CHAPTER 4
Unmasking the Masquerade: Fetishism and Femininity from the Goncourt Brothers to
Joan Riviere
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The feminist ideology of the masquerade and the Freudian discourse of fetishism
could hardly be more antithetical on first consideration. The former, as
constituted by Luce Irigaray, Michele Montrelay, Mary Ann Doane, and Judith
Butler, in response to Joan Riviere's pivotal essay "Womanliness as a
Masquerade" (1929), aims at a destabilization of masculinist
psychoanalysis, whereas the latter in its vivid imaging of castration anxiety
qualifies as one of Freud's most explicitly phallocentric essays. And yet, the
masquerade and fetishism in their shared dependency on the lexicon of phallic
surrogation prove to be curiously compatible at specific theoretical junctures.
Both theories may be characterized in terms of a defensive posture toward the
symbolic order of castration, and both articulate surrogation in a language of
veils, prosthetic appendages, and sexual travesty.
In addition to examining the rather strange points at which femininity and fetishism, or feminism and psychoanalysis, dovetail, collide, and mutually refract (nodes where patriarchal Freudianism loses a measure of its phallocentrism, moments where feminist theory confronts some of its own theoretical inconsistencies and lacunae), this study of sartorial language in the Goncourt brothers and Baron Octave Uzanne also entails an engagement with what Joan Copjec has provocatively termed the female "sartorial super ego." Beginning with an investigation of mid-nineteenth-century idioms of fashion, material culture, and female consumerism, I want to experiment with grounding a feminist ontology of femininity in the constructions, both erotic and social, of a certain kind of Verkleidungstrieb ("will to dress," "sartorial drive") or clothing fetishism.' -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[66] The debate over the impossibly vexed question What is femininity? seems more rather than less elusive with each new attempt within psychoanalysis and feminism to theorize the female subject. In the late twenties and early thirties many important women psychoanalysts endeavored to extend or challenge Freud's writings on femininity (Jeanne Lampl-de-Groot, Helen Deutsch, Ruth Mack- Brunswick, Marie Bonaparte, Karen Homey, Joan Riviere, to mention only the most well known), but successive generations would find even the more unorthodox among them too timid when it came to articulating female sexuality as something other than a second-best version of its masculine counterpart. Though since the thirties the validity of femininity as a category for understanding the feminine has become increasingly the target of skepticism, there has also been a concern to preserve the history of its representations.
With a rather curious consistency, nineteenth-century authors strategically retrieved representations of eighteenth-century woman, projecting her as fiction, fixture, and even fetish of the feminine. In the Goncourt brothers' La Femme au dix-huitieme siecle and in the fashion writing of Octave Uzanne, literary portraits of eighteenth-century libertinage and sartorial pomp are often used to praise and at the same time to pathologize (implicitly) a high culture of flirtation, seduction, and masquerade. These writings provide an interesting illustration of how one century's reading of another leads to epistemological shifts or new developments within adjacent disciplines, demonstrating, specifically, how the nineteenth century's reading of eighteenth-century woman created a vision of femininity that in turn passed into early psychoanalysis.
As in the case of "cabinet fiction," an important
microgenre of nineteenth-century literature may be defined in the Goncourts'
proleptically New Historical reconstruction of eighteenth-century feminine
culture. Coining the expression "elegant reality" (la realite elegante)
for a descriptive mode devoted to foregrounding "the pretty" and
"distinguished" detail, Edmond de Goncourt matched style to content in
his examination of what he called feminilite.2
*************
1. Jann Matlock introduces the notion of Verkleidungstrieb in "Masquerading
Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-dressing, Fetishism, and the Theory of Perver
sion, 1882—1935," in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds. Fetishism as
Cultural Discourse: Gender Commodity, and Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, forthcoming).
2. Edmond de Goncourt, prefaces to La Faustin and Cherie, in
Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Prefaces et manifestes litteraires,
ed. Hubert Juin (Paris: Slatkine, 1980), pp. 57—62.
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Applied to the intangible qualities of a woman's innermost being (her initiation
into coquetry, the dawning of secret effusions, the recesses and shadows of
deception), "feminility" emerges as an essentialist label that
subordinates subtle permutations of psycho logical sensibility to outward
cliches of women's culture fixed by mid-century convention. Similarly Uzanne, a
kind of "lesser Goncourt" in his literary career, made a point of
resuscitating the terms feminie (roughly, all that falls in the domain of woman:
beauty, ornament, love) and femmenie (accenting lafemme herself as circulating
tempta tion [poupee d'Eros] within the Gallic "commerce of gallantry")
from the neglected pages of Littre's dictionary.3 Uzanne's texts on "les
artifices de la beaute" equally constitute a distinctive genre in which
metonymies of costume, natural physique, and attitude coalesce in an eroticized
sentimental prose. Here the mimological rhetorical conventions by which fin-de-siecle
writers represented feminine narcissism, worldliness, and display are clearly
placed in view. By focusing on a genre that might be called (after the Goncourts)
elegant realism, we can clarify the history of gender cliches and better
understand its imprint on psychoanalytical assumptions.
Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were far more notorious for their
virulently misogynistic view of the female species, which they placed on a par
with the animal order in the evolutionary chain, than for any sympathetic
investigation of womanliness. Novels such as Germinie Lacerteux (1865) or
Manette Saloman (1867) capitalized on sensation al illustrations of the
insatiable sexual urges of women. And as Elisabeth Badinter has shown, the
Journal was equally replete with depictions of women psychically enslaved to
their physical morphologies and bodily functions. 'All the life juices, the
whole evolution of woman flows downward toward the inferior parts of the body:
the pelvis, the rump, the thighs," they wrote in Possessed of feeble
intelligence, superficial, agents of the Revolution, and emblems of
nineteenth-century depravity—these characterizations of
***********
3. Octave Uzanne, Feminies (Paris: Academie des Beaux Livres, 1896), p. 190.
4. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, Oct. 13,
1855, as cited by Elisabeth Badinter in her preface to La Femme au dix-huitiseme
siecle (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), p. 11. Further references to La Femme will be
abbreviated F. Badinter's preface is highly informative and suggestive; I am
indebted to it for a number of ideas presented in this chapter.
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women repeatedly surfaced in the Goncourts' multitomed journal.
As naturalist writers who lingered over the most scrofulous particulars of disease, the Goncourts not only contributed to the general nineteenth-century medicalization of eighteenth-century literature but they also pathologized the much-trumpeted libertinage of ancien-regime aristocrats. To the debauchery indulged in by ladies of noble station the Goncourts attributed a psychopathology of emptiness, ennui, vapors, hypochondria, hysteria, and what they referred to as "a kind of intellectual libertinage [une sorte de libertin age de pensees]" (F 316). In brief, as their posthumous reception bears out, a prudish but no less prurient habit of diagnosing the consequences of promiscuity informed their historical panoramas, even at the risk of placing their idealized vision of the ancien regime in jeopardy.
Despite the fact that Madame du Barry, Madame de Pompadour, and Marie Antoinette had set redoubtable examples of licentiousness before the populace, the Goncourts' documentation of the eighteenth- century aristocrat, with her cultivated mien and seductive allure, afforded some kind of narrative reprieve from their characteristi cally gynophobic vituperation. As Juliette Adam, one of the few women spared their contempt, would write: "The Goncourts so loved and frequented eighteenth-century women that they despised the women of the nineteenth.., consigning them to wickedness, debauchery or imbecility."5 Published in 1862, La Femme au dix huitieme siecle marks the culmination of a series of works by the Goncourt brothers dedicated to the nostalgic recuperation of ancien regime political and aesthetic values. Histoire de Ia societe francaise pendant la Revolution et pendant le Directoire had appeared in 1854, Histoire de Marie-Antoinette in 1858, portions of L'Art au dix-huitieme siecle in 1859, and Les Mattresses de Louis XV in 1860. In this fruitful period of a collaboration that critics unfailingly describe as incestuous, they elaborated an ideal of feminine beauty, charm, and even intelligence matched by a prose style at once frothy and rhetorically fetishistic.
In this context, the expression rhetorical fetishism refers to
the taste for epithet, mannered syntax, and tropes of hyperbole and accumulation
commonly used by the Goncourts to render the codes of feminilite. As in the
language of fetishization, whereby the verbal substitute for the phallic
referent is reified to the point where its
***********
5. As cited by Badinter, La Femme, p. 16.
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origin is forgotten, so the Goncourts' idiolect of womanliness replaced the patriarchically inflected signifier with a hypostatized, essentialist sign of the feminine:
Etonnant!
miraculeux! divin! ce sont les epithetes courantes de la causerie. Une
langue d'extase et d'exclamations,
une langue qui escalade les superlatifs, entre
dans Ia langue francaise et apporte
l'enflure a sa sobriete. On ne parle plus que
de graces sans nombres, de
perfections sans fin. A Ia moindre fatigue, on est
aneanti; au moindre contre-temps, on
est desespere, on est obstede
prodigieusement, on est suffoque.
Desire-t'on une chose? On estfolle a perdue le
boire et le manger. Un homme
deplait-il? C'est un homme a jeter par les fenetres.
A-t-on la graine? on est d'une
sottise rebutante. On applaudit a tout rom pre, on
loue a outrance, on aime a miracle.
Et cette fievre des expressions ne suffit pas;
pour etre une femme "parfaitement
usagee", il est necessaire de zezayer, de
moduler, d'attendrir et d'effeminer
sa voix, de prononcer, au lieu de pigeons et de
choux, des pizons et ces soux.
