ENGLISH 173: THE FEMALE GOTHIC
Professor Diane Long Hoeveler
Coughlin 247
Office Phone: 288-3466
Office hours: 11:30-1 Mondays and Wednesdays and by appt.
Email: diane.hoeveler@marquette.edu
Class meets Mondays and Wednesdays at 1-2:15
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Course Packet [CP] of gothic stories written by women (available for purchase at the Bookmarq)
Eliza Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach (Valancourt)
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Houghton Mifflin)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Gothic Tales (Penguin)
Vernon Lee, Hauntings and other fantastic tales (Broadview)
Anya Seton, Dragonwyck ( Chicago Review Press)
Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts (Carroll and Graff)
REQUIREMENTS FOR COURSE:
1. Two short (5-7 PAGES) papers (worth 25% each)
2. Take-Home Midterm exam (worth 25%)
3. Take-Home Final exam (worth 25%)
ADDITIONAL SOURCES AVAILABLE FOR RESEARCH:
Richard Dalby, ed. Victorian Ghost Stories [PR/1309/.G5/V53]
Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, ed. Victorian Ghost Stories [PR/1309/.G5/V54]
Peter Haining, ed. Gentlewomen of Evil [PR/1309/.G5/H35]
Anita Miller, ed. Classic Ghostly Tales [PR/1309/.G5/F68]
Douglas Robillard, ed. American Supernatural Fiction: From Wharton to the Weird Tale [PS/374/.S83/A48]
Joyce Carol Oates, ed. American Gothic [PS/648.H6/A47]
Patrick McGrath, ed. The New Gothic [PS/648/.H6/M67]
The Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell [PR/4710/.C73]
ATTENDANCE POLICY: This course subscribes to the MU College of Arts and Sciences attendance policy. After five absences your final grade will be lowered one-half grade. After three more absences it drops another half-grade. After a total of nine absences you will be withdrawn from the course.
GRADING SYSTEM: 92-100 = A; 88-91 = AB; 82-87 = B; 78-81 = BC; 70-77 =C
JANUARY 17: Introduction to course: what is the gothic? Is there a female gothic?
Jan 22—Parsons, Castle , vol. 1
Jan 24—Parsons, Castle, vol. 2
Jan 29—Gaskell, “The Grey Woman”
Jan 31—Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Feb 5-- WH
Feb 7— WH
Feb 12—Gilman, “Yellow Wallpaper” [CP]
Feb 14—film of “Yellow Wallpaper”
Feb 19—Gilman, “Giant Wisteria” [CP] and Gaskell, “The Crooked Branch”
Feb 21—Gaskell, “Disappearances” and “The Squire's Story”
Feb 26—Gaskell, “Curious, if True” and “Lois the Witch”
Feb 28—TAKE-HOME MIDTERM DUE IN CLASS
March 5—Rossetti, “Goblin Market” [CP]
March 7—Lee, “Dionea”
[SPRING BREAK]
March 19—Lee, “Amour Dure” and “A Wicked Voice”
March 26—Lee, “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady”
March 28—Lee, “Wedding Chest” and “Virgin”
April 2—Oates, “Haunted” and “The Doll” [CP]
April 4-- Oates, “Daisy” and “Bloodstains” [CP]
April 11—Oates, “----,” “Dreamcatcher,” and “Afterword” [CP]
April 16—Oates, Beasts
April 18— Beasts
April 23— Dragonwyck, cc. 1-11
April 25— Dragonwyck, cc. 12-22
April 30— Japanese Female Gothic: Enchi Fumiko, “Love in Two Lives,” Kono Taeko, “Ants Swarm” [CP]
May 10—take-home
final exams due in my office by noon
POSSIBLE TOPICS FOR THE PAPER
--the fairy tale as a feminist and female gothic genre
--find French, Russian, German, Spanish female gothics: are there nationalistic characteristics to their traditions?
--Susan Hill, Woman in Black as a female gothic for adolescents
--the writings of Poppy Z. Brite: pornography or a serious engagement with the female gothic tradition?
--more gothic works by Joyce Carol Oates ( Bellefleur , Zombie, etc.)
