Fetishism and Decadence: Salome's Severed Heads
Charles Bernheimer

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No concept in the Freudian arsenal has been subjected to fiercer critique, and none has endured more obstinately, than castration. The tenacity of castration, its refusal, as it were, to go away and leave us alone, reflects its power as a theoretical tool. Articulating the field of difference in terms of presence and absence, wholeness and lack, masculine and feminine, desire and the Law, the castration complex is rich in speculative implications. In fact, one could argue that the fantasy of castration forms the core of psychoanalytic theory: without castration, psychoanalysis would lack its oedipal key to differential structures in the psyche, the family, and society

The universality of the castration complex was a discovery necessary to engendering Freud's science of unconscious fantasy. But precisely this claim to universality may be the most historically determined of all Freud's major theoretical premises. Castration, I will argue in this essay, is the seminal fantasy of the decadent imagination. By reading sexual difference through this fantasmatic complex, Freud is offering as scientific fact an interpretation of gender rooted in the misogynist fears of his fin de siecle. I make the connection between the construction of Freudian theory and literary representations Of Salome through their common historical genesis in these fearful fantasies of feminine difference. In my reading, the priority attributed to castration within psychoanalysis has much the same function as the priority attributed to art within decadent aesthetics.
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I would like to thank Professors Emily Apter and Thai s Morgan for their carefulcritiques of an earlier version of this essay.
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Etymologically, the fetish is a decadent object. The word comes from the Portuguese feitigo, "artificial, skillfully contrived," which in turn derives from the Latin facticius, "made by art." The sense of human fabrication as opposed to biological origin, of cultural signs replacing natural substance, is at the basis of other words in the Romance languages deriving from the same Latin root: Spanish afeitor, "to make up, adorn, embellish," and afeite, "dress, ornament, cosmetics"; French feint, "feigned, simulated." Furthermore, the French word moquilloge, "makeup," is semantically connected to "fetish" through the Germanic root maken, "to make." As a verb, maquiller, like the words deriving from focticius, suggests not just painting one's face but also to fake, disguise, mask.

I hardly need stress the importance to decadent aesthetics of ideas such as the primacy of artifice over nature, the value of cosmetic ornament, the sense of art as an enchanting fakery, a surface play of masks and disguises. Such ideas are implicitly encoded by gender. One of the earliest and most influential proclamations of this position, Baudelaire's "Eloge du maquillage," clearly exposes the gender dynamics that will later become the focus of the psychoanalytic explanation of the fetish. "Woman performs a kind of duty," writes Baudelaire in 1863, "when she endeavors to appear magical and supernatural: she should dazzle men and charm them, she is an idol who should cover herself with gold so as to be adored. She should therefore borrow from all the arts the means of rising above nature so as to better subjugate the hearts and impress the minds of men."1 Baudelaire praises makeup because it permits woman to construct herself as a fetish, as a dazzling, shiny surface that covers over and obscures the corrupt sexual nature beneath. "Woman is natural, that is, abominable," Baudelaire noted in "Mon coeur mis nu" (BOG, 1272). Hence he praises fashion for its idealizing impulse to achieve "a sublime deformation of nature" (BOG, 1184). Although woman applies makeup to herself—the mirror, as we shall see, is a crucial instrument of fetishistic ritual—it is man who prescribes this artificial cover-up as a duty. The self-regarding female idol rises above her gross, unclean nature at the behest of male artists eager to keep her at an impressive distance.

Although not spelled out as explicitly, a similar attitude toward female sexuality subtends Wilde's decadent aesthetics. Indeed, Wilde praises lying in "The Decay of Lying" in much the same spirit as Baudelaire praises makeup in "Eloge du maquillage." To lie about Nature, Wilde
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1. Charles Baudelaire. La peintre de la vie moderne, in Oeuvres compktes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961). 1184, hereafter ahhreviated HOC. All translations in this essay are my own.
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argues, is to make it (her) up, thereby creating Art as a self-reflective idol. "Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment,, 2 The decorative barrier needs to be impenetrable (the sexual Connotation is evident) so as to protect the (male) artist from the "vulgarity" of (female) nature, which "hates mind" (AD, 169) and threatens to destroy his carefully cultivated individuality Art is woman as corrected through male invention, "our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place' (AD, 168). Masculine protest motivates the fetishization of art by denying its mimetic reference to nature: "Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil rather than a mirror" (AD, 184).

The decadent refusal of mimesis (which is not total, for "art takes life as part of her rough material") corresponds in Freud's theory of fetish ism to the denial of castration The fetish, according to Freud, acts as a veil Covering over the male child's perception that his mother lacks a phallus. He determines, unconsciously of course, not to judge her by any external standard of resemblance, such as that of his own bodily integrity for to do so would suggest not only her lack but his own possible mutilation. Instead, he maintains the fiction of her perfection through the artifice of a magical object, often a shiny, reflective one, that acts as an impenetrable barrier to the perception of female castration while it remains as a kind of permanent "memorial"3 to that perception The fetish serves, in fantasy, to make woman up, to veil the unwelcome gap in the place of her imagined phallus, to disguise through artifice the discovery of the horrifying mutilation that defines her "natural" difference.

Such, in any case, is a reading of Freud that suggests his sympathy with certain key assumptions of the decadent imagination 4 is not just that Freud's theory of fetishism serves to label decadent aesthetics as fetishistic, which of course it does. My point is that Freud's theory participates in the ideology of decadence insofar as that ideology veils the purely constructed quality of the identification of female nature with castration. 
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2. Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" in Aesthetes and Decadents of the l890s, ed. Karl Beckson (Chicago: Academy, 1981], 179, hereafter abbreviated AD.

3. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism" in Standard Edition, 21:154, hereafter abbreviated SE.