Astonishing!
miraculous! divine! these are the common epithets of (wom an's)
chatter. An idiom of ecstasy and
exclamations that goes beyond superlatives,
enters the French language and brings
turgidity to its sobriety. One speaks only of
infinite charms, of endless
perfections. At the slightest fatigue, one is reduced to
nothing; at the slightest
contretemps, one is in despair, one is prodigiously
obsessed, one is suffocated. Does she
desire something? She is crazed to the
point of bringing up her food and
drink. A man displeases her? He is a man to be
thrown out the window. Has she gone
to seed? She is revoltingly stupid. She
applauds to breaking point, she
praises to the limit, she loves miraculously. And
even this fever of expressions is not
enough: to be a woman "perfectly in the
know," it is necessary to lisp,
to inflect, to soften, and to effeminize one's voice,
to say in the place of pigeons and
cabbage, "pizons" and "soux." (F 71; authors'
italics)
Here it is perhaps no accident that the paradigm of feminine speech is predicated on error (of pronunciation)—for the discourse of womanliness seems destined to the regime of surrogation.
The Goncourts complemented this rhetorical fetishism with a
more clinical fetishization of the female body typically found in the work of
eighteenth-century authors. Their portrait of eighteenth- century woman often
derived from writers such as Marivaux, Rousseau, and Retif de la Bretonne. From
the world of Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, with its titillating scenes of
sartorial strategy in love,
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they took inspiration for the theme of the mask.6 A device of dupery designating
the veiling of ulterior motives in the game of love through skillful
manipulation of multiple visages, marivaudage was treated as the ensign of
phallic woman. Like painters preparing fastidious physiognomical and
characterological studies for each genre of feminine beauty (and reinforcing
this technique with constant allusions to Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau), the
Goncourts developed prototypes of the eighteenth-century seductress. As a
fleshy, bovine, Venus evolves through the century, imperiled by the "orgies
of the Palais-Royal," only to reemerge under the brushstrokes of Boucher as
a smirking nymph, she is evoked as "le masque de ses amours [the mask of
her loves]" (F 254). The marivaudage of the feminine facial mask, at least
in rather simplistic Freudian terms, suggests an artful incognito designed to
prolong the male viewer's distraction from the absorbing prospect of a
hypothetical female phallus.7 Evoking Marivaux again in a manner that strikingly
foreshadows the twentieth-century psychoanalytical debate on the masquerade, the
Goncourts identified eighteenth-century woman's ultimate refinement as the
ability to appear as if she were no longer wearing a mask: "She can say:
that's how nature made me. What she will leave visible, as if by negligence or
oversight, will have the irritating charm of a modest, veiled copy of the
original; and the veil that she preserves is so light, so transparent, that it
hardly creates a barrier to the male imagination" (F 270). In the
qualifiers "comme par negligence" and "qu'il ne sera presque pas
un obstacle," the psychosexual innuendos of veiling (as in Nietzsche) shine
through; woman masquerades as essential femininity ("telle que Ia nature
m'a faite"), but her essentialism is only a more invisible form of the
mask.8
**********
6. The roster of theoretical voices contributing to the philosophical treatments
of the mask is long. From phenomenological and anthropological analyses
(elaborated in the 1940s and 1950s by Roland Kuhn, Georges Buraud, Gaston
Bachelard, and the early Foucault) to Derrida and Lacan's post-Nietzschean
interpretations of the veil as trope of the woman's phallic prevarication and
its feminist critique (Jacqueline Rose, Gayatri Spivak, Mary Ann Doane) there
have been seemingly endless reappropriations of this discourse.
7. It is this aleatory technique of delay without consummation that Roland Barthes would assign to marivaudage in his Fragments dun discours amoureux: "To speak amorously is to expend without an end in sight, without a crisis; it is to practice a relation without orgasm. There may exist a literary form of this coitus reservatus: what we call Marivaudage" (Barthes, A Lovers Discourse, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 19781, p. 73.
8. The use of the veil as a metaphor for womanliness and
philosophy alike has been a recurrent theme in the discourses of deconstruction
and feminism. From Nietzsche to Derrida, Luce Irigaray; and Gayatri Spivak a
genealogical discussion can be traced, culminating in Spivaks notion of the
"feminization of philosophizing:'
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If Marivaux captured the ethic of falsity implicit in the feminine masquerade
and Rousseau epitomized the cult worship of erotic synecdoche (from the stolen
ribbon to the famous deformed nip ple), it was nevertheless Retif de la Bretonne
who most influenced their portrayal of femininity. Like no other writer he
appreciated the inherently fetishistic nature of the prosthetic appendages
favored by eighteenth-century fashion.9 Many of his texts sexualized the
extremities of the female anatomy and its sartorial extrusions: corsets,
crinolines, and, most especially, shoes. In his novella Unjoli Pied, for
example, the elegant shoe completely upstages the charms of its wearer:
Elle s'assit et
posa son joli pied sur une chaise, de sorte qu'on le voyait en entier.
Rien de si charmant dans Ia nature
par sa petitesse, par la grace et l'elegance de
sa chaussure: c'etait un soulier de
couleur puce brode et garni d'un cordonnet en
argent sur les coutures; le talon
mince etait assez haut, mais place de maniere qu'il
ne faisait pas refouler le pied; la
forme par devant etait la plus mignonne qu'on
puisse voir. Saintepallaie etait hors
de lui-meme.
She sat down and
placed her pretty foot on a chair, so that one could see the
whole foot. Nothing in nature was
ever so charmingly small, graceful, and elegant
as her shoe; it was footwear of puce
brocade garnished with silver braid along
the seams; the thin heel was quite
high, but placed so as not to compress the foot;
the shape in front was the most
adorable sight imaginable. Saintepallaie was
beside himself.10
Passages of this kind furnished the Goncourts with conceits for rendering the psychology of fashion. As they built up a language of libidinously charged vestimentary details in La Fern me au dix-huitieme siecle they cited Retif's Le Pied de Fanchette:
Nous entrons dans
le regne des artistes en tout genre, des modistes de genie,
aussi bien que des cordonniers
sublimes, uniques pour monter un pied et le faire
valoir, lui donner la petitesse, la
grace, la tournure, la "lestete" si vantee, si
goutee, si souvent chantee par le
dix-huitieme siecle, leje ne sais quoi enfin de ce
pied de Mine Leveque, la marchande de
soie a la Ville de Lyon, qui inspire a
Retif de la Bretonne le Pied de
Fanchette.
**********
9. The Goncourts used Rousseau as an exemplar of hyperbolic sentimental display,
localized in passionate attachments to feminine bagatelles (we have only to
recall the famous episode of the stolen ribbon).
10. Retif de Ia Bretonne, Un Joli Pied, as cited by J. Avalon and Albert Charpentier. 'Restif de Ia Bretonne fetichiste," Aesculape (Apr. 1912), p. 89.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[72]
At this point we enter into the
realm of art in every sphere, from the couturier of
genius to those sublime shoemakers,
unique in their ability to raise up and thereby
enhance the foot, endowing it with
the smallness, grace, shape, and "lightness" so
celebrated and enjoyed, so lyrically
praised by the eighteenth century; it was this
"je ne sais quoi" of the
foot of Mine Leveque (a silk merchant in the town of
Lyon) that inspired Retif's Foot of
Fanchette. (F 275)
Ultimately one might argue that the Goncourts' reading of Retif allows us to supplant the notion of mask with the modern figure of construction, and here we mean to literalize the Foucauldian (and now feminist) figure of social construction so as to designate the actual props, cages, stays, and struts appertaining to the eighteenth- century female body.
It is of course the extravagant, preposterous coiffure that constituted the most familiar cliche associated with the period. The full symbolism of mounted piles of hair, as prolongation of the female body and verbal constellation of fetishistic signs, is, however, less well understood. As Chantal Thomas has recently remarked in her analysis of the names for hair fashions popularized by Marie Antoinette and her followers, "the coiffeur not only had to have the talent of an architect, he also had to show himself capable of chronicling the daily news."11 La Femme au dix-huitieme siecle offers an exhaustive glossary of what the Goncourts referred to as "les coiffures parlantes" (speaking hairstyles), from "le pouf au senti ment," in which strands of hair from deceased loved ones were interwoven; to "les coiffures a l'insurgent," commemorating seismic political events; to "la coiffure a la Dauphine," an image of gender crossover with its phallic resemblance to une queue de paon, or "peacock's tail" (F 282—87). Instead of signifying a timeless, essential femininity, which may have been what the Goncourts wished to evoke, the exaggerated coiffures of the eighteenth-century French noblewoman disclosed the historically commodifying conditions of her erotic construction, one that was, of course, essentially nineteenth century in its character and function.
In the section of his Passagen-Werk on fashion, Walter
Benjamin claimed that it was hard to find a more erotic fetish than the
***************
11. Chantal Thomas, La Reine scelerate (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 88.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[73]
enhanced head of hair, which, in its negotiation between the dead realm of inert
consumer artifacts and the enticing, animated do main of sexual stimulants,
fostered a psychoanalytical mediation of material culture and gender
differentiation. He gave the example of the multiple erotic significations that
were "dissimulated" beneath the feminine hat. As opposed to the strict
political codes of rigidly typified male headgear, women's hats suggested
infinite possibilities of meaning beyond the simple symbolization of the sexual
organs. Thus, he noted the peculiarly mimetic agency of the capote, a form of
bonnet contemporary with the crinoline: "The wide brims of the capote are
turned up, in this way suggesting how one should turn up the crinoline so that
the man might the more easily have sexual relations with the woman."'2 This
penchant for an eroticism of the retrousse, or "turned up," was turned
inward in the case of the corset, described by Benjamin as a passage for the
torso (a kind of Passagen-Werk of the female anatomy).13 The corset, Benjamin
claimed, was a particularly freighted signifier for nineteenth- century
eroticism, for it gave off the aura of the renferme (closed-in) associated with
clandestine prostitution.
Anticipating Benjamin, the Goncourts dismantled the apparent eroticism of coiffure, corset, and crinoline. Consider, for example, their rendering of a panier:
Cette toilette,
avec son incroyable deploiement de jupe, represente le ponier
dans l'ampleur, la grandeur,
l'enormite de son developpment. Le panier que les
princesses de sang vont bientot
porter si large qu'il leur faudra un tabouret vide is
cote d'elles, le panier commence is
grandir sur le modele des paniers de deux
dames anglaises venues en France en
1714; et chaque annee il est devenue plus
usite, plus exagere, plus
extravagant. Il s'est etoffe de facon is couvrir les
grossesses de Ia Regence: il s'est
repandu par toute Ia France comme un masque
de debauche, pendant ces jours de
folie.
