CROSS-REFERENCES: 4.

Lacan
6. Bakhtin
16. Cixous
19. Showalter
27. Irigaray
28. Schweickart
COMMENTARY: CHRIS WEEDON, "'Feminist Poststructuralism and
Psychoanalysis'", in Feminist
Practice and Poststructuralist Theory ( 1987), pp. 43-73

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Femininity, narrative and

psychoanalysis
After some initial remarks on narrative in psychoanalytic practice I shall say a
little about women in the early history of the novel, and turn from that to psycho-
analytic theory; finally I shall illustrate some of my concerns with reference to
Wuthering Heights.

As everybody knowns, psychoanalysis is a talking cure. Obviously the analyst

is male or female, the patient is male or female. If, as we frequently hear, language
itself is phallocentric, a what happens within the psychoanalytic practice? If lan-
guage is phallocentric, what is a woman patient doing when she is speaking? What
is a woman analyst doing when she is listening and speaking back? These stark
questions are relevant to the type of work one can do on a literary text.

Psychoanalysts, at one level, are hearing and retelling histories. The patient
comes with a story of his or her own life. The analyst listens; through an associa-
tion something intrudes, disrupts, offers the 'anarchic carnival' b back into that
history, the story won't quite do, and so the process starts again. You go back, and
you make a new history. Simultaneously with that, the analyst, in analysing his
or her own countertransference, performs the same process on himself or herself,
listens to a history, asks, 'Why am I hearing it as thats': something from the
analyst's own associations disrupts, erupts into that narrative -- the analyst asks a
question from a new perspective, and the history starts all over again.

I bring this up here because I think it relates to questions about the role of
carnival, about the role of disruption. What can you do but disrupt a history and
re-create it as another history? Of course, you have multiple histories, though
you can only live within one at a time.

I want to look very briefly at one kind of history: that preeminent form of
literary narrative, the novel. Roughly speaking, the novel starts with autobio-
graphies written by women in the seventeenth century. There are several famous
men novelists, but the vast majority of early novels were written by large num-
bers of women. These writers were trying to establish what critics today call the
'subject in process'. What they were trying to do was to create a history from
a state of flux, a flux in which they were feeling themselves in the process of
becoming women within a new bourgeois society. They wrote novels to describe
that process -- novels which said: 'Here we are: women. What are our lives to
be about? Who are we? Domesticity, personal relations, personal intimacies,
stories. . . .' In the dominant social group, the bourgeoisie, that is essentially
what a woman's life was to become under capitalism. The novel is that creation
by the woman of the woman, or by the subject who is in the process of becoming
woman, of woman under capitalism. Of course it's not a neat homogeneous
construction: of course there are points of disruption within it; of course there

____________________
a
See Hélène Cixous, p. 266 above; also Elaine Showalter, pp. 315-18 above.
b
Mitchell seems to be alluding to Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of carnival. See "'From The
Prehistory of
Novelistic Discourse'", and headnote, pp. 104-36 above.

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are points of autocriticism within it. Wuthering Heights, for example, is a high
point of autocriticism of the novel from within the novel. I shall discuss it soon
in that light.

As any society changes its social structure, changes its economic base, artefacts
are re-created within it. Literary forms arise as one of the ways in which changing
subjects create themselves as subjects within a new social context. The novel is
the prime example of the way women start to create themselves as social sub-
jects under bourgeois capitalism -- create themselves as a category: women. The
novel remains a bourgeois form. Certainly there are also working-class novels,
but the dominant form is that represented by the woman within the bourgeoisie.
This means that when contemporary Anglo-Saxon feminist critics turn to women
writers, resurrect the forgotten texts of these women novelists, they are, in one
sense, being completely conformist to a bourgeois tradition. There is nothing
wrong with that, it is an important and impressive tradition. We have to know
where women are, why women have to write the novel, the story of their own
domesticity, the story of their own seclusion within the home and the possibilities
and impossibilities provided by that.