--film versions of the female gothic and how they differ from the written text (adaptations of Wharton and Shirley Jackson are in our library)
--Flannery O'Connor and Catholic Gothic: is there an ethical system in her works?
--other gothic works by Minette Walters
--sexual abuse as theme in the works of Oates
--Shirley Jackson and suburban gothic
--Oates and existential gothic
ENGLISH 186: THE FEMALE GOTHIC
DUE: MAY 10 in my office (Coughlin 247) by NOON
PLEASE DO NOT SELECT A TOPIC OR BOOK YOU HAVE WRITTEN ON BEFORE.
You have two options on this exam. You can either answer Part I or Part II.
PART I: We have read a number of examples of Female Gothic literature this past semester. All of them contain some of the most recognizable features of female gothic fiction: house imagery; disputed inheritance or wills; threatened incest with an uncle or father-figure; anxiety about the body or motherhood; abuse and its long-term effects; eating disorders; use of writing as a form of therapy. Select six examples of female gothic fiction we have studies, and analyze how you have seen any three of these motifs developed.
• The Scold's Bridle explores the devastating effects of childhood sexual abuse and the idea that victims always become victimizers. Develop this large topic by analyzing the characters and the generational struggle that occurs in this novel.
• Joyce Carol Oates's short fiction maps a psychology of abuse and eccentricity. Select two of her stories and formulate a thesis that analyzes the reasons for her characters's obsessions.
• The examples of Japanese Female gothic that we have read are different in many ways from the other (British or American) works we have read. Explain those differences and analyze these works as “universal” or “historically specific.”
another syllabus:
ENGLISH 186: THE FEMALE GOTHIC
Professor Diane Long Hoeveler
Coughlin 247
Office Phone: 288-3466
Office Hours: 11-12 M, W, F and by
appt
Email: "diane.hoeveler@marquette.edu"
Course meets from 12-12:50 M,W,F in
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Reading Packet [rp]
of gothic and ghost stories written by women (available for purchase at the Bookmarq)
Ann Radcliffe,
A Sicilian Romance (
Mary Elizabeth Braddon,
Lady Audley's Secret (
Daphne
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
(Doubleday)
Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted
(Penguin)
REQUIREMENTS FOR COURSE:
1.
Oral presentation (worth 25%)
2.
Take-Home Midterm exam (worth 25%)
3.
Research Paper (worth 25%)
4.
Take-Home Final exam (worth 25%)
RESERVE MATERIAL:
Richard Dalby,
ed. Victorian Ghost Stories [PR/1309/.G5/V53]
Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, ed. Victorian
Ghost Stories [PR/1309/.G5/V54]
Peter Haining,
ed. Gentlewomen of Evil [PR/1309/.G5/H35]
Anita Miller, ed. Classic Ghostly Tales
[PR/1309/.G5/F68]
Joyce Carol Oates, ed. American Gothic [PS/648.H6/A47]
Patrick McGrath, ed.
The New Gothic [PS/648/.H6/M67]
The Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell [PR/4710/.C73]
ATTENDANCE POLICY: This course subscribes to the MU
English 186 syllabus, p. 2
GRADING SYSTEM: 92-100 = A; 88-91 =
AB; 82-87 = B; 78-81 = BC; 70-77 =C
August 30: Introduction to course: What is the
gothic? Is there a female gothic?
