The Construction of the "Castrated Woman" in Psychoanalysis and Cinema

Author(s): Susan Lurie

Source: Discourse , Winter, 1981-2, Vol. 4 (Winter, 1981-2), pp. 52-74
Published by: Wayne State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44000262

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52

The Construction of the

"Castrated Woman"
in Psychoanalysis and Cinema

by Susan Lurie

When a discourse appeals directly to an image, to

an immediacy of seeing, as a point of its argument
or demonstration, one can be sure that all differ-
ence is being elided, that the unity of some ac-
cepted vision is being reproduced.1

Stephen Heath

A crucial development in the psychoanalytic account of the

male subject is the little boy's sight of the mother's "no penis."
While this is a shocking sight, it is not a confusing one : mother is
understood immediately as "castrated", as "mutilated" and lack-
ing everything a man who lacks a penis lacks. Because there are
people in the world without penises, the little males begin to
ponder the possibility of losing their penises, a contemplation
which soon crystallizes in the fearful fantasy that they will suffer
castration at the hands of their rival fathers as retaliation for their
oedipal desires. Though mother inspires castration fear, by em-
bodying castration, she does not threaten that castration herself;
afterall she is as pitifully harmless as a castrated man. And al-
though this terror at the sight of mother's "mutilation" triggers
unpleasant castration fear and the sad renunciation of the desire
for the mother, mother's castration turns out to be a fortuitous
cultural fact: the sight of her leads to the repression that will
guarantee the flourishing of patriarchal culture.2

Lacanian psychoanalysis grants an even greater significance to

the certain understanding of woman as castrated, making this
certain meaning the catalyst for the male's accession to the
symbolic and to language.3 In so doing, as Laura Mulvey has
observed, Lacanian discourse depends on the image of the
castrated woman to give order and meaning to the patriarchal
world;4 for it is woman's "lack" which produces the phallus as a
symbolic presence, the crucial difference that initiates the male
into the system of related differences that is language. So, the

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 53

unnerving sight of woman's "no penis" resounds with meaning

that is doubly profitable to male identity: woman signifies her
castration, and the castration fear her sight inspires in males
generates the blessedly invulnerable symbolic phallus. With
Lacan, as with Freud, the sight of the castrated woman prepares
the male for a promising future; he takes his place in a symbolic
order that guarantees he will sprout the badge of powerful desire
simply by maturing, while the woman will grow into the castra-
tion she signified at first sight - a physical condition very com-
patible with, if not necessary for, her occasional appearances as
the symbolic phallus.5

Interestingly, the very discoveries psychoanalysis makes of

castration fear in males, of its connection to the sight of woman,
of its role in repression and the formation of the unconscious, of its
importance in the construction of the symbolic - all raise prob-
lems for the arbitrary ascription of meaning inherent in those
other "discoveries" psychoanalysis makes of certain significance.
For the meaning of woman as her castration, the penis as the
determining mark of human wholeness (an assumption which
must precede the idea of woman as castrated), and the Lacanian
symbolic phallus as the privileged signifier of desire, are, I will
argue, constructions of meaning, intended to insure that the
human symbolic order - found to be so precariously rooted in
fear, in repression and the mysterious unconscious - is safely
anchored by given, immutable significances that protect and
privilege male desire.

Elsewhere I have argued that the sight of woman as castrated is

not an early or a terrifying perception, but rather a comforting
and mature male wish-fulfillment fantasy, designed to counter
the real terror the sight of woman inspires: that she is not
castrated despite the fact that she has "no penis," and does inspire
male fear for his castration.6 The sight of woman is a "crisis of
meaning" for the male, a crisis that inspires an inscription of
meaning onto her in the interests of preserving the signification of
the penis as what it means for him. Psychoanalytic discourse
participates in a broad cultural project (to which, as we shall see,
cinema contributes a complex effort) of constructing woman as
castrated precisely because the sight of her does not signify her
castration, because she appears to possess everything the penis
signifies for the male without possessing a penis. As Stephen
Heath has suggested, the "certainty of seeing" involved in
psychoanalytic configurations of woman is not an acknowledge-
ment of difference, but rather an elision of difference in a con-

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54

structed unity of vision.7 There is a big difference between wholly

constituted difference and a lack based on given criteria for the
one possible whole. In psychoanalysis, the meaning of woman is
fixed not as difference, but as "mutation" in the context of a
desired sameness : she is a "man without a penis."

What makes this crisis of meaning a survival crisis for the male
is that the castration fear inspired by the sight of woman's "no
penis" and, as psychoanalysis observes, linked to the little boy's
desire for (re)union with his mother is not, as I have further
argued, fantasized as forthcoming from the retaliatory father.
Rather, the castration feared in this connection is feared as a
direct result from a union with the mother in which the little boy is
transformed into her likeness, in which he, not she, is "castrated."
Unlike the straightforward one he is supposed to fear from dad
(and perhaps does fear in other contexts), castration by the
mother is feared as a function of her incomprehensible power to
subsume the distinguishing male part in a female whole that does
not require that part. This is the fear that makes the child relin-
quish his oedipal desires; for in the context of such a fearful
fantasy, the father's presence - even with all its restrictions - is a
recuperative one. It is a promise ( like the symbolic phallus ) for the
little boy's future existence, a promise not only that the child will
keep his penis, but that it will grow ever larger.