This tradition has been attacked by critics such as Julia Kristeva c as 'the
discourse of the hysteric'. I believe that it has to be the discourse of the hysteric.
The woman novelist must be an hysteric. Hysteria is the woman's simultaneous
acceptance and refusal of the organisation of sexuality under patriarchal cap-
italism. It is simultaneously what a woman can do both to be feminine and to
refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourse. And I think that is exactly what
the novel is; I do not believe there is such a thing as female writing, a 'woman's
voice'. There is the hysteric's voice which is the woman's masculine language
(one has to speak 'masculinely' in a phallocentric world) talking about feminine
experience. It's both simultaneously the woman novelist's refusal of the woman's
world -- she is, after all, a novelist -- and her construction from within a masculine
world of that woman's world. It touches on both. It touches, therefore, on the
importance of bisexuality.
I will say something very briefly about the psychoanalytical theories behind
this position of the woman writer who must speak the discourse of the hysteric,
who both refuses and is totally trapped within femininity. Then I'll lead on to
some of the things that were said earlier about how to disrupt this.

There is much current interest in re-reading Freud in terms of the moment at

which sexual division is produced within society: the moment of the castration
complex, the moment when the heterogeneously sexual, polymorphously perverse,
carnivalesque child has imposed on it the divisions of 'the law'; the one law, the
law of patriarchy, the mark of the phallus. At that moment two sexes are psycho-
logically created as the masculine and the not-masculine. At the point in which
the phallus is found to be missing in the mother, masculinity is set up as the
norm, and femininity is set up as what masculinity is not. What is not there in the
mother is what is relevant here; that is what provides the context for language.
The expression which fills the gap is, perforce, phallocentric.

____________________
c
'See headnote on Julia Kristeva, p. 206 above.

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In Lacanian thinking this is called the moment of the symbolic. The symbolic
is the point of organisation, the point where sexuality is constructed as meaning,
where what was heterogeneous, what was not symbolised, becomes organised,
becomes created round these two poles, masculine and not-masculine: feminine.

What has gone before can be called the pre-Oedipal, the semiotic, the car-
nivalesque, the disruptive. Now one can take two positions in relation to that.
Either the pre-divided child, the heterogeneous child, the pre-Oedipal child, exists
with its own organisation, an organisation of polyvalence, of polyphony. Or
alternatively that very notion of heterogeneity, of bisexuality, of pre-Oedipality,
of union in a dyadic possibility of child with mother, that image of oneness and
heterogeneity as two sides of the same coin, is, in fact, provided by the law, by
the symbolic law itself. The question to me has a political dimension to it. If
you think that the heterogeneous pre-Oedipal polyvalent world is a separate
structure in its own right, then the law is disruptable, the carnival can be held
on the church steps. But if this is not the case, if the carnival and the church do
not exist independently of each other, the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal are not
separate, discrete states -- if, instead, the Oedipal with the castration complex is
what defines the pre-Oedipal, then the only way you can challenge the church,
challenge both the Oedipal and its pre-Oedipal, is from within an alternative
symbolic universe. You cannot choose the imaginary, the semiotic, the carnival
as an alternative to the symbolic, as an alternative to the law. It is set up by the
law precisely as its own ludic space, its own area of imaginary alternative, but
not as a symbolic alternative. So that politically speaking, it is only the symbolic,
a new symbolism, a new law, that can challenge the dominant law.

Now this does have relevance for the two alternative types of feminist literary
criticism which exist today. It was suggested in another paper at this conference
that this area of the carnival can also be the area of the feminine. I don't think so.
It is just what the patriarchal universe defines as the feminine, the intuitive, the
religious, the mystical, the playful, all those things that have been assigned to
women -- the heterogeneous, the notion that women's sexuality is much more one
of a whole body, not so genital, not so phallic. It is not that the carnival cannot
be disruptive of the law; but it disrupts only within the terms of that law.

This suggests a criticism of the French school associated with Kristeva, and
to me it explains why that school is essentially apolitical. One needs to ask why
Kristeva and her colleagues, while producing very interesting ideas, choose exclus-
ively masculine texts and quite often proto-fascist writings as well. Disruption
itself can be radical from the right as easily as from the left. This type of disruption
is contained within the patriarchal symbolic. To me this is the problem.

I shall just mention some things about Wuthering Heights here so that we can
use it if we like as a text on which to hang some ideas. I do not want to offer a
psychoanalytic reading of this novel; I want to use Wuthering Heights simply to
illustrate some of the points that I have tried to make here.

