a kind of love" (110). Female same-sex desire, then,
serves in Bernier's rhetoric not as a synonym for "perversion," but instead as one of
39. Previous scholarship on the particular gendered and sexual anxieties of the
fin-de-si^cle is immense; some significant titles are Showalter. Sexual Anarchy:
Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Navarette, The Shape of Bear.
40. Trans.: "large gloomy eyes, naturally curved eyebrows;" "hair parted in
the center."
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136
the latter's many symptoms. However, Bernier's image presents lesbianism as a sign
of degeneration instead of underdevelopment: he portrays it as a fall from a woman's
prior state of heterosexual and familial normalcy, as that decadent passion compelling
her to abandon husband and child in search of "supreme bliss" (110). This bliss only
can be obtained, so says the doctor, through the most sadistic of means, ranging from
"laflagellation, lesplaies sanglantes . . . jusqu'al'assassinat" (110)41 These
"perverse" lesbians thus are characterized by what Lynda Hart has described as the
"mark of aggression," which marks as violent their appropriation of masculine
privilege fFatal Women 7-11). While Hart traces this "mark" to the introduction of the
threateningly masculine "'invert'" into medical terminology, it also characterizes the
"perverse" women in Palau's play (Hart, Fatal Women. 10). Marked in some ways as
masculine but in others as feminine, Solange and Mme. de Challens prefigure those
violent, ambivalently gendered lesbians whose presence Hart notes in contemporary
cinema. In the margins of Nadja. a photograph by Henri Manuel shows Solange and
Mme. de Challens eyeing the girl that will become their victim. The former, whose
clothing Palau says "doit indiquer une tres legere note masculine," appears
androgynous; the latter, standing authoritatively behind her desk, wears a decidedly
masculine jacket and tie (Palau 91).
But because the doctor's diagnosis is about not only lesbianism but also "la
perversion sexuelle" more generally, the sadistic qualities attributed to Solange and
Madame de Challens also signal the threat posed by any kind of gender or sexual
deviance to a patriarchal society. The doctor presents the destructiveness of their
"perversion" as infinite: he claims that "la perversion sexuelle autorise toutes
41. Trans.: "flagellation, bloody wounds . ... to assassination."
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137
hypotheses, comme elle necessite les actes les plus abominables" (110)42 For
Bernier, "la perversion sexuelle" is the supreme cause to which all abominable acts can
be referred; its apparent "abomination" is implicated in and made indistinguishable
from those other moral "abominations" that are its symptoms. Yet Bernier's vague
claim that "la perversion sexuelle autorise toutes hypotheses" points to the tautological
nature of his argument: it explains neither what essentially distinguishes "la perversion
sexuelle" from other (vaguely defined) "abominations," nor how it leads to them.
Bernier also uses circular reasoning in claiming Solange and Mme. de Challens to be
"perverse:" his diagnosis assumes that they were responsible for the girl's murder,
though their guilt is not proven until the end of the play. Bernier can only explain the
murders by relying on his knowledge of Solange's "perversion," by conjuring the
shocking figure of Solange-as-perverted-/emme-/ata/e. Characterized only by
unbridled desire and uncontrollable contagion, this figure remains forever
enigmatic. 43
The doctor's claims unfold in a manner that gradually increases the audience's
complicity with the doctor's diagnosis. His explanation sheds light on clues planted in
42. Trans.: "sexual perversion warrants all hypotheses, as it necessitates the
most abominable acts."
43 xhe particular assemblage of texts from which I draw my discussion of
the text of Palau's play— all of them obtained through interlibrary loan-similarly
inscribes Les Detraquees itself as an absent center. Listed in databases and in my
bibliography as "n.p., n.d.," the copy of Les Detraquees from which I have worked
points to an archival inability to determine the drama's proper location, at the same
time as the text's pagination suggests that it has been extracted from the first issue of
Le Surrealisme. Meme. On the other hand, the only copy of Le Surrealisme. Meme
which I have been able to obtain itself is missing exactly those pages assigned by the
table of contents to Les Detraquees. Unable to confirm the place of this imprint of Les
Detraquees within that publication, I have experienced it as an absent center— always
fundamentally disjointed (by a "fissure") from those discourses it is said to organize,
its validity ever in question.
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the first half of the play, which reveals the women's drug addictions, raises the
possibility that Solange might be a declasse aristocrat in disguise, and illustrates the
two women's sadism as they are titillated by a violent schoolyard fight between two of
their charges. The principal dramatic devices driving the second half of the play are
the mounting suspense surrounding the missing girl, and Dr. Bernier's belabored
attempt to persuade the Police Commissioner of the veracity of his explanation. The
Commissioner's empiricist skepticism sheds doubt on the medical explanation
proposed by the doctor, who strives to undermine the officer's common-sense
objections. The doctor explains the apparent calm of the accused during the search for
the missing child by asserting that, as "circulaire et periodique," the women's madness
only manifests itself periodically— upon the arrival of Solange at the school each
December to prepare the students for an elaborate holiday ball (110). Much like the
presumed delirium of the Papin sisters, the crazed frenzy of Solange and Mme.
Challens vanishes upon the accomplishment of its sadistic aim and allows them to
appear normal.
Abruptly resolving the second act's dialectical clash between the physician's
insistence and the policeman’ s doubt, the play concludes with an ex-machina scene in
which the missing girl tumbles, dead, from Mme. de Challens' office cabinet. This
appears to resolve the debate in the doctor's favor, and the Police Commissioner is
forced to expand his empiricist assumptions about what constitutes "fact." Only when
Bernier's suspicions are supported by the authority of medical knowledge and
confirmed by other details of the case does the Commissioner admit into the realm of
legally viable evidence the counterintuitive possibility that dementia might vanish and
an insane criminal come to behave as if normal. However, if the second half of the
play infuses the police's evidentiary procedures with medical modes of knowledge, it
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also raises doubts about the role judgments about criminals' sanity play in achieving
justice. While the Police Commissioner acknowledges Bernier's explanation, he
wonders what difference there is between restraint in an asylum and incarceration in
prison (116). The question of the success of this newfound medical epistemology
remains open at the drama's close: lowering the curtain without arrest, confession, or
conviction, Les Detraquees leaves undecided the matter of the schoolmistresses'
culpability-and the status of medical theories of criminally "perverse" female
sexuality.
V. "Ces superbes betes de proie"
Written expressly for the Theatre des Deux Masques to fit its reputation as a
"'Theatre d'epouvante et de rire,"' Les Detraquees uses the figure of the degenerate
and ultimately sadistic female 'pervert' to shock the bourgeoisie (Behar 84)44
According to its author, Les Detraquees initially was performed in 1921 to a full house
for 278 consecutive days and then was rerun thrice, its great financial success ensured
by the critical scandal it provoked (Palau 117). Exemplifying Lynda Hart's thesis that
in tum-of-the-century medical discourse, the "entrance of the lesbian into
representation as a negation is coupled with her carrying the mark of aggression," the
few journalistic accounts of this scandal still available suggest that the appeal of the
play consisted both in its bloodiness and in its incitation of a frenzy of public negations
of the figure of the female "pervert" CFatal Women 11). One critic, Mas, asks to be
permitted "de ne rien dire des Detraquees" at the same time as he comments on the way
44. Trans.: "theater of scares and laughs."
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its authors "fletrissent les pervertis de tout ordre" in a "spectacle . . . si ecoeurant que
la vue . .. ne peut en etre supportee sans degout"; a second commentator, Catulle-
Mendes, cannot decide at all whether the play will draw '"Tout Paris,"' or only the
"public special" who feels interpellated by i t . 4 5 Another author, Armory, describes
the silent and excited trembling of the members of the audience as they observe horrors
"comme en racontent parfois les joumaux," their expectations incited in advance by a
journalistic discourse that sensationalizes such subjects as murder and sexual
' p e r v e r s i o n . ' 4 6 Apparently fascinated by the "crane, curieuse" Mme. de Challens,
Armory describes her as the "marquise . . . de Sade," suggesting that the appeal and
shock of the drama consists in the gender reversal whereby it transforms women into
libertine subjects of sadistic desire and aggression.^ Moreover, Armory stages the
performance of Les Detraquees as itself a scene of seduction, even of contagion: "on
va blemir d'horreur, crier de degout et on fera: Pouah! en se promettant d'envoyer
ses amies. — Ma chere, allez voir §a, c'est degoutant! Et la chere amie y courra le
lendemain" (qtd. in Behar, 85-6)48 The simultaneous attraction and repulsion
provoked by Les Detraquees signals the way in which the play taps into social
anxieties: it threatens to break down the distinction between the supposedly normative
self and the purportedly perverse other, and raises the possibility that female
4 5 . Trans.: "to say nothing about The Deranged;" "stigmatize perverts in all
ways;" "spectacle . . . so nauseating that the sight of it... can not be tolerated
without disgust;" "All of Paris;" "special audience" ( 8 5 ) .
4 6 Trans.: "that sometimes are told in the newspapers."
47. Trans.: "bold, peculiar."
4 8 . Trans.: "one will pale with horror, cry with disgust and one will say:
Pouah! while promising oneself to send one's friends. — My dear, go see it, it's
disgusting! And the dear friend will run there the next day."
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'perversion' might not only be transmissible, but also desirable to an implicitly
normative, female ("la chere amie") spectatorial subject (emphasis mine). Both a
fascinated anxiety about the position of the female "pervert" and an inability to locate
her within Parisian society drive the negations at work in critical responses to Palau's
play.
By his own admission, Andre Breton was one of those spectators drawn
repeatedly to Palau's play by this scandal, which he cites as proof that Les Detraquees
"ne pouvait etre mauvaise" (45)49 In Nadja, he describes his fascination with Palau's
enigmatic female killers: "[l]e manque d'indices suffisants sur ce qui se passe apres la
chute du ballon, sur ce dont Solange et sa partenaire peuvent exactement etre la proie
pour devenir ces superbes betes de proie, demeure par excellence ce qui me confond,"
that which fascinates him most about Palau's play (55-7).50 Breton is fascinated not
merely by the (supposed) lack of a medical explanation for the women's behavior, but
also by the paradox through which they appear to him as simultaneously predator and
prey. He figures the two women as paradoxically both "la proie" of a mysterious,
external agency, and "superbes betes de proie"-as having lost control of themselves
through subjection to an outside force, but as acting nonetheless (57).51 What
fascinates Breton about these women is their apparent incomprehensibility within
traditional understandings of subjectivity: they are subject to an agency that seems to
49. Trans.: "couldn't be bad" (40).
50. Trans.: "[t]he lack of adequate indications as to what happens after the
balloon falls and the ambiguity about precisely what Solange and her partner are a prey
to that transforms them into these maginificent predatory beasts is still what puzzles me
par excellence" (50).
51. Trans.: "the prey;" "magnificent predatory beasts" (50).
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exceed their conscious i n t e n t i o n s . 5 2 The loss of mastery implicit in Breton's
construction of these women is precisely the state the surrealists claim to desire:
indeed, it is the state ideally achieved in Vamourfou. Within the logic of Vamourfou,
the evacuation of agency is attributed to the position of the feminine and accomplished
by the male partner through his identification with, and consequent loss of a sense of
differentiation from, his female beloved. The loss of distinction between self and
other, subject and object, is precisely what is at stake in Breton's recollection of Les
Detraquees. He figures the enigma posed by the play as conducive to the dream-state
desired by surrealism: the exteriorization of unconscious processes that, if manifested
in waking life, Lacan would call psychosis (Breton 5 5 - 5 7 ; Fink 4 5 ) .
Yet curiously enough, Breton does not mention the way in which the scandal
surrounding Les Detraquees focused on its representation of sexual "perversion" in
women, and thereby elides those early twentieth century medical debates that Palau's
play stages around the figure of the lesbian c r i m i n a l . 5 3 in refusing to consider both
5 2 . Even though the stated aim of Vamourfou is to shatter subjectivity, from
the moment of the text's opening question, "Who am I?", the stance of the "Breton"
narrator of Nadia is that of a Cartesian subject, conceived in the most traditionally
philosophical sense ( 1 1 ) . Burgin points to the contrast between Nadja's spatial
perceptions and Breton's own "fundamentally Cartesian" "coordinates"; Suleiman
makes a similar point by discussing this line in terms of Breton's refusal to "entangle"
himself with Nadja (Burgin 1 0 5 - 6 ) .
5 3 . Only in 1 9 5 6 would Breton publish the actual text of Palau's Les
Detraquees in the inaugural issue of the journal Le Surrealisme. Meme. The play
appears among the first pieces of the issue, which is preoccupied with questions of
violence and female sexuality: it also features an article by Georges Goldfayn on
female blues singers, a story by Joyce Mansour concerning the rape and murder of a
woman by an aristocrat, and a report by Jacques Senelier on two rebellious female
girls who escape from the Catholic girls' school of Le Bon Pasteur (the same
institution in which the Papin sisters had spent their formative years) to a life of
prostitution and possible lesbianism. However, even in this 1 9 5 6 periodical, Breton
does not delve into the implications of the omission of the second act of Palau's play
for those debates surrounding female criminality that he invokes in his discussion of
Nadja's incarceration. Only in 1 9 6 2 would Breton, in a footnote to a revised edition
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the lesbianism of the protagonists of Les Detraquees and the appearance of their
sexuality as the locus of public scandal, Breton sidesteps an unflattering and medical
construction of female sexual "perversion." However, he does so by foreclosing all
accounts of lesbianism together. Nadja thus refuses to acknowledge what Michel
Foucault famously has suggested to be the productivity of pathologizing medical
discourses— the way in which they can enable the consolidation of precisely those
sexual "species" they claim to suppress (History 43). Breton avoids the way in which
public debate-indeed public hysteria— over the medical introduction into discourse of
new categories of sexual identity structured the scandal over Les Detraquees.
In contrast to Lacan's "Motifs," Nadja figures lesbianism only though its
effacement. Whereas Lacan openly posits ("larval") lesbianism as the cause of the
pathological narcissism to which the Papins were prey, Breton actively occludes
evidence that the schoolmistresses in Les Detraquees were lesbian, and instead views
its protagonists through the heterosexist lens of Vamourfou. In a lengthy passage, the
narrator of Nadja relates Solange's reunion with Mme. de Challens, whom he labels
her "partner" in crime (50). He dwells on Solange's "adorable" qualities: "[d]es yeux
splendides, ou il y a de la langueur, du desespoir, de la finesse, de la cruaute . . . [e]t
ce rien de 'declasse' que nous aimons tant" (48-9).54 This passage not only figures
the depths of the unconscious, which Breton universalizes as that of "nous," but also
elevates heterosexual amour fou and the position of the femme unique within it: he
describes Blanche Derval, the minor actress who played Solange and other roles at the
of Nadja and without further comment, refer to the actual text of Les Detraquees.
reprinting Palau's postface with its specific reference to his medical sources and its
closing praise of Breton's flattering references to the play in Nadia.
54 Trans.: "[mjagnificent eyes that mingle languor with subtlety, cruelty,
despair . . . [a]nd something declasse about her that is sympathetic" (42).
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"Theatre des Deux-Masques," as "la plus admirable et sans doute la seule actrice de ce
temps" ( 4 5 - 5 5 ) 5 5 Similarly, in an unanswered letter to Derval, Breton elevates her as
the sole theatrical embodiment of the surrealists' desires: "[c]'est a vous et a vous
seule que nous nous adressons parce que nous ne voyons personne autre que vous qui
incame aujourd'hui l'esprit modeme au theatre" (qtd. in Behar, 80).56 Derval's
femininity-her "splendid," languorous, and cruel eyes— render her prototypically
"modern" (80-1). In Breton's account, the collective spirit of modemity-its
unconscious, if you will-is that of I'amour fou; prototypical subjects of modernity are
the mysterious female killer and the man who, in the pursuit of perfect heterosexual
union, is captivated by her spectacular cruelty.
However, Breton omits a fact crucial to the drama's denouement'. Solange and
her "partner" are lovers (50). As Suleiman argues, Breton does not simply omit the
facts revealed in the play's final scene, but instead "actively negates" them by claiming
Palau never provided them (103).57 Though Suleiman claims that "what Breton sees,
in his recounting, and what excites and mesmerizes him, is the spectacle of female
'otherness': madness, murderousness, lesbianism," there is no evidence in Nadja that
acknowledges the role of lesbianism in Palau's play. Instead, Breton negates it by
staging Derval within the heterosexual male phantasy of I'amour fou (103). Claiming
55. Trans.: "we;" 'mad love;' 'unique woman;' "Theater of the Two
Masques." "[T]he most admirable and probably the only actress of the period" (49).
56. Trans.: "it is you and you only to whom we address ourselves because
we see no one else besides you who incarnates the modem spirit in the theater today."
57. Suleiman specifically refers to the doctor's role in the final scene, which I
will consider later in this chapter. What is important for the meantime is that her
remark, based on Breton's questionable claim to have forgotten whether or not there
was an ending to this play he claims to have seen at least three times, can be extended
to the entire final scene, with its focus on the women's lesbianism.
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not to recall the play's ending, Breton asserts that he hopes that the authors of Les
Detraquees "n'avaient pas voulu que Solange fut eprouvee davantage et que ce
personnage, trop tentant pour etre vrai, eut a subir une apparence de chatiment que, du
reste, il nie de toute sa splendeur" ( 5 4 - 5 ) 5 8 As femme unique, Solange expresses the
highest of surrealist principles: morally exculpating, her beauty makes her actions
"beyond good and evil" (51). Breton thus raises Solange to the level of surreality
through the heterosexual phantasy of Vamour fou. As a phantasmatic object he
considers "too alluring to be true," as a manifestation of "the mind's lower depths,"
she appears surreal (49,40). By raising Solange to the level of surreality, Breton
suppresses the figure of the psychotic lesbian, refusing to consider the way in which
Palau's play proposes to solve the very enigma of femininity that fascinates him. He
thereby also elides the way in which the fusion penultimate to Vamour fou feminizes
the male lover and transforms the couple into a proto-lesbian dyad— indeed, the way in
which his desire for Solange implicates him, too, in lesbian madness. In preventing
the implicit lesbianism of Vamour fou from coming to the surface, Breton's descent
into "the mind's lower depths" fails fully to tap the unconscious and raise its contents
to the level of surreality. As the 'other' abjected in the service of Vamour fou,
lesbianism appears— or, more precisely, is made not to appear— as the constitutive
outside of modernity, as that which, too close for comfort, can only be negated.
As Suleiman argues, the identifications traced out in Breton's text ultimately
involve not so much an embrace of madness and femininity as a flight from them, an
anxiety that forces the narrator to pull back at the point at which he would lose self-
58. Trans.: "did not expect Solange to endure anything more; this character,
too alluring to be true, should never be obliged to submit to a show of punishment
which, moreover, she denied with all her splendor" (49).
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c o n t r o l.5 9 if the loss of agency is that which the male subject of I'amourfou
ostensibly desires, it also is that which he appears most to fear. Above all, Breton is
perplexed yet finally horrified by the enigma of the supposed madwomen's motives,
and responds by presenting that enigma as the women's essence. Slipping from
hollowness of meaning to emptiness of self, he figures Solange and Mme. de Challens
as evacuated of all agency, metamorphosed into grotesque automata. He describes
Solange, for example, as traversing the stage "comme un automate," and as not
sharing the other characters' evident concern for the missing schoolgirl ( 5 3 ) .6 0 Like
Lacan, he tautologically offers his own sense of incomprehension, of being stymied
by an enigma, as the explanation for her actions. The terror the madwoman strikes in
the heart of the fascinated male observer is linked precisely to her apparently
incomprehensible position as both possessed by an external agency and herself
transformed into a hideously predatory executioner.
Victor Burgin attributes Breton's desire for "the encounter with the enigmatic
in the everyday" not only to his recollection of Les Detraquees. but also to his
fascination with Nadja ( 1 0 4 ) . Yet what should be questioned in Breton's construction
of madness as essentially enigmatic is the way in which he deploys it in the service of
understanding that other famous conundrum of psychoanalysis, the "enigma of
w o m a n . " 6 1 Though feminist theorists long have taken Freud to task for presenting
female subjectivity as mysterious, Burgin perpetuates Freud's construct. Without
remarking on the politics of gender involved in diagnosing madness, he distinguishes
59. An earlier version of Suleiman's position can be found in Browder.
60. Trans.: "like an automaton" (46).
61. I borrow this phrase from the title of Sarah Kofman's famous study of
femininity in Freud, L'Enigme de la femme.
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the controlled Breton from the "infantile" Nadja on the sole basis of the difference
between the displacement of identity provoked by the former's encounter with the
"uncanny" and the collapse of identity involved in the latter's psychosis (104).
Marking an extreme case of the surrealists' tendency to represent women as posing a
conundrum to masculinist models of sexuality and social agency, Breton represents
female sexuality as animalistic, governed by a mysterious automatism linked to
demonic possession. Accounting for female murderers' subjectivity and enigmatic
actions in a way that invokes and perpetuates the psychoanalytic "enigma of woman,"
Breton and Lacan do an end run around the question of female murderers' motives,
using the slippery equation of enigma with madness and femininity to present the lack
of explanation for the crime as its very explanation. They imply that the
incomprehensibility of the schoolmistresses' and the Papins' motives automatically
signals the women's insanity, instead of their position within a phallogocentric order
that constructs femininity in general as enigmatic. Breton and the psychoanalysts thus
figure lesbianism as what Elizabeth Grosz aptly describes as "the blind spot of the
blind spot" of phallogocentric theory— as all the more mysterious and all the more
threatening because of its apparent difference from male (hetero)sexuahty ("Strange
Detours"). Breton differs from Lacan, however, by repudiating the threatening figure
of the lesbian altogether. His discourse thus not only produces lesbianism as "the
blind spot of the blind spot," but also, by ignoring crucial details from Palau's drama,
militates against any attempts to construe lesbianism otherwise (Grosz, "Strange
Detours").
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VI. "L'absence bien-connue de frontiere entre la non-folie et la folie"
Breton's refusal to consider the linking, in Les Detraquees. of female insanity
and sexual deviance is odd, given that, near the end of Nadja. he takes up the same
question considered by the Police Commissioner at the close of Palau's play: whether
internment in an insane asylum is merely another form of incarceration, devoid of
rehabilitative potential and designed to segregate the madwoman from the rest of
society. Upon learning of Nadja's institutionalization, Breton polemicizes against
psychiatry, claiming that "II ne faut jamais avoir penetre dans un asile pour ne pas
savoir qu'on y fait les fous tout comme dans les maisons de correction on fait les
bandits" (161).62 Further asserting that "[1]'atmosphere des asiles est telle qu'elle ne
peut manquer d'exercer l'influence la plus debilitante, la plus pemicieuse, sur ceux
qu'ils abritent, et cela dans le sens meme ou leur debilitation initiale les a conduits,"
Breton insists that psychiatric internment, in which the "insane" are sequestered and
punished for every act of institutional noncompliance, exacerbates the slight gap
between normalcy and insanity and thereby reifies madness as a fixed identity always
potentially dangerous within the larger social sphere (164-5). 63 Breton's insistence
that madmen are "made" by psychiatric institutions foreshadows Michel Foucault's
62. Trans.: "Unless you have been inside a sanitarium you do not know that
madmen are made there, just as criminals are made in our reformatories" (139).
63. Trans.: "The atmosphere of sanitariums is such that it cannot fail to
exercise the most debilitating influence, the most pernicious influence upon those it
shelters, and this in the very direction their initial debilitation had led them" (140).
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149
later work on the way in which insane asylums have been administered in a manner
that produces madmen as capitalist society's constitutive outside.64
As does Foucault's work, Breton's insight into the simultaneously producing
and constraining force of the asylum system provides a starting point for critiquing the
way in which the invention of "the insane" has harmed those deemed mad. Breton
complains that the institutional forces of psychiatric medicine,
pour une peceadile, un premier manquement exterieur a la bienseance ou au
sens commun, precipitent un sujet quelconque parmi d'autres sujets dont le
cotoiement ne peut lui etre que nefaste et surtout le privent systematiquement
de relations avec tous ceux dont le sens moral ou pratique est mieux assis que
le sien. (161-4)65
He proposes that instead of being left to associate with those whose company would
be of no help in improving their condition, the harmlessly insane, such as Nadja,
should be left to interact with the rest of society in the hope that their weak egos will be
strengthened by the examples of those around them
However, by using Nadja as an example, Breton presumes that the love
relationship is the means to such an ameliorative end. Bemoaning the way in which
his surrealist idealization and validation of Nadja's unrestricted enjoyment of freedom
prevented him from realizing the dangers she courted in defying social convention,
64. Foucault has extensively discussed the production of the so-called
"mentally ill" through various administrative regimes. This material can be found in
Histoire de la folie a l'age classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972); L'Archeologie du
Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); Naissance de la Clinique (Paris: Gallimard, 1963);
Mental Illness and Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and
Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
65. Trans.: "for a peccadillo, some initial and exterior rejection of
respectability or common sense, hurl an individual among others whose association
can only be harmful to him and, above all, systematically deprive him of relations with
everyone whose moral or practical sense is more firmly established than his own"
(139).
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150
Breton reproaches himself for not strengthening her ego, for not presenting her from
thrusting her head, "puis un bras entre les barreaux ainsi ecartes de la logique"
(169).66 Invoking the now widely criticized construction of the female ego as weaker
than the male, and modeling his and Nadja's relationship on the male doctor/female
patient arrangement common in psychoanalytic practice at the beginning of the century,
Breton suggests that his ideal role would have been that of her lay doctor (Magee and
M ille r ).67 This rhetorical move posits a heterosexual relationship with a strong,
dominant man as the cure for madness in women. Breton's proposed alternative to
"imprisonment" within the asylum system, then, itself entails a set of interactions that
would produce a reformed subject according to another set of social constraints— those
imposed through that discourse and practice Adrienne Rich aptly has identified as
"Compulsory Heterosexuality" (203).
In his alternative to psychiatric internment, Breton ignores not only the way in
which the male doctor/female patient relationship reinscribes arbitrary social
arrangements between the sexes, but also the way in which those gender asymmetries
may themselves have a role in precipitating female insanity. Because asymmetry
between the sexes is structurally inscribed in I'amour fou, Suleiman reads Breton's
polemic against psychiatry as implicitly engaging, yet finally deflecting, the charge that
66. Trans.: "then an arm, out of the jail— thus shattered— of logic" (143).
67 To point out similarities between psychoanalysis' and Breton's gendering
of the doctor/patient relationship is not, however, to equate their discourses or to imply
that Breton's diatribe against asylums is in any way psychoanalytic: it is clear that in
this passage, Breton is dealing specifically with psychiatric medicine. Elisabeth
Roudinesco has described the differences between Breton's reading of psychoanalysis
and the theories put forth by Freud and Lacan; in this passage from Nadja. Breton
figures precisely those views common to the ego-psychiatrists Lacan famously decries
CLacan & Co. 21-23).
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151
he played a role in precipitating Nadja's madness (108-110). Suleiman further points
out that Breton never answers his self-accusations; instead, he asserts that he never
really loved Nadja anyway (109-110). Immediately before Breton relays the fact of
Nadja's internment, he considers the reasons for which, "depuis assez longtemps," he
had ceased to "[s]'entendre avec Nadja" (159). He concludes that
Quelque envie que j'en ai eu, quelque illusion peut-etre aussi, je n'ai peut-
etre pas ete a la hauteur de ce qu'elle me proposait. Mais que me proposait-
elle? N'importe. Seul l’amour au sens ou j 'entends— mais alors le
mysterieux, l'improbable, l'unique, le confondant et l'indubitable amour— tel
enfin qu'il ne peut etre qu'a toute epreuve, eut pu permettre ici
l'accomplissement du miracle. (159)68
While Breton admits to having not been strong enough for what Nadja demanded of
him, he also claims not to have understood what she wanted. Yet ultimately he does
not care, preferring, above all, to reassert the imagined miracle of Vamour fou. Thus,
the alternative he proposes to psychiatric treatment— the presence of a male lover who
can prop up the weaker ego of his female beloved— further shores up the ideals of
heterosexuality and I'amour fou in the face of the threatening possibility that their
enactment may have led to Nadja's internment. Breton's polemic, then, should be
seen not only as an attempt to absolve himself of responsibility for his failed
relationship with Nadja, but also as a vindication of Vamour fou itself. Noting the
contradiction created by Breton's claim not to have loved Nadja and the evidence that
he was preoccupied with her nonetheless, Suleiman concludes that
Breton's conception of 'pure and simple' love— which . . . he called Vamour
fou— precluded precisely the possibility of his being touched by madness, or
68. Trans.: "understanding Nadja;" "Whatever desire or even illusion I may
have had to the contrary, perhaps I have not been adequate to what she offered me.