This fantasy of castration by a union with the mother in which

the boy is transformed into her likeness gets its impetus from the
socialization of little males as they are weaned from that early
union, the time of plenitude when mother is felt to be an extension
of the child's being. Because his penis gains in subjective and
social importance as the prized mark of his sexuality (and of all
his other developing capacities), in direct ratio to his growing
separation from infancy and mother's plenitude, the child comes
to regard his penis as compensation for that weaning. He feels he
has exchanged mother for his penis and the growing capacities it
symbolizes. And, as he continues to long for the re-establishment
of that perfect union, he fantasizes that the reverse exchange
would be required to get her back. Castration is fantasized as the
price he pays to mother whose "otherness," whose autonomous
desire is more and more apparent as he grows from infancy, and is
epitomized by her crucial difference : she has "no penis," a sign of
powerful difference and not of lack. If, in the infancy he recalls
and longs for, mother and child were one - that one, he now
fears, was her not him. In union with her, she is the whole he is
part of, and not vice versa. The recognition of his infancy as a time

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 55

of helplessness, combined with his penis as the signifier of his

growing self-sufficiency, serves to re-enforce this fantasy of cas-
tration by (re)union with his mother.

But the penis as the mark of the constellation of capacity and

sexuality that serves the male in his project of transforming an
unaccomodating world back into the plenitude of accomodation,
is complicated by a crucial contradiction. Of all his "compen-
satory" capacities, the imagination and his sexuality reign
supreme; only they provide a reliable, controllable pleasure - his
other abilities are still quite limited. In fact, the child resorts to
imagination and autoerotic activity in the face of his other limita-
tions; and often he resorts to them at the same time, infusing
autoerotic pleasure with fantasies of mastery in the world. But
this vital link-up raises contradictions that will remain unre-
solved throughout his life; for while his magical imagination can
transcend and transform a disappointing or threatening objective
world, his penis feels vulnerably objective, both to physical harm
and to the kind of transformation he knows the imagination can
effect on seeable objects. The investment of the penis with the
powers of the transcendent imaginative capacity it symbolizes
will always be troubled by the negative side of the identification -
the fear that his "transcendent" powers are as vulnerable as the
penis.

When the male discovers the shape and function of the sexual
parts woman does possess (so that her difference is clearly not a
lack but a different kind of presence), the dilemma worsens.
Female genitalia do not seem as objectively vulnerable as his own,
and the shape of the vagina, its internal parts, its "transforma-
tive" and creative function (in conception and even in coitus)
seem analogous to a "devouring" mouth, and even to the hidden
powerful imagination that transforms the objects it "takes in."
The problematic identification the male hopes for between his
sexual parts and his subjective powers does not seem troublesome
for women; and very likely it is a link-up he projects onto female
genitalia as the result of his aspirations for his own sexual parts.
At any rate, his fantasized estimation of her capacity grows, and
can now be centered at the site of the sight that triggered his fears
in the first place.8 Finally, the characteristics of sexual intercourse
compound the problem based in the fear of castration by union
with a woman; in coitus, the male not only joins with the woman,
but the penis "disappears" inside her, and what he gets back is
somewhat less than it was. Sexual intercourse turns out to be a
dead ringer for castration by union with a woman.

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56

The fantasy of the castrated woman is designed to assuage the

male's complex dread of woman by addressing the major compo-
nents of that dread. It guards against the feared "absorption" of
the male into the "different" female whole by making the penis
the necessary part for the human whole; and in the context of the
penis as the signifier of all the capacities that enable subjective
desire, it guarantees woman will be too helpless to cause him any
harm. Importantly, the castrated woman is most necessary for the
male when he desires adult sexual/loving unions with woman -
for this is the desire he will not relinquish, as he relinquished his
desire for his mother. The fears and disappointments of childhood
are disowned by the adult male (and, in fact, turn up as projec-
tions onto the castrated woman who frequently appears as the
"helpless child" - yet another way of representing woman as
"less than a man," and not as difference). It is the woman as lover
whose castration must be accomplished before she is safe for male
desire. The proliferation of efforts to "castrate" woman - both
literal and metaphorical - in preparation for marriage, love, and
sex, argues vigorously against the hypothesis that men regard
woman as a priori castrated. These efforts show up as the actual
genital mutilation suffered by women in certain primitve cultures
during puberty and marriage rites; in the genital mutilation,
torture, rape, and killing practised in pornography; and symboli-
cally, as we shall see, in the "romantic love" fiction film.
Psychoanalysis contributes its polite version of this ritual prepara-
tion of woman for male desire when the "fact" of woman's
castration triggers the processes that assure the mature male an
"identity with the ideal type of his sex," and "response without
great risk to the needs of his partner in the sexual relation."9

Perhaps the first step in the construction of the castrated wo-

man (which must be perfected by the time the mature male wants
her for his lover) is what psychoanalysis calls "disavowal," the
little boy's belief that mother has a penis, and his insistence, even
in the face of the facts, that she has one. Disavowal, I believe, can
be seen as an effort to ascribe to mother's perceived power and
separate (from his) desire the necessary presence of a penis. It is
an effort to insist that what the penis means for him can only be
signified by the possession of a penis: what might be called a
forcing of the signified under the signifier. When mother's "no
penis" is further revealed as mouth-like, internal, and capable of
transformation, this endeavor to find the penis in woman also
serves the purpose, as Karen Horney argued decades ago, of
denying the existence of the "sinister female genital."10 And that
genital is sinister not only because of the castration associated

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 57

with and feared from the female body, but also because its power-
ful difference threatens to subvert the signification of the penis.

The Lacanian version of this early impulse to a disavowal of

what the sight of woman means is the paradox of mother as the
first instance of plenitude, and as having no penis, while the
phallus becomes the symbol of plenitude. Whatever power
mother signifies is collapsed into a symbolic signifier that bears a
telling and a comforting resemblance to the penis. In the interests
of a symbolic whole that would be shattered by her difference,
female difference is obliterated. In the Lacanian instance, the literal
disavowal that occurs in childhood becomes, for the adult, a sym-
bolic one, magically and happily invulnerable to the actual sight of
woman it is constructed to deny.

