Riviere states that "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..." (28) These women who have great strengths and publicly demand to treated as equals to the men in their field, yet compulsively demand masculine reassurance and approval are caught in a perpetual recycle of personal apocalypses
Consider the first case we are shown. The woman public speaker that is anxious despite her success immediately goes to the father figures at the gatherings to gain a reassurance. She castrates her father (metaphorically) to gain the power to speak in front of all these men; but once she is done, she becomes a scared little girl afraid of what her daddy with do to her now that she is no longer in a position of power. She has had a cataclysmic shift in consciousness. In other words, she has experienced her very own small apocalypse.
Now look at another case of the clever woman who mocks her femininity. As she gives a lecture to her colleagues, “she becomes flippant and joking” (29) as if to give the idea to this group of men that she is really not as masculine as they might think. This is how she saves face (yes, the irony is meant to be there) and this way she makes sure that does not invoke the wrath of the castrated father figures. She treats her masculinity “as a game, as something not real” (29). If this detrimental part of her self (as it is implied that we have a form of bisexuality, the male and female within us) is not in fact real because she has denied it its reality, thus she has called an apocalypse upon herself.
Much of the apocalyptic rhetoric is in the form of the Freudian theory discussing the woman’s primal urges against both the mother and the father. Woven within the primal needs are the desire to destroy the parental figures. She feels the need to possess and destroy her mother’s nipples and internal female organs, as well as castrating her father and taking his power to reproduce. By killing those who gave her life (a form of an apocalypse) and obtaining all that they once had she sufficiently becomes the last person on earth.
These women who are being studied have created their own apocalypticism through a destruction and debasing of the self as a whole (we take into consideration the idea of yin and yang as humans have a male and female balance to their minds), as well as attacking that form which they came. You can’t know where you are going unless you know where you have been; by deconstructing the mother and castrating the father, she cuts off the world that she was once a part of. Where can she go if there is nothing left?
What is more apocalyptic than that?
Let me start this comment with a preface: I know that we are supposed to be examining these readings as autonomous selections, but I really have a hard time talking about castration theory since it has mostly been disproven. Freud's work is no longer accepted as fact and many of his presuppositions were founded on faulty ground. He supposed masuclinity to be the norm, one from which women were supposed to form feminity in contrast to their fathers and in competition with their mothers. Furthermore,his ideas regarding penis envy are enough to make a misogynist wonder. But maybe that is the true apocalysm in Freud: that a commonly accepted and studied theory can become yesterdays psycho-babble, leaving a once-well-respected man to be mocked as a crazy coke head.
ReplyDeleteLeslie, first of all, what is at stake here is not determining whether the "castration theory" is true or false. If we take Freud (and Riviere) seriously, part of the problem would be that the castration complex exists at the level of the *unconscious*—so how would we ever be able to prove it or disprove it once and for all, if we can barely glimpse or articulate its functions? To talk about symbolic castration is not to try to state an obvious truth; rather, it is a subtle (and yes, offensive) theory about how and why people act from anxiety, and it is, if nothing else, *complex*. We must be careful not to dismiss the castration theory as if it were a simplistic concept.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, when we resort to language like "psycho-babble," we actually *support* Freud's theories of dynamic repression, resistance, and repulsion. The castration complex is unsettling and agitating to think about (and to consider seriously), but when we dismiss it in hostile terms, we end up providing solid evidence for psychoanalysis: it's called "denial." (The question then becomes, why do we resist taking this subject seriously?) It is all too easy to call Freud a "crazy coke head"—it is much harder to actually read him and take his work seriously (which doesn't mean that you have to 'believe' in it—it just means you have to try to wrap your mind around the nuances and complexities of the writing, which can be very challenging).
If we follow your apocalyptic conclusion about Freud, wouldn't this also mean that "yesterday's psycho-babble" could also come back to haunt us as 'truth' at some point in the future? If you really mean this about the previously accepted theories becoming outdated, what keeps the reversal from happening again, in the opposite direction? If this is what you are hinting at, you are right: it is apocalyptic to realize that what we are sure is 'truth' today could be exposed as an elaborate fiction tomorrow.
Concerning the form of your comment, this was to be a comment on Clélie's post on Riviere—and I do not see a direct engagement. It is more of a tangential rant against Freud, which is fine if you want to take this on, but this could be better executed through a careful reading of the text (and post) in question. Rather than conclude that it is obvious that Freud should be "mocked," it would be more useful in the context of our class to try to discover what remains unsettling about Freud's ideas, and what of his theoretical insights linger and continue to circulate. (Recourse to the "talking cure" in therapy is more popular than ever, for instance.)
Back to Joan Riviere's article, although the ideal image of womanliness or sort-of "prototype" of femininity has changed drastically since this article was written in 1929, the points Riviere makes about gender roles still hold true. Her article presents a different "apocalypse" from the one mentioned in the latter post: the realization that often one does not fit perfectly into the gender roles determined by society. In 1929, a business woman may have had to overcompensate for her intelligence and ability, and struggle to be accepted among her male peers. The “compulsive ogling and coquetting” may have helped her to gain male acceptance; making her appear less-threatening and more “feminine” (Riviere 27). Clearly this mask of femininity allowed her to function in the business world, but never allowed her to show her real self. By real self I mean the ability to show both her "womanly" and "manly" traits(assuming what Riviere says about women putting on a mask of womanliness to avoid anxiety is true). In a way, the unveiling of this “mask” and the realization of the “bi-sexuality inherent in us all” is the apocalypse (25). Whether or not you agree with Riviere’s theory, it is certainly a type of small apocalypse.
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