But what was she offering me? It does not matter. Only love in the sense that I
understand it— mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering, and certain love that can
only he foolproof might have permitted the fulfillment of a miracle" (135-6).
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152
simply by the 'otherness' in femininity . . . [Distanced from him by the
screen of fantasy, female madness excited him. Close up, he fled from it.
(110)
However, if Breton fled from the possibility of being "touched" by the madwoman-
that is, quite literally injured or otherwise affected by her actions-his text also traces
out his repudiated identification with Nadja. In his appropriately named theory of
Vamourfou, he idealizes the "absence bien-connue de frontiere entre la non-folie and
la folie," yet in reality, he fears its consequences (Nadja 171)69 He will not fully
cede to the delirium he claims to desire: he insists that, despite their idealization of
madness, he and his surrealist colleagues always retained the "instinct of preservation"
that determined their occasional obedience to certain social constraints (169). Though
Vamourfou requires unmitigated identification between partners, Breton is unable
fully to embrace Nadja, to experience the vertigo of identification with her femininity
and madness (159). Breton can vindicate Vamourfou only by disavowing the
possibility that Nadja might exemplify its imperative to renounce all worldly
constrictions in the name of love.
Breton does not merely repudiate Nadja, however, but also the figure of the
insane lesbian. By refusing to consider the second half of Palau's play, which reveals
the doctor's diagnosis of Solange and Mme de Challens, Breton suppresses that
69. Trans.: "well-known lack of frontiers between non-madness and madness
does not induce me to accord a different value to the perceptions and ideas which are
the result of one or the other" (144). While Suleiman attributes the wording of
Vamourfou merely to a "supreme irony of the French language," implying the
description of love as "mad" to be counterintuitive, I hope the entire argument of this
chapter to suggest that Breton's concept was instead quite appropriately and coherently
named, invoking not just the ideal of "'pure and simple'" heterosexual love, but also
that of the "mad," deliriously free abandonment to one's desires through love (110).
In important ways, the phrase Vamourfou taps into the widely articulated surrealist
interest in madness and in the fine, often indistinguishable, line between insanity and
'normal' subjectivity.
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153
"entanglement" with madness and lesbianism that sustains his conception of I'amour
fou (Suleiman 92). Because it draws on discourses that link female insanity to
"perverse" sexuality to criminality, Dr. Bernier's diagnosis of Solange and Mme de
Challens shares some similarities with the psychoanalytic account of female same-sex
desire that animates Lacan's reading of the Papins' delire a . deux. Both Lacan and
Palau portray lesbian partners as perilously undifferentiated from one another and their
relationships as dangerously solipsistic. This association of lesbianism with perilous
narcissism marks for Breton the ultimate danger posed by the dialectical merger of
lover and beloved in Vamourfou: in his disavowal of love for Nadja, he repudiates
the possibility that the boundary between Vamourfou and delire a deux might be as
uncertain as "[1]'absence bien connue de frontiere entre la non-folie et la folie"
(171) JO The ever-present possibility of actual madness, of giving up the last ounce
of his "instinct of preservation," is inherent in Vamourfou, yet Breton finally buries it
with the suppressed figure of the insane lesbian— she whom he would rather never
believe to be lesbian, never believe to be mad, never believe to be his own reflection
(169).
Already incipient in Nadja and its closing proclamation about convulsive
beauty, Vamourfou is the title of Breton's next book. Nadja should be seen as an
unsuccessful testing of the waters of Vamourfou, as a failed adventure in which
Breton, paradoxically, must repudiate the realities of madness in order to imagine
Vamourfou as a means of experiencing surreality. If, as Breton insists, surreality is
70. Trans.: "well-known lack of frontiers between non-madness and
madness" (144). While considering Breton's explanation that he had not been
adequate to Nadja's offer, Burgin quotes Lacan's use of delire a deux to describe the
Papin sisters; however, he does not explicitly discuss the similarities between the two
in light of "[1]'absence bien connue de frontiere entre la non-folie et la folie" (Burgin
106-7; Breton 171).
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that "absolute reality" achieved through the fusion of the contradictory states of "dream
and reality," Vamourfou as articulated in Nadja is not a fusion of dream with reality
but an occlusion of reality by dream, by Breton's ideal ("Manifeste" 24). Nadja thus
reveals the way in which Vamourfou is always already failed, made impossible by
Breton's ultimate refusal of the realities of madness. And if Nadja deploys, through
negation, the unnamed figure of the lesbian as a representative of the surrealist ideal, it
also underscores the danger she poses to the coherence of the very patriarchal order
that has brought her possibility into discourse.
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155
C hapter 3
"What insane passion":
Lesbian Narcissism and Psychical Primitivism in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood
Much like discourse surrounding the Papin affair, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood
textualizes "enigmatic" female same-sex desire through both rhetorics of degeneration
and tropes of lesbian psychosis. And much as do Lacan's "Motifs" and Breton's
Nadja. Nightwood both figures love between women as a mother-fixation that takes
the form of a quasi-psychotic merger, an "insane passion for unmitigated anguish and
motherhood" in which the women appear to have no agency in their desperate acts,
and uses the commentary of a fascinated male clinician, Matthew O'Connor, to figure
lesbian psychosis (75). However, Nightwood diverges from the earlier texts'
formulae in its refusal to grant patriarchal authority to O'Connor: not only is he a
"quack" gynecologist, but also is both queer and (arguably) psychotic himself.
Barnes' novel thus mocks the authority of pathologizing accounts of lesbianism while
failing to find any way out of them.
I. Discursive overdetermination
How are we to think through the dense intersection of medical discourses in
Nightwood? With its decentering of linear narrative described by some as the epitome
of the postmodern and by others as a textualization of the Freudian unconscious,
Nightwood presents an overdetermined textualization of discourses of lesbian
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madness and hereditary degeneration.* As Laplanche and Pontalis explain, Freud
understands the "formations of the unconscious" to arise from "a plurality of
determining factors" (292). They are "overdetermined" in the sense that they result
from the "condensation" into one idea o f "several associative chains" of meaning, and
are "related to a multiplicity of unconscious elements which may be organized in
different meaningful sequences, each having its own specific coherence at a particular
level of interpretation" (82, 292). In a very similar way, Nightwood is a
determinedly unruly text in which the historically and ideologically distinct discourses
of sexology and psychoanalysis intersect in figures of quasi-psychotic female same-
sex desire.
Yet the quasi-unconscious mechanism of Nightwood's (anti-)narrative does
not merely present "representations" of primitive or psychotic lesbianism; some critics
have suggested that the style of the text mimes the mechanisms of psychosis as well.
T.S. Eliot judges that Nightwood would "appeal primarily to readers of poetry";
Elizabeth Meese calls its poetic bent a "crisis of style" similar to the linguistic and
perceptual distortions of schizophrenia (Eliot xi; Meese 56)2 indeed, Terry Eagleton
asserts that " [schizophrenic language has . . . an interesting resemblance to poetry,"
to the extent that both languages depend on "riddling associations and affective rather
than conceptual links between ideas" (159).
*. For discussions of the novel's undermining of linear narrative, see
Beranger ("La femme invisible"), Bock, Boone, Burke, Gerstenberger, Kalfopoulou,
Meese, and Schehr; for deconstructive analyses of gender, see Andrea Harris and
Michel. For readings that focus on the unconscious without a specific consideration
of "overdetermination," see Baird, Boone, Carlston, Castricano, Henke, Kannenstine,
Marcus ("Laughing at Leviticus"), and Nadeau.
2. For an implicit comparison of Barnes' text to the mechanisms of psychosis,
see also Bock.
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157
To approach Nightwood as miming not only the mechanisms of the
unconscious but also those of psychosis is to open up a reading in which the novel
questions the hegemonic "reality" whose acceptance would be required for entrance
into the symbolic order. Matthew O'Connor, a quack physician marked as
Schreberian both in his apparent "schizophrenia" and in his sexual inversion, performs
such a questioning through his verbal dominance within the narration. O'Connor lives
every day in a world that for Schreber is only one of psychotic delusion, and
characterizes his activity as "the contemplation of the mad strip of the inappropriate
that runs through creation" (105). His tirades perform both a dismantling of symbolic
law at the level of narrative and a rearticulation of symbolic sexual positionalities at the
level of character (Fuchs 125).3 Nightwood sends up the psychoanalytic symbolic,
diminishing the phallus by emphasizing the doctor's transvestite ambitions and his
"Tiny O'Toole" (132). Yet while the diminution of O'Connor's penis is also a
diminution of the symbolic phallus, it does nothing to rearticulate the symbolic, but
instead leaves psychoanalysis' structuring principles intact without underscoring the
cultural contingency of their phallogocentrism.
Much as in Breton's Nadja. in Nightwood lesbianism stands in for psychical
undifferentiation in its larger manifestation: because her movements throughout the
novel are characterized by an undifferentiation from others and a lack of deliberate
agency that parallel the workings of the primary processes, Robin Vote is cited with
much frequency as a "simulacrum" both for the unconscious and for psychosis
3. For discussion of insanity at the characterological level, see in addition to
Fuchs the 17 October 1936 review of Nightwood in the Newstatesman and Nation
(reprinted in Marcus, "Mousemeat," 197-199); Beranger ("La femme invisible");
Chisholm; Fadiman, review of Nightwood in The New Yorker. 13 March 1937
(reprinted in Marcus, "Mousemeat," 203-204); Herring; Williamson. Contrasting
with my focus on parallels between O'Connor and Schreber, Kautz, Marcus
("Laughing at Leviticus") and Wilson have discussed the doctor as a mockery of the
Freudian psychoanalyst interpreting female hysteria.
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158
(Gilmore 615)4 indeed, as Shari Benstock suggests, "[i]n Nightwood lesbianism
displays certain affinities with the unconscious operations of the mind, which direct
the body's responses even as the conscious mind tries to suppress them" (264). And
for Meese, just as Nightwood is a quasi-psychotic "crisis of style," so is lesbianism:
it is experienced as a schizophrenic "horror . . . of the subject and object both being
oneself (56). Meese's account of lesbianism as schizophrenia strikingly parallels
Lacan's "Motifs”: while the psychoanalyst does not cast the Papin sisters' dilemma as
that of being both subject and object to each other, his assertion that they never
emerged from narcissistic undifferentiation places them at the same state of
psychosexual development that Meese invokes.
Meese places her discussion in dialogue with Lacan by suggesting that
Nightwood "writes against" his theory of the mirror stage. However, her argument
needs rearticulation. She claims that the "schizophrenia" of both "Nightwood and
lesbianism" demonstrate that "Barnes never bought the buoyancy of the illusion (or
allusion to wholeness, Identity)" conjured in the mirror stage. Yet for Lacan, it is not
resistance to the imaginary via the refusal of the mirror stage, but instead the
foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, that precipitates psychosis. While Meese
conflates the symbolic and the imaginary by explaining the mirror stage as formative
both of "the illusion of identity" and of "access to language," one might emphasize
instead Lacan's assertion that it is at the "moment in which the mirror-stage comes to
an end" that the "dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated
situations" begins (Meese 56; Lacan, "The mirror stage," 5, emphasis added). The
4. For discussions of Robin as the "unconscious," see also Backus, Baird,
Benstock, Boone, Carlston, Henke, Kalfopoulou, Marcus, and Scott. For Robin as
mad or as "psychotic," see above. For Robin as "primitive," see Baird, Benstock,
Beranger, Boone, Burke, Carlston, Castricano, Fleischer, Frank, Fuchs, Greiner,
Henke, Levine, and Robert Nadeau.
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159
"symbolic matrix" that governs the social is imminent in the mirror stage, yet there is a
temporal gap between the child's "jubilant assumption of his specular image" and his
or her articulation as subject within the linguistic structure always already determinant
of that matrix (2). The possibility for foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father arises
precisely in the gap between mirror-stage identification and the entry into language.
Because it enables the psychotic to bypass subjection to symbolic strictures, the
mechanism of foreclosure refuses the privilege ordinarily granted to the symbolic,
causing the imaginary to appear in the Real without symbolic mediation. The
"schizophrenic" style of Nightwood thus challenges those symbolic mandates that at
the mirror stage are imminent but not yet articulated in language.
While Matthew O'Connor's tirades perform a critique of psychoanalysis’
assumptions about the perilously psychotic aspects of female homosexuality, they
nonetheless do little to revise psychoanalysis' bleak account of lesbian desire: the
novel's challenge to symbolic mandates does not ensure their transformation. Though
Jane Marcus argues that "Freud, fascism, Hitler, 'high art,' and the lumpen proletariat
haunt [Nightwood! as a potent 'political unconscious,"' we nonetheless must recall
that the unconscious is the field in which the most elusive of human motives can play
out (Marcus, "Laughing," 222). We are by no means assured that the resistances of a
text qua unconscious will correspond to the radical political resistances we most desire
to read into it. Nor are we assured, by virtue of its textualization of what might be
called a psychotic return to unconscious contents and processes, that a text's
dismantling and reconstituting of the social necessarily involves the progressive
transformation of symbolic imperatives, as the varied torments of psychotic patients
often illustrate so clearly.^
5. As Elaine Showalter's study of The Female Maladv implies, psychiatric
institutions themselves often serve to reproduce, in the guise of a "cure," the symbolic
imperatives contested by the mechanisms of mental illness. And as Sander Gilman
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Moreover, the id-like psychical meanderings signaled by Robin's sexual
wanderings are not reducible to her desire for women, for she becomes involved with
men as well. Furthermore, unlike Nadja. Nightwood is not governed by one
character's overriding phantasy, but instead is an open-ended narration whose
deployment of rhetorics of primitivism in its construction of Robin suggests that
lesbianism and psychosis share structural overlaps but are not reducible to one
another. Even though Robin's lesbian liaisons preoccupy much of the narration, the
scope of her undifferentiation extends beyond those moments in which she merges
with another woman.
II. Representation and Sexual Outlawry
Indeed, the questions that Nightwood poses regarding homosexuality, and
female same-sex desire in particular, are not reducible to ontological questions about
"homosexuality," "lesbianism," or "lesbian identity," for, as Meese has pointed out,
Barnes' novel is "a crooked, obliquely leaning text, a deviation in the letter" (50). Its
departure from the conventions of narrative realism (those so crucial to Radclyffe
Hall's identity-based pleas for tolerance, for example) defy any attempt to pin it down
as providing a specific "representation" of "lesbianism" as such.6 Thus, while the
determination and enactment of sexuality and sexual identity are very much at stake in
fFreud. Race, and Gender) and Eric Santner illustrate in their work on the Schreber
memoir, a psychotic's delusions can trace out reactionary as well as progressive
political identifications.
6 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness is arguably the most famous
"lesbian novel" in the Western literary tradition. Barnes scholars have a particular
fondness for contrasting Nightwood with The Well of Loneliness because of the two
novels' diametrically opposed representational strategies; my own remarks about the
contrast between Barnes and Hall are indebted to the work of Allen, Boone,
Chisholm, and Gilmore.
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161
Nightwood. and while the politics underpinning its figuration of female same-sex
desire in particular are at stake in my own reading of it, Barnes' novel cannot in any
simple sense be described as a "lesbian novel," despite the claims that have been made
of it in the past.7 And while several scholars have begun the important work of
critiquing the reduction of Nightwood to a commentary on lesbianism, conceived as an
ontologically stable identity, they have stumbled on the question of how to
acknowledge the text's "queemess" while delineating the specific modes of desire it
traces out.
Diane Chisholm, for example, critiques the "recuperation of Nightwood's
sexual outlawry by a politics of representation"; she argues that "instead of speaking
out on lesbianism in cryptic modernism, Nightwood seriously challenges the
epistemological and ontological claims of sexual discourse" (171-172). According to
Chisholm, Nightwood "flaunts a queer skepticism concerning sexual liberation and its
bohemian milieux, profaning the illusions of their 'reverse discourse'" (176). This
formulation incisively points out that Nightwood cannot be reduced to a "reverse
discourse" advocating the rights of oppressed minorities by voicing "the struggle of an
emerging subculture" (172). However, Chisholm's argument proceeds as if
debunking naive claims to identity-based liberation necessarily requires the wholesale
abandonment of any consideration of sexual specificity.
Joseph Boone, on the other hand, provides a helpfully sophisticated account of
how one might read the way in which the novel traces out a range of "queer"
sexualities at the same time as it places heavy emphasis on specifically same-sex love.
He begins by arguing against "reifying same-sex love as the lens through which to
7. For discussions of Nightwood as a "lesbian novel," see Abraham,
Castricano, Gilmore, Bertha Harris, Lee, and Marcus; for a discussion of its
inflection of what now is called "bisexual" identity, see Michel. For complications of
such claims, see Allen, Boone, Chisholm, Fleischer, Andrea Harris, and Meese.
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162
read its narrative" and by insisting that it instead figures a "polymorphous desire" that
would most aptly be termed "queer"; he goes on to assert that nonetheless, "the
novel's representation of its underworld of aliens and outcasts organizes itself under
the sign of same-sex love" (234-235), Boone's formulation is problematic, however,
in its elevation of same-sex love as an organizing principle, if not a "lens," for the
novel, for the umbrella-principle he proposes inevitably leaves many threads of
Nightwood uncovered. Matthew O'Connor's transvestism and professed desire to be
a woman, for example, cannot so simply be assimilated to what we now call
"homosexuality" or "same-sex love." Boone's curious choice of support for his
privileging of the "sign of same-sex love"— O'Connor's query, "What is this love we
have for the invert, boy or girl?"— betrays the conceptual difficulty on which his
reading founders (qtd. in Boone, 235). The novel's persistent use of a rhetoric of
"sexual inversion" can hardly be said to be subordinate to a homosexual, or even
same-sex "sign," for the polarizing logic that ascribes to one partner the desire to be
the opposite-sex partner of the other might be read retroactively as an anticipation
either of contemporary "homosexual" identities or of "transgendered" and
"transsexual" identities— the latter of which might (but do not necessarily) involve the
explicit repudiation of "same-sex" object-choice. That sexological theories of
"inversion" might be cited in the genealogies of contemporary sexual identities other
than homosexual identities forces one to question Boone's maintenance of "same-sex
love" as the privileged sign of Nightwood's political organization: if the term "invert"
marks both the patient's apparent "inversion" of heterosexual object-choice and her
ostensibly dysphoric relation to her body, it nonetheless remains unclear whether the
"inverted" object-choice precedes the "inverted" sense of sexed embodiment, or vice
versa. The category of "inversion" is more successful in signaling the impasse in
sexual ontology created by dualistic thinking than in successfully describing either the
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163
sense of bodily belonging or the desired object-choice of those persons to whom it
would refer, and should be maintained as a site of undecidability irreducible to
subsequent attempts to enlist it in the service of "homosexual," "transgendered," O r
"transsexual" identity. If Nightwood might be described as a "queer" novel, then, it is
not, as Boone claims, because its deployment of sexological theory anticipates a
contemporary use of "queer" which retains homosexuality as its definitional center at
the same time as it undoes false dichotomies supporting the "hetero/homo" divide, but
instead because, as Andrea Harris demonstrates through close reading, its rhetorical
"inversions" produce the sexological figure of '"the third sex'" as "fundamentally
undecidable" (Boone 235; Harris 253). I would modify Harris' argument only
slightly by suggesting that this undecidability is not merely a function of Barnes'
"biting parody" of sexological discourse but is inherent in the sexologists'
conceptualization of "inversion" itself (233).
Like Carolyn Allen, I select out for discussion here a strain of eroticism
between women from what in a larger sense are Barnes' "queer texts" (17). I do so
not to assert that female same-sex desire should be taken as an organizing principle for
the novel, but in order to elucidate Nightwood's implication in, though not limitation
by, discourses of lesbian p s y c h o s i s . ^ However, taking issue with the false
dichotomy through which Allen claims that the "struggle[sj" traced out in the novel are
Thus, unlike Allen, I acknowledge as well Boone's initial gesture towards
the novel's wider "community of outsiders" by acknowledging the intersection of the
novel's discourse of female same-sex love with its discourse on ethnicity (234).
Consonant with his study's larger consideration of modernism as a multiethnic
phenomenon, Boone begins his Bames chapter with a nod to the novel's "dizzying
cross-section of the sexually and socially dispossessed"; however, the rest of his
discussion of Nightwood goes to great lengths to establish and then qualify the
significance of sexuality, while not so much that of race and ethnicity, within the
textual apparatus (234). Indeed, there is something slippery about the way in which
Boone assimilates all of the novel's marginalized others under the rubric of "queer,"
yet then proceeds to insist that homosexuality is central to its definition.
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"psychic, not sociopolitical," I pursue the gendered and sexual politics at work in
Barnes' figuration of the psyche (17).9
III. "What insane passion"
Commenting on the "insistent fury" with which "the squatter," Jenny
Petherbridge, weepingly pursues Robin Vote in an effort to wrest her from the arms
and home of Nora Flood, the mad doctor O'Connor declares that "[l]ove of woman
for woman" is an "insane passion for unmitigated anguish and motherhood" (75).
What is most striking about O'Connor's oft-quoted phrase is the conflation of
"anguish" and "motherhood" through which his generalization about lesbian passion
both gains and loses meaning, with regard both to the coupling of Jenny and Robin
which is his immediate object, and to the larger field of lesbian passions to which his
generalization would extend.
O'Connor's declaration anticipates Kristeva's description of the aggressive
fusion of the "homosexual-maternal": he equates anguish and motherhood, presenting
them both as "unmitigated." He pathologizes lesbianism qua "motherhood" as
"insane" and in need of mitigation, assuming, as do certain psychoanalysts, that the
mother-daughter dyad is dangerous by definition, and must be interrupted by the
paternal third term (Michel 43). 10
9. Here I follow psychoanalytically informed writers such as Helene Cixous
and Julia Kristeva, whose work undermines the false dichotomy between the
"psychical" and the "sociopolitical."
10. Kristeva perpetuates the psychoanalytic assumption of the structural
necessity of the "third term" for a subject's entrance into the symbolic order, yet
diverges from it in her positive valuation of the child's quasi-psychotic experience of
pre-Oedipality.
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165
Yet however much O'Connor's oracular declarations attempt to provide a
totalizing characterization of lesbianism as a passion for "anguish" and "motherhood,"
by virtue of their discursive excess they fail to do so; instead, the intersections of his
performatives with other discourses on lesbian passion render Jenny's form of
"insanity" distinct from that of either Nora or Robin. 1.1 While the "perfect fury of
accumulated dishonesty" with which Jenny falls in love with Robin might be
described as an "insane passion" that traffics in "second-hand . . . emotions"
plundered from Nora, the "insistent fury" of Jenny's appropriative love is structurally
different from Nora's "insane" merger with Robin ( 6 7 , 7 5 ) . And while an openly
vicious, "unmitigated anguish" provokes Robin's affair with Jenny, the anguish of
"unmitigated . . . motherhood" would most aptly be said to characterize Nora's bond
to R o b i n . 1 2 Robin's romantic involvements, in contrast, entail a violent repudiation
of motherhood, from her abandonment of her son Guido to her threatened destruction
of the doll that symbolizes her and Nora's child. Nightwood. then, takes up and
rearticulates psychoanalytic constructions of lesbianism, splitting tropes of lesbian
psychosis between the characters of Nora and Robin: whereas Nora is portrayed as
having narcissistically merged with Robin in a quasi-psychotic manner, Robin's lack
11. Here I refer to critical debates on the role of O'Connor in the narration.
While early commentators on the novel tended to read the discursively dominant
O'Connor as providing a totalizing commentary on the novel's events, more recent
scholars have criticized such estimations as overvaluations that unduly credit the male
O'Connor with an authority that the structure of the novel itself does not grant him.
While these latter critics have emphasized the distinction between O'Connor and the
narrator, and have drawn attention to other characters whose pronouncements have
import for the larger novel, I add to their critiques the assertion that O'Connor's very
attempt to assert discursive authority inevitably fails.
1 2 . See Allen for one treatment of Nora's maternal stance toward Robin.
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166
of agency and direction is attributed to a psychical primitivism linked to psychosis and
reducible neither to narcissism nor to l e s b i a n i s m . 13
Indeed, to the extent that it can be said to have a narrative— O'Connor declares
that "I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it"— Nightwood tells the story
of Robin's wanderings and the fates of those whose passion for her is doomed: the
"Baron" Felix Volkbein and Nora Flood (97). Robin's oft-mentioned psychical
primitivism makes her prototypical of a sort of pre-symbolic insanity whose
fascinating pull on those around her drives much of the action of the novel. If the
constructs of lesbian psychosis I have discussed thus far, such as the imaginary
imprisonment of the Papins and the pre-Oedipal aggression of Kristeva's
"homosexual-maternal," to a certain degree are dependent upon a symbolic order that
structures these women's experiences not through their linguistic imbrication in the
symbolic but by a certain imminence of the symbolic in the imaginary or in the pre-
Oedipal themselves, Nightwood's Robin Vote emerges instead as the phantasmatic
construct of a primitive state of psychical and social innocence that appears to precede
not only the symbolic, but also the i m a g i n a r y . 14 Yet Robin's ostensible "primitivism"
can only be accessed by those around her through the symbolic: a "beast turning
human," she is positioned as what Kristeva calls the "abject," at the borderline
between the pre-Oedipal and the symbolic (Barnes 37).
13. I am by no means taking the stance of a clinician whose primary task is to
diagnose Nora and Robin as "psychotic," for, as should be clear, I find the terms of
such a diagnosis to be highly problematic. Instead, I aim to trace out the way in which
psychoanalysis and sexology, as two available sources for Barnes' representations of
desire between women, condition the way in which Nightwood portrays the lesbian
psyche through the same tropes used by clinicians to characterize the mental structure
of psychotics.
14. For similar discussions, see Boone, Carlston, and Henke.
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167
Moreover, Nightwood traces out the way in which Robin's supposed
"primitivism" not only is part of her irresistible appeal for the many men and women
who fall for her, but also marks her lovers' subjectivity as well. Barnes' novel thus
emphasizes the way in which discourses of "primitivism" entail the paranoid
projection onto the sexually marginalized of qualities inherent to yet simultaneously
desirable and threatening within the hegemonic symbolic itself.
Caught up in the novel's positioning of the "primitive" Robin Vote as the
phantasmatic origin of the social are psychoanalytic and sexological discourses of
lesbian psychosis. As Chisholm argues, the story of Nora's love for Robin, a
"Nadja-clone," might be compared to surrealist accounts of the "mad" fascination
provoked in artists by the abjection of the detraquee. Much as does Nadja in its
account of "Breton's" embrace of the detraquee through "mad love," Nightwood
chronicles an "amour fou "--yet one "entre deux femmes"— through which Nora and
Robin are "intoxicated with the process of degradation" that renders them
" 'incommunicable' (Nightwood 52) and unconsumable" (Chisholm 182, 189). Much
as in the play by Palau that fascinates Breton, the derangement of the female detraquee
in Nightwood is marked by her "perverse" desire for other women; Barnes' novel,
however, revises surrealist accounts of Vamourfou by making explicit the "perverse"
desire of the detraquee and by making Vamour fou structurally available to two
w o m e n , However, the novel's concluding chapter shows that its
15. Here we must recall, from Chapter 2, both the heterosexism of the
surrealist theory of Vamourfou and the way in which a presumption of heterosexuality
conditions the disavowal through which the "Breton" of Nadja articulates his
fascination with Palau's lesbian "detraquees." Chisholm, however, neither remarks
on Palau's marking of the detraquee as sexually perverse nor comments on Barnes'
important revision of the sexual politics of surrealism. For other discussions of Nora
and Robin as detraquees or as "deranged," see Boone, Herring ("Djuna Barnes and
Thelma Wood"), and Reizbaum.