This dress, with
its incredible unfolding of the skirt, represents the hoop in its full
amplitude, grandeur, and monstrosity.
Worn so wide that princesses of noble
birth soon needed an empty stool
beside them, modeled after a petticoat sported
by two English women who came to
France in 1714; this panier has each year
become progressively wide spread,
exaggerated, and extravagant. Upholstered
to disguise the pregnancies of the
Regency, the panier spread all over France like
a mask of debauchery during these
days of folly. (F 261—62)
**********
12. Walter Benjamin, Gesammette Schnften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1982), 1: 131. Benjamin is summarizing an argument made by Helen Grund in her
Vain Wesen der Mode (Munich: Privately printed, 1935).
13. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schnften 1: 510.
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In this image of a furnished feminine persona (identified as "debauchery's
mask"), all traces of seduction are forfeited. As the beaux-arts critic
Charles Blanc argued in a section of his aesthetic analysis of women's fashion,
L'Art darts la parure et dans le vetement (Art in Adornment and Dress), this
eighteenth century fondness for amplitude ultimately defeated its purpose,
calling femininity's bluff by revealing its attempt at empowerment through
sartorial bulk:
To exaggerate width
would be to run counter to the proposed end, it would be to
miss the goal by overstepping it;
because excess, which can only be produced by
an increase of size, would end in
spreading out the figure and overwhelming it,
unless in order to balance the
enlargement of the figure that puffs and paniers
would give it, a structure of curls
and feathers were erected on the head, like
those worn by the Princesse de
Lamballe and Marie Antoinette during the reign
of powder.14
Like the oversized falbala, constricting corset, or spiky,
totemic hair ornament, the panier afforded a caricature of mythic femininity. In
the spread of the woman's hips, merging with the footstool used to prop up her
volumnious skirts, femininity seems to evaporate by virtue of its overly
emphasized materialization. Again and again, In their representations of
eighteenth century fashion, the brothers called attention to the charade of
femininity by highlighting the structural supports and surface drapery
sustaining and simultaneously exposing the illusion of a swollen, imperious,
expansive, incorporating female body. In contrast to the nineteenth century body—
that pert, coquettish, curvaceous female form that, as Debora Silverman has
recently observed, became embedded as a design motif in the art-nouveau
furniture and interiors that the Goncourts helped to anticipate—this
eighteenth-century body defied domestication.15 This is of course probably why
the Goncourts seemed so
**********
14. Charles Blanc, Art in Adornment and Dress (London: Chapman and Hall, 1877),
p. 59.
15. 'Archaeologists of material culture," as Debora
Silverman has described them, the Goncourts distinguished themselves as masters
at creating a rhetoric of plasticity and texture-upholstery, drapery, lacquer—which
both feminized domestic artifacts and literalized woman as material
construction. "La mode" is portrayed as the "furniture" of
women's bodies, an extensive "frame" that inadvertently demystities
the masquerade of womanliness in its nomenclature. Silverman has noted,
"the Goncourts clarified how the rococo interior was inseparable from its
female identity, for the Louis XV style moderne was initiated to oppose the
grand gout of Louis XIV with the ethos of la grace, a petite, amorous, and
explicitly female form.... Furniture with anthropomorphic female names
multiplied: la causeuse, 'the chatterer'; la bergere, 'the shepherdess'; la
chiffonniere. 'the dresser'; to marquise brisee, 'the divided marquise'; to
chaise a to reine; to chaise tongue; and especially la toitette. The feminiza
tion of rococo furnishings culminated here, as toilette named both the small
dressing table for women and the art of women's preparation of their bodies for
display" (Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and
Style [Berkeley: University of California Press, '1989, pp. 27—28).
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intent on denaturalizing its impression—the obviousness of feminine artifice
(as in Baudelaire's aesthetic of maquillage) guarantees the failure of an
autonomous (nonpatriarchal) definition of femininity.
But there are risks in underscoring the feminine mask, for this exposed transparency of artifice also reveals the extent to which masculinity relies for its own mythic gender on a contrivance of gender in the opposite sex. As Judith Butler has observed, masculinity is equally vulnerable to the masquerade critique, especially when it is "taken on by the male homosexual who, presumably, seeks to hide—not from others, but from himself, an ostensible femininity."16 This over-exposed quality of the gender masquerade serves to explain why the Goncourts' gongoristic idiom of eighteenth- century fashion occasionally seems to come undone much in the way that their social snobbery and bourgeois monarchism appear to be undercut by their moving fictional portraits of exploited working- class women. Ostentatious articles of clothing rendered with color ful adjectives or meticulously matched to fascimiles of feminine speech patterns come apart at unexpected moments in their texts, revealing a latent instability of sexual identity. In Les Maitresses de Louis XV, for example, they described "Ia Pompadour" appointed as Venus in a gown of metallic blue. The way in which the train of her dress aspires to phallic stiffness serves to overlay a masculine persona on the feminine frame:
Elle etait Ia mere
des Amours, Venus elle-meme, dana un habit de mosaique
d'argent, festonne de taffetas peint,
chenille d'argent et bleu, frange d'argent, et
trainant avec Ia majeste d'un manteau
royal une grande queue d'etoffe bleue is
mosaique d'argent.
She was the mother
of Love, Venus herself, attired in a mosaic of silver,
festooned with painted taffeta,
wrapped around in silver and blue, fringed in silver
and dragging, with the majesty of a
royal cloak, a huge train of blue and
variegated silver material.17
***********
16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1990), p. 51.
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Though as a general rule Edmond and Jules reveled in the aesthetic contrasts
between mistresses, Madame du Barry is similarly masculinized in the costume of
the hunt:
Toutes les
metamorphoses conviennent a cette beaute, comme aux divinites de la
Fable; et que demain elle quitte le
grand habit de Versailles pour un deguisement
de chasse; qu'elle mette l'habit
d'homme aux larges parements battus par la
dentelle d'Angleterre qui fait le
tour de son col nu; qu'elle porte sea cheveux
plats, et que deux ou trois mouches
jetees la et his dans sa figure ou relevent la
mutinerie: elle sera Venus
chasseresse.
All metamorphoses
suit this beauty, as they do the gods of Fable; and tomorrow
may she shed the raiment of
Versailles for a hunting costume; may she don
masculine dress with a large,
English-lace collar encircling her bared throat; may
she wear her hair straight, and may
there be two or three patches thrown here
and there on a face that speaks
unruliness: she will be a Venus of the hunt.15
Commentators on cross-dressing have often insisted that men's clothing when worn by women only enhances the spectacle of femininity. In this case, however, it would seem that Madame du Barry has so entered the spirit of her travesty that her character, in its forcefulness and projection of a predatory will, attests to some kind of veritable sex change.
In their portrait of Marie Antoinette the Goncourts took this
gender ambivalence yet a step further, obliquely associating the scandal of the
Diamond Necklace Affair (in which the queen was implicated in a conspiracy to
buy one of the most valuable jewels in France for resale on the black market)
with the stony dazzle of Marie Antoinette's character, and discerning a natural
disposition to power in the queen's body. Here it is the unadorned, essential
body that functions like some kind of underwire support structure for the royal
social construction. Marie Antoinette's upright carriage ("as if made for
the throne," according to Madame de Polignac)
************
17. Edmund de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Les Mattresses de Louis XV, 2
vols. (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Freres, 1860), i: 230.
18. Ibid., bk. 3, vol. a, p. 172.
19. In a paper entitled "Adorning Marie-Antoinette"
(delivered at the Modern Language Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C.,
December 27, 1989), Pierre Saint-Amand described the way in which the masquerade
of the royal persona was in a sense extended, hardened, and further materialized
in the narcissistically erotic space of Trianon. Saint-Amand writes,
"Theater, balls, fashion shows, Trianon was a seductive paradise.
Everything was constructed in order to reflect back the queen's image to
herself. Mirrors were everywhere, and more were put in at night to mask the
windows. The space was saturated with ornamentation:" For an interesting
analysis of the Diamond Necklace Affair, see Sarah Maza, "The Diamond
Necklace Affair Revisited (1785—1786): The Case of the Missing Queen," in
Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Potitic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991). pp. 63—89.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[77]
and the way in which her blond hair settles on her head like an organic crown
("le diademe d'or pale de ses cheveux blonds") suggest a subliminal
monarchism—an overdetermined will to rule— that decidedly corroborates the
female sovereign's primordial masculinity.20
In La Femme au dix-huitieme siecle the Goncourts gave this transves tite female ruling class a globally imperialist socioeconomic status, attributing the French fashion industry's "domination" and "seduction" of Europe to the Frenchwoman's ingenuity and exigence in the field of frippery: "all of Europe is under the sway of our fashions" (F 274). A patriarchal tendency to export culture and conquer markets is here imputed to the lady skilled in feminine wiles. Finally, in an astonishing passage framed in the context of a political allegory equating the demise of the aristocracy with female empowerment, the same creature who passes for the consummate embodiment of feminine charm is also unmasked as a paragon of maleness:
Cette influence,
cette domination sans exemple, cette souverainete de droit
presque divin, is quoi faut-il
l'attribuer? Ou en est la clef et l'explication? La
femme du dix-huitieme siecle dut-elle
seulement sa puissance aux qualites
propres de son sexe, aux charmes de
sa nature, aux seductions habituelles de son
etre? La dut-elle absolument a son
temps, is la mode humaine, is ce regne du
plaisir qui lui apporta le pouvoir
dans un baiser et la fit commander a tout, en
commandant a l'amour? Sans doute, la
femme tira de sea graces de tous les
temps, du milieu et des dispositions
particulieres de son siecle, une force et une
facilite naturelles d'autorite.... 11
y a dans toutes ces physionomies la resolution et
l'eclair d'une idee virile, 'une
profondeur dans la mutinerie meme, je ne sais quoi
de pensant et de percant, ce melange
de l'homme et de la femme d'etat dont vous
retrouverez les traits jusque sur la
figure d'une comedienne, de la Sylvia....