4. For a more detailed discussion of Freud's theory, see my article Castration' as Fetish," Paragraph 14 (19911: 1—9.
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Over and over again Freud refers to "the fact of castration" as something the little girl must "acknowledge' to be the truth of her sexuality and the little boy must confront as a threat to his sexual identity. The imperative here carries some of the force of Wilde's insistence that Nature must be taught her proper place. Psychoanalysis naturalizes castration as the proper definition of woman's difference. Or rather, it does so at those decadent moments in Freud's text when he appears to sustain that great lie, to use Wilde's term, of the woman's penis, artifice if there ever was one, nonmimetic fantasy, cosmetic embellishment. Even after it is revealed to be a false front, this construct continues to determine a central truth of psychoanalysis, the truth of castration. But this truth is of course a phallocentric deceit: woman cannot be deprived of an organ that was never hers in the first place. In terms of the criterion of factual reality that Freud himself introduces in this context, the un masking of sexual difference reveals that woman is uncastratable, not that she is castrated. When psychoanalysis attributes to woman a sexual nature that is lacking, wounded, incomplete, it is duplicating the revelation that Wilde attributes to Art: "Nature's lack of design her absolutely unfinished condition" (AD, 168).

Castration, I am arguing, is as decadent an interpretation of sexual difference as is the defense mechanism it motivates, fetishism. The failure of this defense confronts the decadent imagination with a horrifying picture of biological origin, the mother's castrated genitals. The mythological figure that represents this repulsive horror, Freud argues, is the decapitated head of Medusa. Associating this representation with Greek art, Freud says nothing about its proliferation in the painting, sculpture, and literature of his own fin de siecle. This proliferation, of which Freud's text is a symptom, is the consequence of the widespread de cadent fantasy of the castrated (m)other.

In Freud's interpretation, Medusa is castration seen head on.5 The severed head looks back at the spectator, giving him, as it were, the evil eye. As analyzed by Jean Clair in a suggestive book, Medusa is the [male) look fascinated by its (female) otherness in the mirror.6 It is the emblem of the failure of Narcissus's specular self-love, suggesting that his identity is monstrously mutilated. But this terror that castration might inhabit the male imago has a compensation for the spectator. This, in any case, is the claim Freud makes, in what appears as a rather desperate interpretive move: Medusa's spectator, as Freud sees him, though petrified with fear, is reassured by his very stiffness that he is still in possession of a penis.
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5. See "Medusa's Head," in SE, 18:273—74, hereafter abbreviated MI-I.

6. Jean Clair, Meduse (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), especially 48—53. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[66] Freud here seems to fantasize a kind of salvation through petrification, through the hardness of inanimate matter, as if Narcissus were to become frozen in the mirror of his phallic consolation. In theory, the fear of castration arouses sexual excitement. This self-stimulation is of a fetishistic nature. As an interpretive gesture, the stiffness of Medusa's viewer is, as Freud says of the fetish, "a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it" (MH, 154). The mechanism of "transformation of affect" (MH, 273), which Freud offers as an explanation for the spectator's reassurance, is a tool of masculine protest. The fetishistic function of Freud's own text is revealed in this decadent moment of theoretical stiffening.

Castration, fetishism, decadence, the mirror of Medusa—the single fin-de-siecle figure who served to focus the interplay of these factors most dramatically was Salome. There were literally hundreds of versions of Salome painted in Europe between 1870 and 1910. 7 The most influential for the literary evocations that are my central concern in this essay were two by Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing, in oils, and The Apparition, in watercolor, both first shown at the Salon of 1876, both described at great length by Huysmans in his breviary of the decadent spirit, A rebours (1884). Huysmans, or rather his protagonist, Des Esseintes, notes that the biblical descriptions of Mark and Matthew draw a veil over "the maddening charms, the potent depravity of the dancer.,, 8 Indeed, both texts say only that Herodias's daughter danced at Herod's birthday banquet and that he was "so delighted" that he promised her anything she might want. The girl, unnamed in the texts, then asks her mother what she should request and Herodias, to revenge herself against John the Baptist for having condemned her marriage to her first husband's brother, tells her daughter to demand John's head. This she does, requesting that the severed head be brought to her "on a platter." When it is, she carries it over to her mother.

The story stresses above all Salome's function as an obedient agent of her mother's vengeful desire.9 Salome's dance is not visualized at all; there is no indication that there was anything sensuous or depraved about it. Nor is it clear from the biblical stories that the source of Herod's "delight" was raging incestuous lust. 
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7. For an account of many of these paintings, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 19861, 379—98.