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168
psychoanalytically informed construct of lesbian amour fou is ultimately doomed,
made untenable by the phallogocentric premises on which it is founded.
"Primitive" identification
Especially in those parts of the narration that concern Robin's romantic
attachments, the novel inflects tropes of lesbian psychosis by narrating others'
fascination with her apparent position as the socially and psychically "primitive."
Both her husband, Felix Volkbein, and her lesbian lover, Nora Flood, are attracted
precisely by her "primitive" qualities. Her bonds with Nora, for example, are formed
in a synchronic moment of identification with the primitive world of the beast: the two
women first meet at the circus, where a fearful moment of recognition between Robin
and a "powerful," "furious" lioness immediately cements the two women's bond and
inspires their co-habitation (54). It is no coincidence that Barnes' narrative places
such a heavy emphasis on the role of identification in precipitating Nora's and Robin's
union. As Diana Fuss notes, "[ijdentification, the first and most 'primitive' of
psychical mechanisms, provides Freud with a ready conceptual relay linking 'invert'
and 'savage'": much like the "primitive" psychical process of identification, "[bjoth
'invert' and 'savage' are represented in temporal terms, placed within a static ontology
that constructs each figure as representative of a primordial phase of human
development" (36). Nightwood repeats this confluence by linking female same-sex
love to primitivism both at the level of thematics and of representational strategy.
Indeed, one of the most striking textual features of the scene at the circus is an
incommensurability of physical and psychical causality: while the diachronic sequence
of the women's actions propels the narrative forward, the motivational logic behind
them remains mysterious. This produces the effect of psychical synchrony, indeed
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psychical automatism, that characterizes the two women's mysterious and compelling
identification with one another. This automatism is strongly linked to both women's
psyches throughout the novel: Nora's mind is "endlessly embroiled in a
preoccupation without a problem"; Robin's "thoughts were in themselves a form of
locomotion" (53; 59-60). 16
Yet why, a rationalistic reader might ask, does this automatism bind Nora and
Robin at the scene of apprehension by the lioness? Why does their encounter at the
circus lead to their immediate c o h a b i t a t i o n ? 1 7 Neither of these consequences would
seem necessarily to follow from the circumstances of their meeting. Like Nadja.
Nightwood turns on the apparent "enigma" posed by the psyche of the woman who
loves women, on the construction of her motives as unavailable for rational account
(Barnes 44). And while in earlier chapters I have pointed out the positioning of the
lesbian as the limit of "civilization," as the socially and psychically "primitive," what
Nightwood shows us is the way in which that positioning takes place through the
mediation of identification. If, in its dependence upon the slide between subject and
object, identification is fundamentally a primitive psychical mechanism, it must be
understood as always threatening a slide into that most "primitive" of psychical states,
the psychotic undifferentiation in which the distinction between subject and object
irremediably breaks down. Nightwood makes precise, then, the threat of psychosis
16. See p. 57 especially for a figuration of Robin's and Nora's commingled
voices and identities.
1^. If all of the texts featured in this project might be read as paradigmatic of
the figure of the psychotic lesbian who continues to appear even in contemporary
lesbian popular culture in the guise of the "psycho ex-girlfriend," Barnes' Nightwood
might be said as well to contain, in its story of Nora's and Robin's near-immediate
domestic union, the paradigmatic example of what now is called the "lesbianTJ-Haul
syndrome."
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170
the lesbian is understood to pose to "civilization:" that of the unraveling of the
"civilized" subject, indeed of the social order itself.
The automatic identification spectacularized in the scene at the circus is not,
however, by definition a function of psychosis. In Lacanian theory, a certain
incommensurability between action and psychical motivation characterizes all modes
of subjectivity. In that Nora and Robin themselves are functions of the constructions
of "civilization" deployed in the novel— in that even Robin's apparent "primitivism" is
a retroactive construction perpetrated by "civilization"~the automatisms made apparent
in their startling identification might be said to mark "civilization" and its supposedly
"normal" subjects as well. The fine and often mobile line between the "civilized" and
the "primitive" is no more aptly illustrated than in the counterpoint between Nora and
Robin. While it is Robin who is more strongly linked to primitivism throughout the
novel, Nora, too, is consistently marked by the primitive: both "savage and refined,"
she maintains property and attends the opera, yet also is drawn to the circus, that
debased world of the detraquee (50). This simultaneous presence of elements of
"civilization" and "barbarism" in Nora and in Robin's other admirers recalls the
juridical construction of the Papin sisters, whose acts of "refined torture" the
Prosecution decried as "barbaric" in order to suture over the crisis in the meaning of
"civilization" signaled by the murders (Houliere, in Dupre 95). Nightwood. however,
takes up the dialectic of "civilization" versus "barbarism" more explicitly than did the
Papins' prosecutor, renegotiating it in order to underscore the way in which constructs
of "primitivism" are a function of "civilization."
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"A psychic prison"
171
The same imagery of degeneration that marks the entrance of Robin's body
into the narrative also marks the description of Nora's home in New York. Run over
by weeds and frequented by bohemian intellectuals, her home is an index of the
emergence of "the primitive" within an ostensibly "civilized" human dwelling. And it
is no coincidence that the scene of Nora's and Robin's primitive recognition is the
circus, that spectacle of tamed animality, for Nora and Robin soon will take a Parisian
flat that one critic calls a "psychic prison," and that Nora herself describes as "this
house I took that Robin's mind and mine might go together" (Henke 334, Barnes
139). Fusing figures of shared domestic space with figures for shared psychical
space, Nightwood represents the women's mutual psyche through the household
objects chosen during their time together: their flat is decorated with items that, as the
objectification of and material support of their shared psychical space, attest to "the
combining of their humours" (55). As feminist scholars have pointed out, the
regulation of the female body and psyche often has operated through her confinement
within the domestic sphere, through what Kristina Deffenbacher memorably calls the
"housing of wandering minds." In Barnes' novel, the collective "personality"
objectified in the women's belongings gradually becomes the instrument of their
punishment: Nora eventually "suffered from the personality of the house," fearing
that "if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused— might lose the scent
of a home" (56). Indeed, the very fixity of the household objects paradoxically works
as a force upon Nora, conditioning the "soft and careful movements" to which her fear
of disturbing the house confines her (56). The very immobility of the women's
shared unconscious, then, both propels and constrains Nora's physical and psychical
trajectory. Implied as well by Nora's fear that her lover "might lose the scent of a
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172
home" is the effect of Robin's continuing bestiality, of her instinctual propulsion by
"scents" rather than by psychical structure, on the "psychic prison" of their
relationship. As Nora's home in New York bears on its exterior the signs of
"degeneration," so the flat in Paris becomes an interior space of psychical primitivism.
Nora's and Robin's household appears, moreover, as the specific "psychic
prison" to which psychoanalytic theorists assume lesbians to be confined in their
ostensibly psychotic, primitive undifferentiation. Nora asks Matthew O'Connor if
"you ever loved someone and it became yourself," signaling the way in which she has
appropriated Robin's image for her own narcissistic purposes (152). She then
generalizes that all lesbian love is narcissistic, contrasting the distance presumably
inscribed in the heterosexual relation to the narcissistic overidentification that
characterizes her love for Robin: she declares that "[a] man is another person-a
woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own"
(143). Psychoanalytically informed criticism on the novel has been dominated by
readings that parallel Nora's latter declaration, which posits narcissistic
overidentification as a structure universally constitutive of lesbian love. Henke, for
example, asserts that Nora and Robin are imprisoned by their mutually narcissistic
embrace. In a striking mime of Lacan's description of the Papin sisters' perilously
narcissistic lesbianism, Henke describes Nora's and Robin's world as a "self-
sufficient microcosm a deux" and asserts that
Each tries, unsuccessfully, to valorize the other through a process of perfect
reflection. Inhabiting the same subject position, they cannot engage in
speech or dialogue; nor can they work through the Hegelian dialectic
necessary to relationship. Meaning has been cut, split, externally fixed in a
setting that demands the perfect completion of an ever-elusive transcendental
signifier.18 (335)
18. As neither Djuna Barnes nor Suzette Henke provide any indication that
they were familiar with the Papin Affair or with Lacan's commentary on it, I do not
argue for any direct influence of his work in the 1930's either on Nightwood or on
Henke's reading of it. However, both of them are clearly familiar with the wider
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173
Though Lacan's article diverges from Henke's account of Nora and Robin by
emphasizing the dialectical aspect of the Papins' ostensible narcissism, the two critics'
common emphasis is on the presumed fatality of lesbian passion, understood as
narcissistic imprisonment and lack of paternal mediation. The peculiar alignment of
critical reception of Barnes' novel with Lacan's claims about the Papin sisters'
narcissistic entrapment suggests that constructions of lesbianism as delire a deux are
not so much reflections of the dynamics of women's relationships with one another as
they are projections constituted by a blind spot, set in place by phallogocentric logic,
through which the analyst or critic refuses to differentiate between two women and, as
a consequence, represents female same-sex desire as a mysterious automatism linked
to primitive aggressivity.
However, in its use of death as a figure for lesbian passion, Nightwood itself
contains some material that supports a comparison between its characters and the
Papin sisters. Tormented by Robin's wanderings, Nora finally realizes that only ”[i]n
death Robin would belong to her," be an object completely under her control (58).
Yet in Nightwood. the roles of lover and beloved are permanently unfixed. Nora does
not distinguish between herself and Robin; she avoids singular pronouns altogether
by insisting that "we love each other like death" and by declaring that all "[ljove is
death, come upon with passion" (139, emphasis added; 137). Indeed, while Nora
strives symbolically to kill Robin by possessing her, she also is symbolically
imprisoned and finally murdered by her lover. Nora claims that at home, Robin "was
sphere of psychoanalytic discourse from which Lacan's analysis of the Papin sisters
emerged. Barnes' deployment of tropes that intersect with Lacan's underscores the
presence, within 1930's quasi-medical discourse, of the figure of the "lesbian
psychotic." Moreover, the similarities between Lacan's and Henke's texts suggest the
way in which conclusions about psychotic lesbianism easily follow from the
psychoanalytic paradigm I critique throughout this project-the phallogocentric
teleology that renders lesbianism representable as narcissistic undifferentiation.
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174
watching me, to see that no one called, that the bell did not ring, that I got no mail, nor
anyone hallooing in the court, though she knew that none of these things could
happen. My life was hers" (147). Upon finally discovering Robin's betrayal, Nora
gasps as if "at the moment of [her] final breath" (64). If an ideologically vehement
critical divide has arisen over the question of whether Nora, through her "masculine"
possessiveness, or Robin, through her 'immoral' infidelities, is the 'true' victimizer,
both sides ignore the slippery reversals of victim and victimizer, prisoner and jailer,
that characterize Nora's and Robin's domestic dynamic. 19 In so doing, they miss the
way in which any attempt definitively to adjudicate the women's household disputes-
whether by Nora, Robin, O’ Connor, or the literary critic— is thwarted by the novel's
own troping of lesbian passion as a mysterious, automatic drive that cannot
definitively be located in one woman or the other.
If Nightwood represents love as a violently passionate yielding through which
the beloved 'loses herself by being taken as an object and reanimated by the lover, the
novel also suggests that such a loss of subjectivity is not always undesirable. Nora's
use of simile in her assertion that "we love each other like death" implies that their
passion is not only for one another but also for death itself. That is, while their
"[l]ove is death" in the intensity of its destructive impulse, that death also is itself
something passionately loved: one might say that they are "passionately attached" to
their own destruction. 20 This link between lesbian passion and death appears
19. Feminist critics such as Benstock, Kennedy, and Marcus emphasize that
Nora's possessiveness makes her "the unknowing instrument of the patriarchy" by
attempting to "make Robin conform to a moral code based on patriarchal self-interest
and misogyny" (Benstock 263).
20. in The Psychic Life of Power. Judith Butler explores the dynamic of
"passionate attachment" through which one clings to the workings of power that
condition one's subjection. Her account is a rejoinder to those who, like Faderman,
"presume a subject who performs an internalization" of the oppressive effects of
power, rather than a subject who is constituted through the workings of power (4).
Butler's account is useful in displacing the assumption that queer representation would
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175
frequently in late nineteenth- and early twentieth century Western literature, from the
destructive passions of Baudelaire's "femmes damnees" to the fatal vampirism of
Swinburne's "Faustine" to the treacherous kisses of Vivien's "Undine." Scholars
such as Lillian Faderman claim that in using violent images of lesbian passion, women
writers such as Barnes and Vivien show that they have "internalized completely the
puerile and self-dramatizing aspects of aesthete-decadent literature" by men
fSurpassing 362-3). A Lacanian interpretation of aggression, however, provides us
with a different way of understanding its significance in literary constructs of lesbian
desire. For Lacan, specular aggressivity is constitutive of subjectivity itself; it is a
"primitive" relation that continues to mark "normal" subjectivity as well.21 One might
view the frequent association of lesbian passion with violence and self-destruction in
fin-de-siecle and early twentieth-century literature as a displacement of the primitive
aggressivity subtending all subjectivity onto the socially marginalized, supposedly
"underdeveloped" figure of the lesbian. The lesbian's passionate yielding to the will
of her beloved stands in for the inevitable loss of self that characterizes all love.
Aggressivity between women has been a focus of discussion for feminist
critics of Barnes, who, taking as their cue Nora's remark that Robin is both "my lover
and my child," "a tall child who had grown up the length of the infant's gown" to need
help and security from a mother, often have argued that Nightwood textualizes the
ministrations of what Kristeva would call the pre-Oedipal mother (156,145). Calling
Nora "the mother of mischief' for her frantic pursuit of the wandering Robin,
O'Connor casts lesbianism as a perilously violent undifferentiation between mother
and daughter, as a dangerous mode of domestic confinement: he reminds Nora that
be devoid of all violence if it were not for the influence of so-called "negative"
representations of queers as murderous.
21. See Lacan, "L’ aggressivite en psychanalyse," Ecrits. 101-124.
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176
'"Donne says: 'We are all conceived in close prison, in our mothers' wombs we are
close prisoners all'" (97). Read within the context of psychoanalysis, Donne's words
recall Kristeva's account of the "homosexual-maternal," of the imprisoning and
aggressive space of the mother-daughter dyad. Crossing Nightwood with Kristeva,
Henke asserts that in playing "the role of (M)Other/Lover" in a relationship that lacks
paternal mediation, Nora "perpetually confirm[s] Robin's misrecognition of
wholeness and plenitude in the phallic (M)Other who centers her destabilized
personality" (3 3 5 ).2 2
Barnes scholars who buy into Kristeva's framework, however, miss the
irreducibility of Nightwood to psychoanalytic claims about lesbian undifferentiation.
As Carolyn Allen and Judith Lee suggest, Nora's and Robin's relationship is
represented through a renegotiation rather than an uncritical acceptance of
psychoanalytic accounts of same-sex desire.23 if Nora indeed plays the role of
"phallic mother," she is remarkably unsuccessful in "centering" Robin: Nora
meticulously maintains their apartment, afraid that her partner might "lose the scent of
home," yet Robin wanders out night after night, prowling the bars and cafes for
partners both male and female (56).
While Nora and Robin occupy the same physical space, the Paris flat, they do
not always inhabit the same psychical space. In contrast to Nora, Robin represents the
radical refusal to be housed; her mind does not "get loose and into the rafters," but
instead pursues liaisons that extend beyond her and Nora's "psychic prison."
Moreover, the novel suggests that Robin experiences a psychical division through
22. See also Boone, Carlston, Castricano, Guthrie, Marcus, and Michel for
discussions of pre-Oedipality.
23. Benstock makes the similarly grounded argument that Nightwood. along
with several other of Barnes' works, "examine[s] the difference within sexual
difference" (247).
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177
which "[t]wo spirits were working in her, love and anonymity," creating distance
between herself and Nora despite the intensity of their passion (55). Indeed, the
much-cited passage that describes Nora and Robin as "so 'haunted' of each other that
separation was impossible" suggests not complete fusion but instead distanced
attachment (55). The trope of haunting suggests that the two women occupy the same
physical place, yet at the same time are not quite 'there.' As if driven by an
automatism that eludes conscious mastery, when "there entered with Robin a company
unaware" she would sing songs, "debased and haunting," that harken to a previous,
indeed almost primitive state, giving "back an echo of her unknown life more nearly
tuned to its origin" (57). With their "snatches of harmony as tell-tale as the
possessions of a traveller from a foreign land," these songs intimate to Nora that
Robin is "singing of a life that she herself had no part in" (57). Likewise, certain
inhabitual movements and turns of phrase informed her "that Robin had come from a
world" entirely foreign to that of their Paris flat (58). By casting Robin as a foreigner,
these metaphors of place and national identity signal the psychical division that propels
her and Nora's 'haunting' of one another. Much as a home would be possessed by
the spirit of the ghost who haunts it, Robin is possessed by songs that hint at a
previous life, a world unbeknownst to Nora "to which she [Robin] would return"
(58). Nora, in turn, is "haunted" by the enigmatic past she senses in Robin. It is
significant that Terry Castle, in her study on the longstanding tradition of literary
representations of lesbians as specters, mimes the novel's logic of primitivism by
concluding from Nightwood that "[t]o be possessed of an apparition is to feel her
within, like some primitive disorder" (54). Nora's and Robin's passion is not an
unmediated merger but an attachment that, experienced as haunting, is ever elusive:
they slide uneasily in and out of the same subject position with a mysterious,
"primitive" automatism, neither fusing nor separating completely. While they strive
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178
towards fusion, their torment is defined precisely by their failure in accomplishing it
completely: sometimes "they would fall into an agonized embrace, looking into each
other's face, their two heads in their four hands, so strained together that the space that
divided them seemed to be thrusting them apart" (55-58). Nora later declares that
"Robin's love and mine was always impossible," paradoxically implying that their
love is a singular entity (it "was" always impossible) that takes divergent paths (those
of "Robin's love" and "mine") (1 3 9).24
Nora's and Robin's thus is not a "perfect" but instead a highly fraught
reflection (Henke 335). Yet if, as Henke argues, "[a]s soon as Robin recognizes that
it is her own fragmented image she sees reflected back in the adoring gaze of Nora,
she feels betrayed" and terrorized, it is not because, in experiencing her body in bits
and pieces, she returns to a primordial state that precedes narcissism and that allows
her temporarily to relive "the blameless innocence of childhood prior to the moment of
the Spaltung or splitting that, in Lacanian terms, enunciates the gendered subject in the
patriarchal register of language" (Henke 335). Such an argument, a psychoanalytic
inflection of Kenneth Burke's assertion that in Nightwood. "the 'essence' of
motivation ties in with terms of one sort or another for the temporally prior, even the
temporally primal," positions Robin as the "prelapsarian self of the novel's other
characters, especially Nora (Burke 2 5 1 ; Benstock, Women. 2 6 2 ) 2 5 However, it is
24 Allen's and Lee's influential treatments of Barnes' rewriting of
psychoanalytic claims about lesbian narcissism nonetheless remain problematic.
Casting the women's turbulent relationship as a "struggle to establish difference," Lee
ascribes a psychical maturity to Robin that is belied by the consistence of the novel's
rhetorical linking of her to primitivism and degeneration (Lee 212). Lee overlooks the
way in which Nightwood's casting of Robin as a "beast turning human" might be just
as problematic as its inflection of figures of lesbian narcissism.
25. Backus, Benstock, and Marcus similarly assert that Robin represents the
"unconscious." Backus, for example, claims that Robin's "unconsciousness is 'bom'
rather than acquired," and "resembles the Lacanian Imaginary" in its status as
temporally prior to symbolic law (426). These perspectives elide the way in which the
symbolic is imminent even in the imaginary, as well as the way in which those states
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important to recall the temporal paradox in Lacanian theory whereby the "violently
unorganized image" of the corps morcele "only comes after the mirror stage so as to
represent what came before" (Gallop 80). The ostensible temporal priority, or
"primitivism," of the corps morcele is a retrospective construct produced by the
symbolic order. Robin's psychical trajectory in Nightwood reflects this paradoxical
temporality of the mirror stage: if she is positioned as the fascinatingly "primitive"
other of Nora and Felix, it is not as a utopian figure who experiences unmediated
access to the state of "blameless innocence" that purportedly precedes symbolic law,
but instead as a figure for the "temporally primal" as it is phantasmatically constructed
by the symbolic order, by "civilization." Those who love Robin imagine her "every
movement" to be "an image of a forgotten experience"-an image that, through the
distortative process of recollection, represents an earlier time in life through the terms
of the present (Barnes 37). Robin, too, actively takes up the role of the "primitive
innocen[t]" (117). O'Connor notes that she is the type of person "who must get
permission to live" from some outside authority, from some representative of the
symbolic (117). He says that she always is "looking for someone to tell her that she
[is] innocent," but if she does not, "she will make an innocence for herself; a fearful
sort of primitive innocence" (117). This is not an innocence that precedes the
inscription of symbolic law, but instead one whose contours are drawn precisely in the
act of attempting to evade it.
Caught between "civilization" and that which it constructs as the "primitive,"
Robin experiences what Julia Kristeva would come to call "abjection": the struggle, at
the borderline between the pre-Oedipal and the paternal symbolic, with the terms
through which symbolic mandates open up possibilities for experience. Kelly Oliver
purportedly "prior" to the symbolic are produced, through negation, by the terms of
the symbolic itself.
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notes that abjection "is a way of denying the primal narcissistic identification with the
mother, almost” (60). In that “[t]he child becomes the abject in order to avoid both
separation from, and identification with, the maternal body,” she avoids the
simultaneous distancing from and identification with the mother that supports mirror-
stage identification and eventual accession to the symbolic order (60). Kristeva
explains that “Even before being like, T am not but do separate, reject, ab-jecf
(Powers 13). Thus, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, the abject “is neither subject nor object,
neither image nor ‘reality.’" Instead, it "is a consequence of recognizing the
impossibility of the identity of either subject or object, and yet the necessary
dependence of each on the other” ("Body" 87).
In her refusal of identification, Robin behaves as the subject-in-process of
abjection: she "can't 'Put herself in another's place'" because "she herself is the only
'position'" (146). Robin's abjection plays out both in her failed relationships and in
her unsuccessful attempts at Catholicism. Pregnant with her husband's child, the
"non-committal" Robin suddenly takes "the Catholic vow," yet "her prayer [is]
monstrous" (44,47). Resisting the sway of the symbolic, she cannot enter into a
contract that would bind her to another person, let alone to a higher law: "those who
cannot conceive a bargain," says O'Connor, "cannot be saved or damned" (47).
Similarly, she sets up Nora, the "early Christian" who "believed the word," as what
O'Connor calls "a 'good woman,'. . . a bitch on a high plane" (51). Repudiating
Nora's attempts to "save" her, Robin puts her "cleverly away by making [her] the
Madonna" (146).
"[0]utside the 'human type'— a wild thing caught in a woman's skin," she
appears within the narration in the liminal state of being tom between bestiality and
humanity (146). Yet if, having fainted, she appears to O'Connor as a "beast turning
human," at key moments of reversal— in her immediate identification with Nora at the
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circus, in her fraught embrace of Nora in their apartment, in her final stmggle with the
dog in the country chapel— it is as if she is a human turning beast (37). Her abjection,
then, marks a more complicated relation to symbolic law than that of "primitive
innocence:" she evades the symbolic even as she attempts to find it.
"Love has fallen off her wall”
"Abjection," asserts Kristeva, "is a precondition of narcissism" (Powers 13).
The subject-in-process of abjection is different, then, from the narcissistic subject
proper. Instead of repeating psychoanalysis' narrative of lesbians' narcissistic,
"perfect reflection" in each other's image, Nightwood emphasizes the way in which
Nora's narcissism is not mirrored by Robin, whose refusal to be captured ensures
only Nora's own psychical imprisonment (Henke 335). As Charles Baxter notes,
Nora's "difficulty is engendered by her own narcissism, which drives her to love her
own image at one remove and which makes her unable to forget that approximation
(Robin Vote) when it is taken away" (1179). Nora's is the delusional pursuit of an
ideal, the incessant attempt to transform the world according to her own image, to
make Robin cease her refusal to inhabit Nora's construct— an act only possible through
the obliteration of Robin herself.
However, Baxter misses Nightwood's force as a critique of psychoanalysis
when he earnestly takes up the diagnostic role of the clinician and juxtaposes himself
to doctor O'Connor, the quack whom he charges with the inability to identify Nora's
true ailment. Though he asserts that "[wjhat she [Nora] needs to be told . . . is that
she has loved herself in Robin Vote," when Nora asks O'Connor if "you ever loved
someone and it became yourself," there is more to the question than meets Baxter's
eye (Baxter 1179; Barnes 152). While on one hand Nora's query indeed signals her
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narcissistic entanglement in an image of Robin, her insistence that she has become
Robin equally suggests that certain elements of that image are especially conducive for
her identification-are so compelling that she would wish to become them. The
primitivism that subtends Nora's narcissistic overidentification with Robin is signaled
especially strongly in her question. The slippery nature of the agrammatical "it" that
"became" Nora confounds the distinction between loving subject and beloved object,
figuring her narcissism and ultimately her madness at the level of the sentence. A
reader willing to ignore the peculiar reference to a person as "it" might reasonably
interpret "it" as referring to "someone"— to Robin who "became" Nora. Yet in another
reading, "it" might be read as an agrammatical and free-floating pronoun that attempts
to signify the general condition of loving. In this second reading, "yourself becomes
the structure of love itself, and not just the subject position of a lover structurally
differentiated from the beloved in whom she loses herself. This second reading
figures the primary narcissism that vehiculates Nora's automatic, seemingly magical
identification with the "primitive" Robin (Barnes 53). Even in the "secondary
narcissism" of her attraction and eventual psychical bondage to the errant Robin,
Nora's subjectivity bears the trace of this "primitive" state. Nora's attraction to her
lover's apparent bestiality is paralleled in the attraction others feel for Robin as well:
the "primitivism" that others can so easily project onto Robin serves as an erotic
conduit, conditioning her near-universal magnetism.
Nora remains bound by Robin's apparent proximity to the primitive world of
the beast; she is driven mad precisely by her harkening to a sense of the "primitive"
she senses in herself and finds confirmed in Robin, and which she cannot purge by
"housing" their minds. Nora's eventual return to a state of primary narcissism mirrors
that of the psychotic, whose return to a state of pre-objectal undifferentiation precludes
the assumption of a subject position. Driven "insane with misery and fright" by
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183
Robin's wanderings, Nora experiences what some scholars call "incipient insanity" as
she frantically pursues her lover through the cafes and nightclubs of Paris in an
attempt to draw her back (Barnes 129; Williamson 72).
Just as the imprisoning nature of Nora's and Robin's household is rendered
through a figurative play between domestic and psychical space, the ravages of Nora's
narcissism are rendered through domestic metaphors even as she literally leaves her
home in search of Robin. Observing Nora's nocturnal pursuits, O'Connor comments
that
"Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman," he thought to himself,
"without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up
the spots on die wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety
from a woman," he said to himself. . . "and love gets loose and into the
rafters. She sees her everywhere." (60-61)
If we read the word "[ljove" as referring to Nora, O'Connor's expression can be
interpreted as a conflation of Nora the physical being with Nora the subject of desire:
she is reduced to her love for Robin. O'Connor's imagery thus has the same effect as
the linguistic slippage of the self-interrogation through which Nora asks herself if
"you ever loved someone and it became yourself' (152). It underscores the quasi-
psychotic undifferentiation at work in Nora's loss of herself in the "primitive" Robin.