Emily Brontë is not writing a carnivalesque query to the patriarchal order;

she is clearly working within the terms of a language which has been defined
as phallocentric. Yet she is, through a kind of irony, posing questions about
patriarchal organisation, and I'll sketch in some of the questions that I think are
asked by the novel. First, who tells the story? Emily Brontë's manuscript was

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stolen from her and presented to a publisher by her sister, Charlotte. It was
eventually published under a male pseudonym: Ellis Bell. The author is a woman,
writing a private novel; she is published as a man, and acquires some fame and
notoriety. She uses two narrators -- a man, Lockwood, and a woman, the nurse,
Nelly Dean. The whole novel is structured through those two narrators. Lockwood
is a parody of the romantic male lover. He is set up as a foppish gentleman from
the town who thinks he loves all the things the romantic gentleman is supposed
to love, such as solitude, or a heart of gold beneath a fierce exterior. These things
are criticised from within the novel, particularly through the character of Isabella,
who thinks that Heathcliff is a dark, romantic Gothic hero who will prove to be
the true gentleman beneath all his cruelty.

The story of Catherine and Heathcliff is a story of bisexuality, the story of the
hysteric. Catherine's father had promised he would bring her back a whip from
his visit to Liverpool. Instead he picks up a gypsy child who is fatherless, who
never has had and never will have a father's name, who is given just one name:
Heathcliff, the name of a brother of Catherine's who had died in infancy. Catherine
looks in her father's pocket, finds the whip broken; instead of this whip she gets
a brother/lover: Heathcliff.

Heathcliff is what Cathy wants all the rest of her life. She, in fact, makes the
conventional feminine choice and marries somebody with whom she cannot be
fully united -- Edgar Linton. Edgar provides only an illusion of complementarity.
I do not mean that they do not have a sexual relation; they have a child whose
birth in one sense -- the most unimportant -- causes Catherine's death. The person
that Catherine wants to be 'one' with is Heathcliff. Breaking the incest taboo,
she says, 'I am Heathcliff, he's more myself than I am.' And Heathcliff says the
same of Catherine. Each is the bisexual possibility of the other one, evoking a
notion of oneness which is the reverse side of the coin of diverse heterogeneity. This
type of 'oneness' can only come with death. Catherine dies; she haunts Heathcliff
for twenty years, which is the date when the novel opens: it opens with Lockwood,
who is given Heathcliff's dream, thinking (because he is the parodic romantic figure)
that he can also get oneness. Heathcliff himself waits the whole stretch of the
novel to have his own dream, which is to get back to Catherine. He dies getting
back to her. 'Oneness' is the symbolic notion of what happens before the symbolic;
it is death and has to be death. The choices for the woman within the novel,
within fiction, are either to survive by making the hysteric's ambiguous choice
into a femininity which doesn't work (marrying Edgar) or to go for oneness and
unity, by suffering death (walking the moors as a ghost with Heathcliff).

I want to end with my beginning, and with a question. I think the novel arose
as the form in which women had to construct themselves as women within
new social structures; the woman novelist is necessarily the hysteric wanting to
repudiate the symbolic definition of sexual difference under patriarchal law, unable
to do so because without madness we are all unable to do so. Writing from within
that position can be conformist ( Mills and Boon romantic novels) or it can be
critical ( Wuthering Heights). I think the novel starts at a point where society is in
a state of flux, when the subject is in the process of becoming a woman (or man)
as today we understand that identity. If we are today again talking about a type
of literary criticism, about a type of text where the subject is not formed under a

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symbolic law, but within what is seen as a heterogeneous area of the subject-in-
process, I would like to end with asking a question: in the process of becoming
what? I do not think that we can live as human subjects without in some sense
taking on a history; for us, it is mainly the history of being men or women under
bourgeois capitalism. In deconstructing that history, we can only construct other
histories. What are we in the process of becoming?

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CHAPTER 25
Umberto Eco
INTRODUCTORY NOTE - DL
Umberto Eco (b. 1929) was born in Allesandra, Italy, and studied at the University of Turin.
He has taught at universities in Turin, Milan, Florence and Bologna, and is a frequent
academic visitor to the United States. In 1981, he achieved international fame with his
novel, The Name of the Rose, which was both a bestseller and a literary success. Before
that, he had established himself as an authority in the fields or semiotics, cultural studies