8. Joris-KarI Huysinans, A rehours (Paris: Gallimard, 19771. 148, hereafter abbreviated AR.

9. For an interpretation that stresses the mimetic quality of this desire, see Rene Girard, "Scandal and the Dance: Salome in the Gospel of Mark," New Literory History 15 (Winter 1984): 311—24, and the cogent response to his reading by Francoise Meltzer, which follows on 325—32.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[67] The decadent vision of Salome as vicious femme fatale, representing "undying lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria . . . the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible" (AR, 149) was conceived, says Huysmans, "apart from any data given in the New Testament" (AR, 148). While this assessment may be true in terms of the visual content of decadent art and literature, it neglects the impact on the decadent imagination of the mother-daughter relationship. Salome in the Gospels is the vehicle of her mother's homicidal desire. The princess wants the same beheading as the queen. In deed, the daughter seems to enter so wholeheartedly into the mother's murderous scheme that she thoughtfully asks for John's head on a platter, apparently the better to offer it up to Herodias. Thus, it is entirely in the spirit of the gospel story that Flaubert has the narrator of his tale "Herodias" remark, when Salome removes her veil before dancing, "It was Herodias, as she had been in her youth."10 Adding to the sense of continuity between mother and daughter is the fact that in the Middle Ages Salome's name became confused with that of Herodias—a confusion that may underlie Mallarme's name for his Salome figure: Herodiade. 11 In short, for the kind of imaginations that Huysmans defines as capable of giving body to the shadowy figure of Salome, "unhinged minds, sharpened and rendered visionary by neurosis" (AR, 148), the biblical story shows that what is fundamental to female desire, what is passed on from generation to generation, from mother to daughter, is the urge to behead men. The decadent visionary accepts Freud's fantasmatic equation "to decapitate = to castrate" (MH, 273) and sees women as agents of male dismemberment. Salome signifies this desire to castrate, which her dance celebrates, but she also signifies the motive for her desire, the "natural" condition of women from the point of view of decadent male neurosis, her castration. Herodias-Salome wants what she lacks. In Des Esseintes's fantasy about the meaning of Moreaus Salome Dancing, he dwells on the possible symbolism of the lotus scepter Salome is carrying. He imagines that it has a "phallic significance" and that the painter may have remembered the Egyptian embalming rite of inserting lotus petals into the sexual organs of a female corpse "in order to purify them (AR, 1501. Equating the dancer with "mortal woman, a soiled vessel,
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10. Gustave Flaubert, Trois conies (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 134. 11. For an overview of treatments of the Salome story, see Helen Grace Zagona. The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art's Soke (Geneva: Droz, 1960). Fran coise Meltzer does an interesting analysis both of the Salome legend and of Huys mans's reading of Moreau in Salome and the Donce of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19861. Meltzer's Derridean perspective leads her to stress quite differ ent interpretive problems from those I discuss here.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[68] ultimate cause of all sins and all crimes," Huysmans fantasizes Salome as a function of her "impure wound" (AR, 150): she must mutilate the other in order to complete herself. Yet that completion, Huysmans implies, can come only in death and only through the artifices of male ritual, which empty the female body of its internal organs (the brain is pulled out through the nostrils, the entrails through an incision in the side) and make it up as a shiny surface, with gilded nails and teeth. The fetishistic implications of this embalming fantasy, clearly a defensive and punishing response to the evocation of Salome as castrating and castrated, are brought out in Huysmans's description of the second Mar eau work owned by Des Esseintes, The Apparition. In this watercolor Salome is depicted "petrified, hypnotized by horror" (AR, 152). She is transfixed by the terrifying vision of John's severed head, which she sees before her, risen from the plate on the floor and "gazing, livid, the color less lips parted, the crimson neck dripping tears of blood" (AR, 151). Frozen by her vision of the risen head, Salome is transfixed in return by its eyes, which "appear to be fixated, as if in agonized concentration, on the dancer" (AR, 151). John's head is a version of Medusa's. In this paradigmatic decadent image, what Salome is seeing head on is her own castration mirrored back to her. Her specular identification with the head's decapitation is further suggested in the painting, as Huysmans describes it, by the only movement of her otherwise paralyzed body:

"Her hand claws convulsively at her throat" (AR, 151). In this decadent interpretation, The Apparition shows a guilty, terrified Salome, incapable of annexing the power represented by John's head, the desired phallus. She can read only her own mutilation in John's eyes.12

But Huysmans is not satisfied to decapitate Salome in the mirror of Medusa. Foreshadowing Freud, he offers himself the consolation of constructing the petrified Salome as a gleaming, brilliant fetish. Her body, in his description of Moreau's watercolor, is nothing but an artificial surface covered with "wrought metals and translucent gems" (AR, 151). Molded and constrained by a corset and a girdle, she is like a highly ornamented sculpture, beautiful but lifeless. What animation she has proceeds from the burning rays of John's aureole, which, reflected by Salome's jewels, transform her body into a play of incandescent sparks. These "prick her on the neck, legs, and arms with points of fire, vermillion like coal, violet like jets of gas, blue like alcohol flames, white like astral rays" (AR, 152). These points of fire constitute "the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, 
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12. Although I find Huysmans's interpretation of the painting persuasive, it is by no means the only possible one. Brain Dijkstra, idols of Perversity, 382. claims that "in fact" Moreau's Salome is eagerly reaching out in "ecstatic hunger" for the severed head. As we shall see, this is a rather Wildean reading of Moreau.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[69] of decorative or ideal treatment" that Wilde recommends putting between art and reality. The mimetic reference to (female) nature is abolished, or nearly so, and masculine power, emanating from the severed head, produces in the place of woman an arbitrary set of metaphorical substitutions. The decapitated head gives life to jewels. but this life is in reality an afterlife, like the survival of an embalmed corpse. It is the enchanted life of the fetish.13 The perspective of such an afterlife is like that one might attribute to John's severed head. Looking at Salome, John's vision be comes reflexive: He sees the brilliant reflections of his own disembodied light. Only a highly mobile metaphorical language can trace these dazzling surface effects. Decapitation thus becomes the bodily metaphor for an impersonal, nonmimetic language, "not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance." Such a language would be like the one Mallarme evokes in his famous description of pure poetry, which might have been conceived by the head of John the Baptist as he (it) stared at Salome: "The pure work implies the disappearance of the speaking poet, who yields his initiative to words, mobilized by the shock of their differences; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual trail of sparks over jewels, replacing the breath perceptible in the old lyric impulse or the enthusiastic personal shaping of the sentence."14 Huysmans's descriptive style is obviously far from having the purity and autonomy Mallarme imagines here: too strong and too neurotic a lyrical impulse animates the novelist's evocation of Salome's jewel-covered body. Huysmans is too passionately involved in extolling, through "the enthusiastic personal shaping of the sentence," the beauty of the female body's translation into male artifice. Yet this translation constitutes the first step toward "the pure work." Mallarme, more detached and sophisticated, makes this translation, or, to use his term, transposition the explicit subject of his poem Hero diode. The name purposely blurs the distinction between the princess Salome and her mother Herodias. Mallarme portrays Herodiade not as a bloodthirsty femme fatale but as a narcissist who wants to become one with the fetishized surface of her body. Through the very articulation of that wish, however, she realizes her difference from the ornamentalized surface she seeks to capture in the mirror. 
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13. Toward the end of her chapter on fetishism in Creativity and Perversion (New York: Norton. 19841, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel remarks: "The practice of embalming. by the Egyptians in particular exactly produces a fetish. Make-up is applied to the putrefying body. which is then decorated with jewels. dressed up with a golden mask, and made into a god" (87—88). 