The two passages differ, however, in that Nora's query conflates both herself and
Robin with "love," while O'Connor's remark conflates only Nora with it.
O'Connor's remarks thus signal the pure narcissism of Nora's pursuit, her
maintenance of the structure of love in the literal absence of its object. For Nora,
Robin is what Lacan would call the objet a: the phantasmatic object that causes desire
yet which never can be attained.
Moreover, O'Connor's words suggest that Nora's literal attempt to bring her
lover home is a response to the figurative unsettling of her psychical "home" by
Robin's departure. The doctor's domestic imagery implies a parallel between the
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"family portraits" that "take a slide" and Nora's fallen "[l]ove" for Robin: if one reads
the passage 'backwards,' O'Connor's rhetorical sleight of hand can be seen to paint
Nora's and Robin's love as a stable image that can be installed on the wall of the
patriarchal mansion to mark them as its rightful lesbian heirs. Yet in that the portrait is
not of Nora or of Robin but of "love," as a decorative domestication it fails to
suppress the constitutive mobility of desire, and therefore inevitably precipitates its
own fall. Nora's is a love always already fallen, always already "off its wall."
Furthermore, this phrase implies the paradox marked by the women's "queering" of
domestic space, indeed by the limit-setting paradox that defines queerness itself. Nora
and Robin are not compliant with the traditional arrangements of patriarchal
domesticity, yet their love is also off "its" wall, the wall that is theirs to the extent that
is the necessary point of departure for their refusals. Potentially progressive in its
appropriation and rearticulation of the terms of normative heterosexuality, Nora's and
Robin's love nonetheless is represented, through the imagery of the fallen portraits, as
destructive: the doctor's rhetorical slide between falling "love" and falling "family
portraits" suggests that lesbian narcissism is a form of psychical unraveling that
precipitates a collapse in the patriarchal family whose (symbolic) portraits hung on the
wall before Nora's and Robin's.
At the same time as O'Connor figures Nora's madness as a fall, as a form of
degeneration heralding the collapse of the patriarchal family, he also represents it as a
foiled flight, as a failed attempt to transcend the constraints of the patriarchal home: let
"loose," Nora's mad love for Robin would allow her to escape, to fly up and away as
if unfettered; instead, her desire is blocked by the "rafters," closed in by the
patriarchal space that collapses around her and that even follows her into the streets.
This paradoxical space of restricted liberty characterizes the domestic topographies of
Nightwood: quoting Donne, O'Connor declares that '"[w]hen we are bom, we are
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185
but bom to the liberty of the house-all our life is but a going out to the place of
execution and death'" (97). The novel associates liberty with animality: when she
enters the narration in a faint, Robin seems "to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing
room" (35). This household is the bastion of a patriarchal civilization whose failure in
its project of domesticating the beast leaves society ever prone to the threat of
degeneration.
The course taken by Nora's madness, then, does not so much illustrate the
way in which lesbianism is especially conducive to overidentification as it does point
up the way in which the representation of Nora's love as jealous, narcissistic delusion
is conditioned by a phallogocentric cultural frame (155). As a result, the novel
presents two divergent accounts of Nora's desire, echoing the contradiction whereby
Lacan presents Christine Papin's psychosis both as a prototypically feminine
narcissism and a dangerous crossover to the masculine. Barnes' Nora Flood is
similarly positioned both as the quintessential feminine narcissist (the overidentifying
mother) and as the jealous, "masculine" lover.
This phallogocentric textual framing sets the stage for the representation of
Nora's grief, at its furthest limit, as a hallucinatory attempt to suture the gap arising
from the loss of "the joy and safety of the Catholic faith" (60). O'Connor presents
Catholicism as a desirable symbolic replacement for the patriarchal family whose
destruction is signaled by the fallen portraits: religion "covers up the spots on the wall
when the family portraits take a slide" (60). Lacking the support of patriarchal
institutions, lacking a grounding in the symbolic order by the phallic signifier, Nora
sees Robin "everywhere" in a hallucinatory attempt to sustain her desire in the absence
of its object (61). Nora's lesbianism thus is figured as an attempt at suture, yet one
that fails to repair the decline in the paternal function it has caused in its unraveling of
patriarchal religion. Taken as a whole, then, O'Connor's discourse on how "[l]ove
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186
has fallen off her wall" traces out the way in which lesbianism appears both as cause
and symptom of the unraveling of the symbolic order of the Catholic faith.
Lesbianism appears as destructive of the patriarchal symbolic and, in turn, as
impossible to sustain with sanity in the absence of the symbolic.
"Intaglio of her identity"
The novel's troping of Nora's grief as hallucinatory invites comparison to
Freud's account of mourning. As Fuss explains, identification is the means of
"psychical memorialization" through which the "murdered Other" is "entombed inside
the subject" in introjective psychical processes such as mourning (34). By introjecting
the lost object, the mourner "prolongs the hallucinatory belief in the existence of the
object by giving it a certain shelf life inside the ego" (37). Nightwood not only
parallels Fuss' description of mourning as entombment, but also her translation of
Freud's work on mourning into an image of the psyche as enclosed space. The
narrator explains that
Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the
'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body,
the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover
will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves. In Nora's heart
lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its
maintenance ran Nora's blood. Thus the body of Robin could never be
unloved, corrupt, or put away. Robin was now beyond timely changes,
except in the blood that animated her. (56)
Figuring Nora's psyche as a tomb in which the petrified trace of Robin is preserved,
Nightwood uses figures of bodily incorporation to figure Nora's psychical introjection
of her wayward lover. Moving from a literal to a figurative meaning of the word
"heart," Barnes conveys Nora's psychical attachment as a physical attachment: not
merely her desire, but also her very blood sustains the life of the relationship. This
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image of physical inseparability suggests as well the dual nature of identification itself.
In introjecting and sustaining the object called "Robin," Nora herself is marked by and
therefore unable to escape it, at the same time as her psychical processes continue to
perpetuate it: Robin is traced as "intaglio," "as an indelible shadow," into her lover's
heart, yet also is sustained only by Nora's blood. The apparently contradictory image
of Robin as a "fossil" maintained by Nora's blood reflects the dual impulse that drives
introjection itself. For Freud, a subject's introjection of a vanished object is always an
attempt to preserve the libidinal link to that object in the face of a contradictory reality—
to attempt, that is, to reanimate a dead object.
As a process in which the subject (re)appropriates the object for her own
libidinal purposes, introjection also is marked by aggressivity. Indeed, by presenting
Nora's love as "analogous . .. to the 'findings' in a tomb," Barnes figures it as
presupposing the death of its object: Nora's love for Robin is legible only through the
traces left in the ravages around them. By drawing an analogy between love and the
remnants of the dead, this passage also implies that love itself is a graveyard into
which the murdered love object is buried, the place where one finds not the living and
breathing flesh of the beloved but only her lifeless skeleton and decaying possessions.
Nora's sense of inseparability from her lover depends precisely on the obliteration of
Robin accomplished through her introjection: the only trace of Robin that remains is
the fossil reanimated by Nora's own blood. Thus, paradoxically, Nora must
(figuratively) kill off and fossilize Robin to propel her frantic drive "to bring Robin
back by the very velocity of the beating of her heart" (61). Just as ancient civilizations
only can be brought back to life through the constructions of archaeologists, so can the
dead only be reanimated in their mourners' imaginings. Nora's hope that her heartbeat
would suffice to reincarnate Robin as faithful lover thus signals, too, her embroilment
in the narcissism of an Imaginary aggressivity that must kill Robin in order to keep her
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animate. Maintained not by Robin's but by "Nora's blood," the phantasmatie "body
of Robin" is permanently preserved in Nora's animation as a lifeless puppet, "beyond
timely changes" outside of Nora's control. Even at its outset, Nora's and Robin's
relationship has a ghostly quality that marks them as always already dead: their
narcissistic "haunting" of one another renders "separation . . . impossible" and their
bonds eventually perilous (55). Yet in Lacanian theory, imaginary aggressivity is not
peculiar to Nora's extreme narcissism but instead is constitutive of subjectivity
itself.26 Nora's example illustrates the way in which lesbian desire, qua pathological
narcissism, appears within psychoanalytically informed discourse as the most extreme
limit of subjectivity-as the illustration of the perils of the narcissistic dialectic.
The perils of narcissism are illustrated most clearly in the breakdown between
subject and object in the novel's figuration of Nora's psyche. A consequence of
Nora's incorporation of Robin is her decreased ability to distinguish herself from the
lover she has animated in her own image. If "[i]n Nora's heart lay the fossil of Robin,
intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora's blood," it is unclear
precisely whose identity is marked by the intaglio: the pronoun "her" could refer to
either of its female antecedents (56). Since the "fossil of Robin" serves as the
"intaglio," on the one hand it is Robin's identity; on the other, however, it also has
marked Nora's identity as an "indelible shadow," and indeed is animated by Nora
herself. Nora's identity is constituted, then, by the abolition of the boundary between
subject and object that characterizes her introjection of Robin.
Nora's confusion of her identity with that of Robin later is figured as
comparable to a confusion of her very body with her lover's: during Robin's
evenings out, Nora feels her absence as
26. See Lacan, "Le stade du miroir" and "L'Aggressivite en psychanalyse."
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189
a physical removal, insupportable and irreparable. As an amputated hand
cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim
is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce.
As the wrist longs, so her heart longed, and dressing she would go out into
the night that she might be 'beside herself,' skirting the cafe in which she
could catch a glimpse of Robin. (59)
During Robin's escapes, at the painful limit of the women's "haunting" of each other,
Robin appears as "an amputated hand," as a phantom limb whose painful pull drives
Nora mad by exacerbating their "insupportable and irreparable" breach (55).
Observing that "[i]n the phantom limb, the diseased limb that has been surgically
removed continues to induce sensations of pain in the location that the limb used to
occupy," Elizabeth Grosz notes that "the absence of a limb is as psychically invested
as its presence" fVolatile 41). Analogously, Nora's psychical investiture in Robin
persists despite her escapes. Yet Nightwood does not simply deploy the category of
"the psychic" to account for bodily sensation. Instead, renegotiating the tenacious
mind/body split by figuring the psyche as body, the novel uses the notion of the
"phantom limb" to do exactly the opposite— to evoke Nora's psychical state: Nora's
heart longs for Robin "just as" the bloody "wrist longs" for the severed hand.
Moreover, by reminding us through its corporeal imagery of the physicality of Nora's
and Robin's former union, the conceptual reversal performed by this passage
complicates, rather than outright rejects, standard accounts of the "phantom limb":
Nora's psyche itself is represented as a bodily organ, the heart. Its identity marked by
the "intaglio" both of herself and Robin, Nora's heart necessarily divides in mourning
her lover: through the analogy to the wrist, her heart's longing is figured as both the
physical and the psychical pain of having lost a part of itself.
"Beside herself'— split from the very object she has incorporated-Nora not
only feels Robin's absence as an "amputation," but also hallucinates her reappearance:
she "sees her everywhere" in a hallucinatory attempt to suture the split through reunion
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190
with Robin (61). While the confusion of subject and object suggested by this passage
is characteristic of the mourner's incorporation of the lost object into the self, it also is
characteristic of psychosis. Indeed, the novel's presentation of Nora as hallucinating
in response to separation from Robin is another point at which it crosses with accounts
of the Papin sisters: Christine Papin, too, was described by Lacan and others as prone
to violent delusion during her separation in prison from L e a .27 Similarly crying to
O'Connor that ’ "I can't live without my heart!"' Nora eventually represents Robin as
her heart itself, transferring agency from herself to her phantasmatic incarnation of the
absent lover she is unable to live without (156).
Fuss' casual description of mourning as "hallucinatory" suggests the same
psychotic quality we see in constructions of Nora and Christine as experiencing an
absent loved one as a "phantom limb." Moreover, the divergences in textual
constructions of the two women suggest that the line between mourning and
melancholia is malleable: whereas Nora's hallucinated "phantom limb," Robin,
appears through a textualization of the psychoanalytic discourse on mourning,
Christine's apparently severed appendage, Lea, appears through a discourse on
melancholia.28 And while the latter example appears in Lacan's account as the self-
punitive element of the narcissistic dialectic of paranoid psychosis, the former crosses
with constructs of female psychosis in Freud's description of mourning as taking the
form of a "hallucinatory wishful psychosis" in its most severe manifestation
("Mourning and Melancholia" 244).
27, Lacan notes Christine's hallucinatory states and eventually links them to
what he views as pathologically narcissistic, pre-symbolic lesbianism; however, he
makes less of the role of her separation from Lea in the genesis of her delusions than
does Dupre.
28. See Dupre and Lacan for discussions of Christine as melancholic.
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191
Even though she echoes Freud's language of "hallucination" in her
sophisticated discussion of Freud's elaboration of distinctions between mourning and
melancholia, Fuss provides little help in understanding their relation to his account of
the psychoses— perhaps because in "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud neither
elucidates the psychotic aspects of mourning nor explores their relation to melancholia.
Later, however, Laplanche and Pontalis would categorize melancholia as a psychosis
distinct from both paranoia and schizophrenia (370). In "Mourning and Melancholia,"
Freud himself symptomatically refuses explicitly to explore the very commonalities his
own discussion of mourning as a "hallucinatory wishful psychosis" suggests to exist
between the psychotic state of melancholia and the psychotic form taken by mourning
in its most extreme moments. Implicitly constructing the mourner as normal, he
asserts that the extreme reaction of the melancholic in contrast renders her "suspect"-
the subject of a clinical investigation intended to ferret out signs of her "pathological
disposition," and conducted not only by Freud the clinician but also by "us," the
reader-assistants whose presumed normalcy and consensus are sufficient proof that
mourning is not "a pathological condition" because that possibility "never occurs to
us" ("Mourning and Melancholia" 243). The tautological construction of normalcy
advanced through Freud's appeal to common sense appears, too, in his claim that
melancholia arises when the loss of an object does not lead to the "normal. . .
withdrawal of the libido from [the] object and a displacement of it on to a new one," as
in mourning (249, emphasis added). Yet if this formulation indeed suggests that
melancholia is "not the opposing of mourning but its most violent continuation"-that it
is "pathological mourning"— then we might ask not what distinguishes melancholia
from the ordinary experience of mourning, but instead what similarities it shares with
those extreme instances of mourning that culminate in a "hallucinatory wishful
psychosis" that allows the bereaved to turn "away from reality" in order to avoid
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192
withdrawing her libido from the absent object (Fuss 38; Freud, "Mourning and
Melancholia," 250, 244). The psychotic turn taken by this especially "intense" form
of mourning implicitly differentiates it from the "normal" process of displacement and
recathexis later assumed by Freud in his hasty opposition of mourning to melancholia.
However, Freud's failure to account for this progression from a "normal" into a
"psychotic" mode of mourning elides the question of the difference between
"normalcy" and "psychosis," and in so doing opens up two not entirely incompatible
lines of speculation: that mourning itself may have variants that parallel melancholia
not only in their initial provocation by loss but also in their later manifestation in a
flight from 'reality;' that mourning, in carrying the potential for "hallucinatory wishful
psychosis," itself might be a socially acceptable (and therefore "normal") means of
entering into that same psychical territory of the psychotic (244, 249).
If, in "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud's recourse to the pathological
"disposition" of melancholics is unsatisfactory both in its unexamined distinction
between normalcy and psychosis and in its failure to account for the overlap of
"hallucinatory wishful psychosis" with melancholia-if, that is, the possibility that
"normal" mourning could progress into a "psychotic" mode itself would seem to
undermine the distinction between normalcy and psychosis--we might ask whether his
claims gain any more cogency in the context of other writings in which he treats the
distinction between "normal" and "psychotic" modes of hallucination more explicitly.
In a footnote to "Mourning and Melancholia," editor James Strachey refers the reader
interested in "hallucinatory wishful psychosis" to "A Metapsychological Supplement
to the Theory of Dreams,” the article which immediately precedes "Mourning and
Melancholia" in the Standard Edition. Exploring the various ways in which subjects
are able to flee "reality," Freud sketches out in "A Metapsychological Supplement"
some differences between the "topographical" and "temporal" regressions operative in
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"normal" processes such as dreaming and grieving and in those presumably
pathological mechanisms propelling the psychoses ("Metapsychological" 222). This
"Supplement" is indeed instructive, but not in any straightforward way. Though he
opens the paper by presenting "grief' as one of the "normal prototypes of pathological
affections" under consideration, by the end of the article mourning nonetheless gives
way to the dreamwork as the exemplary instance of a "normal" regressive process
(222, emphasis added). And even if through this rhetorical effacement, Freud tacitly
questions the status of mourning as "normal," he nonetheless does it through a
refusal, in the deployment of the opposition of dreams to psychosis, explicitly to
question the same assumed distinctions between "normalcy" and "pathology" that will
uphold its apparently nonpathological status in "Mourning and Melancholia."
What, though, does "A Metapsychological Supplement" yield for a general
understanding of "hallucinatory wishful psychosis"? He explains that hallucinatory
psychosis "achieves two by no means identical results": that of bringing "hidden or
repressed wishes into consciousness," and that of representing them, "with the
subject's entire belief, as fulfilled" (230). Freud's conclusion that the hallucinating
subject entirely believes in "the reality" of the fulfillment of his wish is accompanied,
however, by a sense that he is entering into theoretical terrain that is dangerous: he
cautions that his speculations reveal "the gravest" kind of "uncertainties" about the
distinctions between normalcy and pathology (229). The rest of the article is devoted
to an attempt to explain the absolute nature of the binary between "normal" and
"pathological" hallucinations in terms of their divergent topographical effects. So
Freud states his aim in comparing "dreams with pathological states akin to them": not
to explore the way in which the universality of hallucination might allow us to rethink
definitions of sanity and insanity, but instead to "clear up" a feared infection of normal
subjectivity by the hallucinatory process of the dreamwork— to reorient the reader to a
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194
clinical viewpoint in which the hallucinations of "normal" subjects are not seen as
symptoms of pathology (229).29
Do the topographical distinctions advanced by Freud successfully distinguish
between pathological and non-pathological modes of hallucination, however? Arguing
that all hallucinations are caused by a "withdrawal of cathexis" propelled by a
psychical regression that allows the subject to evade reality-testing, Freud notes that
this regression can be accomplished at various topographical sites: "[i]n dreams the
withdrawal of cathexis (libido or interest) affects all systems equally; in the
transference neuroses, the Pcs. cathexis is withdrawn; in schizophrenia, the cathexis
of the Ucs.; in amentia, that of the Cs." (232-5). The pathological or nonpathological
nature of hallucination, then, depends upon the site from which cathexis has been
withdrawn in regression. Yet Freud presents the very fact of topographical
distinctions between the dreamwork and the psychoses as proof that the former can be
seen as uncontaminated by the latter. In so doing, he continues to beg the question of
the distinction between sanity and insanity, providing nothing more than his initial
assumption of the normalcy of the dreamwork to uphold the claim that it is absolutely
distinct from psychosis.
However, if we turn Freud's argument on its head, looking carefully at the
topographical distinctions he proposes, the line between psychosis and normalcy blurs
significantly. If in the three "pathological" states-"the transference neuroses,"
"schizophrenia," and "amentia"— cathexis is withdrawn from specific topographical
sites, in the purportedly normal state, the dreamwork, all of these sites are affected
equally by regression. Furthermore, in that in the latter process, regression is
accomplished the most thoroughly of all, and in fact includes multiple regressions that
29. Orig. "Klarung" (420).
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in themselves are identified as "pathological," it it difficult to understand Freud's
insistence that his topographical analysis proves the "normalcy" of the dreamwork.
"A Metapsychological Supplement," then, leaves the distinction between "normal" and
"psychotic" modes of hallucination as unclear as does "Mourning and Melancholia."
In their begging of the question of the difference between normalcy and
psychosis, Freud's rhetorical moves are similar to those Lacan makes in positioning
Christine and Lea Papin as having transgressed the limits of "the human community"
in the violent culmination of their narcissistic psychosis. In both analysts' arguments,
"psychosis" appears not as an objective diagnosis but as a construct, invested both
with the force of the author's medical authority and with his unexamined biases. The
questionable status of "psychosis" in both analysts' texts is important to keep in mind
in cross-reading them with Nightwood: the novel's much-noted mockery of medical
authority, accomplished through the privileging of the diagnostic voice of the "quack"
gynecologist, Matthew O'Connor, foregrounds precisely the politics of medical
authority that underpin the diagnosis of "psychosis," and, in turn, the construction of
the "psychotic le s b ia n ." 3 0 The point of my long excursion into the aetiological
overlaps between psychosis, mourning, and melancholia is not by any means to arrive
at the most accurate "diagnosis" for Nora or to determine whether or not her behavior
is pathological, for, as we have seen, Freud's claims to the pathological nature of
psychical phenomena are themselves ideologically suspect. Instead, my aim is to
highlight the way in which Nightwood. to the extent that it condenses and redeploys
early twentieth-century analytic constructions of female mental illness and same-sex
passion, figures "the psychotic lesbian" through flexible, and therefore ideologically
30. Critical invocations of Barnes' use of O'Connor to mock masculinity and
psychoanalytic discourse are many: see Benstock, Boone, Henke, Gilbert and Gubar,
Kautz, and Marcus.
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malleable, distinctions between various pathologies linked to ostensibly feminine
psychical constructs of primitivism and narcissism.
"The inbreeding of pain"
How, then, are we to interpret the similarities between constructions of the
mournful Nora Flood and those of the melancholic Christine Papin? Precisely where,
one might ask, do the partially divergent discourses on mourning and melancholia
converge in representations of the two women as hallucinatory, indeed psychotic in
their grief? In her account of melancholia as the "violent continuation" of mourning,
Fuss suggests that the two processes are similar not only because they are propelled
by an initial loss, but also because they are accomplished through identification. The
melancholic, she explains, fails to introject the lost object, and instead takes "the ego
itself as its object of incorporation,.. . [tjuming identification's violent impulses
completely inward," and consuming "itself in an act of auto-cannibalism" (37). For
Freud, although in melancholia the lost object is "withdrawn from consciousness," the
self-reproaching melancholic nonetheless harbors a secret identification with the object
she has refused to incorporate: she takes its qualities as her own, citing its faults as
cause for self-flagellation (Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 245). Noting that the
"substitution of identification for object-love is an important mechanism in the
narcissistic affections," Freud claims that the predisposition to the "pathological
mourning" that is melancholia "ties in the predominance of the narcissistic type of
object-choice," for in such individuals "the object-cathexis, when obstacles come in its
way, can regress to narcissism" (248-250).
Figuring Nora's increasingly intense mourning as a slide into melancholia,
Nightwood emphasizes the link between her increasingly vehement self-reproaches
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and her narcissistic identification with Robin as she experiences what some critics
have called Nora's insanity, or what O'Connor calls the "inbreeding of pain" (129).
His phrase highlights the way in which the cause of Nora's pain gradually has moved
from outside to inside-from the torment of Robin's repeated disappearances to the
ravages of the self-reproaches to which Nora subjects herself in her eventual
assumption of blame for their love's unraveling. Berating herself for having made
Robin "bitter" and evasive by having "dashed .. . down" the "shadow" of innocence
with which she veiled the implications of "her life at night," Nora cries that "I can't
live without my heart!" (156). What appeared earlier as a "fossil of Robin"
incorporated into and maintained by Nora's heart here appears as a phantom limb, as a
hallucinatory rendering of the very organ from which separation would mean death.
Indeed, melancholia is the form of mourning most strongly marked by the extreme
aggressivity of psychosis, by the imminent possibility that the melancholic's death (by
suicide) will follow her identification with the "dead" o b j e c t .31 We might recall that
Nora's sudden awareness of her and Robin's imminent separation is represented as a
figurative death: upon finding Robin clinging to Jenny in the courtyard, Nora gasps
"with the intolerable automatism of the last 'Ah!' in a body struck at the moment of its
final breath" (58, 64).
O'Connor represents Nora's "inbreeding of pain" as caused by an internal
division in which one part of her psyche levels accusations against the other. In
drunken frustration, he describes Nora as "beating her head against her heart, sprung
over, her mind closing her life up like a heel on a fan, rotten to the bone for love of
Robin" (161). However, he also tells her that "you are the only one strong enough to
have listened to the prosecution, your life; and to have built back the amazing defence,
31. Laplanche and Pontalis identify "melancholia and mania" as psychoses
structurally distinct from paranoia and schizophrenia (370).
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your heart!" (153). Just as the narrator slides between metaphors of the body and the
psyche in figuring Nora's heart as animating the "fossil" of Robin, so does O'Connor
in his representation of Nora's psychical split as a battle between two parts of the
body: "her head" represents the realm of reason, and repeatedly beats upon "the heart"
that stands in for her emotional bond to her lover. Moreover, Combining metaphors of
law, body, and psyche in a series of rhetorical equivalencies, O'Connor equates
Nora's "life" with the "mind" that ”clos[es] her life up" through a rationalistic
"prosecution"; he contrasts it with the "heart" whose emotional logic conflicts with the
reasoning of the "mind" yet provides a strong "defense" against the claims of the
prosecution. "Amazing" in its defense of itself, Nora's heart makes claims that are
unusual, yet also implicitly superior to those made by her "mind." Her singularity,
indeed superiority as a human being lies in the fact that she is "the only one strong
enough" to have allowed her "heart" to prevail against charges of its irrationality.
O'Connor's representation of the triumph of "heart" over "mind" in Nora's
psychical division has important consequences for the novel's deployment of
psychoanalysis' conventional linking of female same-sex desire to psychosis. By
equating Nora's "mind" with her "life," and therefore with the experience of her
material and psychical existence under patriarchy, O'Connor renders her love for
Robin socially valid by representing her "heart" as prevailing over reason in legal
battle. While elsewhere O'Connor presents "love of woman for woman" as an
"insane passion," as the limit of the social, in this moment of reversal he reconfigures
it— through the very "defense" mounted by Nora's refusal to cede on her lesbian
passion-not as madness, but as an alternate form of reason, as the founding principle
of an alternate social order (75). Indeed, he asserts that his "great virtue" is that he
never uses "the derogatory in the usual sense" (116-117). Thus, instead of proposing
her lesbianism as the cause of her madness, as would a standard psychoanalytic
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account, O'Connor's rhetorical reversal instead suggests that the discursive conflation
of her insanity with her desire for Robin is conditioned by a phallogocentiic
representational frame whose purchase on subjectivity is historically and ideologically
contingent, rather than transhistorically necessary. What in the standard
psychoanalytic account of lesbianism is understood as her irrationality, as the index of
her social and psychical "primitivism," becomes the hallmark of rationality, of
"civilization," in this alternate universe.
Although Catherine Guthrie also presents an account, derived differently than
my own, of the way in which Nightwood reconfigures the symbolic order, I hesitate
to concur with her presentation of the novel as a wholly successful "re-founding" of
"the symbolic on the basis of lesbianism" (54). First, even though O'Connor's
remarks reconfigure social law to render lesbianism sane and viable, they do not
necessarily suggest it to be the foundational principle of the social order. Second,
while at one moment O'Connor elevates Nora as a queer heroine, as "the only one"
able to fortify her heart against the ravages of patriarchy, in another instance he
describes her frantic pursuit of Robin not as the triumphant establishment of a new
civilization, but instead as "the demolishing of a great ruin" (153, 142).
"A fine and terrifying spectacle"
The larger narrative trajectory of Nightwood traces out the demolition to which
O'Connor refers, suggesting that his positing of an alternative symbolic order does
little to halt the destructive path paved for Nora by a patriarchal society that renders her
lesbianism an "insane passion." Her refusal to cede her desire does not successfully
rearticulate symbolic law, but instead leads to the "fine and terrifying spectacle" of her
destruction in the scene of failed reunion with which the novel closes (142-143).