The symbolic phallus is conceived as a metaphor; and metaphor,

using Lacan's own terms, can be regarded as the perfect metaphor
for castration - the falling of one signifier to the signified of
another signifier,11 the subsuming, the disappearance, of one
whole into part of another, different whole. This metaphor not
only manifests the working of imaginative transformation (a
capacity the male fears in the female as a function of her "castrat-
ing" desire) to the profit of male desire, but is also well equipped
to combat a castration fear that can be traced to a crisis in
meaning. For the symbolic phallus is the metaphor that guards
itself against the metaphorical process of meaning construction it
is supposed ťo epitomize ( it is the privileged, implacable signifier
in an otherwise endless chain of signifiers). As such, it provokes
the speculation that the phallus represents a disavowal both of the
female genital - the mark of that other (w)hole into which the
penis may disappear, and of an imaginative capacity that can
produce metaphorical configurations that privilege female desire
( so provocatively symbolized by the shape and function of the
female genital). Like its objective forerunner, the penis, the
symbolic phallus is engaged in a struggle to force significance, a
struggle against "castration" at the level of the signifier that
becomes an effort to contain the dynamic processes of meaning
that can displace and condense signifiers. The significances de-
sired both for the object penis and for the symbolic phallus have in
common the insistence on the certainty of immutable métonymie
and metaphorical figures, respectively. While the penis enforces
the metonymy that makes it the part that determines the whole
(human body), the symbolic phallus is the privileged term in a
metaphorical configuration, collapsing all the other terms into a
metaphorical whole named and shaped by "the phallus."

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58

Accordingly, the Lacanian woman is no less castrated - in

terms of the possession of her own sexuality, desire, capacity -
for the weight of the symbolic phallus she is made to bear in hopes
that it will hide the female signifiers men fear to represent. Neither
as "maternal plenitude" nor as "the fetishized object of desire,"
does the Lacanian woman as phallus signify her own desire /sex-
uality /power (which is always enigmatic and somewhat ridi-
culous ) . And the phallus as her desire, as "the desire of the other,"
insures that her desire accomodates, as it is tethered to, the mark
of male desire.

Of course, the more popular version of "grown-up" disa-

vowal (the version manifest in less complicated psychoanalytic
descriptions as well) is that woman's "no penis" simply signifies
that she lacks everything the penis signifies for males. If the sight
of her signifies her autonomous power and desire, and no amount
of disavowal is able to produce a female penis, then her meaning
will be constructed to "fit" the determining mark of the privileged
signifier; the perception of her capacity will be denied by, and
hidden in, the substantiation of the signification of the penis.

But this desired signification for the penis continues to quail

before the lasting effects of castration feared from women, and
generates the intriguing cultural phenomenon of what I will call
the "powerful castrated penis" (henceforth to be indicated by
p.c.p.). What characterizes the p.c.p. is not only a transcendence
of a castration it has suffered, but a gain rather than a loss as the
result of this castration. The p.c.p. is invested with the means
and /or the meaning of what males fear as castrating powers
(power, desire, imaginative constitution, the capacities repre-
sented by eyes and mouths), and often enforces the metonymy or
metaphor that links it irrevocably to the whole from which it has
been severed. The Lacanian phallus, rising like the phoenix from
the depths of castration fear to transform, like a magic wand, all
things desired to the shape and sign of male desire, is psycho-
analysis' p.c.p. The symbolic p.c.p. pops up regularly in narrative
and visual construction as phoenixes, magic wands, eyes (and in
cinema the projected "eye of the camera,") teeth, arms, birds,
machines, and so on; and its mission, very often, is the literal or
symbolic castration of women. The p.c.p. is the triumphant end
product of a symbolic game that men play with castration, in the
hopes of mastering castration fear; it is a game, however, which is
always securely fixed ahead of time. The game itself can be dis-
cerned in certain primitive puberty rites for males where the penis
is superficially cut, by men, as an initiation into manhood;12 the

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 59

young male symbolically suffers, transcends, and gains from this

"castration" that is so carefully administered by the safe hands of
other men. A similar effort to transcend castration feared from
women is manifest in the psychoanalytic assertion that the castra-
tion feared from the father (and never from the mother) triggers
the young male's entrance to a symbolic world which privileges
male desire.

The p.c.p.y in all its versions, and the castrated woman are
complementary constructions that attempt to counter the male
fear that the penis, an object and a part, may have no part in a
whole conceived in female and different terms; that it may be
subsumed in the physical /figurative (w)hole of a union with
female body /desire /imagination. In theoretical discourse, these
constructions are accomplished comparatively easily by naming
and labelling: the woman certainly means her castration, the
phallus is the privileged signifier, and so on. But what of a dis-
course where "what is seen" bears a significance not qualified by
theoretical descriptive assertions - the discourse of film? Here, I
believe, can be found even more persuasive evidence that what
men see, and what men want to see when they look at a woman,
are very different. The desired and constructed meaning for
woman has a much more difficult time "sticking to" the actual
sight of woman than it does to declarative sentences about her.

As with the other cultural projects that aim to produce the

castrated woman on the occasion of her marriage, of her romantic
or sexual unions with men, cinematic construction of the
castrated woman occurs in the narrative context of love and sex.
Here, of course, it is largely the visual significance of woman that
is at issue, the very issue generated by the visual fact of female
sexual difference. The cinematic emphasis on vision as the locus
of meaning alone may very well rekindle this anxiety over visual
significance, but when the imagistic and narrative material in-
volves male desire for a woman, this anxiety may be unavoidable.
The defense, of course, is to use the visual tools of cinema to
construct the desired visual significance.

