Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature by Deane Laura;

Author:Deane, Laura;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

His embarrassment turns on the notion that sex is one of the “abuses of instinct” leading to waste of the “finer feelings, or indiscriminate recourse to members of the other sex, upon which follows venereal disease” (478), and his attempt to explain to Louie that she must not have sex without marriage falters again: “if you must ever go with a man or a boy, Looloo—I leave it to you, it seems inadvisable to me” (478). The man who engulfs the household with his everlasting talk retreats into a silence that suggests the dimensions of his sexual guilt and shame.

Sam fragments into a psychotic state of dissolution and merging. This is explicit in the closing pages of the novel when he tells Louie: “I am going to watch every book you read, every thought you have” (520), so that his policing of her will take on an increasingly telepathic tenor. His inability to distinguish between self and other is suggested in several scenes of merging that signify a psychotic collapse of borders, of structure, and of meaning: the scene where Henny gives birth, but it is Sam who is “red with delight and success” (303); the scene where he tries to force chewed-up banana into Louie’s mouth (92); and the scene where he insists to Louie: “You are myself” (164). In her analysis of narcissism, Grosz proposes that the narcissist “loves an object according to its resemblance, identity or connection with the self,”[100] and this is apparent in Sam’s exhortations that Louie must be like him. Judith Kegan Gardiner has proposed that this is evidence that Sam suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder.[101] However, I go further than Kegan Gardiner to argue that Sam’s behavior is more complicated than narcissism, veering into psychosis. His injunction to Louie, “you and I must cleave together” (479), reveals an incestuous and eroticized desire to obliterate the threat that Louie poses to his own sense of self. The collapse of boundaries by which he correlates Louie to himself attests to a psychotic failure of representation. For Grosz, psychosis involves a “failure” in representation and is predicated upon repudiation or foreclosure as a mechanism of psychic defense:

It is a failure to register an impression, involving a rejection of or detachment from a piece of reality [resulting in] the return of the Real that has never been signified [so that] what is internally obliterated reappears . . . in hallucinatory . . . form.[102]

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