14. Stephane Mallarme, "Variations sur un sulet," Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 19451. 366, hereafter abbreviated MOC.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[70] Herodiade figures a fundamental desire of Mallarmean poetry: to see itself as a hard, reflective surface without organic or psychological depth. But Herodiade is also a woman speaking and thinking, a consciousness striving for self- possession and struggling with sexuality. This tension is at the heart of the poem.

Herodiade's project is to construct herself as a solitary, virgin idol whose sole other is her specular reflection. She sees herself as constituted of metallic gleams, radiating from her golden hair, and effulgent flashes, blazing from her jewellike eyes. Her cold sterility, her fear of being touched—these apparently psychological traits are metaphors for a poetic language that wishes to cut itself off from "la chair inutile" ("the useless flesh") (MOC, 47), from any reference to bodies, to organic origin, to sexual difference. Herodiade's goal seems to be the evacuation of her biological and psychic interiority, her mummification as a glittering fetish.

But Herodiade's resistance to her death wish echoes throughout the poem in the words, conveying the princess's affective response to her self-paralyzing desire. The brilliance of her hair is "cruel"; her cherished virginity is also a "horror"; her chastity makes her comparable to an "inviolate reptile." It is as if Herodiade had caught a glimpse of Medusa in the mirror and realized the monstrous consequence of her immobiliz ing dream: "Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta severe fontaine /J'ai de mon reve epars connu la nudite" ("But, how dreadful! Some evenings, in your unsparing fountain, I perceived the nakedness of my scattered dream") (MOC, 45).

Herodiade's speech juxtaposes contradictory perspectives: In one line she declares that her desire has nothing human about it and that she is a sculpture crafted by art alone; in the next she imagines paradise in terms of the milk she drank at her nurse's breast. Herodiade's nostalgia returns her to an organic origin, to a breast rather than to a mechanical device. It is as if the Medusa head in the mirror were the reflection of the violence done to the mother by the attempt to fetishize the self in her image. At the end of the poem H6rodiade seems almost willing to abandon her cosmetic enterprise. She admits that her bravura claims to aesthetic self- sufficiency have been a lie and that she is waiting for "something un known" to come and "finally make these cold jewels part [se separer]" (MOC, 48). This readiness to have her fetishized armor pulled apart suggests a desire for sexual initiation. Herodiade, finally, is too much a desiring woman to remain trapped in "the idolatry of a mirror" (MOC, 48). Therefore, she fails as a figure of poetry's narcissistic absorption in verbal reflexivity.
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Section 3 of Herodiade, "Cantique de Saint Jean" (MOC, 49), abandons the princess and actually adopts the voice of John the Baptist's severed head. As it arches through the air, John's head celebrates its "clean break" with "les anciens desaccords / Avec le corps" ("the old dissensions with the body"). Expressing none of Herodiade's ambivalence about cutting herself off from her sexual body, John's head experiences the loss of its body as a liberation from the dualistic world of desire. Decapitation facilitates John's union with the very principle of poetic creation.15 Now he is "illuminated by the same principle that elected me." Decapitation is the price joyfully paid for the afterlife of the head that "surges up" with new creative potency and, from its solitary look out, sociably "bows a salutation" down to earth. This fantastic talking head is the poet's fetish. Its "triumphant flights" defeat the fundamental female desire to behead/castrate. Indeed, the head's "pure gaze" does not even encompass Salome, who is now no more than an instrument of poetry's triumphant erection.

Wilde's version of Salome is self-consciously belated and self- consciously French. Although he may first have thought of writing about Salome in England in 1890, all the details of the project were worked out, and most of it written (in French), in Paris during the fall of 1891. Wilde involved most of his many French literary friends and acquaintances in the gestation of his subject, obsessively testing out ideas on people such as Jean Lorrain, Marcel Schwob, and Pierre Louys, writers of a strong decadent persuasion. He had a broad knowledge of the Salome iconography, going back to Rubens, Leonardo, and Durer, but, notes Richard Ellmann in his biography, "Only Moreau satisfied him, and he liked to quote Huysmans's description of the Moreau paintings." 16 The passage from Herodiade printed in A rebours, a passage that Des Esseintes liked to recite as he contemplated his Moreau pictures, also had an immense impact on Wilde. How much more of this poem Wilde may have read is impossible to establish, but his friendship with writers in Mallarme's close entourage suggests that he would probably have seen additional parts of this work that Ellmann calls "the best-known un finished poem since Kubla Khan" (OW, 339). Despite his admiration for Mallarme and the latter's praise of Dorian Gray, Wilde attended only a few of the famous mardis. Ellmann supposes that this diffidence was due to Wilde's awareness that he was engaged in a deliberate trespass on the maitre's poetic terrain. 
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15. For a different but complementary reading of this poem. see Leo Bersani, The Death of Stephane Mallarme [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982), 78—81.

16. Richard Ellmann. Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 19871, 342. hereafter abbreviated OW.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[72] However this may be, it is clear that Wilde intended to challenge his literary forebears. Responding to a criticism that the play was reminiscent of Flaubert's "H6rodias," he replied: "Remember, dans la litterature il faut tuer son pore" (OW, 375).