It is the image of the young lovely woman that the male hopes
will signify "castrated woman," for it is this woman that he
desires. Mother is ancient history, and if the male feared her as a
child, in maturity that terrified child can be denied as surely as the
threatening mother is denied. But cinematic constructions of the
castrated woman suggest that the mere presentation of the desired
woman's image (even what certain psychoanalytic film theory

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60

labels the fetishized female object of the male's powerful posses-

sive and desiring gaze) somehow fails to signify the range of
characteristics associated with her "castration." This failure is
evident in attempts to force this signification through métonymie
progressions, both narrative and imagistic, that "add up" to the
desired metaphor for the image of woman.

For lurking in the lovely object of desire is not only the recalled
fear of the mother, but also the fear of female desire and power
signified by the "lovely's" sexual difference. Accordingly, the
cinematic construction of the castrated woman often involves the
exorcism of the mother (and especially of the mother in the love
object), the positioning, both visually and narratively, of the
desired woman in the place of the helpless child (who is
"castrated" in the need for union with the mother), the purging
and punishing of female desire and capacity, and, in the instances
where all else seems to fail, the literal inscription of "castration"
on the female image with wounds, mutilation, and even killing.13

As woman, the image of the male's "object of desire" resists the

fixed metaphorical meaning he would assign her, and resonates
with a significance gathered in the male's lived experience of
woman. Thus, the cinematic production of the castrated woman
is an effort to privilege what is present over the lurking presence of
what is absent (the "lived" and remembered significance of wo-
man). This project both results from and engages the male's early
response to the sight of woman's "no penis": the fear that what
isn't there is there (in terms of what the penis signifies for him) in
some hidden dangerous way, and the subsequent insistence that
woman be defined as castrated, as the lack that is, in his terms,
there. If, as Christian Metz has suggested, the game of castration
is brought into play in cinema merely because the present images
also represent an absence,14 certainly that anxiety must be in-
tensified by this struggle between the present and absent signifi-
cances of woman. For while visual representation signifies an
absence of what is there as well as its presence, lack of a certain
representation does not guarantee its absence (from other rep-
resentations ) . As with the early sight of woman, it is not so much a
question of "what is seen" not really being there, as it is one of
"what is not seen" being there. In both instances, the certainty of
visual significance that the male longs for is undermined.

And, I would like to suggest, this "game of castration" is further

enlivened by certain effects of the apparatus that simultaneously
heighten the "risk" and intensify the pleasure because that risk is

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 61

mastered. On the one hand, the cutting and splicing in cinematic

editing is a very graphic instance of the constitution of an ar-
bitrary whole from arbitrarily selected parts (from other wholes
whose other parts are "out of the picture?). This, as I have
argued, is the process (the arbitrary constitution of wholes from
arbitrary parts) males fear as the result of union with a woman.
On the other hand, when this constitution of parts and wholes
clearly reflects malé desire, the potentially threatening power
inherent in this process becomes a reassuring one: once again,
what most threatens castration anxiety is appropriated to reverse
the castration fear by inscribing the female as castrated. Further-
more, this reassurance is bolstered by the fact that the cinematic
construction of a diegetic whole engages the spectator's own
imaginative unifying capacity, requires him to put the parts to-
gether even as they are assembled in the film: as a result, a
pleasing configuration feels like a product of his own creation,
evidence that he is in control. Like the game of castration the male
so triumphantly wins in primitive puberty rites, cinematic con-
struction can establish the male's "castrating power" in a situa-
tion that symbolically is reminiscent of castration : all is well as
long as the knife (be it butcher-knife or editing-knife) is in male
hands.

In Hitchcock's The Birds both kinds of "knives" - the wound-

ing instrument of the birds' beaks and the editorial cutting -
collaborate to construct a visual diegetic unity that privileges
male desire. That the birds and the "cinematic cuts" are birds of a
feather is explicitly demonstrated in the initial shots that present
the credits : the words are visually built up and broken down by
the flight of birds through the frame. And this rather grizzly
collaboration maintains throughout a film whose narrative pro-
jects are symptomatic of the construction of the castrated
woman: the disenfranchizing and exorcism of the mother, the
placement of the desired woman in the place of the helpless child,
the punishing of female desire, the mutilation of the love object.
These projects are punctuated, and even accomplished by the
repetitive attacks of the birds, and complexly underscored by ef-
fects of the apparatus - the construction of the characters'
"looks", the construction of the capacity for movement within
and out of frames, and the obtrusive, controlling look of the
camera. In The Birds , as well, we find what may be the most
ingenious manifestation ever of the "powerful castrated penis,"
the p.c.p .; the phallus, transformed to the free-wheeling bird that
attacks with its mouth, is magically linked with the male desire -
both of the camera and of the "hero" - that fortifies it. The