**************
20. Edmund de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Histoire de Marie-Antoinette (1'
858]; Paris: Flammarion/Fasquelle, n.d.), pp. 101—102.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[78]
Quittez les portraits, ouvrez
l'histoire: le genie de Ia femme du dix-huitieme
siecle ne dementira pas cette
physionomie. Vous le verrez s'approprier aux plus
grands roles, s'elargir, grandir,
devenir, par l'application, l'etude, Ia volonte, assez
misle ou du moms assez serieux pour
expliquer, legitimer presque ses plus
etonnantes et ses plus scandaleuses
usurpations.
This influence,
this domination without example, this sovereignty of near divine
right, to what must it be attributed?
Where is the key to the explanation? Did
eighteenth-century woman owe her
power solely to the innate qualities of her sex,
to the charms of her nature, to the
habitual seductions of her being? Or did she
owe it exclusively to her epoch, to
the fashion, to the reign of pleasure that
brought her power in a kiss and
allowed her to rule everything in ruling love?
Without a doubt, woman will draw from
the graces of every century, from the
milieu and particular temperaments of
her age, a strength and a natural facility for
authority. . . . In all these
physiognomies, there is the clarity and resolution of a
virile idea, a profundity even in
rebelliousness, an "I don't know what" of
perspicuity and thoughtfulness, this
mixture of the man and woman of state that
you can trace through to the features
of the actress Sylvia.
Put the portraits
aside, open up history: the genius of the eighteenth- century
woman will never give the lie to this
physiognomy. You will see it take over the
largest roles, grow bigger, become,
through application, study, and sheer force of
will, male enough, or at the very
least, serious enough, to explain, and legitimate,
even its most astonishing and
scandalous usurpations. (F 294—95)
This masculine face stamped indelibly on period physiognomies of women, this "scandalous" propensity to usurp male prerogative, this fundamental commutability of femininity and masculinity, ultimately implies that there is absolutely no fixed sociopolitical basis for sexual difference. Woman's social construction is revealed as just that: no more than an evanescent agglomeration of codes and commonplaces, no less than a materially ornamental construct that gives narcissistic pleasure to the female subject by enhancing her body in her own eyes.
Half a century later Proust would render this idea in one of
his portraits of Swann's mistress. Odette emerges as an impossible construction,
for she is made from clumsy sheaths and unadhering parts. In the gaping seams of
her mechanical body, we glimpse the emptiness of her feminine essence:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[79]
II faut d'ailleurs dire que le visage
d'Odette paraissait plus maigre et plus
proeminent parce que le front et le
haut des joues, cette surface unie et plus plane
etait recouverte par Ia masse de
cheveux qu'on portait alors prolonges en
"devants", souleves en
"crepes", repandus en meches folles le long des oreilles; et
quant is son corps qui etait
admirablement fait, il etait difficile d'en apercevoir Ia
continuite (is cause des modes de
l'epoque et quoiqu'elle fut une des femmes de
Paris qui s'habillaient le mieux),
tant le corsage, s'avancant en saillie comme sur
un ventre imaginaire et finissant
brusquement en pointe pendant que par en
dessous commencait is s'enfler le
ballon des doubles jupes, donnait is Ia femme
l'air d'etre composee de pieces
differentes mal emmanchees les unes dans les
autres; tant les ruches, les volants,
le gilet suivaient en toute independance, selon
Ia fantaisie de leur dessin ou Ia
consistence de leur etoffe, Ia ligne qui les
conduisait aux noeuds, aux bouillons
de dentelle, aux effiles de jais
perpendiculaires, ou qui les
dirigeait le long du busc, mais ne s'attachaient
nullement is l'etre vivant, qui selon
que l'architectuie de ces fanfreluches se
rapprochait ou s'ecartait trop de Ia
sienne, s'y trouvait engonce ou perdu.
It must be remarked
that Odette's face appeared thinner and more prominent
than it actually was, because her
forehead and the upper part of the cheeks, a
single and almost plane surface, were
covered by the masses of hair which
women wore at that period, drawn
forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves
and falling in stray locks over her
ears; while as for her figure, and she was
admirably built, it was impossible to
make out its continuity (on account of the
fashion then prevailing, and in spite
of her being one of the best-dressed women
in Paris) for the corset, jetting
forwards in an arch, as though over an imaginary
stomach, and ending in a sharp point,
beneath which bulged out the balloon of
her double skirts, gave a woman, that
year, the appearance of being composed
of different sections badly fitted
together; to such an extent did the frills, the
flounces, the inner bodice follow, in
complete independence, controlled only by
the fancy of their designer or the
rigidity of their material, the line which led them
to the knots of ribbon, falls of
lace, fringes of vertically hanging jet, or carried
them along the bust, but nowhere
attached themselves to the living creature, who,
according as the architecture of
their fripperies drew them towards or away from
her own, found herself either
straitlaced to suffocation or else completely
buried.21
*************
21. Marcel Proust, A to recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard.
1987), p. 594. Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random
House, 1970), p. 151. Kaja Silverman has also analyzed this passage in terms of
the feminine sartorial construction in her "Fragments of a Fashionable
Discourse," in Tania Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 138—52. See also Diana Festa-McCormick,
Proustian Optics of Ctothes: Mirrors, Masks, Mores (Saratoga, Calif.: Libri,
1984), pp. 11—13.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[80]
Prefigured here as he was so often by the Goncourt brothers, Proust's picture of
absent femininity has the phallic woman as its corollary: the raised-up mass of
crimp curls, the imaginary stomach over which the corset ends in a point, the
fetishistic bows and tapering curtain of dark beads, the explicit allusion to a
"loss" of the female body, all conspire to give the impression of
phallic uncertainty, "to keep the reader from ever being able to answer the
question: is woman castrated?" as Naomi Schor, paraphrasing Barthes, has
put it.22
This undecidability over what Freud called the "fact" of castration (a fact that unravels quickly into a highly unlikely hypothesis, as Charles Bernheimer has reminded us) constitutes, as we know, the defining feature of psychoanalytic fetishism. What is brought to the fore by the Goncourt brothers' masculinized representation of eighteenth-century femininity is the extent to which this undecidability was featured all along in the culturally endorsed clothing fetishism of an entire epoch. La Femme au dix-huitieme siecle leads, one could say, to a reappraisal of vestimentary female fetishism and its hither to suppressed connections to masquerade.
Interestingly enough, it was Freud who inaugurated this under taking in a little-known lecture delivered to the Vienna Psychoana lytic Society in 1909. Going against the conventional ban on female fetishists, he suggested that "all women. . . are clothes fetishists" because fashion, by magnetizing the gaze, both represses and de-represses a woman's desire to show herself:
In the world of
everyday experience, we can observe that half of humanity must
be classed among the clothes
fetishists. All women, that is, are clothes fetishists.
Dress plays a puzzling role in them.
It is a question again of the repression of the
same drive, this time, however, in
the passive form of allowing oneself to be seen,
which is repressed by clothes, and on
account of which, clothes are raised to a
fetish. Only now we understand why
even the most intelligent women behave
defenselessly against the demands of
fashion. For them, clothes take the place of
parts of the body, and to wear the
same clothes means only to be able to show
what the others can show, means only
that one can find in her everything that one
can expect from women.23
************
22. Naomi Schor, "Fetishism and Its Ironies," Nineteenth-Century
French Studies 17 (Fall—Winter 1988—89) 94.
23. Freud and Fetishism: Previously Unpublished Minutes of the
Vienna Psycho analytic Society." ed. and trans. Louis Rose, Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 57 (1988): 156.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[81]
This new addition to the Freud archive (buried until recently in Otto Rank's personal papers) offers a fetishism ingeniously dissociated from castration anxiety. The female superego (or to defer again to Joan Copjec's expression, the "sartorial superego") that emerges assimilates fetishism into narcissism and in the process takes away many of narcissism's pejorative connotations. 24
Copjec's notion of the sartorial superego (derived from 3. C. Flugel's 1930 classic The Psychology of Clothes and applied to the functionalist ethics of dress codes in the modern age, particularly as they appertain to that curtailing of male display that Flugel calls "The Great Masculine Renunciation") invites us to consider the "low" culture of fashion writing (along with its massive upsurge in consumer appeal in the fin de siecle) as the source of an ethic of womanliness as masquerade. Though Flugel applied the term to an ascetic turn in dressing rather than to appanages of decadent display, one could say that in the high pageantry and "exotic magnificence" that Flugel emphasized in eighteenthcentury cos tume there was a ceremonial aura approaching religious decorousness. paradoxically, puritanical dress codes shared with ancien-regime splendor a general tendency to subordinate the human body itself. As Flugel noted: "during the period of artificiality that distinguished the eighteenth century, the body was largely to serve as a support for gorgeous clothes"25 This anaclitic, purely supportive social body describes, on the one hand, the dependency of the female masquerader on a masculine social gaze that mandates subordination of the female body, but on the other, it prepares the ground for redefining the notion of "support" as an anchoring, stabilizing ontology for the female subject, what Flugel called "the extension of the bodily self." The latter option might allow us to reread fashion writing not as a genre of egregiously reductive female typecasting but as the literary support structure of a critical femininity.
One of the most adept and prolific devotees of the genre was,
of course, Octave Uzanne, whose apostrophes to muffs, gloves, para sols, and the
fan so delighted the public that, to his consternation,
************
24. Joan Copjec, "The Sartorial Superego," October 5o (Fall 1988): 57—96.
25. J. C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes (New York:
International University Press, 1969) p. 158.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[82]
they overshadowed his subsequent "serious" publications on la feminite
psychologique (psychological femininity).26 Like the Goncourt brothers Uzanne
codified the tropes of feminine sensibility already in place within the courtly
tradition of French letters or within a popular journalism of the 1830s perhaps
best exemplified by the Chroniques parisiennes of Delphine de Girardin.27
Certainly he was not alone: without even attempting to enumerate the myriad
professional contributors to fashion bulletins destined for a female readership,
we have only to evoke the names of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, Remy
de Gourmont Mallarme, and Paul Bourget to see that Uzanne was in the best of
company when it came to Perpetuating the genre of "elegant realism."