Sept 1: "Sir Bertram" and
"The Unknown"
Sept 3: "The Haunted Chamber" and "The
Dream"
Sept 8: Sicilian Romance, book
1
Sept 10: Sicilian Romance,
book 2
Sept 13: "Doom of the
Sept 15: "Lois the Witch"
Sept 17: "The Open Door"
Sept 20: "At Crighton
Abbey" and "Shadows on the Wall"
Sept 22: Lady Audley's
Secret
Sept 24: Lady Audley's
Secret
Sept 27: Lady Audley's
Secret
Sept 29: Lady Audley's
Secret
Oct 1: Lady Audley's
Secret
Oct 4: Lady Audley's
Secret
Oct 6: "Bottle," "All
Souls"
Oct 8: "Lady's Maid's
Oct 11: "Eyes"
Oct 13: "Bewitched,"
"Angel"
English 186, p. 3
Oct 15: "Goblin Market"
Oct 18: review for midterm exam
Oct 20: take-home midterm exam due in
class
Oct 25: Jamaica Inn
Oct 27: Jamaica Inn
Oct 29: Jamaica Inn
Nov 3: stories from Haunted
Nov 5: Haunted
Nov 8: Haunted
Nov 10: "Yellow Wallpaper"
Nov 12: film showing of "The
Yellow Wallpaper"
Nov 15: Haunted; "The
Lottery"
Nov 17: Alias Grace
Nov 19: Alias Grace
Nov 22: Alias Grace
Nov 29: Alias Grace
Dec 1: Alias Grace
Dec 3: Alias Grace
Dec 6: Alias Grace
Dec 10: research paper due in class
Dec 17: take-home final exam due in
my office by
WHAT IS THE GOTHIC?
‑‑"the darker side" of life; a world of pain and destruction/ fear and anxiety which shadows the daylight world of love and ethereality
‑‑gothic fiction consists of a set of analyzable displacements about what it means to be a human being and gendered;
‑‑it strains at the limits of mortality/immortality; morality/immorality; reason/emotion; order/disorder; mind/body; masculine/feminine
‑‑gothic fictions are structured as case histories of types of insanity
‑‑we as readers are asked to adjudicate various diagnostic accounts
‑‑pleasure/pain dichtomy: why do we enjoy reading these fictions?
‑‑the fiction as essentially a regressive fantasy: we peer back over our own personal history because all psychotic states are simply perpetuations of landscapes that we have all inhabited at some stage in our early infancy (we all outgrow our "madness")
‑‑accounts of cultural and psychic dislocation
‑‑Barthes' enigmatic code: we identify with parts of the text whose primary function is to keep us peristing in our reading by focusing our minds on unanswered questions, upon a certain pattern of hiatus and expectuancy, unpon a continually postponed hope for a resolution of the uninterpretability of change
‑‑fiction of fear arises at times of great social and economic upheaval;
gothic fiction introduces a prolonged contemplation of the objects in the individual's internal world at the same time there is a repeated vindication of the individual's ability to survive despite threat
‑‑landscapes of childhood: narcissism; incest; violence and vampirism; androgyny and sexual anarchy; the oedipal triangulation; the family romance; projective identification (I am the Other) and splitting are the two dominant psychological defenses
‑‑like other romantic texts, the gothic deals with interruptions in the maturation process; they are tales of recuperation or reparation; resistance to loss
‑‑the gothic exposes the essential instability of the domination and submission patterns in the fantasy; creation of doubled characters; self‑other relationships revealed when we realize that the hero never shares the stage with a heroine; if the text focuses on a heroine, then the male has to be a split figure: villian or weak "hero"
‑‑in their quest for identity as masculine or feminine, all the characters appear to be enthralled to fragmentation or disintegration
Robt Hume distinguishes between two sub‑genres of gothic:
1. novel of terror = Radcliffe (female)
2. novel of horror = Lewis, Monk (male)
conventional trappings = heroine, hero and villian, clouds, castles, mystery, inevitable travel sequence that transports the characters from everyday life, educates the reader about foreign lands, and casts a general aura of mystery about the proceedings
adult fairy‑tale; immersion in "enchanted castle"; woman's body
assault on the castle gates, room = metaphorical rape
heroine leaves the known (childhood) to venture into unknown (adulthood); pauses in a sterile wasteland (pre‑sexuality) and then moves through a never‑never land (courtship, magic, illusion, dream) to arrive at full sexuality (adulthood and chaste marriage).
