Feminizing the Fetish by Emily Apter

Author:Emily Apter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Interestingly, as the progression of dreams transposed by Stekel reveals, the more Beta (marching about in sandals) becomes identified with Christ’s wounds, the more he assumes the woman’s position. Stekel narrates three intricated dreams: an old box filled with red splinters signifying “the cross and blood of Christ,” a journey on a train during which he is asked by a conductor to share a bed with his father, and a phone call from a friend advising him about a telephone. Menstruation, sleeping with his father, “receiving” a call, these telltale subtexts point to only one interpretation: “As a female he could be passive and masochistic,” Stekel concludes. “He could suffer. This phantasy leads directly to the wish to be a woman, Christ nailed to the cross. His pet phantasy is that he is nailed (possessed)” (SA 241).

One may infer from Stekel’s case that masochistic fetishism prefers a female subject, or worse, that when fetishism degenerates into masochism, the subject is implicitly feminized regardless of biological gender. Certainly the Goncourts’ portrait of Madame Gervaisais conforms to this psychoanalytically phallocentric model. Madame Gervaisais treats her own body much as Beta treats the lacerated foot. By the end of the novel, wracked by consumption and catalepsy, her body bears the signs of immolation. She has used what is left of her wits to devise “rare and recherché privations”: filing her nails with a heavy brick, clothing herself in penitential garb, mortifying the flesh.

· Depuis quelque temps, Honorine s’étonnait de trouver, sans pouvoir deviner d’où pouvait venir cela, dans les chemises de sa maîtresse, des taches de sang au bout de brindilles d’arbuste: Mme Gervaisais avait, sur le refus du P. Sibilla de lui laisser porter un cilice, pris l’habitude de coudre, sur la toile qui couvrait sa poitrine, de petites branches de rosier dont les épines lui déchiraient la peau.

· For some time now, Honorine was astonished to find, without being able to divine from whence it came, bloodstained twigs in the shirts of her mistress: Upon Father Sibilla’s refusal to allow her to wear a hair-shirt, Madame Gervaisais took up the habit of sewing little rosebush branches into her undergarments, the thorns of which tore her skin. (MG 237)

The blood that falls from her neck and shoulders hearkens back to the dripping rose. Drunk on the charms of “the discipline,” mesmerized by mystical ascesis, locked into the bizarre performance of a mock Calvary, she has become a fanatical bride of Christ. How has this happened? What, in fact, has triggered the psychosis of what Luce Irigaray, following Simone de Beauvoir, has called la mystérique?

The Goncourts’ pathography provides a fascinating array of insights into the way in which maso-fetishism burns its way into feminine consciousness by means of the beguiling aesthetics of religious “show” (le faste). An antique sculpture located in the Vatican acts, for example, as a psychosexual lure:

· Tout enveloppé d’une étoffe mouillée qui l’embrasse, le baigne et le serre, en se collant à tous ses membres, le voile de marbre,

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