Wilde's project is to kill his French fathers using their mother tongue. He stages his filial belatedness not only by deliberately echoing prior versions of the Judean princess by Flaubert, Huysmans, and Mallarme but also by evoking, in ways that I cannot detail here, the whole style of aesthetic decadence associated with such writers as Theophile Gautier, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Anatole France. These authors were all mentioned by the most perceptive reviewer of the play's text when it was published in England in 1893. But this anonymous critic interprets Wilde's tactical recognition of belatedness as a failure of creative verve. SoIom6, he complains in the Pall Mall Gazette, is "the daughter of too many fathers. She is a victim of heredity."17 But this is precisely Wilde's point. Salom6 has no singular inheritance; no father can claim her. She is indeed what the reviewer calls her disparagingly, "a handbook to a library.., the quintessence of a school of writing."18 Salome is a victim of her literary heredity only to the extent that one maintains that art should copy life. But if one adopts Wilde 's maxim "Art never expresses anything but itself" (AD, 191), then the pollution the Gazette reviewer found in Salom6's blood is no more than the symptom of literature's artificial genesis, of its fetishistic displacement of organic interiority.

This displacement is the fundamental subject of Wilde's play. Salome is a figure of decadent belatedness whose "life" reflects the unnatural ness of literature. A central issue in the play is what it means to contemplate this reflection.

The theme of the gaze is introduced in the opening scene when Herodias's page tries to persuade the young Syrian, whom he loves, to look away from Salom6: "Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems. She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things" (AD, 195). This speech is characteristic of many others in Salome. The sentences are short. There
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17. Pall Moll Gazette. 27 February 1893, 3. reprinted in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19701. 136.

18. Ibid., 137. It could be argued that Wilde is belated even in adopting the perspective of belatedness: Jules Laforgue's 1886 "Salome," the fourth of the Maralit~s Idgen daires, treats the princess as an excuse far an intertextual carnival that outrageously parodies Flauhert's "Herodias" while it produces an anarchic effect of parasitical citationality. But Wilde may not have known Laforgue's nearly unreadable story, and his technique has none of the brashness of Laforgue's burlesque patchwork of mostly enigmatic references. For an excellent discussion of Laforgue. see Daniel Gro)nowski. Jules Laforgue et "l'originalite" (NeuchAtel: A la Baconniere, 19881.
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are no connectives between them to indicate logical relation. Each paratactic sentence has a kind of declarative autonomy, as if it were a talking head without a body. The effect is typical of a decadent style as defined by Paul Bourget, "where the unity of the book decomposes to give way to the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to give way to the independence of the sentence, and the sentence decomposes to give way to the independence of the word."19 Individual words are fore- grounded through their recurrence from sentence to sentence, producing a rhythmic, incantatory effect. In the quoted passage, "moon" occurs in sentences I and 2, "woman" and "like" in sentences 3 and 4, "dead" in sentences 4 and 5, "look" in sentence I and "looking" in sentence 5. The semantic counterpart to this rhythmic suspension of linear syntax and atomistic decomposition of textual wholeness is focused here, as elsewhere in the play, on the meaning of the look. The page suggests that to look is to see not what is but what seems. The look discovers the strangeness of things, how they are like other things, how, one might say, they are constitutive of a rhythm. The vehicle of the look's apprehension of strangeness is metaphor, which functions through verbal displacements and substitutions. The passage associates this process with a dead woman and the reanimation of her corpse. Male fancy recreates woman's strangeness and attributes to it a necrophilic drive. Originating in a metaphor, this drive is energized by rhetorical rather than psychic force. Admittedly, this reading pushes interpretation to what may seem like an exaggerated extreme. This extremity is, however, the necessary point of analytic departure if one takes seriously Wilde's claim that "the primary aesthetic impression of a work of art borrows nothing from recognition or resemblance."20 The verbal repetitions in Wilde's sentences create a sense of ritualized artifice, as if talking were a mode of reciting. Likewise, looking becomes a veil over the seen, a vehicle of productive nonrecognition rather than of mimetic apprehension. To pull a veil of metaphor over the object of sight is, so to speak, to suspend its life, but also to prolong that life in the shimmering folds of the veil's unfurling. Wilde contrasts this aesthetic form of the look's mortifying power with its naturalistic form, the look as the agent of a desire to possess so urgent that it risks destroying its object. This urgency provides Wilde with the "rough material" for his story, its mimetic connection to "that dreadful universal thing called human nature" (AD, 175). The Syrian captain and Herod both want (to look at) Salome, whereas the page and Herodias, jealous, warn them not to; 
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19. Paul Bourget. Essais de psychalagie cantempOraine. vol. 1 (Paris: Plan. 19121, 20. 

20. Letter to the editor of the Speaker, December 1891, in Letters of Oscar Wilde. ed. Rupert I-tart-Davis (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 19621, 299.
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Salome desires (to look at) Iokanaan, who refuses to return her gaze and has eyes only for God. Desire never coincides with its object—this is the tragic psychological truth of the play. Desire never sees straight—this is closer to its literary truth, the deviation being due to literature's decadent desire to fetishize itself.