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Alerted by the barking of her dog, Nora follows it from her upstate New York home
to a chapel at the top of a hill. "[C]ursing and crying" for no apparent reason, she
runs in pursuit of her dog, only to plunge "blindly" into the chapel door (169).
Felled, her enraged passion thwarted by the patriarchal structure of the chapel— by the
very social order that produced her lesbianism as insane narcissism— Nora disappears
from the narration, never to witness the scene whose anticipation compelled her. All
that remains of Nora is her dog, its beastliness standing in for the primitivism that
subtends her own subjectivity.
Completing the descent into animality that began when, like an animal, she
"circled closer and closer" to Nora while wandering through the woods and engaging
in specular identifications with animals-speaking to them, grasping them, "straining
their fur back until their eyes were narrowed and their teeth bare, her own teeth
showing as if her hand were upon her own neck"— Robin goes down on all fours
before the altar, at the moment Nora strikes the doorframe, and begins an eroticized
struggle with Nora's dog (168). If at first, Robin's status as a person is ambiguous
(she is "someone" Nora loved "and it became" herself), and if she eventually becomes
an "it" (she is "something strange" that had loved Nora but later had "forgotten" her),
in "The Possessed" she finally descends to animality in her identification with the dog,
another "it" (152, 156). In this instance, she is not a "beast turning human," but
instead a human turning beast (152).
This final scene in which Nora is drawn to the chapel with a furious
automatism both destroys her and displaces her primitivism onto Robin. By
identifying with the dog, Robin identifies with Nora's "primitive" core, an act that can
be fully accomplished only through Nora's destruction. The final chapter thus fulfills
Nora's plaint, in her reflections upon her and Robin's position at "the centre of
eroticism and death," that "in bed Robin should have put me down" (158). Prompted
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by the felling of Nora, the "Madonna" upon whom Robin depends and against whom
she rebels, Robin's descent into "primitivism" also tracks the unraveling of patriarchal
religion (146). Indeed, in that it takes place in a chapel, the home of the Christian
church, Robin's unraveling spectacularizes a "primitivism" that is at the core of
"civilization" itself. This unraveling is that of the gendered and sexual regime upon
which patriarchal society is founded, and which has produced the tragic figure of the
psychotic lesbian. Yet the chapel itself remains unaffected-unchanged by the
unraveling of that very figure of lesbian psychosis its own terms have produced.
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C hapter 4
“Prophetess Faced Prophetess”: Madness and the Female Visionary in H.D.’s
HERmione
In July of 1919, while vacationing in the Scilly Isles with her female
companion, Bryher, the poet H.D. experienced a startling vision in which she “felt this
impulse to 'let go' into a sort of balloon” she saw hovering overhead, along with “a
second globe or bell-jar” that rose as if from her feet. In her diary of the experience,
she asserts that “it was being with Bryher that projected the fantasy,” that she would
have “dismissed it at once” had it not been for her friend’s role in sustaining it
(“Advent” 130). Less than a year later, while vacationing on the Greek island of
Corfu, H.D. experienced another vision, again with Bryher. This time it took the
form of a projection of images, then of writing, onto the wall of a hotel bedroom. As
“dim light on shadow, not shadow on light,” the poet first saw a silhouette of a
soldierly head and shoulders, then an “outline of a goblet or cup” of the same size as
the silhouette and “suggesting the mystic chalice.” Next appeared “a simple design in
perspective . . . a circle or two circles, the base the larger of the two”; the image
recalled that of “the tripod of classic Delphi,” a symbol of prophecy found at a shrine
H.D. had strongly desired to see earlier in her voyage yet which required too rigorous
a journey than was permissible during that period “for two ladies alone” (H.D.,
“Writing on the Wall,” 45-49). Without “budgfing] an inch or break[ing] the
sustained crystal-gazing stare at the wall before” her, she testified to Bryher that
‘“ [tjhere have been pictures here , . . They are quite simple objects— but of course it’s
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very strange. I can break away from them now, if I want— it’s just a matter of
concentrating-what do you think? Shall I stop? Shall I go on?’” Without hesitation,
Bryher said, ‘“Go on’” (47). H.D. went on to sense “a sort of pictorial buzzing”; she
saw small, black creatures swarming about the base of the tripod, first believing them
to be ants or “very small half-winged insects that have not yet learnt to fly,” but then
insisting that they were “tiny people, all in black” or in shadow (48). When the
buzzing ceased, H.D. sensed a “moving finger” to be writing on the wall, slowly
forming lines, then ladders, out of dots of light. Then, suddenly, the figure of the
angel Nike appeared, moving upward as if climbing the ladder toward a series of
broken curves of light. When H.D. collapsed in exhaustion from the intensity of
concentration required by the vision, Bryher completed it for her, seeing “a circle like
the sun-disk and a figure within the disk: a man . . . reaching out to draw the image of
. . . Nike . . . into the sun beside him” (52-56).
H.D.’s visions with Bryher have been the subject of scholarly debates in
which three related topics of discussion cross; her texts’ negotiation of sexual identity,
her writings’ figuration of the mother/daughter bond, and her 1933-1934
psychoanalysis in Vienna with Sigmund Freud. At stake in these debates often is the
nature of female creativity, and the role of female sexuality in it. Frequently
speculating about H.D.’s mental health at the time of the Corfu visions, much of this
scholarship has as a subtext the unanalyzed question of links between madness and
female same-sex desire. While asserting that the visions are a form of female creativity
that importantly envision a homosexualized feminist utopia, prior feminist scholars
have nonetheless read textualizations of H.D.’s visions in a manner that leaves
uninterrogated the politics through which the social marginalization of lesbianism is
articulated in figures of psychosis.
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In her prose writings, H.D. comments on her visionary experiences. One of
her first attempts to provide a “a rough account of this singular adventure” with visions
and to assess their creative productivity is her 1919 experimental prose-poem, Notes
on Thought and Vision (H.D., “Advent,” 130). With its emphasis on vision and on
levels of consciousness in the production of experimental writing, Notes shares the
concerns of more highly publicized avant-garde manifestos such as Breton's
Manifestes du surrealisme. * Notes accounts for creative visions by emphasizing the
interplay between body and mind in a visionary "over-conscious" derived from the
"over-mind," yet dependent on the body as well. Indeed, as Susan Stanford Friedman
remarks, the piece “directly theorizes the interconnection of erotics and poetics”: H.D.
writes that “[t]he over-conscious world is the world of waking dreams and the world
great lovers enter, spiritual lovers” (Friedman, “H.D.,” 88; H.D., Notes. 107).
Making indirect reference to the Scilly vision in her explanation of the “over
conscious,” H.D, insists that “[w]e must be ‘in love’ before we can understand the
mysteries of vision,” for “[t]he minds of the two lovers merge, interact in sympathy of
thought.” As a result, “[t]he brain, inflamed and excited by this interchange of ideas,
takes on its character of over-mind, becomes (as I have visualized in my own case) a
jelly-fish, placed over and above the brain” (Notes 95). Speaking explicitly of the
erotics at work in visions, and indirectly of Bryher as the lover with whom she was in
sympathy during her Scilly experience, H.D. elliptically figures a homoerotic charge
as the force behind the visions.
Yet her account of the genesis of such visions also touches on parallels
between the state of the “over-conscious” and that of madness. She asserts that “[w]e
want receiving centres for dots and dashes” to be produced in the “over-conscious”
*. See Friedman’s “ H.D.” for an important discussion of Notes in the context
of manifestos of Modernist doctrine.
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between two lovers, and then holds up Leonardo da Vinci’s mad states as involving
the “right sort of receiving brain” for such visions (97). However, far from
appropriating madness itself as a source of creativity, Notes explicitly attempts to
differentiate the productions of the visionary “over-mind” from the delusions of
psychotics: H.D. writes that "over-mind without the balance of the other two is
madness and a person so developed should have as much respect as a reasonable
maniac and no more" (93). Indeed, paralleling the logic through which the surrealists
attempt to embrace the creative productivity of madness while retaining a sense of
mastery, H.D. asserts that “[i]f your brain cannot stand the strain of following out...
lines of thought... and if you are not balanced and sane enough to grasp these things
with a certain amount of detachment, you are obviously not ready for experiments in
over-mind consciousness” (99). But as much as H.D. implies a distinction between
the structure of madness and that of the visionary over-conscious, she leaves the
slipperiness between the two unresolved: near the end of the piece, she backs down
from her earlier theory because she "was about to cover too much of the field of
abnormal consciousness by the term over-mind" (107). The slippage of the visionary
over-mind into psychosis is thus a recurring threat within H.D.'s theory of poetry.
During H.D.'s psychoanalysis in Vienna, Freud himself interpreted her
visionary experiences as manifestations of a potentially dangerous desire to return to
an erotic, undifferentiated union with the mother— as psychotic regressions betraying
the ostensible “megalomania” of her “suppressed desire to be a Prophetess . . . to
‘found a new religion’” (“Writing on the Wall” 51). However, in “Writing on the
Wall,” the 1944 memoir of her analysis, H.D. herself asserts that “[w]e can read my
writing, the fact that there was writing, in two ways or in more than two ways”: either
Freud’s way, or an alternative way in which the
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writing-on-the-wall is merely an extension of the artist's mind, a . picture or
an illustrated poem, taken out of the actual dream or daydream content and
projected from within (though apparently from outside), really a high-
powered idea, simply over-stressed, over-thought, you might say, an echo
of an idea, a reflection of a reflection, a 'freak' thought that had got out of
hand, gone too far, a 'dangerous symptom.' But symptom or inspiration,
the writing continues to write itself or be written. (“Writing” 51)
H.D.’s reading in “Writing on the Wall” parallels the theory she had put forth in Notes
on Thought and Vision, before her psychoanalysis: both texts suggest a positive
valuation of the visions’ creative potential, and leave the question of psychopathology
undecidable. Indeed, in her retrospective discussion in “Writing” she even engages in
an “active appropriation of the analysis,” breaking the transference in order to question
and propose alternatives to Freud’s premises (Arens 380). Moreover, as quite a few
scholars have remarked, H.D. responds to Freud’s assessment with the
counterproposal that her visions serve as creative inspiration— more often than not
enabled by the erotic energy of Bryher’s supportive, female presence. Yet while a
certain line of feminist criticism, most famously perpetuated by Susan Stanford
Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis, provides a utopian reading of H.D.’s
counterproposal by casting her visions as a means of accessing a female mutual
creativity that exceeds the boundaries of patriarchy, what it leaves unremarked is
H.D.’s hesitation to contradict Freud’s reading outright. In leaving the question of the
validity of Freud’s theories open, H.D. does not so much dispense with the question
of the psychoanalytic association of lesbianism with psychosis as she does leave it in
continual suspense.
2
. The literature on H.D.’s analysis with Freud is extensive. See Arens,
Buck, Chisholm, DuPlessis (Career of that Struggle). Friedman (“Against
Discipleship,” Penelope’s Web. Psvche Reborn, and “The Writing Cure”), Friedman
and Duplessis (“‘Woman is Perfect’”), Holland, Jaffe, and Riddel. For another of
H.D.’s responses to her analysis, see her poem entitled “The Master.” For a
discussion of H.D.’s later, Kleinian analysis with Walter Schmideberg, see Edmunds,
Out of Line and “Stealing from ‘Muddies Body.’” See Martz for a discussion of
Tribute to Freud and H.D.'s visions in the context of prophecy.
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Reading her own visionary experiences against psychoanalytic case studies,
H.D. is especially concerned in “Writing” with contextualizing Freud's "linking up
neurotic states of megalomania and aggrandizement with, in certain instances, fantasies
of youth and childhood" (76-77). She does so by focusing on those who inhabited
the “unexplored waste-land,” the “no-man's-land between” hysterics and “the actual
insane” (77). Her interest in this “border-line” between neurosis and psychosis not
only reflects a larger concern with social and psychical marginalization, as Friedman
has pointed out, but also mirrors her fictionalization of arguably “border-line”
psychical states in experimental novels such as HERmione. as I will discuss shortly
(“H.D.” 89-90; “Modernism of the ‘Scattered Remnant’”).^ Indeed, in asserting that
“the writing continues to write itself or be written” regardless of whether its source is
pathological, “Writing on the Wall” articulates an ambivalence that recurs throughout
her fiction, which often recounts episodes of her protagonists’ alienating experience of
writing and speaking as if automatically, as if dispossessed of themselves. While
many scholars have amply documented the relation between her visionary experiences
and her continual struggle with the patriarchal strictures of early twentieth-century
British and American culture and mainstream literary modernism, the only explicit
consideration of H.D.’s possible rewriting of “Freud’s association between lesbian
paranoia, repetition, and death” is found in Out of Line. Susan Edmunds’ study of the
long poems H.D. produced late in her career (6). However, H.D.'s earlier writings,
especially the experimental novels she composed in the nineteen-twenties, also
question psychoanalysis’ linking of lesbianism and psychosis. Simultaneously
reiterating and interrogating psychoanalytic constructions of lesbianism, H.D.'s
textualizations of her visions often seem haunted by accusations of psychosis that
. See both Arens and Friedberg for a discussion of both psychical and ethnic
borderlines in H.D..
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insistently are conjured away, though never entirely exorcised. To borrow Edmunds’
apt phrase, the psychoanalytic construction of psychotic lesbianism is not just one of
the “temporary nadirs in larger narratives of ascent” through which H.D. overcomes
struggle with patriarchal stricture and arrives at the promised land of lesbian utopia
(Out of Line 4). Instead, psychoanalytic constructions of lesbian psychosis continue
to return within her work precisely through the attempt to expel them. Although in
H.D.’s prose writings one can indeed discern what Gilles Deleuze calls a “line of
flight” from psychoanalytic paradigms, it is a route that is neither without obstacles nor
completely traversed even by the end of her career (226). Instead, what H.D. leaves
us is a testimony to what Duplessis aptly terms a “career o f ... struggle” with the
patriarchal environment within which she lived and wrote.
I. “To close the gap with signs”
- Norman N. Holland
In speaking of H.D.’s writing as figuring “the erotic ‘paranoia’ of psyche,
palimpsest, prophecy,” Duplessis underscores both the strong impact of H.D.’s
visionary experiences on her entire oeuvre, and the contested status of critical attempts
to pathologize both her visions and her writings as symptoms of paranoid psychosis
(Career of that Struggle 118). The latter tendency is most marked in early criticism
that mimes Freud’s interpretation of her visions as “megalomania”; however, it also
continues to haunt even those readings that are most skeptical of psychoanalysis’
politics of gender and sexuality. In an early essay now infamous amongst feminist
scholars, Norman N. Holland uses Freud’s claims as a springboard for literary
criticism by discussing the relevance of H.D.’s Corfu vision to her hard, imagist
poetry. He draws the following conclusion:
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To close the gap with signs. H.D.’s myth could have taken a psychotic or
pre-psychotic form. Apparently it did, if we credit Freud’s singling out of
‘megalomania’ in the Corfu vision. The terrible losses of the 1914-1919
period [the stillbirth of her baby during German air raids on London; the
loss of her husband, Richard Aldington, to his mistress] fitted into the
pattern of her childhood deprivation; psychotic mechanisms were mobilized
to ‘close the gap.’ As for neurosis, H.D. makes it clear that part of her wish
to close the gap took neurotic forms— anxieties about her body: penis envy,
her height, her femininity. Whether there was character disorder—
perversion, sociopathy, schizoid tendencies— her silence about her adult life
makes it impossible to say. If, however, we apply Freud’s basic criteria of
normal functioning— lieben und arbeiten; to love and to work— it is clear that
H.D. was a productive poet and a sufficient mother. She was functioning in
large part as a healthy adult. (503)
I dwell on this early essay not only because its conclusions highlight the
psychoanalytic premises through which both Freud and early literary critics
pathologized H.D.’s visions, but also because it makes explicit the way in which
analytic constructions of her supposed “megalomania” imply a link between female
creativity and psychosis. Yet unlike the work of later critics, Holland’s text is
ambivalent about the claim that a homoerotics are at work in her writings’ drive to
“close the gap” between daughter and mother. In response to unnamed speculations
about H.D.’s erotic orientation, Holland insists, following Norman Holmes Pearson,
that H.D. was “passionately heterosexual” and did not discuss an attraction to women
during her analysis with Freud (477-478). However, as subsequent scholarship on
H.D.’s letters to her partner, Bryher, has shown, H.D. did discuss her desire for
women during the analysis, earning Freud’s praise as a rare example of “the perfect bi-
.” She simply censored homoerotic material from published accounts of her analysis
(Friedman. Penelope’s Web. 311).^ Holland parallels his effacement of H.D.’s
bisexuality in his dependence upon a disavowed link between female creativity,
. For more on bisexuality in H.D.'s life and in her texts, see Claire Buck,
H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse: Friedman and Duplessis, “‘I
had two loves separate’”; Lidia Yukman, “Loving Dora: Rereading Freud through
H.D.’s Her.”
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2 1 0
“perversion,” and madness. He presents H.D.’s vision with Bryher as potentially
“psychotic or pre-psychotic,” and, despite his earlier insistence on her heterosexuality,
implies psychosis to be a function of a “perversion” that is possible yet unverifiabie in
her case (“her silence about her adult life makes it impossible to say”). In the course
of questioning her mental health, then, Holland raises the issue of H.D.’s reported
love for women, yet figures its possibility only through its negation. His conclusions
are characterized by a rhetorical indetermination in which H.D. both is and is not
“perverse,” is and is not “normal,” is and is not “psychotic.”
Furthermore, he calls in a set of Freudian judgments as evidence of H.D.’s
apparent functionality, yet does so in a deeply suspicious tone: “in large part,” he
writes, H.D. was “a productive poet and a sufficient mother” (503). In citing as
evidence of H.D.’s “normal functioning” not only her poetic “productivity” (by which
Holland presumably means her performance of a “masculine” style of poetry,) but also
her ability to be a “sufficient mother” to Perdita, Holland paradoxically presents
traditionally feminine maternity, on one hand, and masculine poetic identification, on
the other hand, as indices of normalcy and mental health. He argues that H.D.’s
poetics and visions serve the same psychological function, that of “closfing] the gap”
between herself and her mother (502-503):
H.D.’s account of her analysis with Freud makes it clear that creativity does
not stem from mental illness; neither is it a simple alternative. Rather, the
key variable is style. Both illness (“megalomania,” to take the gravest case)
and creative activity (imagistically rendered myths) will have the same style.
Put another way, both will act out the same underlying myth. The
megalomaniac vision will distort reality, the Imagist mythographer will create
an artifact, both ‘to close the gap with signs’ (503).
While Holland claims to displace the argument that “creativity . . . stem[s] from mental
illness,” the terms of his discussion nonetheless retain and further the assumption that
H.D.’s writings invite questions about her mental health.
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211
The role Holland gives to H.D.’s Imagist style in “clos[ing] the gap with
signs” is significant in the context of recent scholarship on the gendered politics of the
“high modernist” aesthetic, of which Imagism is one example. Feminist scholars have
argued that the “high modernist” canon valorized by the New Critics is marked by a
masculinist ideology that values an aesthetic of hardness over softer, arguably more
“feminine” artistic m odest Holland himself aligns H.D.’s early poetics with
masculine aspirations, not only citing her purported “penis envy” but also claiming that
she wishes to “create a hard, phallic object so as to replace a lost masculinity” (502).
Yet one must wonder if he would take such pains to speculate on the mental health of
male Imagists simply by virtue of their style: would he assert that they, too, are using
“hard, phallic” images “so as to replace a lost masculinity”?^ Holland thus renders
pathological the phallic appropriation, or “linguistic cross-dress[ing]” (to reinflect
5
. See Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Friedman, Penelope’s Web:
Hirsh, “Imaginary Images.” Much like theories of “ecriture feminine,” however,
studies that discuss the writings of modernist women as proposing an essentially
female poetics need to be interrogated and recast in anti-essentialist terms. The
inability of H.D.'s career to fit either so-called "male" or "female" modes of modernist
writing calls for a further complication of such paradigms, for it is surely as dangerous
to imply her early phase of "hard" and "masculine" Imagist poetry to be an instance of
literary false consciousness as it is to dismiss or to pathologize her later writings for
their more fluid style. For a critique of the deployment of H.D. in feminist
discussions of "male" modernism, see Kaufmann.
There are dangers in naturalizing men’s claims to “masculinity,” as both
Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam remind us, and for that reason I do not mean to
suggest that the function of masculinist ideology in male modernists’ writings need go
unquestioned. A reading of the male modernists’ poetic doctrines through Butler’s
recent interrogation of the naturality of gender and sex could easily begin by taking
literally the rhetorical question with which I point up Holland’s critical bias. Indeed,
Holland’s questioning of H.D.’s “masculine” style raises interesting questions about
the social construction of masculinity: it suggests a reading of “high modernist”
aestheticism as a frantic and repeated attempt to reinstall— and therefore naturalize-a
purportedly prior “masculinity” whose presence in the male modernist is continually
under threat. Such an investigation is, alas, beyond the scope of my present study.
See Butler. Bodies That Matter and Gender Trouble: Halberstam. Female Masculinity.
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212
Shari Benstock’s phrase), through which H.D. ostensibly attempts to “close the gap”
7
between herself and her mother (Benstock, Women. 188; Holland 503).
Holland’s essay also exemplifies the politically charged assumption that a
literary work’s structure and clarity are indices of its aesthetic value. Snidely
remarking that H.D., “fine poet though she was, is nevertheless no Shakespeare,”
Holland explains that “her weakness is in structuring . . . details into a poetic,
characterological, or, still more acutely, fictional whole. Poems, fiction, even essays .
.. become a series of isolated images or events linked by free associations . . . At the
very sentence level, her boundaries tend to be ill-defined” (474). In its diagnosis of
H.D.’s artistic “weakness,” this passage suggests a parallel between psychological and
artistic flaws. While Holland specifies her work’s lack of fictional wholeness as
“acute” and her diction as “ill-defined” in its “boundaries,” his judgment of H.D.’s
writing will soon, and all to easily, slide into an assessment of her mental health
focused on the collapse of subject-object boundaries characteristic of psychosis. He
thus adds suspicion of pathology to standard masculinist charges against H.D.’s
aesthetic, placing the poet and her writings in a double bind. While her Imagist verse
is questioned as psychopathological because of its ostensibly false masculinity, her use
of free association is described as a “weakness” because of its dangerously “ill-
defined” boundaries.
7
. Benstock is referring specifically to the writings of Gertrude Stein, whom
she calls a “linguistic cross-dresser” (188). I use the term here somewhat differently
than she does, however: whereas she uses it in reference to sexual orientation, to
denote Stein’s supposed coding of lesbian content within (hetero)patriarchal grammar,
I use it in reference to gender, to signify H.D.’s appropriation of an arguably
“masculine” poetic style.
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II. “The homosexual-maternal”
- Julia Kristeva
2 13
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, standard Freudian interpretations of
H.D.'s visions were fodder for feminist critics who desired to replace or revise the
8
“high modernist” canon to include texts of a more “feminine” style. These critics
have read H.D.’s prose as poetically valuable “ecriture feminine,” rather than as the
aesthetically flawed product of an uncontrolled and pathological authorial
consciousness. Because of the rich text provided by H.D.’s engagement with
psychoanalysis, feminist critics often have focused on the function of the
mother/daughter relationship in her poetics, and have read her writing through Julia
Kristeva's discussion of the supposedly pre-symbolic "homosexual-maternal" phase
9
of "semiotic," quasi-psychotic poetic language.
Deborah Kelly Kloepfer asserts that Kristeva allows us to read Modernist
women writers as figuring “the mother-child dyad outside the structure of the father,”
even though that dyad often only is figured through “loss” (Unspeakable Mother 2 ).^
Yet her presupposition of a pre-symbolic “mother-child dyad” misses the way in
which the mother's ostensible "nostalgia" for the "homosexual-maternal" is not
ontologically prior to the inscription of symbolic law, but instead is a retroactive
8
. I do not mean to suggest that all feminist efforts to revise the canon have
done so by construing women’s writing as “ecriture feminine.” This has, however,
been the predominant trend in H.D. scholarship, as her texts lend themselves to such
readings.
9
. For readings of H.D.’s maternal poetics, see Duplessis, Friedman,
Hollenberg, Kloepfer, and Travis.
Susan Stanford Friedman, the other major H.D. scholar to use Kristeva’s
work, takes up the “homosexual facet” of the pre-Oedipal while still ignoring the
troubling question of psychosis.
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214
construction of the symbolic. ^ ^ If H.D.’s return to the pre-Oedipal arguably succeeds
in accessing the homosexual potential of a maternal body repressed under patriarchal
law, and thereby “teaches us . . . that the passage from the semiotic to the symbolic is
perhaps not necessary, at least not textually,” it nonetheless does little to challenge the
terms of the symbolic order that produces that unrepresentability (171).12 H.D.’s
linguistic recovery of the mother does not so much illuminate a space radically outside
paternal law as it does underline the way in which the terms of the mother/daughter
relation are determined by the patriarchal symbolic.
Furthermore, Kloepfer leaves the problematic politics of Kristeva's linking of
lesbianism to psychosis unremarked. In the only essay that explicitly considers the
politics of proto-psychotic passages in H.D.’s texts, S. Travis claims that H.D.
focuses on “woman-centered” relationships; however, Travis falls into the same trap
as other feminist H.D. scholars by positioning lesbianism as temporally prior to
mimesis, and therefore as radically outside of patriarchy (123, 131). Similarly,
discussing textualizations of H.D.’s “homoerotic thralldom” to Frances Gregg,
Cassandra Laity cites Kristeva’s theory of lesbianism as pre-Oedipality, but fails to
comment on its politically ambivalent link to psychosis (H.D. and the Victorian Fin de
. Quite a few commentators on Kristeva similarly contend that the semiotic
is dependent upon the terms of the symbolic. In addition to Fuss, see Butler, Gender
Trouble: Coward and Ellis; Hill; Stanton; and Starr.
12. Christine Bemi also provides an important critique of the deployment of a
certain reading of Kristeva in scholarship on HERmione. Bemi does not, as I do,
tackle the problem through a critique of the status of the pre-Oedipal as a retroactively
inscribed fantasy of maternal plenitude, but instead uses another aspect of Silverman's
Acoustic Mirror to argue for a reading of the novel that privileges a focus on the
oppositional possibilities inherent in Oedipal attachments to the mother. While such
attachments are not the primary focus of my own reading of the novel, Bemi's
argument is not incompatible with my own.
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215
13
Siecle 132). However, by focusing on the poetically productive yet psychically
dangerous role of the decadent "persona" of the lesbian "femme fatale" in H.D.'s
work, Laity implies a critique of the very Kristevan theories she seems to support.
She uses the work of Sue-Ellen Case to argue that H.D. figures the aggressive
femininity of her "femmes fatales" through tropes of lesbian vampirism (H.D. and the
Victorian Fin de Siecle 129-134). According to Case, culturally “dominant”
representations of the lesbian vampire threaten us with the possibility that “our gaze
will be hypnotically locked into hers and we will become her victims” through a
violent collapse of spectatorial distance (10). Kristeva's language of pre-Oedipality
creates a female homoerotic scenario that threatens a similar collapse of distance;
however, it is limited in its subversive potential because it leaves the terms of women's
desire "locked in the phallocratic order" (10-11). Those critics who use Kristeva's
work on the pre-Oedipal to approach H.D.'s writing privilege texts that trace out
women's attempts to find a place within the symbolic order, and avoid dealing with the
implications for psychoanalysis of those texts that challenge, rather than reaffirm, its
phallogocentric terms.
When the proto-Kristevan facet of H.D.'s prose is held up as the sole example
of psychoanalysis' influence on a strain of textualizations of female same-sex desire
within modernism, what results is an incomplete picture of her negotiation of
psychoanalytic paradigms for desire between women. 14 Far from capitulating entirely
13
. Laity backs her claims not only with Kristeva but also with Joyce P.