Uzanne situated himself in a line of "women's" poets famous for privileging rhetorical preciosity over concision and pith:
Le style compact du
savant ou de l'archeologue ne convient guere a un sujet ou
les graces seules doivent regner, ou
un poete ami de Ia femme, un Ovide, un
Petrarque un Musset ou un Swinburne
trouvait assurement d'assez subtils
vocables pour traduire Ia pense dans
une forme exquise.
The compact style
of the scholar and archeologist hardly suits a subject on which
only the graces should reign supreme,
only poets such as Ovid, Petrarch, Musset,
or Swinburne true friends of woman,
find vocables sufficiently subtle to translate
the idea of so exquisite a form.28
Fashion, he vehemently insisted, was woman's only
"literature" and he himself the only true "historian" of
this art form. The names of clothes were in themselves poetic vocables
("The muff!" he exclaimed. "It's name alone has something
adorable, downy, and voluptuous about it.")29 Uzanne described new outfits
("costumes inedits") as unpublished masterpieces, avenues for fantasy
and escape for 'the imagination, subjects over which women argued and "epilogued."
If in some instances he applied the language of textuality to fashion,
*************
26. In his preface to a new edition of Les Ornements de tafemme (Paris:
Librairies Imprimeries Reunies, 1892), originally published in 1882, Uzanne
complains that he was henceforth referred to exclusively as "l'Auteur de
l'Eventail" (the author of the Fan).
27. Delphine de Girardin, Chroniq es par siennes 1836—1848 ed. Jean-Louis Vissiere (Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1986); see in particular her "La Parure est un langage" (1839), pp. 210—17; ;'Feminitude" (1840), pp. 243—5 1; "Recettes de beaute" (1844), 384—87; "Masculin, feminin" (1845) pp. 393—96; and "Les Pompiers du bal" (1847), pp. 398—412.
28. Octave Uzanne, L'Art et tes art ifices de ta beaute (Paris: Juven, 1902), p. 181.
29. Octave Uzanne, Les Orssements de tafemme p. 239.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[83]
in other instances he generated a poetics directly out of neologisms afforded by
the images of fashion plates: "Oh! les divines chemises cintrees et
ajustees, fanfreluchees de larges collerettes plongeaient l'esprit darts
l'inquietante obsession des formes qu'elles devaient revetir! [Oh! those divine
close-fitting chemises, frilled with wide lace collars, how they plunged the
spirit into a disquieting obsession with the forms that they were destined to
array!]." 30 Adjectives such as fanfreluche (from the Latin fanfaluca,
meaning "bagatelle," and the German pompholux, "air
bubble"), turned here as a past participle so as to heighten the power of
sartorial affect, add a mimologically "feminine" mannerism to Uzanne's
hackneyed repertory of mythological allusions. They also serve to underscore the
dark, obsessive side of clothing mania that Uzanne understood to be the secret
bond between himself and his female reader.
What stands out in Uzanne's belletristic tributes to the narcissistic female fetishist (perhaps more than in the works of his canonical rivals) is an almost palpable will-to-be woman, a desire to write himself as woman through the art of sartorial describing. The effect of his rhetoric can be almost uncanny; even if one rejects the cloying, overly "artistic" undulations of his style it comes back at us with the force of a shocking reflection. Uzanne (much like Clerambault, rumored to have secretly dressed up in the Muslim veils that he so delighted in photographing on Algerian women) doubles the already doubled feminine masquerade, creating a masculine travesty or cross-dressed impersonation of women in prose.
Uzanne began his most renowned work—a history of the fan—
with a statement indicating his pleasure in rhetorically "trying on"
women's garb: "L'auteur de l'Eventail ose se presenter is vous dans le
neglige du home [The author of The Fan dares to present himself to you in the
deshabille of home]."3' Alternately speaking as a woman and to a woman, he
shifts from the role of transvestite to lover, cajoling his addressee in the
confidential tones of an habitue of the boudoir: "Causons donc, s'il vous
plait, de cette causerie intime qu'un terme plus malpropre qu'impropre appelle
le deboutonne de la conversation [Let's chat then, if you will, about that
intimate patter which might itself be called, using a term more malapropric than
improper,
*************
30. Octave Uzanne, L'Art et tes artifices p. 215.
31. Octave Uzanne, L'Eventail (Paris: A. Quantin. 1882), p. 1.
Further references to this work will be abbreviated LE.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[84]
the 'unbuttoned' conversation)" (LE 2). Elsewhere, he adopted the voice of
the fetishist regressing, as Freud described him, to that last moment when the
mother could still be regarded as phallic. Infantile phantasms of the most
blatant variety hover around this memory of the "maternal muff':
Tout enfant, nous
aimons is jouer avec le grand Manchon maternel, is passer les
mains au rebours darts l'electricite
des longs poils, is plonger notre visage darts
l'odeur fauve et capiteuse du pelage
et is nous servir de ce sac fourre dans des
espiegleries inconcevables, en y
faisant cache-cache avec des menus objets ou
en y enfouissant le chat familier qui
s'acagnarde en sa tiedeur.
As a small child,
we loved to play with the big maternal Muff, stroking and
touching the electricity of its long
hairs; plunging our face into the heady, animal
scent of its skin; getting up to
unthinkable monkey-tricks with this furry sack,
from playing peek-a-boo with small
objects to burying our dear cat inside to
snuggle in its warmth.32
When Freud wrote of hair and fur becoming a fetish for his juvenile subject, he would hardly have found a more appropriate example than this quasi-autobiographical passage by Uzanne. What is perhaps more interesting, however, is the way in which this blazon of the muff succeeds in personifying femininity even as it blocks perception of the mother by privileging the sartorial part over the living whole. The muff flirts! Despite the safely distancing effect of fetishistic displacement, the woman's dangerous sexuality shines through, communicated through the very medium chosen to thwart its immanence.33 One could say that in this description and those like it throughout Uzanne's work, the fetish is the feminine; their languages are one and the same.
Following in the steps of the Goncourt brothers, Uzanne
evolved his discourse of femininity out of the nostalgically reconstructed,
extremity-enhanced body of eighteenth-century woman:
**************
32. Uzanne, Les Ornements de to femme, pp. 239—40.
33. Uzanne created a similar effect in the section
"Furs" in Les Ornement.s de to femme: "Thus amid her furs, woman,
this adorable plant, this mimosa pudica, releases a beauty more mysterious, more
gentle, more alluring, more envelopped and envelopping, as if the electricity of
this furry skin were wafting into the air surrounding this provocative daughter
of Eve, a sensuality enticing like a subtle caress that lightly brushes our
senses as it passes" (p. 41).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[85]
Du Manchon, ornement du dehors, je
conduirai le lecteur is la Chaus sure, is
l'ensorcelante petite Mule, cene
friponne qui cache son museau de soie ou de
maroquin sous le flot des dentelles
et que Fragonard nous fait voir dans les
Hasards de l'escarpolette, lancee
gracieusesnent en l'air, s'envolant plutet que
tombant is terre, avec un esprit et
une volupte de facture qui ne se retrouvent
plus que darts les peintures des
Cytberes d'autrefois. Ne sera-t-il pas charmant
de se complaire dans l'histoire de
ces coquets Souliers de femme, qui eurent
toujours leurs fanatiques admirateurs
et qui inspirerent is Restif de la Bretonne le
roman du Pied de Fanchette qui debute
comme un chant de poeme epique: Je
suis l'historien veridique des
conquetes brillantes du pied mignon d'une belle?
From the Muff, an
external ornament, I will lead the reader to the shoe, to that
enchanting little Mule, this minx who
hides her silk or leather snout under a
cascade of lace and who Fragonard
invites us to see in The Little Swing flung
gracefully into the air, taking off
rather than dropping to earth, with a spirit and
voluptuousness of facture that one
only finds in the bygone paintings of Gythera.
Wouldn't it be charming to gratify
oneself with the history of these stylish feminine
shoes, footwear that has always had
its fanatical admirers, inspiring Restif de la
Bretonne's novel Fanchette's Foot
which begins like an epic poem: "I am the
truthful historian of the brilliant
conquests of a beautiful woman's adorable foot?"
(LE 4—5)
Like Maupassant's character Olivier Bertin (a ladies' man and society painter) in Fort comme la mort (t889), the narrator of The Fan warrants the sobriquet "realist Watteau," for in addition to reviving the eighteenth-century taste for scenographies of feminine frivolity, he is as guilty as Bertin of garnering favor as a "photographer of dresses and coats.
There are several possible explanations for Uzanne's
strategic revival of a clothed rather than a partially naked eighteenth century
female body (and certainly Fragonard and Boucher provided ample visual examples
of the latter). His foremost concern was to counteract the encroachment of the
execrated "modern nude (as in Manet's Olympia or Degas's bathers) on the
aesthetic taste of the fin de siecle. Uzanne complained that "la nudite
qu'elle expose exprime une beaute malsaine et sincere, une volupte perverse, une
mani~re de sadisme ddirant et capiteux
*************
34. Guy de Maupassant, Fort comme la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 104.
Bertin exhibits all the symptoms of Uzanne's confessed affliction—vestignomia
or clothing mania. He penetrates the secrets of feminilite with his intimate
knowledge of "the thousand little nothings" comprising a woman's
toilette; he experiences vertigo and a sense of religious awe upon entering the
commercial "sanctuaries" where feminine accessories are displayed; his
eyes become uncontrollably riveted by fabric, and his hands reach for lace like
those of the kleptomaniac fetishists described in criminological records of the
188os.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[86]
[the nudity displayed by the modern nude was an overly sincere, unhealthy
beauty, a per verse voluptuousness, a sadistic manner at once ecstatic and
heady]."35 Vampiric, gaunt, anemic, chlorotic, convulsive, and above all
hystericized, this decadent nu pathologique excited hallucinatory flights of
eloquence in Uzanne's "sociology of women," published in 1910.