Salome's description of what she sees when she looks at Iokanaan is the most striking example of the gaze's metaphoric displacement of its object. Salom6 begins by associating Iokanaan with death and negation: the "black hole" of his prison is "like a tomb," his eyes are "like black holes," he is "wasted" (AD, 206). He represents for her the denial of the body and of sexuality: "I am sure he is as chaste as the moon is" (AD, 206). As chaste also as Salome herself, who identifies with the moon, praising its cold virginity. As chaste also as Mallarm6's H6rodiade, who likes to confirm her mineral sterility in the mirror. Chastity is here an essentially literary condition: Salome recognizes in Iokanaan not a desirable sexual being but a desirable mirror of her own literary constitution. This is the meaning of her evocation of Iokanaan's physical attractions in terms borrowed from the Song of Songs: his white body is like hers, is "like the lilies of the field," is "like the snows in the mountains of Judaea" (AD, 208), and so forth. The "likes" proliferate as Salome plunders the language of erotic psalmody to describe Iokanaan's incompar able eyes, body, mouth, and hair (at once like clusters of grapes and like great cedars of Lebanon!). As Gail Finney points out, this part-by-part praise of the beloved's physical attributes derives from a standard Petrarchan convention, elaborated during the Renaissance in the blason tradition, which makes individual anatomical features the occasions for extravagant rhetorical celebration. The fact that this tradition firmly establishes the male poet as the subject of the gaze and a desirable woman as its object leads Finney to conclude that Salome is, "on a disguised, symbolic level,"21.a man. It is in a male role, Finney argues, that Salome fetishizes Iokanaan's bodily parts, her ornamental dismemberment of his physical integrity being an 'attempt to gain control over the forbidden object of homosexual desire. I would take this quite plausible interpretation a step further, to suggest the connection between homosexuality in Wilde's fantasy and a kind of "chaste" displacement of the body into the domain of rhetoric, where issues of sexual difference are dissolved in the murmur of (derivative) metaphoric elaboration. It is just such a displacement that the homosexual page, in the play's opening scene, is trying to induce in the gaze of the man be loves.
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21. Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 19891, 62.
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But Jokanaan refuses to be assimilated into Salome's rhetoric. Sexual difference is for him the bedrock of the spiritual life. Suggesting the closeness of the decadent perspective on woman to the Christian view, Jokanaan identifies Salome with her mother and with the essential perversity and unbridled sexuality of female nature. Salom6's response to this vituperative condemnation is simply to switch metaphoric registers, turning from the positive context of Narcissus to the negative one of Medusa. Having first compared Jokanaan's hair both to clusters of grapes and to cedars of Lebanon, in an incongruous pairing that suggests how dissociated rhetorical display is from its object, she sees his hair after his rebuff as "a knot of serpents coiled round [hisi neck" (AD, 208). In naturalistic psychological terms this switch reflects Salom6's childish petulance; in aesthetic terms it exhibits the decomposed parts of a belated poetic creation. Salom6 as Jokanaan, Salome as Narcissus, Salome as Medusa—this substitution of masks produces the "strange music" that the princess claims to hear when she "look[s] on" Jokanaan (AD, Z36). Salome, it seems, has learned the lesson that Herod applies to himself: "One should not look at anything. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors is it well to look, for mirrors do but show us masks" (AD, 229).

To displace desire from the world into art sounds like Freud's definition of sublimation. Through sublimation libido transferred from sexual objects is made available for original artistic creativity. In decadence, however, this creative energy finds itself framed in a mirror of reflection and repetition. The mirror is full of already painted masks; the artist's belatedness stares him in the face like the knot of serpents swarming around Medusa's head. The decadent solution is to embrace paralysis as creative potential, to make of the petrifying head the vehicle of one's originality. Sublimation thereby becomes fetishistic. Libido is discontinuously displaced among bodiless masks. The apogee of this displacement is the strange music Mallarme puts into the mouth of John's severed head as it surges forth in triumphant flight.

Does Wilde serve (up) John's head otherwise? The answer would at first appear to be yes. The prophet's pate is the decadent emblem of woman as castrated and castrating. Salom6 is not content to "look on" Jokanaan: she wants to touch the prophet's body and to kiss his mouth. Her desire violates the shared bond of chastity that initially attracted her to Jokanaan. Insofar as this bond generates a literary play of masks, Salome's desire for the male's sensuous presence appears to violate her specular self-constructions. But her carnal lust is a mask already made up in the mirror. It is to be found, for instance, in Huysmans's "symbolic deity of undying Lust, [which] poisons everything that comes close to it, everything that sees it, -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[76] everything it touches" (AR, 149). We are dealing here with two different levels of literary self-consciousness: Salom6 ex presses the literariness of her gaze, Wilde expresses the literalness of her desire to possess its object. Wilde, it could be said, "looks on" Salom6 in the same way as Salome "looks on" Jokanaan.

Wilde's gaze, cultivated in the library like a decadent plant in the hothouse, exaggerates to the point of comic absurdity the characteristic traits of the femme fatale. She wants to kill men, specifically, to dismember them: "Well, I tell thee, there are not dead men enough" (AD, 234). She gets erotic pleasure from cannibalizing male corpses: "I will bite [thy mouth] with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit" (AD, 2341, she says to Jokanaan's taciturn head. She loves revenge and delights in perverse cruelty: "Well, I still live, but thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will. I can throw it to the dogs and the birds of the air" (AD, 234). Her lust knows no bounds: "Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion" (AD, 236). Salom6's castrating desire is in effect a parodic collage of desire's decadent articulations. If, as Ellmann writes, Salom6 "dies into a parable of self-consuming passion" (OW, 345), the point to stress is that the parable preexisted Wilde's belated retelling and that her passion has already been consumed by its representations. Wilde's princess is as artificial, made up, and ornamental when she yearns for male flesh as when she rhapsodizes about the lilies of the field. These attitudes are juxtaposed masks, bodiless rhetorical postures.22 It is as if Salom6's life as a figure for woman's "natural" desire to decapitate the male had been truncated and she were now enjoying the afterlife afforded by her own beheading. The Decapitation of Salome—this was Wilde's first title for the play.

The fetishized female body was not, however, the primary focus of Wilde's gaze, as is revealed by Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations. Recent interpreters agree that these pictures provide a kind of witty commentary on the plot, obliquely displaying vectors of desire and erotic associations that are disguised in the text.23 The instability of gender in the
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22. My reading here diverges significantly from that of Elliot Gilbert, "'Tumult of Images': Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome," Victorian Studies 26 (Winter 19831. Gilbert stresses the "unmediated" and "natural" quality of Salome's passionate challenge to patriarchal art and culture. I would also argue that any resemblance between Salome and the New Woman of the 1890s should be appreciated in a parodic mode.