Lindenbaum’s Chodorowian observation that a woman in a lesbian couple may
experience a loss of “identity” by becoming “lost in her partner” ('H.D. and the
Victorian Fin de Siecle 132). Though the proximity to Kristeva’s work of this use of
Chodorow in lesbian theory is provocative and potentially problematic, to comment on
it is beyond the scope of this study.
14. Shari Benstock, the only scholar who discusses the relation of "Sapphic
Modernism" to psychoanalysis' account of the social order, similarly defines
"Sapphic" textual strategies through the phallogocentric terms of psychoanalysis,
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2 1 6
to psychoanalysis’ claims about female subjectivity and same-sex desire, H.D. often
resisted and revised its discourse, questioning the phallogocentric premises of the
symbolic rather than shoring them up in an ironic attempt to found a feminine world
"outside" of their terms. if psychoanalytically informed, feminist work on
modernist literature thus far has emphasized similarities between ecriture feminine and
the textual practices of modernist writers, its future depends upon its willingness to
engage other questions: to look, not for ways in which modernist fictions of female
same-sex desire evade paternal law, but instead for ways in which, at the very moment
of their apparent complicity, they perform an "imminent critique" of the symbolic.
HI. “A concentric friendship”
- HERmione
Feminist efforts to reclaim H.D.’s prose frequently focus not only on
textualizations of her visionary experiences, but also on HERmione- a quasi
leaving its premises intact while failing to push far enough in examining the theoretical
consequences of "Sapphic modernists'" textual "resistance" to it. Following a well-
established tradition within feminist criticism, Benstock takes Lacan's account of
psychosexual positioning as descriptive of the phallogocentrism that governed early
twentieth-century, Western culture; she locates "the Sapphic" as its counterpoint.
Benstock notes that "[tjhere is not one Sapphic modernism but instead many 'Sapphic
modernisms' that echo one another." Yet they all mount a common "resistance . . . to
the canonical modernism that reinforces cultural norms"; when the "Sapphic" "finds a
medium through which to speak, it radically restructures the rules of the cultural
game."
Benstock's formulation does not provide the leverage needed to change "the
rules of the cultural game," however. Her claim that "sexual difference leads to a
poetics of difference" retains psychoanalysis' dichotomous positioning of male and
female, heterosexual and homosexual, and circumscribes the role of the "Sapphic
modernist" text as that of revealing a lesbian specificity heretofore suppressed within
Western culture— yet also defined and limited by that culture. See Benstock,
"Expatriate Sapphic Modernism," 192-6.
15, See Friedman's Penelope's Web for an extensive analysis of H.D.'s
explicit revisions of psychoanalysis.
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217
autobiographical, experimental novel that performs the consciousness of a young
woman caught between her engagement to a young poet, George Lowndes, and her
attraction to a young woman, Fayne Rabb. Hermione develops a “concentric
intimacy” with Fayne in which “prophetess face[s] prophetess” in visionary sessions
not unlike those H.D. had with Bryher (164, 146). However, while earlier
scholarship has invoked psychoanalytic theory to highlight the way in which erotic and
creative intimacy with Fayne renders the previously unmoored Hermione a “speaking
subject, able to articulate her desire, to name herself,” it has done little to trace out the
ways in which the young women’s relationship might also be described by those same
theories as threatening psychosis (Faery 58).
If Friedman is correct in claiming that HERmione was devalued until recently
because it is driven by the psychical battles of its protagonist instead of by a
traditionally conceived plot, I would add that the novel likely also was devalued
because it performs female, indeed lesbian consciousness in a way that to some critics
is threateningly akin to psychosis (Penelope’s Web). As Shari Benstock has argued,
Hermione’s linguistic splitting and “sexual division” are bound up in one another in
the novel, marking the “alienation . . . of mind from body, of identity from psyche” as
Hermione progresses from her relationship with Fayne into a nervous breakdown
invoked in a manner that strongly resembles psychoanalytic accounts of psychosis
(335). Without questioning the politics embedded in diagnostic categories, L.S.
Dembo even goes so far as to assert not only that Hermione experiences "perceptual
madness," but also that her "reasoning . .. is itself odd and suggests a dementia that
goes beyond the senses" (213). One of the most vexing problems, then, that arises in
discussing H.D.’s quasi-autobiographical fiction from a psychoanalytic perspective is
that her novels often assert the symbolic efficacy of female same-sex desire, while still
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218
figuring the traces of those theories of lesbian psychosis that they appear to have
overcome.
Though HERmione often is featured as evidence for the claim that H.D.’s
literary practice involves a politically subversive evasion of symbolic law, I would like
to suggest instead that it performs a proto-psychotic, visionary female homosexuality
strongly marked by the terms of the patriarchal symbolic. As Brigitte Gerl points out,
the novel describes Hermione through the device of a third person omniscient narrator
whose psychoanalytic vocabulary contrasts with her own inability to articulate her
perceptions (5-7). The novel opens with the narrator's explanation that the "conniving
phrase ‘arrested development’ had opened no door to" the pre-analytic Hermione (3).
Yet while the narrator’s remark invites us to read the novel through the psychoanalytic
theory of homosexuality as arrested development, its description of the theory as a
“conniving phrase” suggests that one must do so askance, with suspicion— with
attention as much to the strictures imposed by the psychoanalytic framework as to its
productivity. As the rest of the novel will go on to suggest, the “conniving,”
duplicitous aspect of the theory in question may lie in the heterosexist politics whereby
successful psychological development is presumed to culminate in heterosexual
orientation. Furthermore, what the narrator skeptically suggests to be “arrested
development” will all too easily read as psychosis as the ensuing text performs
Hermione’s consciousness. Shortly after the narrator’s remarks about “arrested
development,” Hermione herself changes the terms of her pathology to that of
madness by worrying that “I am certifiable or soon will be” (6). The text thus is
framed in such a manner as both to suggest and question two psychoanalytic accounts
of female homosexuality that often are conflated: Freud's claim that the lesbian suffers
from arrested development, and Lacan's claim that she psychotically refuses paternal
law.
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2 1 9
Hermione’s ruminations throughout the novel often have been described as
anticipating Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage: they struggle with the role of the
patronym, and paternally inscribed names more generally, in constituting identity. As
Kloepfer asserts, Hermione attempts “to register her severance not only from her
family but from language,” though she cannot do so as successfully as Kloepfer
implies (“Flesh Made Word” 35-36).^ Hermione was named by her father after a
Shakespearean character, the wife of a Sicilian king who is falsely humiliated as an
adulteress for apparently having borne a child out of wedlock. At times, H.D.'s
protagonist identifies with the Hermione of The Winter’s Tale, yet at others she
attempts to disidentify from her:
“Hermione. Hermione.” A voice called Her Hermione. ‘My name’s Her. I
am Her. She is Her. I am not Hermione out of Shakespeare. Hermione out
of Shakespeare was more or less one person like the person who went with
Orlando. Have you noticed that in Shakespeare everybody goes with
someone?’ (192).
Hermione associates her name with the heterosexual pairings of Shakespeare’s plays,
17
in which “everybody goes with someone” of the opposite sex. The name
“Hermione” marks the protagonist’s inscription within both Shakespearean tradition
and the Gart family's patriarchal kinship structure; the nickname “Her,” on the other
hand, signals her attempt to disidentify from her Shakespearean namesake and open up
space for alternative structures of desire. Yet “Her” also points to the difficulty of
dislodging herself from the heteropatriarchal symbolic, for it both retains the trace of
her Shakespearean name and points up her inscription as object and not subject of
discourse, as both Benstock and Friedman have pointed out (Benstock 337;
For a discussion of the novel in light of the mirror stage and naming, see
Faery, Friedman tPenelope’s Webl. and Kloepfer.
17
. For a comparison of the romantic plot of HERmione to that of The
Winter’s Tale, see Friedman, Penelope’s Web. 121-124.
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220
Friedman, Penelope’s Web. 119). Indeed, the text insists elsewhere that “Hermione
Gart hugged HER to Hermione Gart,” underlining the way in which her nickname is
enclosed through the metaphorical and grammatical inscription of paternal law (33).
Furthermore, by stating that “God is in a word. God is in HER,” the novel
underscores the implication of its protagonist’s names within a Judeo-Christian
paternal order predicated on the metaphysics of presence (32-3). In so doing, it
highlights the way in which her arguably resistant nickname, “Her,” still participates in
the paternal symbolic at the same time as it questions its terms. As Benstock argues,
“‘Her’ is the mad countersign to [phallogocentric] language, a subversion of its law
that is present even under the law’’ ' (343).
While Benstock cites the name “Her” as itself “a sign of [mental] illness,”
criticism on HERmione has said little about the additional twist that takes place in her
manipulations of her name when she shifts from calling herself “Hermione” and “Her”
to the nonsensical, sonorous “AUM,” a sound which even more clearly highlights the
protagonist’s slide into psychosis than the linguistic divisions that interest Benstock
(343). Hermione’s unwitting emission of “AUM” frightens her, provoking first a
series of substitutions intended to mask its violation of linguistic norms, and then an
eventual retreat to the security of proper names:
She said, 'HER, HER, HER. I am Her, I am Hermione . . . I am the word
AUM.' This frightened her . . . Her back was to the desk, to Eugenia, to the
Winter’s Tale .. . She tried to forget the word AUM, said UM, EM, HEM'
clearing her throat, wondered if she had offended something, clearing her
throat trying to forget the word . . . I am the word .. . the word was with
God . . . I am the word . . . HER. Hermione Gart hugged HER to
Hermione Gart. I am HER. The thing was necessary . . . Her own name
was a ballast to her lightheadedness. (32-33)
Hermione has her back turned to paternal representatives— to Eugenia, her father’s
desk, and the Winter’s Tale-as she performs her frightening identification with
“AUM.” Approximating psychosis, her assertion that “I am the word AUM” closes
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221
the metaphorical gap between name and referent, transforming her quite literally into a
column of sound and removing her from the world of linguistic substitution that
constitutes the paternal symbolic. Thus, as Benstock notes with regard to other
linguistic phenomena, Hermione “discovers through illness a means of releasing the
word from predictable contexts and referential moorings” (336-337). The novel’s use
of nonsensical words to “make the language speak with an extra-grammatical
meaning” by approximating sound is similar to quasi-psychotic passages in other early
twentieth-century texts, such as the writings of Antonin Artaud and the phonetic poetry
of Kurt Schwitters-texts important in the recent theoretical push to interrogate the
fraught, and politically contingent, distinction between psychosis and normalcy
(Artaud, “To Henri Parisot,” 449).^
Yet HERmione is especially remarkable for underscoring the politics of gender
and sexuality attending both the figuration of psychosis and the undermining of the
distinction between sanity and insanity. Carrying the trace of paternal naming, “Her”
partially serves as “ballast” to the “lightheadedness” precipitated by the outright
rejection of paternal law and its metaphysics of presence, yet also contributes to that
vertigo through its partial erasure of the patronym. It thus quickly leads to “AUM,”
which appears at the point of collapse of the categories of identity that uphold the
paternal symbolic, standing in for the vertigo attending their absence. Similarly, while
speaking with her fiancee,
Hermione realized George wanted now to help Her. She tried to reach
forward to some stabilized world they might create between them. Her head
now was simply hot, she felt a tight band about her forehead withdrawn . . .
18
. For Artaud, in Oeuvres completes see especially: Artaud le mo mo. Ci-git
(Vol. XII); Lettres de Rodez (Vols. IX-XI); Cahiers de Rodez (Vols. XV-XVIII,
XIX-XXI). For Schwitters, see “Sonate” and “Ursonate.” See also Deleuze and
Guattari, 476, for a discussion of Schwitters’ “Merz” poetry and architecture as quasi
schizophrenic “desiring machines.” For an important discussion of Artaud, writing,
and madness, see Derrida, “La parole souffle.” L’Ecriture et la difference. 253-292.
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222
She tried to drag out some consecutive classroom relay of catalogued
information. What now had she been reading? "I don't know, George. I am
the word AUM.” (68)
“AUM” appears in response to the loosening of the “tight band around her forehead,”
of the patriarchal strictures that both constitute and confine Hermione’s mind; the
sound resonates in lieu of the “stabilized world” she fails to solidify with George.
Unable to communicate to him what she has been reading and ruminating over,
Hermione can only assert her identification with that unrepresentable abyss that marks
the absence of symbolic Law.
Similarly, by performing the generation of Hermione’s seemingly automatic
use of language in social situations, another passage figures the incommensurability of
word and sound that symptomatizes one’s fundamental alienation in language:
Somewhere something within herself heard something like a ouija board that
feels something . . . Something far and far within kept repeating something
that had no words, to which words fitted . . . Hermione knew what she was
saying in that part of her mind that was collecting something, that was
apprehending something, that was perceiving something like a dynamo
vibrating with electricity from some far distance . . . The ouija board was
sifting values for her and a voice, a thing so simply remembered but
connected somehow . . . repeated systematically and went on repeating.
(122-4)
As Dana Shugar suggests, this passage traces out Hermione’s initial apprehension of
desire for her friend Fayne Rabb by proceeding from its unspeakability, signaled in the
excerpt above, to its articulation through the homoerotic verses from Swinburne that
immediately follow (86). Yet unlike Friedman’s Kristevan reading suggests, the novel
hardly can be said on such grounds to “narrate how the young woman slipped the
noose of the male words that were her ‘plague’ and formulated her own agency with
words in the matrix of maternal and lesbian desire,” for it also traces out the way in
which coming into language implies accession to a paternal symbolic that determines
even the way in which lesbian desire is articulated (126). Instead, what the passage
suggests is the necessary alienation in paternal language through which Hermione
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2 2 3
comes to speak her desire for Fayne. Something sonorous, “like a dynamo vibrating
with electricity,” is apprehensible to her yet not directly articulable. Words “fitted” to
this thing but are not identical with it; they do not stand in for that repeated “something
that had no words,” but instead are mobilized as illusory suture for a gap in meaning.
The language with which Hermione so often replies, as if with an “automatic click-
click that had gone to so much of the outer mechanism of the thing called Her Gart,” is
incommensurate with her apprehension of sense as vibrating dynamo, and thus
"Hermione heard Hermione speaking, saying something out of a play, words had been
written for her, she was repeating words that had been written" (56, 94-95).
Hermione’s successful communication with others thus is predicated on her alienation
in the symbolic order, whose regulation by paternal law both conditions her familial
19
interactions and prompts acts of linguistic resistance. Nonsensical sounds such as
“AUM” intervene as failed attempts to push beyond the patriarchal terms of the
symbolic. Such sonorous words do not point to a discrete meaning illegible within the
terms of the symbolic, but instead mark the way in which attempts to resist or refuse
the symbolic often threaten psychotic incomprehensibility.
Hermione’s struggle with patriarchal naming becomes especially marked in her
friendship with Fayne. HERmione traces out the way in which the girls' experience of
mutual visions inspires Hermione to write. Referring to the circles of the Delphic
tripod that symbolized prophecy in H.D.'s Corfu vision, the novel figures the girls'
relationship as a “concentric intimacy,” yet implies that it threatens psychosis as much
19
. Though Benstock claims that “the sense of displacement she [Hermione]
feels in language reflects the homosexual difference that put Hermione . . . under
penalty of linguistic law,” it is wise to recall that for Lacan, language itself is
fundamentally alienating, and we are all “under penalty of linguistic law” (339).
Hermione’s struggle with language is so intense because the phallogocentric symbolic
renders the “penalty” for articulating homosexual desire especially severe, creating
multiple rifts, rather than a singular split, in subjectivity.
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2 2 4
as it inspires creativity (164). Hermione’s and Fayne’s mutual visions involve the
bringing forth of an alternative to the symbolic order through prophecy: Hermione
characterizes Fayne as making “herself out some sort of Pythian priestess who has
visions, who sees, who can prophecy”— as a “professional crystal gazer” who can see
the future (160, 189). While theirs is a relation of “prophetess to prophetess,” Fayne
is the more powerful visionary: when “the mood was on them,”
Teeth might chatter in a head bent backward and Her Gart might quiver with
suppressed emotion and with curious, terrible, intense terror, terror of the
things that Fayne saw clearly, terror of the world that Her sensed piecemeal,
that was to Fayne (Fayne said) the one reality. (177-178)
Hermione only can apprehend partially and with terror that which her friend “saw
clearly”; she is positioned at the border of a land whose difference from the environs
of Gart Grange terrifies her. She asserts that this terrifying landscape is the only “one
reality” for Fayne, whose aura of not being in the everyday world frightens away
Hermione’s other acquaintances. George Lowndes declares that because of their
mutual visions, the two young women should be “burnt for witchcraft”~an anti-
patriarchal form of religion that historically has met with severe punishment (165).
Hermione’s mother, Eugenia, agrees with George, banishing the ‘“unwholesome”’
Fayne from the Gart household and insisting that “I don’t think that girl is good for
you . . . I think the whole thing is wrong, a strain on us all” (176-177). Because of
her daughter’s disquieting intimacy with Fayne, Eugenia even begins to view the
unconventional George as more “normal” than before; she begins to consider him an
appropriate suitor for Hermione and encourages the marriage she previously had
opposed. The terms of Eugenia’s censure imply that the future world Fayne envisions
is marked with the stigma of sexual perversion and represents a turn away from
patriarchal kinship structures. To Hermione's mother, Fayne’ s disruption of the
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paternal symbolic renders her abject: Eugenia “fleefs], as before an upraised Gorgon
20
head, this thing called Fayne Rabb” (185).
Eugenia’s reaction inspires her daughter’s criticism as much as her outward
assent: identifying with Fayne’s desire to escape her own mother’s world, Hermione
thinks that her mother’s "vocabulary gets more meagre" than ever in falling back on
terms such as “normal” and “unwholesome” (177). As a result, Hermione is as
predisposed to embrace Fayne’s alternate universe as she is to fear its
unconventionality. She views her experiences with her friend as furthering the break,
begun with her scandalous engagement to George, from the chains of familial
tradition:
George got me loose, lifted, as it were, a tangle; mama knotted to Minnie
[Hermione’s sister-in-law] and Gart to Gart. The web of Gart on Gart and
Minnie . . . were lifted by George but she had been too tired to run and
shout. She hadn’t cared to, simply. She had run and shouted at the sight of
Fayne . . . had run to far hills, and found foothold on odd continents. (166)
While her engagement to George is merely functional in effecting a break from Gart
family convention, her relationship with Fayne is inspiring: it takes her to alternate
landscapes, those “far hills” and “odd continents” upon which she suddenly is able to
find a “foothold.” Playing on the double meaning of "possession," Hermione asserts
that she should view George through her “new possession” of the lens of Fayne’s
seemingly perverse vision, which would allow her to see him correctly “before
discarding” him (146-147, 166). On the one hand, Hermione is caught up in the
alternate world of their visions, as if possessed by a demon who compels her assault
on the sanctity of the family; on the other hand, she is able to use Fayne as her own
“possession,” as the utilitarian object that supports the world of visions. Hermione's
20
. Freud’s reading of the Gorgon head as provoking both terror of
(women’s) castration and reassurance of (men’s) phallic presence has been a focus of
the feminist critique of psychoanalysis; see Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the
Medusa” and “Castration or Decapitation?”
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is the same kind of female agency that we witnessed in Breton's Nadia: it appears
both to operate of its own free will and to be governed by a mysterious and demonic
force; it disturbs and terrifies representatives of the patriarchal order, even the
otherwise radical “Breton” of Nadja and the flamboyantly unconventional George of
HERmione.
By “drop [ping] affectation of sanity” in the phantasmatic “Delphic headland” in
which the two young priestesses deliver their truth, the entranced Hermione embraces
Fayne’s alternative reality (180). As they read Swinburne, a British decadent author
whose poetry often serves to encode both the pleasures and perils of their
21
transgressive desire,
Her Gart saw rings and circles, the rings and circles that were the eyes of
Fayne Rabb. Rings and circles made concentric curves toward a ceiling that
was, as it were, the bottom of a deep pool. Her and Fayne Rabb were flung
into a concentric intimacy, rings on rings that made a geometric circle toward
a ceiling, that curved over them like ripples on a pond surface. Her and
Fayne were flung, as it were, to the bottom of some strange element and
looming up . . . there were rings on rings of circles as if they had fallen into
a deep well and were looking up. (164)
The two women are flung into an abyss from which they cannot escape but can only
look up. “The bottom of a deep pool” or “well,” this abyss is rendered in a manner
that recalls the myth of Narcissus, the beautiful boy transfixed by the reflection of his
own image in water; it thus also refers to the psychoanalytic account of lesbianism as
the arrest of development at narcissistic object-choice.
However, Hermione's and Fayne's fall inverts the position taken by Narcissus
in regarding the pool. Whereas Narcissus views the pool from above as he is
transfixed by his own reflection, the two young women view the pool from within as
21
. See Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle. Ch. 2 and Ch.
5, for a detailed discussion of the various ways in which Swinburne’s lyrics both
enable Hermione to articulate her desire for Fayne and figure its self-destructive end.
See also Friedman, Penelope’s Web. 119-124, for a discussion of H.D.’s use of
Swinburne to figure narcissistic lesbianism.
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they are “flung” to the bottom of the well and are left “looking up” not at their own
images but at the ripples produced by their fall. While Narcissus engages in mirror-
stage identifications in which the paternal symbolic is immanent, Hermione and Fayne
instead experience an inversion of symbolic premises that renders their “concentric
intimacy” a psychotic delire a deux. The spatial structure of the image of the well
allegorizes the temporality of psychosis, conceived in Lacanian terms. If the pool's
surface represents the vehicle for imaginary captivation, and if its exterior environs
stand in for the universe demarcated by the symbolic, then the interior of the well
represents that space, ostensibly prior to the inscription of symbolic law, into which
the psychotic is thrown through foreclosure of the phallic signifier. If we recall the
retrospective projection that constitutes psychosis— the way in which foreclosure
throws the psychotic back to a mythical space and time whose contours are determined
by the law, yet which seems to exist "before the law"— we can read Hermione's and
Fayne's "fall" into the well as a textualization of psychotic foreclosure. They have
come into contact with the world outside of the well-the symbolic order-before the
visually disconcerting experience of falling into the well and having the outside world
obscured by ripples. Indeed, as it is characterized by female overproximity and
perceptual distortion, the two women's experience of the interior of the well can also
be read as an inscription of the Kristevan pre-Oedipal, that realm of homosexualized
psychosis marked out by the attempt retrospectively to circumscribe a space
ontologically prior to the symbolic. The alternate world of Hermione's and Fayne's
prophecies thus appears as the psychotic inverse of the patriarchal symbolic, as not an
escape from its terms but an alternate mode of inhabiting them. Much as in the first
half of the novel Hermione quickly slides into psychosis through her resistance to
symbolic imperatives, in this passage she and Fayne “fall” into the narcissistic
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2 2 8
psychosis of delire a deux by visiting those “odd continents” whose borders are
marked by the limits of the symbolic.
The words of George, who taunts Hermione as “Narcissa,” further underscore
the way in which the novel’s figuration of psychotic, narcissistic femininity is a
function of the patriarchal symbolic (170). Explicitly Figuring the homoerotic,
narcissistic doubling suggested by the image of the well, mirrors mediate Hermione’s
and Fayne’s relationship throughout the novel. The young women’s obsessively
reiterated variations on the refrain of Swinburne’s "Itylus"--“[S]ister, my sister, O
fleet, sweet sorrow”— have a similar effect (Swinburne 58). As Laity argues, Decadent
poetry is a “Janus face” that both opens up a space in the symbolic for desire between
women and marks it as perilously self-destructive (H.D. and the Victorian Fin-de-
SiM e 41) 22
Moreover, in the visionary world in which they inhabit the same center,
Hermione and Fayne’s psychical entanglement is mirrored in invocations of their
bodily interchangeability, which figure what Kloepfer calls the “commingling . . . of
[their] bodies and identity” (“Flesh Made Word” 41). Within the circular logic of their
22
. Swinburne’s “sister, my sister” has recently been deployed in a similar
vein as the title of a 1994 film on the Papin affair, suggesting the continued cultural
persistence of Decadent figurations of lesbianism as threatening psychotic narcissism.
The title of Nancy Meckler’s Sister Mv Sister even removes the comma from
Swinburne’s refrain, further underscoring the narcissistic undifferentiation presumed
to be at work in the Papin affair. However much the film takes up this psychoanalytic
and Decadent trope, however, it also displaces the claim that homosexual psychosis
caused the sisters’ crime, and proposes their class oppression as an alternate motive.
See my article entitled “The Papin Enigma” for a discussion of the film. It thus is hard
to understand Teresa de Lauretis’ claim that the film fits into a genre of recent queer
cinema whose willingness to represent homosexuality serves to “unwittingly reinstate
or relegitimate the old equation of homosexuality and perversion with pathology, and
[to] refuel the popular mythologies about lesbians, in particular, as psychotic, mother-
fixated feminists, men-haters, or, worse, as ‘women who kill’” (“Stubborn Drive”
870). While de Lauretis is surely right in claiming that the recent resurgence of such
films belies the continued force of “popular mythologies” about pathological queers,
she underestimates the way in which individual films, such as Meckler’s, might
displace them at the same time as they deploy them in their marketing.
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2 2 9
“concentric intimacy,” Her and Fayne share the same center instead of inhabiting
separate, distanced positions. The signifier “Her” slides between designating the
protagonist and Fayne, both complicating the logic of self and other presumed by the
theory of the symbolic, and suggesting their identities to be mutually conditioning and
continually in process: Hermione ruminates that “I know her. Her. I am Her. She is
Her. Knowing her, I know Her” (158). After Hermione refuses to allow Eugenia to
awaken Fayne after her visions had resulted in a deep, trancelike sleep, the text shifts
into first-person narration and substitutes Hermione’s nickname “Her” for the third
person “her” that initially designated her friend: “I will keep her heart beating. I will
keep Her asleep. Her is asleep here .. . Her is asleep . . . Her must stay there
sleeping” (182). The substitution of first for third person mirrors the bodily
substitution that characterizes the girls' intimacy: it implies that by keeping the
sleeping Fayne’s heart beating, Hermione in turn is keeping herself both asleep and
alive. When read literally, Hermione’s insistence that sleep is imperative in keeping
Fayne’s “heart beating” suggests that the dream-state of her visions supports her
bodily life; when read figuratively, it further suggests that imagining a jointly
inhabited, alternative reality is crucial to maintaining the women’s love for one
another.
Much as they do for Hermione in awkward social occasions, words appear
between the women as if automatically. Hermione observes that “just as we are near
coming together in some realm of appreciation,” Fayne’s “[wjords spring from
nowhere” (146). Yet unlike Hermione’s parlor conversation, which appears as if from
the air itself, the women’s prophesizing speech appears through far more physical
means. Hermione tells Fayne that “[y]ou draw things out of me,” and then
immediately goes on to figure her friend’s tugs in much more literal terms: “[t]he
words were (as it were) dragged out of her long throat by a small hand, by a tight
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2 3 0
hand, by a hard dynamic forceful vibrant hand. The hand of Fayne Rabb dragged
words out of the throat of Her Gart” (143). The novel thus figures the women’s
capacity to slide in and out of one another’s psyches as facilitating the visions they
appear quite literally to pull out of each other. Words provide the material for the
“projections” that traverse their bodies: “[wjords with Fayne in a room, in any room,
became projections of things beyond one. Things beyond Her beat, beat to get through
Her, to get through to Fayne” (146). In beating through both women, the visionary
word-projections support their bodies’ repositioning within the fantasy of an alternate
landscape.