inherent ambiguity and ambivalence lies at the core of the genre's appeal
orphaned heroine searches for surrogate parents, only to find her parents by finding her self; her most sinister enemy is her own awakening sexuality; heroine's task is to destroy the mythic beast within, for the wages of passion are madness, disease, and death; virtues are repression and sublimination
orphans are social outsiders; they seek social approval and kinship
(Foucault on kinship and alliance)
values of silence, rectitude, balance (mind of a man and heart of a woman); restrained emotions and strength of character; century's idealization of Virgin Mary
heroine plays role of aetherialized maiden, brave young detective, symbolic quester of her own and others' identities
theme of female powerlessness; motherhood was source of women's greatest power
"The posture of romantic victim concealed thwarted dreams of power"
Wolff, "The Racfliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality"
rpt. in The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann Fleenor
men subscribe to the "virgin‑whore" syndrome because they have split their affectionate (and asexual) feelings from the passionate (and sexual) side;
they PROJECT their own feelings onto women they then label either "bad" or "good"; they also invariable set up a rival for the women
women mirror this syndrome in their invention of the "Devil/Priest" syndrome and their rivals usually take the form of a mother‑figure
danger in the fiction is equated with an "inner space"‑‑a secret room, etc, within the larger castle/body
Edith Birkhead: "Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines resemble nothing more than a composite photograph in which all distinctive traits are merged into an expressionless 'type.'"
Their only business is to experience difficulties
heroine has to earn her right to preside over the gothic castle
the pairing of the hero and villian in 18th century gothic each embody a sort of authority that the heroine has to choose between; a violent taboo is usually attached to the villian (again, recourse to Foucault's explanation about the machinery of alliance and kinship in operation)
1950's: second Gothic revival; heroine now is allowed to marry the demon lover
"Power" is most prevalent word in these fictions
"The problem of love divided is now resolved in the direction of undiluted sexuality, and the reading and rereading of modern Gothics gives comforting reassurance both that sexuality is safe and appropriate for women and that the primitive quality of this passion need never be compromised or relinquished"
*******"Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank" --Charlotte Bronte
*******"There is a joy in fear" ---Joanna Baillie
IS THERE A FEMALE GOTHIC [FG]?
Ellen Moers, "Traveling Heroinism: Gothic for Heroines" in her Literary Women (1976):
--gothic fiction is concerned with fear: "fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural
--gothic fiction intends to scare and to get at the body itself, to our physiological reactions to fear
--gothic arose what religious fears were on the wane, giving way to that vague paranoia of the modern spirit from which gothic mechanisms seem to have provided therapy
--the FG concerns a young woman who is simultaneously a persecuted victim and a courageous heroine
--the FG transforms the standard romantic is
--Frankenstein,
--FG is characterized by the compulsion to visualize the self; where woman is examined with a woman's eye
--the fear in FG suggests the haunted and self-hating self
--FG is characterized by traveling heroinism: traveling both outdoors and indoors: the fg novel became a feminine substitute for the picaresque, where heroines could enjoy all the adventures and alarms that masculine heroes had long experienced, far from home, in fiction
--the test in the fg allows the heroine to prove herself through courage and self-control in the face of physical dangers
--the fg heroine uses her sufferings as the source of her erotic fascination (Marquis de Sade and the sadistic impulse)
--property, decorum, taste in manners, social status, respectability are touchstones for the fg heroine
--the final gothic castle to be navigated by the fg heroine is the insane asylum
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY SOURCES ON "THE FEMALE GOTHIC"
Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property.
Day, William P. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic
Fantasy.
DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of
Nineteenth‑Century Gothic.
Doody, Margaret Anne. "Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female
Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel."
Genre 10 (1977), 529‑72.
Ellis, Kate. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion
of Domestic Ideology.
Fleenor, Julian, ed. The Female Gothic.
Haggerty, George. Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form.
New Literary History 8 (1977), 279‑94.
Howells, Coral. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic
Fiction.
Kahane,
Centennial Review 24 (1980), 43‑64.
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in
Fiction.
Masse, Michelle. In the Name of Love.
Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies
for Women.
Moers, Ellen. "The Female Gothic." In Literary
Women.
Women's Press, 1978.
Mussell, Kay. Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas
of Women's Romance Fiction.
Poovey, Mary. "Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho."
Criticism 21 (1979), 307‑30.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic
Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and
Popular Literature.