Seen in this light, Uzanne's Verkleidungstrieb may be interpreted as part of a deep compulsion to keep the specter of the "essential" naked female body at bay. Pathologizing the nude was an ingenious technique for sustaining the fetishistic illusion of an idealized femininity. In Son Altesse lafemme (Her Highness the Woman; t885), the narrator prostrates himself accordingly before a hieratic goddess whose aloofness, in contrast to the vulgarly available "modern nude" inspires reverence and awe. The work is imbued with a nostalgic cult of the woman of yesteryear, specifically the eighteenth- century type designated as la Caillette. "La Caillette!" Uzanne teases his reader, "cejoli mot vous trouble et vous surprend, tres curieuse Lectrice! ... Ce mot resume dans sa plus haute et sa plus mignonne expression le type gracieux, evapore et fripon de la femme au XVIII siecle. [The Rennet! this pretty word provokes and surprises you, curious reader! This word resumes in its highest and most appealing expression the gracious, vaporous, roguish type of eighteenth-century woman]."36 Vapid, frivolous, feckless, pervious ("She takes on a lover like a new dress, because it's the custom"), debauched ("In her person there is a kind of exquisite depravity of sentiment and expression"), and flighty—a cross between a quail (caille) and a pebble (caillou)—la Caillette emerges as the most fetishizable male fantasy of the masquerading woman to be found, identifiable (as Uzanne notes), in the works of every major libertine author of the eighteenth century: Duclos, Casanova, Crebillon fils, Marivaux, Retif de la Bretonne, and the marquis de Caraccioli (A 117—18).
For Uzanne la Caillette looms large as a historic reminder of
an age of erotic theatricality long gone. He implicitly pays homage to the
"constructed" eroticism of the eighteenth-century female body
***************
35. Octave Uzanne, Etudes de sociotogies ['eminines: Parisiennes de ce temps
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1910), p. 50.
36. Octave Uzanne, Son Altesse lafrinme (Paris: Quantin,
i88~), p. 114. Like most of Uzanne's deluxe publications, this edition contains
arresting illustrations by Henri Gervex,J. A. Gonzalbs, L. Kratkb, Albert Lynch,
Adrien Moreau, and Felicien Rops. Further references to this work will be
abbreviated A.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[87]
when he lingers over the nomenclature of hairstyles in his history of coiffure
in the age of Louis XVI. Here Marie Antoinette receives special praise for
ushering in "un systeme d'outrance, de retroussis, de boursouflure qui, en
quelques annees, prit de pyramidales proportions [a system of excess, of
curling, of puffing up, that, in a few years, took on pyramidal
proportions]."37 In their expenditures and disregard for functionalism, the
coiffures of eighteenth-century woman transparently signify sexual pleasure
enjoyed in and for itself; a disinterested, gratuitous gratification forever
insubordinate to civilization's reproductive aims.38
If eighteenth-century fashion was occasionally harnessed in
the service of an apology for libertinage, it was also evoked for purely
aesthetic purposes. Uzanne dilated on the "heroism" of eighteenth-
century woman's grand tenue: "On observe son heroisme, ses stratagemes
d'amour, ses coquetteries, son mepris de l'opinion, son extravagance dans les
modes, et is la fois sa science de fee pour draper un chef-d'oeuvre de costume
avec quelques metres d'etoffe sans valeur [One observes her heroism, her
strategies in love, her coquetry, her contempt for opinion, her extravagance in
fashion, and her fairy genius in draping a masterpiece of costume in meters of
priceless cloth]" (A 267). In the monumentalization of falling drapery, in
the exorbitant spectacle of fabric thrown in abundance over horizontally
extending poufs, the rococo acquires a solemnity and pomp normally reserved for
the classical sublime. Eighteenth- century woman's grandeur "freezes"
an erotic credo of perpetual foreplay in time and testifies to the mysterious
process by which raw materiality is converted into the value-saturated commodity
fetish. Equally, we can see in his larger-than-life shroud an allegori cal
representation of the female body's transformation into womanliness: nothing
becomes something; a lifeless robe becomes an aura- soaked veil.
***********
37. Octave Uzanne, La Parure excentrique ~poque Louis XVI: Coffures de styte
(Paris: Edouard Rouveyre, s8g~), pp. 16—17. This tiny, jewel-like book
contains marvelous illustrations of the most remarkable eighteenth-century
fashions in hairdressing.
38. Uzanne's endorsement of this symbol of nonutilitarian,
antibourgeois sexuali ty forms a piece with his apology for an ethic of
libertinage in Le Bric-is-brac de t'amour (Paris: Edouard Rouveyre, 1879), p.
126. In a chapter on libertinage Uzanne bemoans the nineteenth-century
censorship and medicalization of open sexual practices: "Today we
understand sexual libertinage to be 'a sensual derangement and a bodily
intemperence' when we would rather hear only 'tasteful delicacy and delectation
of pleasure,' variants on this spinet of love which, alas, possesses no more
than a single octave" (p. 126). Forced to go underground, undermined by the
sickly nineteenth-century taste for sentimentality, libertinage has suffered
many setbacks, according to Uzanne. His chapter concludes with a plea to bring
back the pleasures of a grand century.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[88]
For Uzanne, as for Georg Simmel, writing a mere decade later, the veil was
perhaps the preeminent sign of the feminine, the image behind the image of his
cherished fan: "In the gesture of the fan, in the glistening of precious
stones or the fold of the veil, is there not, for sensitive souls, the whole
secret of the heart?" "The little veil is a total symbol," he
wrote; "when a mistress takes it off or puts it on, glimmers of abandon,
hope, and tenderness if not melancholia and inexpressible sadness pass through
her gaze."39 Rarely did he miss an opportunity to expatiate upon the
seductive symbolism of this most mysterious feminine accoutrement. Entering a
sanctuary of intimate apparel he confesses:
Je ne sais rien de
plus troublant, de plus cajoleur is l'oeil, de plus souple, de plus
adorable, de plus chatouilleux au
toucher que tous ces voiles legers, brillants et
superfins...Au course d'une recente
visite is une maison de grande lingerie de
luxe, il mesembla vivre dans un
milieu Edenique ofs les houris auraient laisse leurs
voiles de lumiere.
I know of nothing
more troubling, more cajoling to the eye, more soft, adorable,
and tickling to the touch than these
light, sparkling, transparent veils. ..During a
recent trip to one of the great
lingerie shops, it seemed that I was living in an
Edenic milieu where the houris might
have left their veils of light.40
Refuting the symbolism of Nietzsche's misogynist veil, Simmel
observed that the "girdles and petticoats that fulfill the function of a
fig leaf' paradoxically render concealment itself ornamental.4' As
************
39. Uzanne, L' Art et tes arttfices,'pp. i8s, 227.
40. Ibid., p.215.
41. Georg Simmel, "Flirtation (Die Koketterie)," in
Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans. Guy Oakes (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1984), 147—48. "Die Koketterie" was first
published by Simmel in Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essais (Leipzig, 1911).
In speaking of Nietzsche's "misogyny" I am referring specifically to
passages in Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science in which Nietzsche claimed
that woman's self-adornment and concern with beauty were the emblems of
philosophical mendacity. For a critique of the veil as philosophical metaphor of
femininity (linking the discourse of the veil to fetishism as "faked
orgasm"), see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay "Displacement and the
Discourse of Woman," in Disptocement: Dercida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). pp. s69—95. More recently, Mary
Ann Doane has examined these problems in relation to film theory in her essay
"Veiling over Desire: Close-ups of the Woman," in Feminism and
Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, sg8g), pp. 105—41.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[89]
if picking up where Uzanne left off, he located the mystery by which femininity
acquires value in a chain of dual significations: "consent and
refusal," "giving and not-giving," and "having and
not-having' Flouncing, waving, winking, veiling—all these gestures are for
Simmel the legible expressions of a dual signification that places the male
possession of woman enticingly into question:
It seems to be the
universal experience of male sensibility that the
woman—indeed, the deepest, most
devoted woman, whose charm is
inexhaustible--holds back some
ultimate, indecipherable and unattainable quality
even in the most passionate offering
and disclosure of herself. From the
perspective of the man, however, the
woman's mode of being appears as a
Not-Yet, an unredeemed promise, an
unborn profusion of obscure possibilities
that have not yet developed far
enough beyond their psychic location to become
visible and apprehensible. 42
If one follows Simmel's optimistic association of ornamental secrets with the outlines of an untapped feminine potentiality, then one might say that Uzanne's vestignomia leads not to an alienated pantomime of masculinity (foregrounded by the Goncourts) but, rather, in the direction of a nuanced intimation of the female sartorial superegoY3 Using Simmel, then, we might interpret Uzanne's fetishistic language of clothes as referring to a "Not-yet" of femininity—a fullness without emptiness.
I have used Uzanne and the Goncourt brothers' readings of
eighteenth century woman to demonstrate the historical relativism of femininity
as a literary and psychoanalytical invention. It seemed to me that their texts
provided particularly clear illustrations of how certain stereotypical
attributes of womanliness came to be codified in such a way as to survive into
our own time. The Goncourts' La Fern me au dix-huitieme siecle exemplified the
unmasking of discursive femininity by the eruption of masculinity onto the
***************
42. Simmel, "Flirtation," Pp. 147—48.
43. Pierre Saint-Amand's emphasis on the ornamented body of
Marie Antionette leads in this direction. He makes the case that "the
history of Marie Antoinette could be reconstituted according to a series of
adornments, each one corresponding to a crucial moment in her short life.