As much as Hermione’s and Fayne’s psyches are entwined, the two women do
not necessarily negate each other in the manner that Fayne is negated by her grasping
and paranoid mother, Clara. Upon visiting the Rabb household, Hermione notes that
“[i]n her own room, she [Fayne] was negated. The album negated her, the window
negated her. Mrs. Rabb negated Fayne Rabb” fHERmione 160). Much as does
Hermione by truncating her name, Fayne marks her difference from her mother’s
construction of her by taking on her middle name instead of “Pauline,” the first name
she is called by her mother. Watching the two women interact, Hermione remarks to
herself that “Pauline and Paulet negated Fayne Rabb,” depriving her of the identity and
demeanor she takes on outside the home in her enigmatic pose as prophetess (160).
Mrs. Rabb reduces Fayne to “bleat[ing]” with the “frightened cooped-up voice” of a
wild goat who has been caged, for Clara keeps her daughter prisoner and rudely
handles visitors, discouraging them from returning (155). Hermione’s initial
impression that Mrs. Rabb is paranoid, prone to read politeness as insult, is
corroborated by Fayne’s account— perhaps equally paranoid— of her own educational
career: Clara had jealously guarded Fayne at home until the board of education
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231
forcibly sent the girl to school; then, she made her daughter ill in order to justify
removing her from the company of her ostensibly harmful classmates.
Both the Rabbs’ complete undifferentiation from each other and the paranoia
attending their bond suggests Kristeva’s theory of the homosexual-maternal. Fayne
herself draws their madness as an effect of the mother-daughter dynamic, asserting
that “I sometimes think mama is mad. I know I am,” and explaining to Hermione that
Clara “would make me ill and then nurse me. I used to think and think and think until
I saw things. That’s why somedays I see things. You make me see things” (186,
157-158). If Fayne claims here that her excessive thinking and escapist visions result
from her mother's pathological ministrations, she also suggests her visionary dynamic
with Hermione to be a repetition of the hallucinations with which she responded to her
mother’s grasp.
Kloepfer is partially correct in suggesting that Fayne serves as “bothmother-
substitute and object of desire” for Hermione, allowing them to repeat the mother-
daughter relation (“Flesh Made Word” 40-41). Nonetheless, the young women’s
relationship is not a simple repetition of Fayne’s dynamic with C la r a .23 Hermione
and Fayne repeat the bond to the mother with a difference-reconfigaxing their place
within the symbolic rather than confining themselves to the pre-Oedipal space of
psychosis. As Friedman has suggested by drawing on Freud’s work on (male)
homosexuality in “On Narcissism” and his claims about female homosexuality in
“Femininity” and “Female Sexuality,” the novel embeds two competing theories of
same-sex desire: the first grounded in narcissistic object-choice and the second based
23. Friedman uses Freud in her reading of the Rabbs' familial dynamic to
claim that the “narrative of HER . . . is fundamentally pre-Oedipal”; Kloepfer uses
Kristeva to argue that Hermione subversively returns to an ostensibly pre-symbolic
realm of maternal affect (Friedman, Penelope’s Web. 116; Kloepfer, Unspeakable
Mother. 171).
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2 3 2
on the pre-Oedipal relation between mother and daughter (Penelope’s Web 123-
24
124). Yet there is another way of making a similar argument, one which better
elucidates the differences between Hermione’s and Fayne’s relationship and that of the
Rabbs. Just as Freud’s work on homosexuality and paranoia suggests that a form of
“narcissistic” male homosexuality can emerge as a boy transitions from fixation on to
identification with the mother, HERmione uses the relationship between its protagonist
and Fayne to suggest that a narcissistic form of female homosexuality comes into
being as a means of transitioning out of the “homosexual-maternal” bonds of the pre-
Oedipal phase (Freud, “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms,” 167). In contrast to “On
Narcissism,” the text Friedman uses, Freud’s “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms”
accounts for the importance of the mother in the psychoanalytic construction of
narcissistic, same-sex object choice by underscoring the homosexual’s identification
with the affectionate mother. Whereas for Freud, the male homosexual replays
through identification his attachment to the mother, seeking out love-objects upon
whom to lavish maternal adoration, in HERmione the narcissistic relation between the
protagonist and Fayne recalls the mother for both (“Certain Neurotic Mechanisms,”
167).
While the women’s activation of the mother-relation takes place at times as a
“concentric” overidentification between them, at other times it is articulated through a
logic of horror and revulsion approximating what Kristeva calls “abjection”— the effort
to separate from the pre-Oedipal mother and to take a place within the symbolic order.
The activation of mother-daughter dynamics between Hermione and Fayne does not
continue the unmediated relation in which Clara negates her daughter, but instead
enacts the process of abjection that both repeats and severs the maternal bond. In one
2 4
. See also Friedman and Duplessis, ‘“I had two loves separate.’”
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2 3 3
of her visions, Fayne imagines that she and Hermione “are and . . . aren’t together”;
she asserts to Hermione that
Something in you makes me hate you. Drawn to you I am repulsed, drawn
away from you, I am negated. You are not myself but you are some
projection of myself. Myself, myself projected you like water. . . you are
the sort of fountain (to become graphic, biblical) that gushed out of the dead
desert rock. (145-146)
This effect of abjection suggests that Hermione and Fayne do not simply repeat the
mother/daughter dyad, but instead reactivate it in the course of the attempt to separate
from it. Just as Hermione slides between the third and first person in her use of her
nickname to designate both herself and her friend, Fayne uses the reflexive pronoun
“myself’ to vehiculate a substitution between herself and Hermione. Her statement’s
enactment of repulsion, a process characteristic of abjection, suggests that the logic of
substitution supporting the visions does not so much perform a complete, pre-Oedipal
identification between the two women as it does trace out both their “necessary
dependence” on one another and the “impossibility” of their identity as “either subject
or object” (Grosz, "Body," 87). Similarly, Hermione uses her nickname to designate
her friend in describing herself as Fayne’s mother: “She is some amplification of
myself like amoeba giving birth, by breaking off, to amoeba. I am a sort of mother, a
sort of sister to Her” (158). Her string of images figures mother-daughter
undifferentiation through the claim that they are of one substance, like an amoeba, yet
also underscores the necessary separation involved in the act of birthing, or division.
Grammatically equating herself with a woman she claims to be both her sister and her
mother, Hermione is simultaneously the same and different from Fayne; their
Swinbumean sisterhood is both marked by, yet distinct from, the maternal relation.25
25 While similar, Kloepfer’s reading of the same passage elides the role of
abjection in effecting an imperfect separation that continually is in process (“Flesh
Made Word” 41).
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2 3 4
The difference between the Rabbs’ relation and that between Fayne and
Hermione thus lies in the difference between the pre-Oedipal approximation of
psychosis and the “borderline” experience of abjection. Whereas the paranoid pre-
Oedipal relation between Clara and Fayne is articulated through the psychotic’s logic
of denial, that between Fayne and Hermione takes place through a logic of abjection
that re-enacts the quasi-psychotic state of pre-Oedipality from which the young women
attempt to escape fPouvoirs 15). The relationship between Hermione and Fayne
differs from that of the Rabbs precisely in that Hermione is incorporated in, rather than
excluded from, Fayne’s alternate world: the young women’s mutual visions do not
mark one woman’s attempt to flee from the other, but instead create a universe they
can inhabit together. This contrast also marks the difference between the Rabbs’ pre-
Oedipal dynamic and the two young women’s apparent delire a deux: the former
dynamic appears to exist prior to symbolic law while actually being conditioned by it;
the latter exists as a regressive repudiation of a symbolic order that is in the process of
becoming legible to its unwilling participants. Hovering at the point at which the
relation to the mother is both repudiated and reactivated, the visionary Fayne and
Hermione partake both of the regressive delirium of the pre-Oedipal and the tumult of
abjection through which they struggle for a foothold in the symbolic.
Importantly, HERmione invites its readers to take seriously that which Lacan
would describe as psychotic delusion or delire a deux. The novel’s interrogation of
the grounding of the symbolic in the laws of kinship and naming undermines the
exclusivity of the patronym’s claim to be a metaphor for Law, and radically calls into
question its foundational role in constituting that phantasm called “reality.” Yet
HFRmione also dramatizes the way in which living within the inverse of the symbolic
order is difficult because the repudiated heterosexual world returns to haunt its
protagonist. Fayne’s romantic betrayal with George precipitates Hermione’s nervous
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2 3 5
breakdown and her increasing consent to familial conventions, which become
increasingly appealing as they smooth over psychical conflict during her recovery.
While Hermione’s decision to use her trousseau money for travel rather than marriage
and Fayne’s return to Gart Grange at the end of novel both gesture towards the
possible resumption of their mutual visions and their lesbian relationship, one cannot
know whether they will prove any more tenable than before. No simple escape from
familial imperatives, the two women’s lesbian relationship is portrayed as a continuous
26
struggle with the patriarchal order.
9 f \
. For more on the ending of HERmione. see Friedman, Penelope’s Web.
115-116; Friedman and Duplessis, ‘“I had two loves separate,” 214; Shugar 90-93;
Travis 119.
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Chapter 5
“Some net of wrong enchantment”: H.D.'s Asphodel and the Lacanian Gaze
Though H.D. likely composed Asphodel some time before she began work
on HERmione. the former continues the narrative that begins in the latter. 1
Asphodel, which begins as Hermione is touring London and Paris with Fayne and
her mother, narrates her break with the destructive Fayne, involvement in several
unsatisfying heterosexual relationships, and final embarcation upon a more viable
lesbian relationship with the wealthy young Beryl (Bryher). Like HERmione.
Asphodel engages with the trope of undifferentiation between women, particularly in
its portrayal of Fayne's "swamp[ing]" mother, Clara (53). However, by moving
away from figures of pre-Oedipality and reinflecting the figure of the lesbian
vampire, the novel also introduces an alternative mode of psychoanalytically
theorizing desire between women. With Beryl, the "mad child" whose "vamping" of
Hermione is the subject of the closing section of the novel, Hermione finds not the
ultimately disabling collapse of distance she did with Fayne, but instead a distance
that renders their relationship viable (177).
One should be skeptical of criticism that presents Asphodel as narrating a
smooth progression from Hermione’ s fraught involvement with Fayne to her less
1. H.D. composed HERmione in 1927. Asphodel, notes Robert Spoo, was
composed in 1921-22 and likely revised several years later (x).
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2 3 7
conflicted and more supportive relationship with Beryl, for such a view ignores the
unspoken hostility with which Hermione first receives Beryl’s overtures. Laity, for
example, proceeds from her discussion of the perilous Fayne to a more problematic
generalization about all of H.D.'s homoerotically charged, quasi-autobiographical
fiction: "H.D.'s . . . romans a clef cast the figures for Frances Gregg as "all-
consuming femmes fatales while the more nurturing, sympathetic" figures for Bryher
"are contrastingly depicted as the vigorous members of self-sustaining, pastoral,
communities of women" ("Lesbian Romanticism" xxiii). By locating the appearance
of female aggression in H.D.'s texts in the "femme fatale" and omitting the
possibility that it might also appear elsewise, Laity deploys an implicit split between
bad and good lesbians, casting the Gregg-figures as unmitigatedly dangerous in their
pathological aggression and the Bryher-figures as wholly comforting in their
offering of female community (H.D.. 125-140; "Lesbian Romanticism," xvii-xliii).2
While Beryl of Asphodel does eventually offer material support for Hermione by
saving her from destitution and likely death during pregnancy, Hermione's initial
2. Friedman is similarly eager to discuss aggression both between mother
and daughter and between Hermione and Fayne, but is reluctant to consider its
appearance in the relationship between the protagonists of H.D.’s novels and their
Bryher-figures: see Penelope's Web, especially chapters 3. 4. and 5. And while
Johanna Dehler and Susan Edmunds also have recently focused on the role of female
aggression in H.D.’s work, they give little consideration to aggression between
Hermione and Beryl in Asphodel. See Edmunds, Out of Line, and "Stealing from
‘ Muddies Body," for a discussion of female aggression in the context of H.D.’s
Kleinian analysis with Walter Schmideberg.
Critical reception of H.D.’s Paint It Today, arguably the most exclusively
“lesbian” of her novels, has been even more strongly marked than have discussions
of Asphodel by the attempt to polarize the Gregg and Bryher figures. Furthermore,
criticism on Paint It Today often claims that the latter introduces the protagonist to a
gynocentric, coastal universe outside of patriarchy and linked to the mother-daughter
bond. See Friedman, Penelope’s Web, and Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin-de-
Siecle. Johanna Dehler’s essay on Paint It Today is a welcome respite from such
arguments.
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238
hostility to her suggests that the two women’s relationship is articulated not only
through supportive communitarianism but also through intersubjective aggression.
Asphodel importantly complicates the common feminist argument that
presumes that aggression between women is a function of "patriarchy" and that a
community untainted by men's influence would be inherently peaceable. This
critical framework creates a blind spot that precludes consideration not only of other
causes of aggression but also of manifestations of it, such as those between
Hermione and Beryl, that do not result in utter destruction. 2 As Jacqueline Rose
points out, "if psychic life has its own violence; if there is an aggression in the very
movement of the drives . . . then there can be no analysis for women which sees
violence solely as an accident, imposition, or external event" (16). Lacan predicates
his account of psychical and visual experience on the assumption that subjectivity
involves a fundamental misrecognition (meconnaissance) constituted through
4
paranoiac aggression. Whereas paranoiac aggressivity is writ large in the violent
acts of the paranoid psychotic, it subtends "normal" subjectivity as well. While the
psychotic dangerously leaves her primordial aggressivity unchecked by refusing to
follow the imperatives of the symbolic order, the "normal" subject, on the other
hand, allows her aggressive impulses to be mitigated by submitting to the Law of the
Father. In so doing, the "normal" subject undergoes a triangulation of desire, an
3 xhe most significant consideration of aggressivity in H.D.'s work, Susan
Edmunds' Out of Line, focuses on her late poetry rather than her fiction.
Importantly, Edmunds suggests a revision of Kristevan readings of H.D. by
considering the writer's encounters with the work of Melanie Klein, whose focus on
paranoiac aggressivity between mother and daughter strongly marks Kristeva's work.
While Lacan did not articulate his theory of the gaze until his 1963-1964
seminar on Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. his assumption of
primordial aggressivity is present even in his early work: see “Le stade du miroir”
(1949) and “L’aggressivite en psychanalyse”(1948), Ecrits. 93-100, 101-124.
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2 3 9
inscription of distance between self and other, that is absent in the psychotic's
potentially violent undifferentiation from those around her.
Feminist and queer theorists often contest Lacan's claim that the "normal"
subject must accept the "Name of the Father" as the "master" signifier that anchors
the symbolic order around the poles of "sexual difference." This aspect of his theory
implies that any refusal of dualistically conceived "sexual difference"— any
transgression of the roles of the sexes, any manifestation of desire for a person of the
"same" sex— is a symptom of psychosis. Asphodel, however, counters Lacan by
tracing out Beryl's solicitation of Hermione's gaze, and thereby raises the possibility
that distance can be inscribed in a homosexual relation— that is, that desire between
women is psychically viable. Through scenes of lesbian vampirism that involve
distanced enchantment instead of a collapse of spectatorial distance, Asphodel
complicates Case's claim that the possibilities for psychoanalytically informed queer
theorizing are bleak. Far from leaving the phallogocentric premises of Lacanian
psychoanalysis intact, as do "dominant" representations of the overproximate lesbian
vampire, H.D.'s novel suggests that the foundational terms of psychoanalysis can be
reconfigured in order to open up new ways of theorizing lesbian desire.
Asphodel presents a trenchant challenge to psychoanalysis' assumption that
the social order need necessarily be grounded on paternal law and its corollary,
(hetero)sexual difference. By emphasizing the constitutive instability of gender,
Asphodel critiques psychoanalysis' doctrine of "sexual difference" by undermining
the privileging of the phallus that is explicit in Lacan's structuralist work on
psychosis in the 1950's and implicit in Kristeva's formulation of the "homosexual-
maternal." The novel interrogates the production of gender identity, positing not a
mode of specifically feminine resistance to the symbolic but instead a means of
unraveling the symbolic's very claim to represent paternal law. Figuring the
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2 4 0
symbolic order as a highly contested territory, Asphodel does not leave the doctrine
of "sexual difference" intact; rather, it questions the very premises through which
psychoanalysis' insistence on sexual dualism consigns lesbians to the "feminine"
realm of psychotic undifferentiation. It thereby opens up a means of theorizing
lesbianism as something other than the psychotic inverse of heterosexuality.
I. "You must cut... the cord . . . Umbilical cord to be exact"
Asphodel challenges theories of ecriture feminine by tracing out Hermione's
explicit self-distancing from pre-Oedipal modes of female erotic friendship and
poetic creativity, figuring them as limited in their subversive potential and even
dangerous to her survival. Much of the second half of HERmione and the first half
of Asphodel involve comparisons between Hermione and Fayne's lesbian
relationship and the Rabb women's imbrication in pre-Oedipal mother-daughter
dynamics. Whereas HERmione marks its characters’ arguably pre-Oedipal
relationships as pathological only through the patriarchal rants of the brash poet
George Lowndes, Asphodel questions their efficacy though the mouth of Hermione
herself. In Asphodel. Hermione Gart takes a critical distance from the Rabb dyad,
representing its pre-Oedipal dynamics as the source of the two women’s “mad”
behavior; she pathologizes their relationship while removing herself— and her love
for Fayne— from its influence fHERmione 186).
The Hermione of Asphodel portrays the Rabbs’ relationship as dangerously
pre-Oedipal. In an attempt to persuade Fayne to stay in Europe after her mother
returns home to resume teaching, she challenges her about the ways in which her
relationship to Clara might be destructive: “[s]he is arresting your development.
You are a case particularly poignant, of arrested development” (51). Furthermore,
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241
much as Kristeva describes the pre-Oedipal as that place at which the “homosexual
facet” of motherhood is activated in the undifferentiated contact between mother and
daughter, Hermione sexualizes Fayne’s bond to Clara by asserting that “her love for
you is incest” (Kristeva, "Motherhood," 239; H.D., Asphodel. 53). However, far
from viewing the “homosexual-maternal” as harboring an ambivalence conducive to
poetic production, Hermione insists that this genre of mother-daughter dyad is not
only pathological but also socially contemptible: “[m]others and daughters don’t
sleep in the same bed. It’s horrible” (53). She reproaches Fayne, calling Clara
" [t]his thing that you allow to creep over you, to swamp you” (53). Far from being a
person, Clara is an object, a mere "thing," within Fayne’ s tortured psyche.
Construing the pre-Oedipal as unmitigatedly dangerous, Hermione insists
that Fayne must relinquish her bonds to her mother in order to become an adult: she
insists that ‘“we can’t creep back into our mothers, be bom again that way. You
must cut, as it were the cord--’ ‘Umbilical cord to be exact’” (51-3), In contrast to
Clara, the lifeless "thing," Hermione insists on the reality and viability of her and
Fayne’s love for one another: "I, Hermione, tell you I love you Fayne Rabb . . . I see
you. I feel you. My pulse runs swiftly. My brain reaches some height of delirium"
(52-53). She differentiates her love for Fayne from the “arrested development” of
the mother-daughter dyad, positioning both Mrs. Rabb and the turbulence of the pre-
Oedipal as harmful things from which Fayne would have to extricate herself in order
to embark upon a serious relationship with a woman her own age.
Hermione declares that "Clara is stiff from some rigid family complex," and
holds herself up as a model to bolster her assertion that Fayne should separate herself
from the grasp of familial tradition represented by her mother (54). Hermione
asserts her own difference from her Shakespearean namesake in order to insist upon
the necessity of transforming familial imperatives:
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2 4 2 ,
Hermione. My grandfather read Shakespeare, that’s why, Hermione. But
that’s not me. That’s not me. They can laugh if they want cry if they want,
become rhapsodic over Her Gart, Hermione Gart or Hermione. But I’m
something different. It’s nothing to do with them. I’m something else.
Different. You Fayne know that. Perhaps you are the first one at all to
know it. (53)
In contrast to the protagonist of HERmione. who continually wrestles with the force
of her name’s literary significance, the Hermione of Asphodel unequivocally insists
that her name is the site of catachresis. It can be wrested away from the
Shakespearean resonances that represent her grandfather’s construction of her,
divested of its heterosexual significance, and redeployed in order to assert her own
desire for women. Furthermore, her name’s implicit reference to ancient history— to
Hermione, the daughter of Helen of Troy— makes especially clear that her assertion
of difference from her namesake interrupts what Gayle Rubin has called the “Traffic
in Women”-th e exchange of women that founds the Lacanian symbolic.** Declaring
that “[w]e are children of the Rossettis, of Bume Jones, of Swinburne” and are “in
the thoughts of Wilde,” Hermione situates their relationship within a genealogy of
well-known literary homosexuals-within what Diana Collecott calls an "English
lineage of Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes" that "implies another modernism than
Pound's" (61). Hermione’s proposed relationship with Fayne would wrestle kinship
away from both patrilineage and the exchange of women, resituating it as a
voluntary alliance irrespective of gender, and re-inflecting the symbolic order away
from its historical dependence on the organizing principle of paternal law.
By describing Fayne’s relationship to Clara as “arrested development” but
proposing lesbianism as a viable alternative, Asphodel displaces the psychoanalytic
* * . For more on Hermione’s name, see Friedman and Duplessis, “‘I had two
loves separate,” 209.
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2 4 3
claim that adult lesbian relationships are repetitions of a woman’s earlier attachments
to her mother, and as such, symptoms of an arrest in sociosexual development. By
severing the pre-Oedipal qua maddening mother-daughter “incest” from adult forms
of lesbianism, the novel altogether divests the former of the claims to subversion that
have been made on its behalf. Indeed, Asphodel invokes the necessity of decisively
separating from the mother and confining the experience of the mother-tie to the
nostalgic re-enactment of the pre-Oedipal bond through abjection, the process of
repeatedly severing and then reinstating the bond to the mother in an attempt to gain
a foothold in the symbolic order. In Pouvoirs de l'horreur. a reformulation of her
earlier work on the pre-Oedipal, Kristeva argues that the experience of abjection
necessarily implies a negotiation of symbolic mandates. Though Kristeva’s use of
terms such as “the symbolic” in early articles such as "Motherhood" sustains the
patriarchal order by insisting on the role of the paternal metaphor in instituting law,
in Pouvoirs de l'horreur she instead suggests that the "paternal function" might not
necessarily require a male representative: she writes of an "etre-la du symbolique
qu'un pere pourrait ou non incamer" (18, emphasis added).^ Similarly, by asserting
that an adult, lesbian relationship can be an adequate ballast to the turbulence of the
pre-Oedipal, Hermione implies that it is a viable means of entering into the symbolic
order. Hermione's denunciation of the "swamping" Clara and her insistence that
lesbianism is a fully viable mode of adult sexuality raise the possibility that the
symbolic order could be conceived otherwise-a possibility that is explored more
thoroughly in the novel's final chapters.
Trans.: "a being-there of the symbolic that a father might or might not
embody" (10, emphasis added).
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II. “Some net of wrong enchantment”
2 4 4
Paralleling those moments at which the narrative of Asphodel moves towards
an apparently inevitable heterosexual conclusion, H.D. explains in a letter to Norman
Holmes Pearson that she has marked the manuscript of the novel for destruction
because it is merely an “[e]arly edition of MADRIGAL” (qtd. in Friedman,
Penelope’s Web. 141). Subsuming the relevance of Asphodel to the entirely
heterosexual plot of the novel later published as Bid Me To Live. H.D. appears to
capitulate entirely to the hegemonic narrative that positions heterosexuality as
marking the successful transition into adulthood. However, H.D. also notes to
Pearson that “[u]n traditionally, I am picking it apart to see how it was written,”
signaling an effort to work over once more not only its style but also the bisexual
vicissitudes of its narrative— to keep in discourse, rather than suppress, its moments
of lesbian passion (141).
Similarly, the introduction into the narration of Beryl, a new female
companion for Hermione, marks an important turning point near the end of
Asphodel: it sets off a confrontation between the poet’s self-enclosed consciousness
and the outside world. The narrative traces out the movement from the initial
penetration of Hermione’s solipsistic world by the suicidal Beryl’s depressed and
searching stare— a penetration perceived as intolerably intrusive, vampiric
aggression— to the consequent provocation of the reluctant Hermione’s gaze.
Having become pregnant during an heterosexual affair, Hermione is residing
in the country to escape the ravages of war. Her consciousness is referred to as a
“sort of madness” and is evoked through the same tropes of pre-Oedipal
undifferentiation she repudiated earlier in her diatribe against Clara Rabb:
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I am in several pieces, it’s true, but I gave up the stark glory of the intellect,
I chose finally this thing. O sister, my sister O fleet sweet swallow. I might
not have had it. I chose it and I am taking the consequences of this choice
which was the great choice, which was heaven. Unless you become as a
little child, unless you become one with a little child, I have it and I don’t
see why I can’t be let alone anyhow. (177, 170)
This passage doubly deploys the echo of the Swinburne citation to invoke a
homosexualized, Kristevan version of what Hollenberg has called “the poetics of
childbirth.” Indeed, as Friedman notes, the novel’s “discourse of pregnancy . . . is
consistently lyric and rhythmic, repetitious and hypnotic, an eruption of the
7
Kristevan Semiotic into the Symbolic” (Penelope's Web 187).
Even though Hermione revels in solipsistic union with her own child, she
nonetheless resists Beryl's initial advances, which she perceives as threatening a
similar undifferentiation. Invoking what Case calls the culturally "dominant"
discourse on lesbian vampires, she asks herself “if perhaps she wasn’t in some net of
wrong enchantment,” and insists that “she [does] not want this mad child vamping
her" (175-7). At first, Hermione ascribes evil intent to what she perceives as Beryl’s
intrusion into her maternal, poetic world:
Hermione had determined to sink into her own self-made aura. Herself had
woven herself an aura, a net, a sort of luminous cocoon but somehow
daemon eyes drew out of her all these things, all these other things. Was
the girl a witch, some bad thing, some evil thing? Why did the girl draw
these things out of her, things that came automatically, a sort of superior
intellectual psycho-analysis, going on and on. (185)
However, it eventually is clear that the witchcraft attributed to Beryl is different
from that of which Hermione and Fayne are accused in HERmione by George, who
asserts that the two girls should be "burnt for witchcraft" because of the frequency
and exclusivity of their world of female prophecy and creative productivity (165).
7
. See Laity, H.D. and the Victorian fin-de-siecle. for more on the role of
Swinburne's decadent poetry in H.D.'s writings.
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2 4 6
Far from the product of a “concentric intimacy,” Beryl’s apparent witchcraft is
generated through a stare that inscribes distance, fascination, and “enchantment,”
and that serves as an antidote to the solipsism of the pre-Oedipal (HERmione 164;
Asphodel 181). Furthermore, the Hermione of Asphodel suggests that her resistance
stems not from fear of overproximity but from her own desire to be the vampire
instead of the victim, “to take from this girl not give to her” (177). Hermione figures
a resistance to complete merger by insistently differentiating herself from Beryl and
by asserting her desire to reverse the terms of victimization. She thus resists the
collapse of distance that, in HERmione. at times governed her friendship with Fayne.
In so doing, she creates a new kind of lesbian vampirism: one not characterized by
the “border-line” experience of abjection, the continued threat of a return to
overproximate undifferentiation, but by the mutual entanglement of two separate
subjects.
Hermione’s puzzlement at the way the vampiric Beryl could “draw things out
of her” through her evil, demonic eyes anticipates Jacques Lacan’s theory of the
g a z e .8 In the passage that introduces Beryl, the emphasis on distanciation between
the eye and the gaze differs from the invocation of female proximity that animates
8. Earlier feminist H.D. scholars have deployed the term “the gaze”
somewhat differently than I do. Friedman, for example, follows feminist film critics
such as Laura Mulvey in understanding the gaze as “inherently masculine and
patriarchal,” while arguing that H.D. breaks away from psychoanalysis’ phallic
mode in order to appropriate “sight and seeing . .. for female desire.” Penelope’s
Web. 383n20. Yet as Elizabeth Grosz notes, this argument conflates “the [Sartrean,
objectifying] look with the gaze.” “Voyeurism/exhibitionism/the gaze,” Feminism
and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1992), 449. As will become clear in the course of this discussion, my
argument is distinct from that of the feminist film critics in its proposal of a feminist
deployment of Lacan’s theory of the gaze.