23. This point of view was first argued by Elliot Gilbert. "'Tumult of Images."' In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (New York: Viking, 1990);Elainee Showalter goes so far as to claim that "the Beardsley drawings all depict scenes or moments described in the play" (151). Richard Dellamora offers a number of pro vocative readings of the illustrations in "Traversing the Feminine in Oscar Wilde's Salome," in Men Writing the Feminine, ed. Thais Morgan (forthcoming from Illinois University Press).
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veiled play of homoerotic vision is suggested by Beardsley's having changed the title of his first drawing of Wilde's lunar countenance from "The Man in the Moon" to "The Woman in the Moon." One of the figures androgynous Wilde observes is a naked male, the other a clothed figure of uncertain sex. The identities of these figures are left so unmarked that one astute critic, Richard Dellamora, can interpret them as Jokanaan and Salom6, while another astute critic, Elaine Showalter, sees them as the page of Herodias and the young Syrian. According to Dellamora, Beardsley is playing with the viewer's gender assumptions by having Jokanaan appear to shield Salome from Wilde's lustful gaze, while, for those in the know, the image reveals the true homosexual object of that gaze.24 According to Showalter, the page and Syrian are gay lovers over whose immanent expulsion from paradise a dreamily fantasizing Wilde Jehovah presides.25 I would argue that the identities of these figures cannot be fixed and that this mobility of gender and desire illustrates a gaze liberated from the defenses of specular reflection. The lunar face of Wilde is itself subject to this figurative mobility, for the moon, from the outset of the play, is most often associated with Salom6, who, in other drawings, resembles Jokanaan.

Beardsley's drawing of Salome floating in air as she holds the severed head of Jokanaan before her was the artist's tribute to Wilde's play and earned him the commission to illustrate the English version. One of the ways this tribute is Wildean is in its being Huysmanian, Moreauesque, and Mallarmean as well. Beardsley's Salome is staring at her own image as Medusa. The twisting black locks of her hair are a version of his snakelike tresses. But this Salome, unlike Huysmans's, is not petrified by fear. On the contrary, she is uplifted in an ecstasy that resembles that of John's head in Mallarmd's "Cantique." Salome appears here in a "triumphant flight" that frees her from "les anciens desaccords avec le corps." Beardsley and Wilde, however, move away from old bodily discords not in order to create a higher, sublimated harmony but in order to invent new bodily disharmonies and play perversely with genders and sexualities. This perversity is exhibited in the many suggestions of deviant sexual practices that suffuse the image. There is the suggestion of same- sex love in the visual similarity of the two heads—but is the implication homosexual or lesbian? There are the phallic images of the flower erect on its stalk and of the head erect on a rhyming, albeit fragmented, lance of blood. Is Salom6, then, a cross-dressed male about to engage in fellatio, as Dellamora suggests? 
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24. Dellamora, "Traversing the Feminine." 15.

25. Showalter. Sexual Anarchy. 144.
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Aubrey Beardsley 'The Woman In the Moon." 1894. Illustration far Salome. by Oscar Wilde. Harvard College Library.

Aubrey Beardsley J'ai Baise ta Bouche Iokanaan7 1893. Drawing from The Studio no. 1. Harvard College Library
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[80] Support for such a reading is offered by the French inscription "J'ai baise ta bouche," which brings the slang meaning of baiser together with the buccal orifice. Should one further broad en the field of sexual imagery to include the peacock feathers, which Elliot Gilbert tells us have "vulval eyes" 26 Beardsley's drawing, titled "The Climax" in its second version, invites its viewer to fantasize a number of different erotic climaxes, this plurality being the artist's illustrative point. Medusa imagery thus becomes, for both Beardsley and Wilde, a stimulus to sexual inversion, confusion, and parody, rather than a horrifying symbol of emasculation.

The violence produced by reductive symbolic interpretation is brought out clearly in the drama's final moment. As Herod is about to retreat into his palace, he turns around, sees Salom6 embracing Jokanaan's severed head, and orders her to be killed. His gaze is in direct violation of his own taboo against looking at anything other than mirrors. Indeed, his assertion of power and moral outrage (he calls Salome "monstrous") is actually a gesture of weakness in his own terms, since it confirms his inability to be satisfied by specular imagery and rhetoric. Identifying Salome with the defeat of his phallic desire, Herod's "turn" symbolically reinstates castration as a threat directed specifically against patriarchal privilege. Earlier, he had warned against making such naturalizing symbolic equations: "How red those petals are! They are like stains of blood on the cloth. That does not matter. It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors. It were better to say that stains of blood are as lovely as rose petals" (AD, 225). It is precisely this fetishizing wisdom that fails the tetrarch at the end. He finds symbolic "matter" in Salome's dismissal of the "matter'~ of whether or not she has tasted blood on Jokanaan's lips:

"But what matter? what matter? I have kissed thy mouth" (AD, 2331. For Herod, this blood symbolizes the mutilation of his official authority, SaIom6 having exploited the symbolic value of his kingly word to fulfill her desire against his. His order of execution sets to rights the patriarchal order of nature: women are not as lovely as petals; the fact of the matter is that they stain cloths with blood.