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62

mission of the birds is a recognizable one of the p.c.p. : to leave the

mark of castration on the female object of male desire.
The metaphorical connection between male desire, the "desire of
the camera", and the birds is established in the first sequence of the
film : as Melanie Daniels is walking along, a young boy whistles,
passes her, and moves out of the frame. Melanie turns at the sound
and looks after the boy, smiling, amused. As she does so, we hear
the sharp cry of birds - like an echo, but an angry one, of the
whistle - and again Melanies look follows the sound: jolted from
her rather maternal musing, she turns a startled, almost fearful face
directly toward the camera , the apparent location of the cries. Only
then does the camera cut to the flock of wild birds. But Melanie is
not, as Raymond Bellour has claimed, "raising the birds to the sky
with her look"15: rather, her look is riveted, first by the sound (as
with the whistle) and then by the movement of the birds - whose
startling cries seem to be provoked by Melanie's patronizing smile.
And this tethering of Melanie's potentially powerful look to the
sound and /or movement of male desire (and birds) will be repeated
several times in the course of the movie.
When the whistle and the birds' cries are further echoed by the
caged birds in the store Melanie enters, the spectator wonders if the
drama about to unfold has something to do with the freeing of
the caged birds. But hardly - there seems to be quite a difference
between free wild birds and caged domestic ones; and that differ-
ence is not unlike the one between the free powerful adult male
and the helpless child united with (enclosed by) the mother. Just
as the adult male has no trouble acknowledging the irrational
terrors of the child he no longer is - terrors that, in psychoan-
alysis, form the foundation of the patriarchal order - so the caged
love-birds that seem to provoke all the powerful antics of the wild
birds seem to be required for that very purpose; a purpose that
depends on, rather than rescues them from, their dilemma.

"Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels," says Mitch as he

replaces an escaped store bird in its cage, and in so saying articu-
lates the project of the film. For while the caged love-birds, that
provide the model, are never freed, Melanie eventually ends up
trapped in a cage-like room with attacking birds, and finally is
placed as a helpless, mutilated thing in the arms of Mitch's
mother. With the recognition of the birds as versions of the p.c.p.,
the "birds in a cage" may be regarded as their foil, a symbol both
for the "castrating" childhood union with the mother, and for
adult unions that are no less threatening. The latter significance is
emphasized when Melanie brings the caged birds to Mitch's house
as a function of her own desire, a gift that is made in the context of

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an almost criminal act. Accordingly, she must be situated in the

place her desire threatens to place the male.

But bird-cages, closed rooms, and mother's arms are not the
only cages to be dealt with. There are those constructed by the
apparatus itself: the actual framing of each shot, the trapped
feeling of static shots and long-takes, the capturing of "what is
seen" by a character's look (by alternating between the looking
and what is seen). And, in the context of these effects, Melanie's
construction as caged is more complex than simply closing the
door on her. For these are the cages that automatically threaten
everyone in the film - including Mitch and the birds. Accord-
ingly, the signification of these effects must be constructed dif-
ferently for different characters. But this exploitation of the
paradoxical potential of visual significance turns out to spotlight
the dilemma such an undertaking cannot avoid : this potential of
visual significance becomes the evidence that "what is seen" bears
a definite, non-paradoxical meaning.

Most apparent in this instance, and perhaps most important, is

the construction of the characters' looks. For despite the emphasis
psychoanalytic film theory places on the powerful look, the look
that captures and inscribes its object with the mark of its desire, in
The Birds the look has its "dark side." This dark side of the look is
characterized by emphasizing its physical limitations, its attach-
ment to a body whose movement is restricted, and by the passive,
uncontrollable reception of an undesired "seen" which at its
extreme, attacks the look(er). In context of the look's phallic
value - its symbolic link to the constellation of desire and capac-
ity signified for males by the penis ( in that the look can capture the
desired object, can "take it in" for imaginative elaboration) -
this dark side of the look can be usefully exploited in the construc-
tion of the castrated woman. For, when "what she sees" com-
mands or controls her look, denies her look the sight of what it is
looking for, reflects the physical restrictions of her circumstances,
etc., the effect is not only one of her reduced capacity, but also one
of a symbolic castration.

While both Melanie and Mitch have the capacity for looking,
they are not, as Bellour has argued, "equal and complicit in the
look."16 And nowhere is this clearer than in the sequence Bellour
so admirably analyzes for its structural components: Melanie's
journey to and from the Brenner's house to deliver the caged
birds. Here, indeed, as Bellour emphasizes, Hitchcock is con-
cerned with "the vision of Melanie Daniels,"17 but only to

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64

establish its severe limitations - especially on this occasion of the

expression of her desire, and especially in contrast to Mitch's.
And this is accomplished quite thoroughly - well before the
iconic moment that symbolizes the effort: the gull's attack near
her eyes.

Melanie's ride out and back is marked most obviously by the

repeated presentation of her image in static shots as if she were
posing for the camera and the spectator, even when these shots are
of her "looking." This is the presentation of the image that should
both inspire male desire and the confidence that her vulnerability
to sight reflects the symbolic castration required of the male
object of desire. That her presented image fails to be persuasive in
this way is evidenced by the energetic construction of the required
marks of "castration" throughout the sequence. The constitution
of Melanie's look as impaired is foreshadowed during the ride out
by the obtrusive presence of the camera (where Melanie is the
only character present), and by denying her the look as the camera
watches her place the caged birds in the Brenner house. But the
effort begins in earnest as soon as she leaves the house and heads
for her boat. As she is still looking to make sure she isn't seen, she
must look over her shoulder, against the direction she is moving
in, as she hurries away. This results in "what she sees" being
marked both by the limitations of her physical movement (the
barn which hides Mitch from her sight bobs up and down with her
movement), and by a slipping away from her sight. Each time she
looks, what she sees recedes, reversing the possessive potential of
the look. Once in the boat, she must continue to look over her
shoulder, and when she finally sees Mitch she responds by turning
all the way around and crouching by the motor. At this point,
Melanie is curiously granted a number of alternations that indicate
her looking and seeing; yet, in the shots of her looking, she and the
black motor seem posed together. The motor seems like a second
head, but dark, featureless, and, of course, sightless. The effect is
one of investing her head with similar characteristics, and appro-
priately, the distance prevents her from seeing Mitch very clearly.