Moreover, while my principal focus is on the gaze as Lacan discusses it in
The Four Fundamental Concepts, it is important to note that this gaze is marked by
the same kind of paranoiac aggression he theorizes in his earlier discussions of
visuality.
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2 4 7
the passages in both Asphodel and HERmione that concern Hermione’s relationship
with the Rabbs. Hermione is preoccupied throughout with Beryl’s eyes, the locus of
a stare she finds disconcerting and that even makes the young woman’s eyes appear
incongruous with the rest of her face. The pull of Beryl’s stare emanates from the
gaze that the inquisitive but melancholy girl incites in the unwilling Hermione.
In Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psvchanalvse. Lacan argues that a
dialectical relation obtains between the “eye” of a spectator and the “gaze” through
which he or she sees. For Lacan, the “gaze” is not so much a field of vision that
folds out from the point of the seeing subject’s “eye” (which point, he reminds us,
we can never see except as separate from ourselves— as an object in the mirror or in
the eyes of another person), but instead is a function of the fact that we are seen by
9
others (Four Fundamental Concepts 103). We can only apprehend the gaze to the
extent to which we can imagine it in the field of what Lacan calls the “Other” (84).
For Lacan, the Other is both a function of other persons who look at the subject, and
the repository of linguistic structures and social imperatives inscribed through what
he calls the “symbolic order.” The “gaze” qua Other is an extemalization of the
unconscious, supported by what Lacan calls the objet a, that phantasmatic “chose
dont le sujet, pour se constituer, s’est separe comme organe” (119).^ Through the
splitting off of the objet a, the subject itself is constituted as split, as radically ex-
centric to him or herself. The chiasmic split between the “eye” and the “gaze” both
conditions the splitting of the subject and renders the gaze, qua vanishing objet a,
9. Lacan notes that “I am not simply that punctiform being located at the
geometral point from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of
my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am not in
the picture” (Four 96).
Trans.: “something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself,
has separated itself off as organ” (Four 103).
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2 4 8
inapprehensible. Lacan writes that "Des que ce regard, le sujet essaie de s’y
accommoder, il devient cet objet punctiforme, ce pont d’etre evanouissant, avec
lequel le sujet confond sa propre defaillance" (97). ^ ^ Mediated through the Other,
the gaze works to constitute the illusion of truth— that is, the illusion of recognition
12
and knowledge that Lacan calls meconnaissance.
In automatically “draw[ing] things out of” Hermione, the strange pull of
Beryl’s eyes constitutes an illusory recognition between them, serving as the
mechanism through which the unwillingly philosophical Hermione confronts her
intellect. Just as Lacan asserts that language is “une communication ou l’emetteur
regoit du recepteur son propre message sous une forme inversee,” Hermione, when
looking at a portrait of her hostess, perceives Beryl’s eyes as reflecting back her own
questions: the “eyes said to her what she had just said, they asked and asked, ‘what
13
is truth?”’ (Lacan, Ecrits. 298; H.D., Asphodel. 187). Hermione describes the
intellectualization that attends her subjection to the gaze by invoking the language of
childbirth, deploying it rather differently than in her earlier, more Kristevan
ruminations over her pregnancy. She asks, “What was that staring at her? Was it
another child, child of her mind, her spirit?” (177). Resistant at first to giving up her
H . Trans.: "From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to
adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being
with which the subject confuses his own failure" (Four 83).
12. Frequently translated as "misrecognition," "meconnaissance" also puns
on "connaissance," the French word for "knowledge." In referencing the
epistemological impulse of the gaze, Lacan's neologism implies that misrecognition
occurs not only at the level of images but also at the level of the "truths" we attribute
to them. His notion of "meconnaissance" thus provides an important corrective to
naive critical epistemologies that, without examining their own methodological
assumptions, attempt to take images at face value.
13
. Trans.: “a communication in which the sender receives his own message
back from the receiver in an inverted form” (Ecrits: A Selection 85).
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2 4 9
“poetics of childbirth” for intellectual birthings, she insists that she “must stay a net
of gauze, not be beguiled by eyes into some open rock-hewn wind blown spaces of
the intellect” (179).
Hermione nonetheless is drawn unwittingly into those “spaces of the
intellect” through an automatism anticipating Lacan’s theory that “le langage . . . se
' 14
refere au discours de 1 ’autre” (Ecrits 298). Beryl’s depressed and searching stare,
uncannily familiar to the equally depressed Hermione, propels the re-entry into
language whereby the poet is able to answer Beryl’s queries automatically and
reluctantly emerge from her solipsistic universe:
She had said the right thing by accident, her brain seemed to work that
way, automatically but she couldn’t go on expecting the right answer, like
throwing dice and expecting double sixes every other time . . . why didn’t
the girl go? Brain went on (she had tested it) on a rail all by itself though
brain was (she had tested it) a white marble statue, a bronze heavy thing
that had sunk, had sunk, irrevocably like the precious cargoes of Corinthian
plunder that had sunk. (184)
Hermione is disquieted by the way in which her interactions with Beryl
paradoxically bring to the surface those “precious cargoes” obtained during her
“plunder[ing]” of ancient mythology, yet “irrevocably” lost during the traumatic
events of war and stillbirth. Hermione’s “brain,” her means of recalling her lost
knowledge, appears as a heavy, solid object that will not yield to conscious probing
and appears to be as lost, as “sunk,” as the knowledge itself. Yet a psychoanalytic
gloss of this passage explains Hermione’s ability automatically to produce these lost
contents when provoked. “[S]unk” in the depths of her unconscious, Hermione’s
knowledge of ancient history is as irretrievable to her conscious, statuesque ego as it
Trans.: “[Ljanguage . . . refers itself to the discourse of the other”
(Ecrits: A Selection 85).
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2 5 0
is automatically articulable as discourse of the Other. Thus Hermione can make
the apparently contradictory claim to have proven through testing both that her brain
runs “on a rail all by itself,” and that it was a “statue, a . . . heavy thing that had
sunk.” The automatism at work in this passage thus differs from that between
Hermione and Fayne in HERmione: whereas the latter is forced out by the grasp of
a disturbingly proximate other, one whose hand "dragged words out of the throat of
Her Gart," the former is generated through the distanced solicitation of the gaze
tHERmione 143).
Yet Asphodel most clearly anticipates Lacan when it figures the dynamic of
gazing he attributes to the “evil eye,” whose “voracious appetite” underscores the
insurmountability of the subject’s split by illustrating the eye’s aggressively
separative power (Four 115). The novel portrays Beryl and her eyes as initially
voracious, and Hermione and her eyes as eventually so as well: it figures the
former’s bottomless appetite for knowledge through her eyes’ draining stare, and
represents the latter’s eventual act of ‘taking’ from Beryl through her eyes’
increasingly desperate imbrication in the gaze. A passage in Asphodel delineating
Hermione’s fascination with the eyes in a portrait of Beryl further illustrates, via a
situation analogous to the “evil eye,” the dynamics of the eye and the gaze that
Lacan describes. Hermione is
staring mesmerized at something that at first had seemed a subtle bit of
colour but that had turned out to be pearls painted, carefully painted pearls
that had given back a cheating semblance of glamour and the thing had
turned out to be a portrait and all twisted and all wrong eyes looked at her.
Eyes had looked at Hermione from the wall of the enormous drawing room
For a discussion of Lacan’s theory (in “Le stade du miroir”) that the ego
is constituted as statuesque through imaginary captation, see Chapter 1 of Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991).
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251
and mesmerized she knew she would never, never escape those eyes that
looked and looked and looked. (178)
Through the allegory of Hermione’s mesmerization by the portrait, this passage
traces out Beryl’s solicitation of Hermione’s gaze. It does so by exemplifying
Lacan’s claim that “dans la dialectique de 1 ’oeil et du regard . . . il n’y a point
coincidence, mais foncierement leurre”— a visual oscillation in which "[l]e sujet se
presente comme autre qu'il n'est, et ce qu'on lui donne a voir n'est pas ce qu'il veut
16
voir" (118-19). Through such a lure, Hermione’s gaze shifts as she regards
something that appears to be a “subtle bit of colour” but that turns out to be a portrait
of Beryl, a portrait that stares at her through eyes that are “all wrong.” Indeed, the
passage illustrates the way in which the lure has entangled Hermione’s gaze with
Beryl’s gaze through the mediation Of the disquieting eye. It signals their
entanglement by figuring both Beryl’s “voracious” stare, and the “mesmerized”
Hermione’s equally voracious consumption of Beryl’s painted image.
The operation of the gaze in this passage also underscores the aggression that
subtends the two women’s interactions as Hermione feels that Beryl’s eyes “split her
open” (178). By highlighting the aggression at work in Beryl’s “voracious” stare,
Hermione’s mesmerization by the portrait exemplifies the evil eye’s function as
fascinum: it bears a mark of death that can only be sutured through the
meconnaissance of the gaze. Writing that the “appetit de l’oeil qu’il s’agit de nourrir
fait la valeur de charme de la peinture,” Lacan suggests that the painting of Beryl
17
provides such a suture by mesmerizing Hermione (131). Yet the “placating”
Trans.: "in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze . . . there is no
coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure"; ”[t]he subject is presented as other than he
is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see" (Four 102, 104).
^ . Trans.: “appetite of the eye that must be fed produces the hypnotic value
of painting” (Tour 115).
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2 5 2
effect of the portrait can only provide temporary respite from the destructive power
of the gaze. Its visual plenitude is subtended by the disquieting specter of death
from which Hermione “knew she would never, never escape” and which reveals
itself in her perpetual aggression against Beryl’s intrusive stare, emanating from the
eyes she fears “would still stare at her the other side of— the other side of— Styx”
(181).
In suggesting that Beryl’s vamping of Hermione both carries the threat of
death and sutures it over through the workings of the gaze, the passage’s delineation
of Hermione’s fascination by the painting performs the threat of the “evil” woman
somewhat differently than do "dominant" representations of lesbian vampirism.
Asphodel uses the gaze not to narrate the two women’s collapse into
undifferentiation but instead to inscribe Hermione and Beryl as distinct from one
another— as differentially positioned in their mutual entanglement.
Indeed, Beryl’s painted eyes have an anamorphic effect comparable to that of
the piece of wood in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which appears as a skull
when perceived at a slant. When Hermione looks at the portrait askance, Beryl’s
eyes appear “all wrong:” as the site of oscillation of their viewer’s scopic drive, they
figure the inevitable death intimated by her constitutive aggression. As the
anamorphic object, Beryl’s eyes appear to Hermione through the Other, in the form
of what Lacan calls the “stain.” Lacan insists that the gaze is unrepresentable as
such and that, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen explains, a trace of “[t]he gaze is seen” as
“phenomenalized,” but only through the appearance of “an incongruous stain . . . in
the painting-mirror of the visible” (236). As such a “stain,” Beryl’s eyes eventually
appear as disembodied and depersonalized to Hermione: “Hermione almost asked
whose were the eyes, for they did not any more belong to anybody . . . they looked at
her night and day . .. demanding” (178). The eyes appear incongruous, “all wrong,”
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to Hermione because as “stain,” they function as the emblem of an otherwise
unphenomenalizable gaze. And much as Lacan argues that the “stain” is an “eye that
gazes at (concerns) me all the more in that it does not see me, in that it stains the
mirror,” Hermione suspects throughout the passage that Beryl does not “see her,” so
to speak (Borch-Jacobsen 236). She locates her discomfort with Beryl’s stare in the
way in which it appears to draw her into a relationship that she claims not to desire,
that she perceives as ex-centric to herself. As she sits in Beryl’s beautiful drawing
room, for example, she stifles the accusation that the girl does not understand that
the torment of her recent stillbirth renders her unwilling to be sociable. As a result,
she contemplates the apparent disjunction between her own feelings and Beryl’s
need for her: “staring back into eyes that stared and stared . . . Hermione asked
herself if perhaps she wasn’t in some net of wrong enchantment” (175). Hermione’s
and Beryl’s gazes thus appear to cross one another irreconcilably. Nonetheless, as
the gaze that objectivizes the Other, the "stain" figures not only Beryl’s apparently
divergent intentionality, but also its pull upon Hermione’s unconscious, its
“enchantment” of her.
T IT . "Eyes don't look normally out of faces like that"
The passage that figures Hermione’s encounter with the portrait also
emphasizes the way in which the gaze serves as the locus through which, after her
emergence from her solipsistic world, Hermione encounters the desire of the
18
Other. The entanglement of Hermione’s and Beryl’s gazes amounts to an
1R
. Lacan notes that “in the relation of subject to subject, in the function of
the existence of others as looking at me,... the gaze intervenes . .. only in as much
as it is not the annihilating subject, correlative of the world of objectivity, who feels
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254
entanglement of their desire in which Hermione’s gaze eventually circles around
19
Beryl’s face as erotic object. Hermione admires her companion’s “[sjmall chin,
small Eros chin, mouth more than a child-Eros, a mouth that was a youth Eros,
perfect box of slightly too wide mouth but lips narrow, coral.. . Lips were coral lips,
smooth, lips were Eros lips” (185). Studying her companion and recalling the
portrait, Hermione emphasizes the appeal of both Beryl’s traditionally feminine
beauty and her arguably more masculine traits, figuring the latter through a series of
phallic metaphors:
Why didn’t the mouth speak, beguile the eyes? The mouth was too perfect,
a little too wide, but in shape too perfect, but it had to be wide, that perfect
mouth to cover that row of beauty. Hers were straight, beautiful, like a
young lion's teeth, not cruel like an old lion, like a young lion, teeth that
could worry bird feathers— teeth that gave back the authentic sheen and
shimmer that those pearls painted on that parody of the child throat did not
pretend to give . . . teeth . . . pearls. (178-79)
Concluding by vacillating between the brilliantly phallic “teeth” of a predatory
young lion and the flatly feminine “pearls” of the girl in the portrait, this passage
underscores Beryl’s gender ambiguity. Yet it presents her phallic teeth not as
disconcerting but as beautiful, as a “row of beauty” covered by a wide and “perfect
mouth.” And more so than the text does elsewhere, it marks her aggressively phallic
teeth as authentic while casting her portrait, with its feminine pearls, as a ridiculous
parody. It cites the visually grasping “sheen and shimmer” of the lion-like teeth as a
mark of their authenticity, using concrete images to emphasize their potential for real
himself surprised, but the subject sustaining himself in a function of desire" (Four
84-5).
19. Here we must recall that Lacan would also emphasize that if the two
women’s gazes are implicated with one another through a chiasmatic crossing, it is
not through their mutual recognition within a “world of objectivity” predicated on
presence and visibility, but through an illusory relation in which each party
inevitably mwrecognizes the other.
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255
effects such as inciting fear in their prey. It further implies the pearls’ visual flatness
to be a symptom of phoniness, of the inauthenticity of Beryl’s feminine garb.
Hermione reflects elsewhere that Beryl’s dress is “too old for her” and that “her
shoes weren’t right”; she wonders “[w]ho had dressed her” in such garments and
done up her parodically feminine, “huge coils of braided hair” (172). She notes that
her wealthy companion is not the epitome of feminine delicacy, either: she is
“Clumsy with the tea-cups” (172). Yet by ascribing to Beryl’s mouth the potential to
“beguile the eyes,” Hermione elevates and eroticizes a phallicized image of her
companion in order to cover over the oscillation signaled by her disconcerting eyes
and ill-fitting feminine trappings.
This resolution is only temporary, for Hermione continues to be profoundly
disturbed by Beryl’s appearance. She shows pleasure at her companion’s “jh]igh,
clear voice of a boy” and her laugh that lights “the room with . . . metallic glamour,”
yet for her that metallic quality sounds a “slight note of discord” (174). She wishes
“[t]o escape— to escape,” yet senses that “there is no escape” because “blue eyes say
so, the eyes of some Persian magnate’s horrible boy child, eyes of a prince, the Beryl
eyes of Beryl, Beryl” (180). The shiny, phallic, qualities of the boyish Beryl’s eyes
both attract and disconcert Hermione, for whom such “[b]eauty is Hell” (180).
Indeed, her eroticized perception of Beryl’s face is marked by the persistent sense
that “something was wrong” with it:
Eyes don’t look normally out of faces like th at. .. the mouth was too
perfect though the nose plunged forward dangerous, too large, ploughing as
it were a way before it, but the nose in this light was put on, rightly placed,
giving too much character to the characterless child-face. There was too
much character for that baby chin, that breadth of chaste arc eye-brows.
The nose gave too much character and the eyes spoiled all the effect of
peace, and of non-entity. (185)
To Hermione, the peaceful effect of Beryl’s chastely feminine eyebrows and
childlike chin is undercut by her nose’s dangerously masculine assertion. She
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256
implies that Beryl’s face is disconcerting because it violates Victorian constructions
of womanhood: instead of Simply presenting Beryl as a chaste and childlike “non
entity,” the face signals through its assertive nose an unwelcome degree of
“character” and refuses through its voracious eyes to be pacified. Importantly,
Hermione cannot discern which facial elements represent the ‘real’ Beryl. She
muses that her “eyes and nose were wrong or was it perfect small chin and perfect
mouth and chaste nymph eye-brows wrong? Something was wrong,” but she cannot
decide whether Beryl’s gentle chin and mouth or her assertive eyes and nose mark
her ‘true’ identity (185-6). Her inability firmly to ground her perception of Beryl
betrays an ambivalence as to precisely which part of the body conditions the
supposedly abnormal look of the eyes: is it the eyes that of their own volition “don’t
look normally,” or is it the “faces like that” that render the looks of their eyes
peculiar? In circling around her companion as its object, Hermione’s gaze is
characterized by an ontological vacillation in which the ground of Beryl’s gender
appears as continually unsettled.
The eyes that “don’t look normally out of faces like that” carry out an
anamorphic function in the logic of the gaze by appearing as the jarring blot that
Lacan calls the “stain.” When perceived at a slant, the “stain” phenomenalizes an
alternate landscape onto a reinflected "screen"— the visual field through which what
we see is phenomenalized, and which determines the contours of what we see. In
Asphodel, the “stain” of Beryl’s eyes marks the site of a dualistic inscription of
sexual difference, yet leaves the question of its hold on the subject in continual
indeterminacy by highlighting the woman’s masculine and feminine features.
Hermione’s gaze thus exemplifies Lacan’s assertion that “le point de regard participe
toujours de l’ambigmte du joyau:” what the protagonist playfully calls “the Beryl
eyes of Beryl” serve quite literally in the capacity of a Beryl jewel (Lacan, Les
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257
20
quatre concepts 111; H.D., Asphodel. 180). Asphodel thus underscores the
phantasmatic character of gender through its use of the “screen” to phenomenalize
Beryl’s body.
In emphasizing the instability of gender, Asphodel reinflects standard
Lacanian accounts of sexual difference. As Jacqueline Rose suggests,
psychoanalysis' doctrine of (hetero)sexual difference does not produce "the petrified
block of a singular visual space since, looked at obliquely, it can always be seen to
contain its moments of unease." Instead, "psychoanalysis describes the psychic law
to which we are subject, but only in terms of its failing" (232-33). Read through the
uneasy figuration of Beryl's phallicism in Asphodel. Rose's formulation recalls what
Judith Butler labels the "heterosexual matrix": the set of discourses through which
the sexed body is materialized as implicitly heterosexual. Butler uses an
approximation of Foucault and Derrida to assert that, through the deployment of
normative gendered and sexual identifications, the "heterosexual matrix" both
produces its own "failures" as a result of the unpredictability of signification, and
through negative self-definition depends upon those failures in order to uphold and
to reproduce its own imperatives (Gender Trouble). Similar to Butler's proposition
in its claim that hegemonic heterosexuality asserts itself through a necessary
dependence on the very identifications that could dismantle it, the dynamic of gazing
in Asphodel suggests that normative heterosexuality (or what Lacanians call "sexual
difference") is itself a pretense, one that "contain[s]" those "moments of unease" that
intimate its possible unraveling. The anamorphic unsettling of Beryl's gender marks
what Rose calls "a form of resistance which can be articulated on this side of (rather
90
. Trans.: “the point of the gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the
jewel" (Four 96).
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2 5 8
than beyond) the world against which it protests": it suggests that resistance to
heteronormative "sexual difference" does not necessitate a utopian realm radically
outside the confines of the symbolic— such as the pre-Oedipal— but instead can be
articulated from within the symbolic itself (232-33).
A danger in Rose's argument is that the resistances signaled by the "moments
of unease" of the dominant visual sphere could all too easily be recuperated by the
symbolic— as her observation that the symbolic "contains its moments of unease"
perhaps unwittingly suggests (233, emphasis added). However, as Kaja Silverman
argues, Les quatre concepts begins an important “swerve” away from the phallus as
the privileged signifier of Lacan’s high structuralist phase ("Lacanian Phallus" 107).
She contends that in Les quatre concepts, "the Name-of-the-Father emerges as . . .
one of the signifiers that impart a retroactive significance to the lack introduced by
language, rather than as a timeless Law that will always preside over the operations
of desire" (112). For Silverman, the phallogocentrism of Lacan's theory of the gaze
is a second-order instead of a first-order phenomenon: even though Les quatre
concepts retains the poles of sexual difference for which Lacan’s work is notorious,
it presents them as contingent rather than necessary. Silverman argues that Les
quatre concepts presents the drama of gender identification as a means of suturing
over a more fundamental lack: as a means of attaining a “fictive wholeness,” the
male subject fictitiously asserts that he has the phallus (113). The symbolic order
thus need not be understood as a province in which the paternal name consigns
femaleness to the negativity of “lack,” but instead as a highly contested territory
open to the insubordination of female phallic appropriation. In other words, the
phallus of Les quatre concepts is potentially what Judith Butler would call
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25 9
21
“transferable.” With its acceptance no longer a prerequisite for subjectivity, the
"transferable" phallus might even become dispensable, available--at least in theory-
to play bit parts instead of the lead role in the dramas of desiring subjectivity.
Within Lacanian theory, however, the challenges posed by the "transferable"
phallus remain purely hypothetical. Though it relinquishes its role in the paternal
metaphor, the phallus of Les quatre concepts is as dragged by penile reference as is
its earlier counterpart, whose disavowed links to the male organ Judith Butler so
22
carefully has illuminated. Even if Les quatre concepts is limited both by being
bound up in the penis as the disguised referent of the phallus, and by insistently
linking the phallic phantom to the gaze, the text nonetheless renders
phallogocentrism less trenchant— if not less pervasive— by dislodging the paternal
metaphor from its privileged place in subjectivation.
Going even farther than Lacan or Silverman in displacing the phallus, the
oscillations of Hermione’s gaze in Asphodel signal a crucial displacement of the
phallus that opens up the possibility of transforming the symbolic order. By
narrating its protagonist’s emergence from narcissism though the introduction of the
Other, the chapter that introduces Beryl does not trace out Hermione’s acceptance of
the primal signification of the phallus and her consequent subjection to universal
91
. See Butler's essay on "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological
Imaginary" in Bodies That Matter. In this essay, Butler reads Lacan's 1958
discussion of "The Signification of the Phallus," in Ecrits: A Selection. 281-291.
See Butler. "The Lesbian Phallus." Bodies That Matter. In Les quatre
concepts, as an analogy for anamorphosis, Lacan discusses the way in which an
erection would distort a penile tattoo, linking the transformation to the apparition of
a "fantome phallique" (“phallic phantom”) in the geometric dimension of the gaze
(101). In Lacan’s rhetoric, this phallic phantom both is and is not implicated in
vision: its geometric realm is only a "partial dimension in the field of the gaze, a
dimension that has nothing to do with vision itself' (Four 88). As produced through
the gaze which conditions vision but which always eludes us, the "phallic ghost" (as
the trace of the tattooed penis) is necessary yet ever elusive.
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2 6 0
paternal law, but instead illuminates her interest in the signification of a
“transferable,” second-order phallus whose potential availability for female “having”
both complicates standard psychoanalytic accounts of lesbianism and challenges
psychoanalysis' claim that paternal law is universal. Far from insisting that a subject
must exclusively be positioned as “being” or “having” the phallus, Asphodel neither
situates Beryl unproblematically at the site of “having” the phallus nor allows that
signifier wholly to determine her subjectivity. Nor is Hermione positioned in
opposition to Beryl as simply “being” the phallus; on the contrary, she too appears
as “having” it when Beryl positions her as the source of “truth” by envying her
knowledge of ancient history and her poetic insight. Hermione even attacks
psychoanalysis' dichotomous construction of the phallic lesbian outright: she insists
that she neither wants to have the phallus nor be it— that she does not “want to be (as
they say crudely) a boy” but also does not “feel a girl” (53). In its delineation of
lesbian desire, the novel undermines psychoanalysis' phallogocentrie positioning of
women as “being” the phallus, and opens up the possibility of experimenting with
different modes of female phallic “having.”
However, this is not to say that at all moments, the novel avoids the deeply
entrenched cultural mandate for a woman to “be” the phallus. Indeed, it features
precisely the mode of female phallic “being” in the sections that chronicle
Hermione’s heterosexual liaisons, from its most apparent manifestation in her
relationship with the officious George Lowndes to the beginnings of its displacement
in her poetically productive marriage to Darrington and her comforting affair with
Vane. Moreover, the unrelenting sense of disturbance attending Hermione’s
ambivalently erotic appreciation of Beryl underscores the imbrication of the two
women’s desire in a normative matrix of cultural legibility in which there is still a
drag on the transferability of the phallus. Hegemonic constructions of feminine
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261
“non-entity” continue to render the novel's alternative materializations of
womanhood a beautiful “Hell” (185, 180).
Nonetheless, in challenging the claim that the social order is grounded
through the signification of the paternal phallus, the narrative trajectory of Asphodel
does not decisively recontain challenges to paternal law. Instead, it ends with the
beginning of an innovative domestic arrangement between the two women.
Hermione’ s husband, Darrington, is dismissed as "mad" for attempting to evade
financial obligation for her child, and a woman is installed in his symbolic place:
Beryl obtains financial support, legal protection, and medical care for Hermione and
her baby (200). The novel thus points to the possibility of a "transfer" of the phallus
to a woman, suggesting that limitations to the women's challenge to paternal law
need not necessarily be read as conditions that will obtain for all time.
Moreover, by undermining the role of the phallus in the structuration of the
symbolic order, Asphodel opens up a space within which one can theorize a link
between female mutual creativity and same-sex desire that involves contingent
discomfort but not necessary psychosis. As Silverman’s argument implies, if neither
the phallic signifier nor the Name of the Father are understood as essential in the
constitution of the subject, the "transfer" of the phallus to a woman does not
necessarily precipitate psychosis. In moving from Hermione’ s self-absorbed
isolation to her implication in the gaze through interaction with Beryl, Asphodel
moves from figuring lesbianism as a dangerously pathological overproximity to
presenting it as the distanced entanglement of two separate subjects. As a result,
Hermione and Beryl eventually develop a relationship that saves them both from
suicide: Hermione ceases to consider her companion the agent of an evil force and
begins to appreciate her as the gift of a benevolent “sun-god on the rocks” (187).
Just as in Lacan’s theory, the Other is both separate from the subject and a part of
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2 6 2
her~the prosthetic of her conscious misrecognitions, so to speak— the new model of
female intimacy constructed in Asphodel allows for a productive proximity and
exchange between the two women while preventing their lapse back into complete
undifferentiation.
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263
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Coffman, Christine Elisabeth
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"Insane passions": Psychosis and female same -sex desire in psychoanalysis and literary modernism
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Comparative Literature
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