Restuccia, Frances L. "Female Gothic Writing: `Under Cover to
Russ, Joanna. "Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's
My Husband: The Modern Gothic." Journal of Popular Culture
6 (1973), 666‑91.
Sedgwick, Eve K. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions.
Thompson, G. R., ed. The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark
Romanticism.
Thurston, Carol. The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for
Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity.
Notes on Christina Rossetti's
"Goblin Market":
--the poem's multiple heroines represent alternative possibilities of selfhood for women
--poem as sexual/religious allegory: "rape"of a lock of her hair causes Laura to lose her virginity; once that is lost she is valueless
--Lizzie (like Christ) intervenes offering a womanly holy Communion; she changes her sister from a lost whore to a virginal bride
--poem presents a world where men hurt and women redeem
--poem posits a matriarchal world and more covertly, a lesbian world
--girls eventually find redemption in the heaven of bourgeois domesticity
--eating fruit recalls Paradise Lost's presentation of fruit as "intellectual food"
--eating fruit enacts an affirmation of poetic and sexual selfhood--eating words; tasting power but the taste of words (artistic creativity) causes guilt
--genius and sexuality are diseases in women, like madness
--what are the goblins? it/id-like inner selves; desirous little creatures that live in the haunted minds of women artists
--poem suggests the need to suffer and renounce the self-gratifications of art and sensuality
--Lizzie, the word made flesh, forces Laura to devour her repressive wisdom, the wisdom of necessity's virtues
--poem as a lesson in renunciation
notes from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 564-752
Excerpts from criticism of "Goblin Market":
Mary Wilson Carpenter, "'Eat me, drink me, love me': The Consumable Female Body in CR's GM," Victorian Poetry 1991: CR constructs a "marketplace" in which "appetite" puts women at risk, but where her salvation is to be found not in controlling her appetite but in turning to another woman; GM suggests that female erotic pleasure cannot be imagined without pain, yet the poem not only affirms the female body and its appetites but constructs sisterhood as a saving female homoerotic bond.
Janet Galligani Casey, "The Potential of Sisterhood: CG's GM" in Victorian Poetry 1991: "The concept of a female Christ figures prominently in Cassandra and GM, for both Florence Nightingale and CR believe that women, like men, may be redeemers. For both of these writers, women have been unfairly relegated to the roles of Mary/Martha and Eve, when the role of Christ is within their grasp as well."
David F. Morrill, "'Twilight is not good for maidens': Uncle Polidori and the Psychodynamics of Vampirism in GM," in Victorian Poetry: Polidori published his novel The Vampyre in 1819 and committed suicide in 1821. "Suck" is the central verb in GM, suggesting the erotic/oral compulsion in childhood sexuality. CR equates the sexual act with a vampiric transference of energy; in love relationships one partner gains mastery and fattens emotionally as the other wastes away.
Paula Marantz Cohen, "CR's GM: A Paradigm for 19th-century Anorexia Nervosa":
How is it possible to remain innocent and whole, a perfect little girl, forever? This is the poem's essential question as well as the question which plagues the anorexic who, as she experiences the physical and emotional changes of adolescence, wants desperately to preserve the simpler, more familiar self of childhood.
Elizabeth Campbell, "Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in CR's GM":
if you buy the fruits--if you buy a belief in a market economy couched in religious terms--then you will surely die. But at this point in the poem, temptation is everything, and goblin fruits represent something that the women want, even if it is something they know they cannot have: a place where the fruits are produced, a place in, and a piece of, the economic action.
Dorothy Mermin, "Heroic Sisterhood in GM": two girls live alone; they encounter goblin men; they have children. Except for the word "wives' which legitimizes the children, there is no mention of any men but the goblins, who are explicitly male. The children are apparently all girls and are exhorted to keep the female circle closed and complete. This is a world in which men serve only the purpose of impregnation. Once both sisters have gone to the goblins and acquired the juices of their fruits, they have no further need of them.