When Mitch comes out of the house, not only is "the look"
given over to him, but also, the growing distance which has
reduced the capacity of Melanie's look is easily "captured" by
Mitch's binoculars. Furthermore, the binoculars frame the image
of "what Mitch sees" in a way that both recalls and emphasizes
the camera's framing of her; as a result, the image that has

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66

previously signifed "her looking" becomes "what Mitch sees". So

Mitch is in cahoots with the camera which is in cahoots with the
birds; they may all be in cahoots with the motor which has not
only helped efface her look imagistically in the previous shots, but
magically starts up as soon as Mitch sights her with the binocu-
lars. Now the motor will allow her to continue her journey away
from what she is looking at - a conflict of direction between her
movement and her look that is maintained until the last moments
of the ride back.

As Mitch begins the drive around the bay to meet her, the
alternation ostensibly returns to Melanie looking/ "what she
sees," but a closer study reveals that Melanie's look is tethered to
Mitch's movement. As he drives, moving quickly through each
frame (that represents her frame of vision), she moves her eyes to
follow, though she remains statically posed for each shot of "her
look." Though it is she who looks, Mitch is hidden in the car that
takes Melanie's look with it, while she is the one who is seen. The
distinctions are clear: the frame Mitch inhabits, he moves
through, breaking the boundaries of the frame and articulating,
constructing Melanie's look as he goes. On the other hand, the
frame Melanie inhabits, even as she moves, renders her fixed,
"caged" within the frame. Within the order of the look, Mitch has
the power of the camera to both capture and freeze what he sees,
while Melanie can never really see what she is looking at (or for),
and is much more available to sight than is what she sees. Capac-
ity for movement, in and through the frame, empowers both the
seer and the seen, and characterizes the capacity of the look
accordingly.

With the shots that prepare for and follow the attack of the gull,
Hitchcock introduces another way of impairing Melanie's look;
the camera "breaks" the alternation that has signified Melanie's
look several shots before the bird literally breaks her look with the
attack. First we have successive shots of Melanie so that her
looking is emphatically converted to her seen (by the camera); a
brief shot of Mitch on the jetty followed by a shot of her looking
threatens to reestablish her look (and with something in it), but
this threat is swiftly undermined by the next shot : a shot of the
bird unseen by Melanie. "What Melanie can't see" has taken the
place in the alternation of "what she sees."18 The next shot is the
attack of the gull suggestively near her eyes, followed by a shot of,
not Melanie, but the bird (again unseen by Melanie) flying off.
Several shots intervene before we see another shot of what
Melanie sees : the blood from her wound on the hand that "crimi-

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68

nally" left the caged birds in Mitch's house. The punishment for
her desire, a desire that the powerful look signifies, is the impair-
ment of that look to the point of "filling" it with the mark of that
injury.

As long as Mitch is hidden from her sight or directs her vision

with his movement, Melanie is granted the look in these limited
versions; when Mitch arrives on the jetty and is available for
Melanie's sight, the camera robs her of that look entirely, and
replaces the expected shot of "what she sees" with "what she
can't see:" the bird that caps the whole process with the literal
attack on her look. Of course, the gull's attack also "breaks" the
spectator's look; it both comes between him and the image of
Melanie, and disrupts the fascination with that image that may
certainly have developed in the course of the ride out and back.
Perhaps this is a warning against the lurking dangers of such a
pleasurable fascination with an image whose signification can not
be trusted; a warning whose initial disappointment is recuperated
by the forcing of signification the wounding represents, and by the
speedy re-establishment of the spectator's look, focused first on
the powerful bird and then on the fact of Melanie's bloody
wound. And that it is the bird the camera follows after the attack
has a further significance; the three shot sequence is: the bird
flying in, the attack on Melanie, the bird flying off. The bird flies
through its frame into Melanie's "cage-frame" and out again; in
her fixed position, she is the object not only of the look (the
spectator's and the camera's), but also of what can move through
the frame.

Wounded and robbed of the potential of her look (which

signifies her "criminal" desire), Melanie can make a "safe" en-
trance into Mitch's frame (any union indicated by their simultan-
eous presence in the frame will be, in the context of Melanie's
construction in the previous sequence, governed by his desire).
But Melanie's arrival at the jetty is a significant entrance in more
than one sense; for now both she and Mitch enter a sequence in
which time and space are largely continuous. The pan that brings
them to the restaurant is followed by long-takes of Melanie once
they are inside; the rapid cutting and splicing of images that
characterized Melanie's journey, the very apparent and comfort-
ing presence of imaginative construction, gives way to images
that, in the cinematic order of things, are closer to the restrictions
of what the eye can see in the "real," non-cinematic world.
Significantly, in this sequence there is a narrative and imagistic
insistence on Melanie's "castration:" first she is paraded as a

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 69

bloody, wounded spectacle, the object of everyone's mortified

attention (the horror at the wounded creature psychoanalysis
claims for the little boy). This spectacle also engages the
spectator's mortified, attention, and mitigates against the re-
establishment of the eroticized fascination with Melanie's image
that accompanied the previous sequence. Then, as Mitch attends
to her wound, both her former image and the spectator fascination
it provokes are carefully and graphically reconstructed by "male
hands." Now Melanie's lovely image will have the métonymie
benefit of the wound its former presentation failed to signify; now
her image should be safe for the spectator's fascination and desire.
Moreover, whatever threats are posed by the recall of the "lived"
experience of woman (which opposes the imaginative construction
of the castrated woman) that her presentation in pans and long-
takes may inspire, are duely vanquished by the filling of these
cinematic spaces with the image of woman clearly seen as
mutilated, her desirable beauty a constructed "cover" for, and
signifier of, that wound.