Framing her flight to Varennes and ultimate beheading as a staged set piece, an
act called "The Final Wardrobe," Saint-Amand reads the fullness of her
character as she stands disheveled, badly dressed, her hair shockingly white
before the crowd. Paradoxically, he argues, the crowd makes of her lack of
adornment a kind of martyrized ornament.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[90]
sartorial image. By contrast, Uzanne's speaking fetishes blur the gender
distinctions habitually assigned to specific apparel, as in R. Redelsperger's
"Memoirs of a Corset," in which the narrator, personified as a talking
corset stay, is both feminized as it shapes itself to the female body and
masculinized as it competes with a jealous husband for the attentions of his
lingerie-smitten wife.44 Uzanne's cross-dressed writing of the feminine may
ultimately be read through a feminist perspective as a send-up of gendered
textuality, a pastiche or "performance" of sartorial pleasure that
serves to unfix ontological gender codes.
By investigating these representations of the constructibility
of femininity, I hoped to underscore its tenuousness as a masquerade of gender.
But ,the theory of the masquerade itself has proved to be inextricable from
essentialist commonplaces associated with femininity. As we all know, Joan
Riviere's articulation of "womanliness as a masquerade" has endured,
renewed by film critics such as Mary Ann Doane as part of her effort to define
the psychology of female spectatorship. What remains somewhat unclear to me is
just why one would want to retain such a theory. With its language of veils,
masks, and sexual travesty, the discourse of the masquerade seems always to
participate in the very obfuscation of femininity that it seeks to dispel.
Though invented by a woman psychoanalyst to explain the "flaunting of
femininity" on the part of intellectual women, the theory of the masquerade—associated
with the art of camouflaging masculine as feminine—may ultimately qualify as
just another mask of phallocentric psychoanalysis. Even if one wants to argue
that the masquerade provides a "screen-test" for a female superego,
the psychohistorical perplex remains: if femininity, in its most historically
flamboyant incarnation ultimately reverts to masculinity (as the Goncourts' text
seems to suggest), then in what does the construct of femininity inhere?45 How
did woman come to be identified with womanliness and then trapped behind the
mask of the masquerade? Is the masquerade feminism's fetish?
***********
44. R. Redelsperger, "Mbmoires d'un corset," L'Art et la Mode (s88o):
33—36. The corset speaks throughout in the first person, bragging of his
intimate knowledge of women, recounting his seduction of a married lady and near
destruction at the hands of the husband who tugs too hard on the laces.
45. Jane Gaines also addresses these questions in her
introduction to a volume of essays entitled Fabrications: Costume and the Female
Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Heizog (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp.
20-27. This book, published after I had written my section on the masquerade,
makes a number of similar points with respect to contemporary culture and the
fashion industry.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[91]
Joan Riviere's powerful essay "Womanliness as a Masquerade," presented
as a response to Ernest Jones's paper "The Early Development of Female
Sexuality," appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in
1929. As Stephen Heath has pointed out, no thorough examination of Riviere's
life and contribution to the history of psychoanalysis exists to date.46 She was
analyzed by Ernest Jones (with whom, according to Heath, she probably had an
affair), by Freud (whose collected papers she translated), and later by Melanie
Klein. After she herself became an analyst, D. W Winnicot became one of her
patients. A bibliography of her work appeared in the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis in 1963, but aside from the masquerade essay her writings remain
shrouded in oblivion.
That Riviere's theory of the masquerade has secured so
privileged a place in contemporary critical thought seems all the more curious
when one rereads the piece closely—it contains some bizarre twists and leaves
issues unresolved. Riviere's premiere analysand was "an American woman
engaged in work of a propagandistic nature which consisted principally in
speaking and writing'47 Later we learn that this lady propagandist is a
southerner, plagued by the fantasy of seducing a black man intent on raping her.
Riviere (who was English and for a time educated in Germany) makes no mention of
the American sociocultural context of racism, fear, and bigotry so clearly at
work in the fantasy life of her patient. The woman dreams of washing off her
guilty pleasure after sex with the black man (a masquerade of innocence
according to Riviere), but the question of her erotic negrophobia—and by
extension, of psychoanalysis and race—are never alluded to in Riviere's
elaborations of the case (nor, to my knowledge are these issues addressed by
subsequent critics, with the exception of Mary Ann Doane).48 At the very least,
the lesson we might draw here is that the chosen prototype of the masquerading
woman is a problematic figure—abstracted from history and culture and blind to
the psychosexual politics of racism.
************
46. Stephen Heath, "Joan Riviere and the Masquerade," in Formations of
Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen,
1986), pp. 45—61.
47. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," in Formations of Fantasy, p. 36. Further references to this essay will be abbreviated "WM'
48. Mary Ann Doane, "Masquerade Reconsidered: Further
Thoughts on the Female Spectator," Discourse 2 (Fall—Winter 1988—89):
48. Doane's article on her earlier essay (a response prompted by Tania
Modleski's critique in The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist
Theoty [New York: Methuen, ig88]) contains a succinct account of the problems
posed for feminist thought by Riviere's masquer ade essay. Further references to
this essay will be abbreviated "MR'.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[92]
Riviere's paragon of femininity is a successful career woman, an exemplary wife,
an accomplished homemaker, and an elegant dresser. The only signs betraying her
suppressed inward instability are those of sartorial extravagance and what
Riviere refers to as a tendency toward "compulsive ogling and
coquetting," particularly manifest during her delivery of public lectures
("WM" 37). Riviere's interpretation of the jarring contrast between
her intellectual seriousness and her simpering, flirtatious manner emphasizes
theatricality and gender crossover: "The exhibition in public of her
intellectual proficiency, which was in itself carried through successfully,
signified an exhibition of herself in possession of the father's penis, having
castrated him. The display once over, she was seized by horrible dread of the
retribution the father would then exact. Obviously it was a step towards
propitiating the avenger to endeavor to offer herself to him sexually"
("WM" 37). Though the explanation is somewhat crude and fails to
contest the primacy accorded castration and Penisneid in Freudian theory, what
is perhaps of far greater concern in her argument is its elliptical logic, a
logic leading away from rather than toward any resolution of the famous
"riddle of femininity." Womanliness is construed as an effect of
masked masculinity, as the passage most often cited by feminist critics attests:
Womanliness
therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the
possession of masculinity and to
avert the reprisals expected if she was found to
possess it—much as a thief will
turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to
prove that he had not stolen the
goods. The reader may now ask how I define
womanliness or where I draw the line
between genuine womanliness and the
"masquerade." My suggestion
is not, however, that there is any such difference;
whether radical or superficial, they
are the same thing. ("WM" 38).
Clarifying the contours of the empty representation lying at
the very core of Riviere's notion of womanliness, Stephen Heath has written of
this passage: "In the masquerade the woman mimics an authentic—genuine.......womanliness
but then authentic womanliness is such a mimicry, is the masquerade ("they
are the same thing"); to be a woman is to dissimulate a fundamental
masculinity, femininity is that dissimulation."49 A double cover-up, a
make-believe semblance of womanliness
**********
49. Heath. "Joan Riviere," p. 49.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[93]
Unmasking the Masquerade 93 superimposed on a pretend masculinity, a
camouflage of persiflage—this notion of womanliness (recalling the Goncourts'
portrait of the phallic femme d'etat) exhibits the structural logic of fetishism
insofar as the (Freudian) fetish functions as a · substitute for something that
was never there in the first place. Riviere herself encourages this analogy when
she implies that the male equivalent of the female masquerade is fetishism.
Summarizing the case of a transvestite she noted: "The excitation was
produced by the sight of himself with hair parted in the center, wearing a bow
tie. These extraordinary 'fetishes' turned out to represent a disguise of
himself as his sister; the hair and bow were taken from her"
("WM" 40; author's emphasis). One might conclude here that fetishism
is failed masquerade, for when the man dons the mask of womanliness it remains
an unconvincing representation of femininity, whereas the opposite is true when
women adopt a cover-up for masculine attributes—their travesty appears to be
entirely believable.
What impresses me in all this is not so much that the sex anatomically endowed with a penis seems perverse when it tries to pretend not to have it (implicitly reinforcing the security in being male) in contrast to the woman (who instinctively, "naturally" veils her lack) but, rather, that the disguises adopted by both man and woman refer back to a travestied masculinity, or as Lacan would say, to a veiled "phallus" possessed by nobody.50 Femininity remains devoid of content except insofar as (1) the layers of its dissimulation are stripped away to reveal a fundamentally masculine Imago; (2) it slides into masochism (as in the case of female Harlequin romance readers who, as Ann Douglas has observed, enjoy "the titillation of seeing themselves, not necessarily as they are, but as some men would like to see them: illogical, innocent, magnetized by male sexuality and brutality"); and (3) it mimics what Lacan termed "virile display?'51
Lacan, rather underhandedly, returns the masking function to
masculinity even as he springs sexual identity loose from biological
essentialism. In "La Signification du phallus," he uses the masquerade
to corroborate Freud's "view that there is only one libido, his text
clearly indicating that
**********
50. Doane also notes that Riviere's argument "makes femininity dependent on
masculinity for its very definition" ("MR" 47).
55. Ann Douglas, "Soft-porn Culture," New Republic 30 (Aug. sg8o): 29, as cited by Tania Modleski in Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 1982), p. 30. Jacques Lacan, "La Signification du phallus" in Ecrits II (Paris: Seuil/Pointa, 1971), p. 115.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[94]
he conceives of it as masculine in nature."52 Riviere's essay, as we have
said, seems to suggest that there are only differing guises of an essential
masculinity common to both sexes. Lacan's appropriation of Riviere points to a
similar conclusion despite its distortion of her argument. Where Riviere had
described the masquerade of womanliness in blindly hetero sexualist terms as a
compensatory feint for a phallicism that risks tabulation to lesbianism, Lacan
sees (heterosexual) woman as successfully obtaining a semblance of manliness
through masquerade:53
Paradoxical as this
formulation might seem, I would say that it is in order to be
the phallus, that is to say, the
signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman
will reject an essential part of her
femininity, notably all its attributes through
masquerade. It is for what she is not
that she expects to be desired as well as
loved. But she finds the signifier of
her own desire in the body of the one to
whom she addresses her demand for
love. Certainly we should not forget that the
organ actually invested with this
signifying function takes on the value of a fetish.