ENGLISH 186; THE FEMALE GOTHIC
TAKE-HOME MIDTERM EXAMINATION
ANSWER ONE QUESTION FROM SECTION A AND ONE QUESTION FROM SECTION B:
SECTION A:
1. The doubled or split woman is a dominant characteristic in female gothic fiction and poetry. Analyze how she functions--what she symbolizes--and how she contributes to the meanings of "Goblin Market" and "The Yellow Wallpaper."
2. Fear of sexuality, anxiety, and nausea/disease are featured in female gothic literature, most of the time as responses to the constrictions and oppressive power of the patriarchy. Analyze how the patriarchy is presented and attacked or subverted in "Goblin Market" and "The Yellow Wallpaper."
SECTION B:
1. Norbert Elias's History of Manners presents his theory of "the civilizing process," a gradual transformation of society by which the middle class aped aristocratic values but increasingly justified its dominance by pointing out the corruptions of the upper classes. Discuss the impulse of the middle class to criticize aristocratic values and characters in Jane Eyre and Rebecca at the same time it celebrated a middle-class heroine. How does the female gothic genre participate in justifying the middle-class takeover of society?
2. Both Jane Eyre and Rebecca make heavy use of similar patterns of meaning and imagery: young penniless governess-type in love with older father-figure; blocking older female-figures; and animals (birds, dogs) as surrogates for the characters' emotions.
What do you make of the obviously oedipal structure of desire in female gothic novels? What fantasies are being appealed to by the female author to her largely female reading audience?
REMEMBER: No plot
summary--we've all read the works. Offer
a clear thesis in the introductory paragraphy, and
then provide support for your ideas by using specific passages from the
literary works you are analyzing. Your
conclusion then restates your thesis and points toward larger related is
ENGLISH 186: THE FEMALE GOTHIC
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR GROUP OR INDIVIDUAL REPORTS TO CLASS
The following are suggestions only. Please feel free to come up with your own ideas, but check with me before beginning research work:
--the life and poetry of Christina Rossetti: how does Goblin Market fit into her career? what interpretations can you propose for its meaning?
--Asylum Piece--a contemporary novel about a woman's stay in a mental hospital--and its relevance to Yellow Wallpaper
--choose one scene from three or four filmed versions of Jane
Eyre: how does each filmmaker transform the scene to suggest his
interpretation of Jane or
--Harlequin Romances--supermarket gothic--and their relation to Jane Eyre
--a report on the governness in Victorian society: her class status, role, and treatment in real life as contrasted to her treatment in JE
--fairy tales as sources for JE
--Rebecca as film: the Hitchcock version contrasted to the BBC and A&E versions
--"The Haunting" as an adaptation of
--"Wide
--the gothic fiction of Joyce Carol Oates
--black gothic: Beloved as gothic
--Southern gothic: Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty
--Victorian gothic: Gaskell and other women writers collected in Dalby's collection, Victorian Ghost Stories
THEORIES OF FANTASY AND THEIR RELATION TO LITERATURE:
"The day-dream is a shadow play, utilizing its kaleidoscopic material drawn from all quarters of human experience, but also involving the original fantasy, whose dramatis personae, the court cards, receive their notation from a family legend which is mutilated, disordered and misunderstood.--Laplanche and Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality" in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin
For Freud, fantasies, like nocturnal dreams, are an imagined scene representing the fulfillment of a wish: "a happy person never fantasizes, only an unsatisfied one (SE: "Creative Writers and Daydreaming")
Every fantasy, however, is also an articulation of a lack
For Freud the primal fantasies are the "seduction of three children [called the heritage or seduction fantasy], the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse [called the primal scene or origin fantasy], and the threat of castration [called the fantasy of sexual difference]." "These were once real occurrences in the primeval times of the human family, and children in their fantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth" ("Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis").
The three primal fantasies--heritage, castration, and
seduction--involve the human subject's desire to solve the riddle of its
existence, to explore the is
Fantasies also generally center on scenarios of self-aggrandizement: the plentitude of childhood is recaptured in the possession of a protecting house, loving parents, and a safe autoerotic objects for the dreamer's affectionate feelings
Fantasies are the means by which a hysteric can disguise the real traumatic events of her childhood by translating them into an imagined scene that veils a reminiscence without entirely obliterating it. Fantasies also mark the moment of mediation between the conscious and the unconscious, given that under the censoring aegis of repression, they merely screen an impossible traumatic knowledge by modulating this forbidden knowledge into a belated and distorted articulation.