It is during this sequence as well that Hitchcock ingeniously

constructs another visual clue to Mitch's "complicity" with the
birds. Mitch's white sweatered arm and beak-like hand are fixed
at Melanie's head as he attends to her wound. This shot of
Melanie with Mitch's "bird"-arm at her head is sustained for
several moments, and not only condenses the reconstruction of
her beauty with the attack of the bird (making the "castration"
and the construction of her image synonymous), but also presents
Mitch's arm as "severed" from his body - by the frame (which
encloses Melanie). Because we know that his arm is connected to
the rest of him, most of Mitch ( and the will /desire that directs the
part we do see ) is "present" as safely outside the cage of the frame.
The "severing" accomplished by the frame simultaneously
guarantees (through the certain métonymie knowledge of the
spectator) that the restrictions of the frame will be transcended:

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70

the part survives its partition because of its necessary attachment

to the rest of the whole. Not only does this part avoid absorption
by the frame that encloses Melanie's image ( a visual union of "all
of her" and "part of Mitch" ), it is about the business of construct-
ing the image in the frame. To further the impact of Mitch's
"determining presence" in an imagistic whole that cannot capture
any part of him, when he speaks, the camera often does not cut to
a shot of him, the expected alternation that accompanies conver-
sation, but rather stays focused on the image of Melanie, with
Mitch's arm at her head. So Mitch's voice inhabits this frame in
much the same way that his arm does : the part transcends the
"other" whole while it marks that other whole with its intention,
desire. For Mitch's disembodied voice also undertakes to con-
struct the significance of the image : he announces himself as the
voice of the law (he is a criminal lawyer) and recognizes Melanie
as a criminal.

Mitch's "severed arm as bird", the p.c.p. that enforces a certain

métonymie meaning that connects the part to the whole, even if
the part so j urns for a while into other wholes, will appear quite
graphically twice during the final attack scene. At one point,
Mitch closes the window on his arm as he holds the birds outside,
so that when the camera cuts to the outside, we see the arm and
hand bobbing and grasping among the bobbing, grasping birds;

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 71

another time, Mitch sticks his arm through the door that traps
Melanie with the attacking birds, and his efforts to get hold of her
and drag her out, vie with and mime the grasping, snapping
gestures of the birds. Again, the action that saves her for male
desire is linked to the one that "castrates" her. It is important to
note that Mitch's arm "becomes" bird-like only when it is
partitioned by its position in the frame; so the signification of
"bird as the castrated part" is underscored, while the privilege the
arm enjoys of being unquestionably linked to the whole that
transcends "castration," rubs off on the birds - whose construc-
tion as the "fantastic flying penis-dentatas" is not so unquestion-
able. And, needless to say, Mitch's arm survives it's bird-like
battle with the birds quite well, if a little bloody; the superficial
wounds he suffers are just another version of the male game of
castration that produces both the p.c.p. and the castrated woman.

Predictably, the women in The Birds don't fare as well as Mitch

in the face of the attacks; Annie is killed and Melanie is mutilated,
rendered almost senseless with horror at "what she has seen." For
especially in the last attacks, Hitchcock clearly shows that
Melanie is attacked by "what she sees." During one of these
attacks, Melanie is caught in a glass phone booth, and as she looks
out the birds fly at her, breaking the glass; even more explicitly, in
the final attack, Melanie provokes the ire of the birds by literally
shining a light up at them so she can see. They respond by flying
savagely towards her in the shot of "her look" for the mutilation
that will graphically leave the mark of her "castration" that the
complex and repeated construction of her image has refused to
metaphorically signify.

Because Annie, who is everyone's surrogate mother in the im-

age of the young beauty, dies - Lydia (Mitch's real mother) is
spared. For it is never the aged mothers who threaten the men, but
the memory of the mother the child feared that lurks in the image
of the desired young woman. And Lydia is saved for another
reason; she is needed to provide the "mother's care" Mitch has
earlier prescribed for Melanie - a verbal prescription which di-
rectly precedes, and appears to provoke, the first attack of the
birds (as if one of the missions of the birds is to prepare Melanie
for that care by rendering her helpless). Appropriately, after the
final attack on Melanie, Lydia assumes the task of the bandaging,
which this time will not hide the bloody mark of her wounds that
seeps through (unlike the nifty cleanup job Mitch earlier per-
formed on her bloody forehead to reproduce the unmarked image
which apparently was unequal to the task of signifying

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72

"wounded"). Huddled together in the back seat for the final

scene, the mutilated Melanie in the place of the helpless child and
the terrified mother imagistically merge with each other, mutually
powerless. Meanwhile, Kathy, the actual child, moves into the
"lover's place" next to Mitch in the front seat, holding fast to the
caged love-birds, as Lydia holds fast to Melanie. The only lover
safe for male desire is the one who takes the place of the child the
male fearfully remembers, and disowns, as himself: the meta-
phorical "bird in the cage."