"The fact of castration'—this, we remember, is Freud's curious phrase. I want to return in conclusion to Freud's theoretical codification of the central decadent fantasy identifying woman with castration. In this context, castration's "factuality" can obviously be nothing other than symbolic. Freud is much like Herod, to whom Wilde attributes the Romantic notion that symbols have an organic basis in nature. The symbol,
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26. Gilbert. "'Tumult of Images,"' 153.
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writes Coleridge, "always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative."27 Castration symbolizes the "reality" that lies naturally beneath the surface—organic interiority, maternal origin, a primary unity of being. It "partakes of" this reality in the mode of loss. Freud images castration as that which the male child "sees" when he catches a glimpse of what is under the mother's underlinen. This sight reveals the falsity of an original hypothesis about sexuality, that all humans have a penis. This enlightenment does not, however, prompt the child to abandon his narcissistically flattering theory. He does not conclude that there is an anatomical difference but that a mutilation has occurred. His allegiance to the truth of his theory is so powerful that he cannot see the female genitals for what they are, that is, different. For him, they exist only insofar as they symbolize the absence of a theorized presence. The presence is the monosexual whole of which castration is a living part. Hence arises the characteristically decadent move in interpretation: woman is symbolized as mutilated man; to discover her "nature" is to uncover her lack. The Freudian male child invents castration as a theoretical veil that obscures woman's difference while apparently giving access to its knowledge. With a slight but crucial adjustment, Freud's description of the normal boy's strategy for dealing with sexual difference corresponds to his analysis of fetishistic perversion. The adjustment concerns the object of the fetishist's denial. Freud claims that the fetishist denies · castration while recognizing its reality, but it would be more accurate to say that the fetishist embraces castration as a defense against what he · finds still more "uncanny and intolerable"25~that is, woman's other- ness, her specific difference. It is this difference that his fetish at once obscures and reveals, not the "fact" of female mutilation. The fetishist is characterized not by his incapacity to accept woman's lack but rather by his incapacity not to see woman as lacking. This is precisely the negative interpretation of woman's sexual nature that Freud insists oil men must accept as their own. They must acknowledge, he says in the essay "Fetishism," "the unwelcome fact of women's castration" (SE, 21:156) and master the typical accompanying reactions he elsewhere identifies, "horror of the mutilated creature or triumphant contempt for her."29
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27. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Statesman's Manual. ed. W. G. 'L Shedd (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1875). 437—38. 

28. Sigmund Freud, "Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood" (1910), in Standard Edition, 11:95. 

29. Freud, Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes (1925). in SE, 19:252.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[82] Freud's analysis of female maturation reinforces his theory's veiling of woman's difference. Incapable of accepting her sexual organs as valuable in themselves, Freud's little girl, when confronted with the anatomical distinction between the sexes, instantaneously interprets herself as castrated. To fail to do so, Freud suggests, would be to risk a loss of reality that "in an adult would mean the beginning of psychosis" (SE, 19:253). Madness will be the consequence if a girl refuses to accept as real the perfectly unreal "fact" of her castration. Yet it is not clear just what narcissistic reward she obtains through her swift and unquestioning assumption of her inferiority. As I see it, the reward is entirely theoretical: by accepting the ontological truth of her lack, the girl becomes the perfect object of male fetishism. She collaborates in transposing the seen, her own difference, into a theoretical framework that defines the seeable.

This framework delimits the scene of decadence. For Wilde, the qualifying term is beauty. "One does not see anything until one sees its beauty," he says. "Then and only then does it come into existence" (AD, 189). The fetish returns the gaze from the depths of symbolic meaning to the glittering details of the aesthetic surface. 30 In Freud's famous example, it returns the gaze from the symbolic significance of the nose as mother's phallus to the brilliant shine on the nose, the Glanz auf der Nose. The shiny surface is like a mirror, perhaps the most widespread of decadent fetishes. The mirror is the agent of alienating falsity, the magi cal medium in which the male self can theorize itself as being the other as well, where sameness can overtake separation and sexual difference. The mirror presents (female) depth as an illusion; it offers, in Wilde's phrase, the truth of masks.

This truth has a great appeal in our own fin de siecle, when gender is once more in crisis, sexually transmitted disease is again an obsession, and a critique of biological esdentialism performs a necessary first step in the subversion of patriarchal ideology. 31 In this regard my essay sounds a cautionary note: the playful truth of masks may not be as liberating as it first appears. It may be linked in a reactionary mode to a reductive definition of gender based on the "fact" of castration. At issue is whether or not the play of sexualities is being fetishized, whether or not the play is masking a fundamental repulsion from female sexuality, whether or not, in the terms of my argument here, the play is decadent.
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30. Wilde declares in the preface to Dorian Gray that ~'all art is at once surface and symbol." Then he goes on to warn that "those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings (New York: Bantam, 1982), 3.

31. For a stimulating discussion of these analogies from a literary and cultural perspective, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy.
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This question is often extremely hard to resolve. I have presented Oscar Wilde both as a Herod figure, whose ideal of specular detachment is fetishistically bound to his castration fears, and as a Beardsley figure, for whom desire and gender offer unbounded access to multiple erotic and rhetorical possibilities. In this as in most other aspects of his creativity, Wilde is divided. On the one hand, he remains enclosed with in the decadent castration-fetishism structure; on the other, he breaks free of the symbolic bond of reaction and opens the representational field to ludic transpositions and gay disguises.

Theory continues to be particularly susceptible to the decadent lure of the gender dynamics set in motion by the castration-fetishism machinery. The major, and all too obvious, reason for this appeal is that castration is a bulwark of phallocentric ideology. The massive authority of Freud's thought (whose historical roots in the decadent soil of the fin de siecle are too often overlooked), the close link between decadent aesthetics and modernism, the systematic fetishism that underpins our consumer culture—these are other important factors. But there is also the fact, not to be neglected, that castration appeals to theory because it privileges the theoretical. Indeed it could be said that castration produces female sexuality out of (male) theory. Woman lacks because theory is full, woman is mutilated because theory holds to its erection despite evidence of the monument's collapse. Castration is theory's decadent fetish. It is high time to discard it on the compost heap of history.