With Lacan's formulation, we come full circle from male
fetishism as female masquerade manqu~ to women masquerading as fetishes, that
is, as false phalluses that permit the imaginary phallus which both sexes want,
but which neither sex has, to continue functioning as a man que & ~tre
("lack in being") that generates desire as it is brought into being.54
In her analysis of the costumes in Federico Fellini's film Juliette of the
Spirits,
***********
52. Lacan, "La Signification du phallus," trans. Jacqueline Rose under
the title "The Meaning of the Phallus," in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques
Lacan and the lcole freudienne (New York: Norton, sg8~), p. 8~: "The fact
that femininity takes refuge in this mask because of the Verdrdngung inherent to
the phallic mark of desire, has the strange consequence that, in the human
being, virile display itself appears as feminine" (p. 8~). 53. Lacan,
"The Meaning of the Phallus," p. 84. Judith Butler's reading (Gender
Trouble, p.84) of Riviere as "fearful of her own phallicism" provides
a crucial antiheterosexualist critique of the masquerade theory. She says;
"the donning of femininity as mask may reveal a refusal of a female
homosexuality and, at the same time, the hyperbolic incorporation of that female
Other who is refused—an odd form of preserving and protecting that love within
the circle of the melancholic and negative narcissism that results from the
physic inculcation of compulsory heterosexuality" (p. ~ 54. Butler offers
important critiques of Lacan's model of woman masquerading as a fetish. "At
least two very different tasks can be discerned from the ambiguous structure of
Lacan's analysis," she argues. "On the one hand, masquerade may be
understood as the performative production of a sexual ontology an appearing that
makes itself convincing as a 'being'; on the other hand, masquerade can be read
as a denial of a feminine desire that presupposes some prior ontological
femininity regularly unrepresented by the phallic economy" (Gender Trouble,
p. 47).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[95]
Micbele Montrelay, elaborating on Lacan, describes how, when woman masquerades
as a fetish, the results are unremittingly negative: "In this mountain of
crazy objects, these feathers, hats, and strange, baroque constructions rising
up like so many silent insignia, a dimension of femininity is clarified which
Lacan, appropriating Joan Riviere's term, designated as masquerade. But it must
be noted that this masquerade takes 'saying nothing' as its only end. Absolutely
nothing. And to produce this nothing, woman disguises herself with her own
body."55 Here the female body is fetishistic insofar as it functions as a
disguise or foil that lures the male subject into wanting something that he does
not really desire (woman) in order to preserve free and clear the erotic
territory of the ideal phallus (le manque a etre) that he continues to covet
elsewhere. Whether as prosthesis or personification of "nothing" the
masquerading woman appears in the self-depreciated role of lack sustainer, a
kind of supporting "cast" or "mainstay" of one in the
theater of phallocentric illusion.
In the first of two important essays on the female film
spectator, Mary Ann Doane attempts to redress this negative turn despite an
initial avowal that "the mask of femininity conceals a non-identity?'56 Her
interpretation~ influenced by the body poetics of Irigaray (though diverging
sharply from Irigaray's use of la mascarade to indicate the female mimicry of
the Oedipus complex, of woman's induction into the male libidinal economy),
hinges on a question of nearness/farness. The masquerade, she claims, "in
flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be
worn or removed. The masquerade's resistance to patriarchal positioning would
therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness, as
presence-to-itself~ as, precisely, imagistic" ("FM" 8 1—82).
For Doane, the wearability of the masquerade—the beguiling ease with which
such cladding is removed—affords women a critical distance from the
claustrophobia of their own bodies. It also advances a feminist project: the
masquerade proves to be an uneasy spectacle for the masculine viewer, serving
both "to defamiliarize female iconography" and "to disarticulate
male systems of viewing" ("FM" 82). In this piece, Doane takes us
to the
**************
55. Michble Mootrelay, L' Ombre et te nom: Sur tofeminitl (Paris: Minuit, 1977),
p. 75.
56. Mary Ann Duane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing
the Female Spectator," Screen 23, no. 3—4 (1982): 81. Further references
to this article will be abbreviated "FM."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[96]
brink of an undermined patriarchal positioning. She concludes her article
optimistically prophesying the advent of a female spectator, but this spectator
remains a specter awaiting definition. Returning to the topic six years later,
Doane is more circumspect toward the pitfalls involved in trying to use the
masquerade as a counterdiscourse to that of the female screen fetish ("her
status as spectacle rather than spectator"), yet even here the argument
concludes on a futuristic, hypothetical note:
Riviere's patient,
looking out at her own male audience, with impropriety, throws
the image of their own sexuality back
to them as "game," as 'joke," investing it,
too, with the instability and the
emptiness of the masquerade. Heath refers to this
as a "strong social-political,
feminist joke" in the manner of Virginia Woolf in
Three Guineas. As long as she is not
caught in her own act. As long as she does
not forget that the masquerades of
femininity and masculinity are not totally unreal
or totally a joke but have a social
effectivity we cannot ignore. We still need to
tell our own jokes, but hopefully
they will be different ones. Structurally different
ones. ("MR" 52—53;
author's emphasis)
In this 'joke" we see the glimmering outlines of an
ironic, sexually volatile, politically feminist subject with some chance of
survival but little protection against the risk of getting "caught in her
own act." In the end, her "act" depends too much perhaps on
Doane's laconic contention that masquerade can generate femininity from within,
eschewing reference to masculine essentialisms and the fetishistic conceit of
the present/absent phallus. Where does this leave us theoretically? Freud,
Riviere, Lacan, Montrelay, and Doane all seem to concur that femininity,
handicapped by its lack of a visual signifier equivalent in symbolic import to
the phallus and historically relative in the forms of its social construction,
disappears upon close inspection into a conceptual void, or at best, survives as
a surrogate masculinity.57
************
57. Alice Jardine reconfigures this void in another way when she applies
fetishism (as a synonym for oscillation and "a demand for doubling")
to the ambivalence within contemporary feminism over "essential"
differences. In contrast to paranoia (which for her implies that women know what
they are in knowing that they are different), feminist fetishism, oscillating
between "Women are different" and "No, they are not,"
reinvents the epistemological "dark continent" of womanliness.
Jardine's feminist fetishist, it appears, is plunged anew in darkness; deprived,
on the one hand, of an empowering, "fetishistic" illusion of
masculinity, and on the other, of the small comfort afforded by womanliness as a
masquerade. See Alice Jardine, "Notes for an Analysis," in Between
Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (New York: Routledge, 1989), p.
75.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------[97]
If the "womanliness as a masquerade" controversy sounds a pessimistic
note in the quest for an enabling articulation of femininity, a different tactic
may be in order. A return to the earlier problematic contained in Freud's
singular conception of the universal female clothes fetishist may in fact
provide an alternative approach. Despite its patronizing undertone, Freud's
stark announcement 'All women... are clothes fetishists" allows us to think
of woman's sartorial autoreification as the symptom of an extended, projected
affirmation of female ontology.
Citing Louis Flaccus's "Remarks on the psychology of Clothes" (1906), Flugel offers specific strategies for imparting an ethic to this narcissistic female fetishism: "Whenever we bring a foreign body into relationship with the surface of the body. . . the consciousness of our personal existence is prolonged into the extremities and surfaces of this foreign body, and the consequence is—feelings, now of an expansion of our proper self, now of the acquisition of a kind and amount of motion foreign to our natural organs, now of an unusual degree of vigour, power of resistance, or steadiness in our bearing. By reading sartorial augmentation as a complex sensation an inmixture of prolongation, vigor, resistance, steadiness, and thrilling contact with the "foreign"—Flaccus anticipated the notion of a sartorial superego. Years later, in a similar vein, the Lacanian analyst Bela Grunberger offered a revised look at feminine narcissism:
If woman, following
the tendency toward increased social homogenization and
the effacement of sexual difference,
seeks to benefit from a certain sexual liberty
(the same enjoyed by men), then she
cannot help investing her love life in a
narcissistic mode. She will valorize
her corporal superego in the most extended
sense, going from her body, her
clothes, and her adornments toward her
"interior," her house and
everything that functions as material support for her love
life.59
In this context, Grunberger's notions of physically extended
subjectivity and "material support" literalize sartorial figures of
speech as they recode them within the rhetoric of feminist psychoanalysis. Such
a rhetoric allows female subjectivity to be theorized in terms of an aesthetics
of ornamentation without immediate recourse to a
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58. Louis Flaccus, "Remarks on the psychology of Clothes," Pedagogicat
Seminary 53 (1906): 61, as cited by Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes, p. 34
59. Bela Grunbel'ger, "Jalons pour l'btude du narcissisme
dans la sexualite feminine," in La Sexualitl feminine, ed. Janine
Chasseguet. Smirgel (Paris: Petite Bibliothbque Payot, 1964). pp. 105—106.
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compensatory emphasis on phallic cover-up. As Georg Simmel wrote in what looks
like a prescient effort to wean gender theory from its fixation on feminine
lack: "It is, of course, a mistake to regard this 'lack of differentiation'
simply as a deficiency and a condition of inferiority. On the contrary, it is
the thoroughly positive mode of being of the woman, which forms its own ideal
and has no less legitimacy than the 'differentiated state' of the man?'60
Foreshadowing Irigaray's utopian dream of an asymmetrical sexual difference
beyond sameness, Simmel's "thoroughly positive mode of being of the
woman" encourages the unmasking of the masquerade as a theoretical
"get-up" for defensive womanliness but falls short of dispensing with
it altogether. Simmel's affirmation of ornament, recalling the Goncourts'
exultation in "cette mode de parade, de magnificence, d'eclat, imposee par
l'etiquette aux femmes de la cour [this fashion of parade, magnificence, show,
imposed by etiquette on ladies of the court], imparts an ethic of sartorial
presence to the aesthetic of masquerade. In this sense we might reread the
theory of the masquerade as corrected, so to speak, by sartorial female
fetishism, which supplants the notion of femininity as empty content or
infinitely layered veil, to replace it with a theory of materialized social
construction.
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60. Simmel, "Flirtation," p. 148.