That is the final scene for the characters, but the final shot of the
movie is yet to come. As the car drives off through hordes of
restless, threatening birds, we expect, and even long for, the
camera to follow it - to cut to a safe arrival. But the camera
deliberately stays anchored to a static shot of the birds' terri-
tory - the frame out of which the car drives. For while mothers
are dead or tamed, and the lover sports excessive evidence of her
"castration," there remain the challenges of the "cage of the
frame" and of the continuous space and time of the static shot
(that is not so clearly marked by the presence of imaginative
constitution). The final shot takes on these challenges in the name
of male desire (the camera/birds/Mitch), and is the final triumph
for that desire. For here, the birds occupy and control the terrible
weight of still space with the willful, visually "jumpy" potential
of their desire that threatens to burst the frame ( as well we know it
can). But they demonstrate, at the same time, the capacity ofthat
desire to command the look of the camera, to privilege the pre-
sence of the birds and to resist an allegiance to the movement of
the car - an allegiance that has characterized Melanie's "power-
less" look. To the extent that this is an allegiance the spectator
desires in his simultaneous (with the camera that triggers it)
construction of an imaginative diegetic unity, his initial disap-
pointment should give way, if he is a male spectator, to the
cheering message inherent in this final shot: the emphatic mark,
and the diegetic process of imaginative constitution of visual
space can be relinquished. The "seen" world is a priori occupied
by the desire that transcends that world's potential restrictions;
the objectively perceived "real" world (into which the spectator
will be plunged in a few moments) is a function of, and safe for,
male desire. All the evidence that it may not be such a world - the
battered, senseless Melanie who by now signifies the need for her
mutilation as much as she signifies that mutilation itself -
disappears before our very eyes as the car rides out of a visual
world only the male spectator can embrace.

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 73

NOTES

1Stephen Heath, "Difference," Screen, 20, No. 3 (1978), p. 53

2For a very readable summary of the Freudian configurations of the pre-
oedipal phase, the oedipal complex, the castration complex, and super-ego
formation, see Charles Brenner, An Elementary Textbook of Psy choanal-
y sis (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 108-141.
3For a detailed account of Lacan's theory of the role of the Oedipus in the
access to the symbolic, see Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David
Macey (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 78-92. For further
explanation of Lacanian configurations, and in the context of feminist film
criticism, see Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"
Screen, v.16, no. 3 (1975), pp. 6-18; and Christine Gledhill, "Recent
Developments in Feminist Criticism," Quarterly Review of Film Studies,
V.3, no. 4 (1978), pp. 475-484.
4Mulvey, p. 6.
5My critique of Lacanian discourse is concerned specifically with that
aspect of the discourse that poses a dynamic link between the a priori
signification of women as castrated, as lack, and the emergence of the
symbolic phallus as the privileged signifier of desire (in an otherwise
endless chain of signifiers). While I will argue that both the castrated
woman and the symbolic phallus are theoretically constructed to the profit
of male desire, this argument does not imply a rejection of the body of
Lacanian psychoanalysis.
6The argument I recapitualate here on pages 53 -56 is a brief summary of the
argument I develop in my article, "Pornography and the Dread of Women :
The Male Sexual Dilemma," in Take Back the Night: Women on
Pornography, ed. Laura Lederer (New York : William Morrow, 1980), pp.
159-173.

7Heath, p. 53.
8For a listing of instances in literature and mythology where a woman's
destructive, transformative power issues from her sexuality, see Karen
Horney, "The Dread of Woman," in her Feminine Psychology, ed. Harold
Kelman (New York: Norton & Co., Inc., 1967), pp. 134-5. Horney
mentions Delilah's emasculation of Samson whom no man could vanquish,
the beheading of Holofernes by Judith after a sexual encounter,

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74

Wedekind's "Earth Spirit" who destroys the men who succumb to her
charms, among others. Some other notable instances include the myth of
Hermaphroditus, who becomes part woman when he "jumps into" the
female water nymph who desires him, the primitive myth of "vagina
dentata," the burning of witches for, among other things, making male
organs shrivel and /or disappear.
9Jacques Lacan, "The Signification of the Phallus," in his Ecrits , trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton & Co., Inc., 1977), p. 281.
10Horney, "The Dread of Woman," p. 138.
uJacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," in his
Ecrits , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton & Co., Inc., 1977), p.
164.

12 A discussion of various interpretations of male initiation rites that in-

volve subcision and circumcision occurs in : Nancy Chodorow "Being and
Doing: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Socialization of Males and
Females," in W oman in Sexist Society , ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K.
Moran (New York: Mentor Books, 1971), p. 279.
13These kinds of constructions are apparent in numerous films that deal
with romance and sex, and a discussion of one of these, Hitchcock's The
Birds, will conclude this article. Other exemplary instances include Vad-
im's Barbarella (where the heroine is prepared for successive sexual en-
counters by successive attacks perpetrated by versions of the p.c.p. : doll's
teeth, birds, and a sex machine); Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Countessa
(notable for a rare instance of cinematic juxtaposition of the "difference"
between a castrated man and a whole woman, the latter of which is killed
and replaced by her statue because her "no penis," unlike his "no penis,"
does not preclude her from sexual desire and activity); Nicholas Ray's
Johnny Guitar ( in which narrative progression is motivated by the placing
and replacing of characters in the place of the child - beginning with the
hero and ending with the heroine, who also acquires the literal wound that
marks her "castration.").
14"The Cinematic Apparatus as Social Institution - An Interview with
Christian Metz," Discourse, No. 1 ( 1979), p. 14.
15Raymond Bellour, "Les Oiseaux : analyse d'une sequence," Cahiers du
Cinema no. 219 (1969). Trans., "The Birds: Analysis of a Sequence," in
mimeographed form from the British Film Institute, Educational Advisory
Service, p. 38.
16Bellour, p. 21.
17Bellour, p. 33.
18This insertion of "what Melanie can't see" in the place of "what she sees"
( in the context of the expected alternation ) occurs more extensively in a
later scene. When Melanie is waiting outside the schoolhouse, the camera
alternates between shots of Melanie and shots of the birds, gathering
unseen, behind her head. She finally sees the flock - when it's too late - by
following the movement of one of the birds as it flies to join the others.

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