Freud: "If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in fantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these fantasies were intended to coverup the autoerotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the fantasies, the whole range of a child's sexual life came to light."
THE STRUCTURE OF THE THREE UR-FANTASIES AND THE
PHYSICAL/PSYCHIC MANIFESTATIONS OF EACH:
Definition: Fantasies are psychic structures of meaning that disguise real or imagined traumatic events of childhood by translating those traumas into an imagined scene that veils a memory without totally obliterating it. The fantasy, in other words, allows the adult to master the childhood trauma in a substitute formation.
Fantasies mediate between the conscious and unconscious mind because repression will screens a trauma that can only be expressed after the event and in a distorted fashion.
Fantasy precedes identity.--Laplanche
SEDUCTION: CORRESPONDING TRAUMA OF BETRAYAL; fantasy of desire; oedipal rivalries; incest; solipsism/narcissism; self-loathing; gynophobia; somaphobia; emergence of sexuality; eating disorders
CASTRATION: CORRESPONDING TRAUMA OF ABANDONMENT/DESERTION; fantasies of death and sexual difference; beating fantasies; persecutory fantasies; decapitation; fetishism; sadism/masochism; self-mutilation
PRIMAL SCENE:
CORRESPONDING TRAUMA OF SEPARATION/ OTHERNNESS; fantasy of heritage; identity/origins;
voyeurism/exhibitionism; family romance scenarios; scopophilia/epistemephilia;
gossip; boundary is
REBECCA and fantasy from Alison Light, "'Returning to Manderley' FR 16 (1984):
"Romance fiction deals above all with the doubts and delights of heterosexuality [and] suggests that the acquisition of gendered subjectivity is a process, a movements towards a social self, fraught with conflicts and never fully achieved. Psychoanalysis takes the question of pleasure seriously, both in its relation to gender and in its understanding of fictions as fantasies, as the explorations and productions of desires which may be in excess of the socially possible or acceptable."
"In the course of the novel the girl idealizes Rebecca as the expression of all the other possible versions of female sexuality which her own middle-classness excludes. Rebecca disrupts the girl's romantic model and leads her to search for a 'successful' marriage which will also legitimize female sexual desire. For the girl to find a secure social identity (a name) as Maxim's wife, Rebecca's difference must be reinterpreted. From being the girl's imaginary ideal, she has to become her nightmarish enemy. No longer the perfect wife, hostess and lover, she is to branded by the end of the novel as lesbian and whore."
"What the girl has to attempt, and what she must compulsively repeat in the telling of the tale, is a kind of self-murder. It is a violent denial of those other versions of female sexuality, which Rebecca has come to represent. Rebecca, then, is the focus of the novel's conflicting desires for and descriptions of the feminine....Going back is precisely what Rebecca is all about: returning to Manderley, to the primal scene of the acquisition of femininity."
"The reader, like the girl, wants to be like Rebecca, but dare not. And yet once that process of identification with Rebecca has been set in motion its effects can never be fully contained nor its disruptive potential fully retrieved. This narrative of wishful projection and identification, displacement and repulsion is then the story of all women, of what we go through in the constructing and maintaining of our femininity."
When the embodiment of bourgeois sexuality realizes how far she is from Rebecca's polymorphously perverve sexuality, she contemplates suicide: "the two sexualities cannot co-exist. This is the book's crisis. Now every attempt must be made to separate Rebecca out from the girl's and the reader's identification with her. Rebecca must be externalized, taken out of the realm of imaginary projectiosns of subjectivity and put back into the world. This means that in terms of the text, she must be forcibly reinscribed within that range of social discourses which will condemn her difference and so legitimate the girl's."
"The girl, in becoming narrator of the crime, transfers her identification from Rebecca to Maxim, and invites the reader to do the same....she learns to accept the regulation of female heterosexuality through class differences which themselves necessitate sexual